Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [114]
“I’m hoping that’s you,” she said.
It was.
He went back again and again. At first, Pablo was hesitant, and the van drivers absolutely forbade it. But Teddy overcame their resistance with wads of cash and assurances of silence, and the men weren’t total animals. They had some compassion, and Teddy convinced them that it was in their interest to have the girls checked for venereal disease, that it was just good business.
“The girls are raped multiple time a day, six days a week,” Teddy tells Boone now. “They give them Sundays off. The men pay five to ten dollars to have sex with them. It doesn’t sound like this would add up to a lot of money, but multiply it by several locations a day, all over California. Hell, all over the country, more and more. Now you’re talking serious money. The variety of potential and actual STDs is staggering. No matter what we do, a third of these girls are going to become HIV-positive. And then there’s vaginal trauma … anal tears. Not to mention the day-to-day garden-variety colds, flu, respiratory infections, hygiene issues. You could set up a clinic there and staff it twenty-four/seven and you’d still be overwhelmed.”
But Teddy did what he could.
He did set up a clinic. He rented a full-time room at the motel and stocked it with antibiotics and other drugs, hiding them in locked cabinets, as otherwise the room would be broken into and the drugs stolen. He went up there two, three, five times a week as his schedule allowed, usually with Tammy.
The pimps tolerated them.
As long as they got the girls in and out, as long as the girls met their schedule, as long as nobody breathed a word, it was okay. Just. There was always the threat that the operation would be shut down, and Teddy, no matter how hard he tried to argue, no matter what kind of cash he threw at them, was never, ever allowed anywhere near the “safe houses” where the girls lived.
“ ‘Safe houses,’ ” he says to Boone. “There’s a tasty irony. More like petri dishes, fecund hothouses for bacteria. If I could get to them and institute just some basic hygienic procedures, we could eliminate at least half of the chronic diseases they suffer from.”
But it was no good. They could never find out where the girls were housed, and they were afraid to push it. And the girls themselves changed all the time. They were shuffled around, disappearing, sometimes returning, new girls arriving every few weeks.
It made Tammy crazy with fear.
Once, Luce went missing for two weeks and Teddy had to sedate Tammy. When the girl returned, Tammy swore that she couldn’t go through that again, that they had to do something.
“She loved the girl,” Teddy says. “Do you have kids?”
Boone shakes his head.
“I have three,” Teddy says. “By a couple of different wives. You fall in love with them, you know? And the thought of anything happening to them …”
She decided to take Luce.
Tammy and Angela decided that they would take the girl and raise her themselves. They knew they just couldn’t take her—that would endanger Luce’s family back in Guanajuato—so they decided to buy her.
What kind of life could Luce have otherwise? If she survived the chronic rape, the STDs, the trauma, the exposure, the beatings, the malnutrition, psychological abuse, emotional deprivation, if she lived through her teenage years, then into her twenties, what could she expect? To be moved to an actual brothel? To a sweatshop? If she went through all of that without going to crack or getting hooked on meth, even then, what kind of life would she have?
What’s the price of a twelve-year-old girl?
Twenty thousand dollars.
Because they not only had to pay for the price of a lucrative working girl; they also had to pay the always-accruing interest on her debt, the money she owed the smugglers for getting her into the country, and the interest on the debt she owed for room and board.
Twenty large, growing every day.
So Tammy and Angela ramped it up. They worked extra shifts. They used every trick they knew to manipulate men into