Page 56 of Hotter than Wildfire

Ellen turned to him. “I don’t know, Mike. The Blue Moon is sort of tailor-made for…for women like us. The owner wants us off the books and he doesn’t care at all what our background is. If we can do the work—and it’s not rocket science—he pays on time and asks no questions at all. The customers are mainly sad men who don’t even look at us. There aren’t that many jobs you can get without showing up on any books. And Kerry was…she was lonely.”

“If she’s one of ours, she’s not supposed to talk.” Mike’s deep rumble held disapproval.

For someone who slept around a lot, Mike didn’t seem to have a good handle on women. They were hard wired to talk.

“She recognized I was like her.” Ellen gave a sad smile. “She said if I was ever in danger to get to San Diego and she gave me your card.”

“Guys,” Nicole interrupted. She lifted her fingers from the keyboard and looked triumphantly at them. “I think I’ve got something.”

Seattle

It was raining. It seemed like it was always raining in Seattle. For a moment, Kerry Robinson missed San Diego. She thought with longing of the warm springs, hot summers, beautiful falls and mild winters. It rained rarely, and often the weather had the good taste to rain only at night, like in Camelot. She missed it so much.

On the other hand, if she were still in San Diego, she’d probably be dead. There was that.

She hopped from puddle to puddle trying to keep her shoes as dry as possible. Working an eight hour shift in wet shoes was miserably uncomfortable, she knew from bitter experience. She had two pairs of shoes, neither of them rain-worthy.

Once upon a time, she’d had three hundred pairs of shoes. She’d had an entire closet for her shoes. Those days were gone.

A drunk crashed into Kerry while she dashed from storefront to storefront, trying to keep dry. She barely managed to avoid falling into a huge puddle that had accumulated in a pot hole in the sidewalk.

The drunk mumbled something and staggered off, uncaring of the rain dripping off his lank, greasy long hair and soaking the tattered green sweater. No raincoat, no boots, dank rotten smell. He looked homeless. No doubt he’d settle on some corner and panhandle until he got together the money for another beer. Or another whiskey. Or maybe even to score some drugs.

Kerry knew that there was a taxonomy to despair, but hadn’t quite gotten the classification system down pat yet. No doubt a cop could tell whether the smelly man staggering down the street was a drunk or a junkie or just plain crazy, but she couldn’t. Not yet. It filled her with desperation that sooner or later she’d be able to distinguish all the stripes of horror down here at the bottom of society’s ladder.

It was all so very far away from La Jolla. No homeless people in her old world. Everything and everyone in it had been pampered and manicured to within an inch of their lives. No out-of-control drunks, no junkies, no crazies. No poor people at all, unless you counted the help. The ones who kept the gardens green and trimmed, the houses spotless, the streets pristine.

It had been a wonderful world and a wonderful life, if you didn’t count being beaten up on a regular basis. That had sucked.

Her husband had loved her, so very much. So much that he couldn’t stand for her to be imperfect. Any imperfection had to be punished. For her own good, of course.

For three years, Kerry had gone to a different hospital with a different story each time, but there were only so many hospitals in the area. When she found herself at the same hospital for the third time in a year, she mixed her story up. Most well-to-do matrons don’t walk into doors that often.

A social worker had visited her in the hospital and had been questioning her when Tom walked in. Tom had, of course, turned on the charm. He had a special spigot, 24 carat gold. He was tall, handsome and well dressed. He managed to be elegant without coming off as a dandy. He was almost dazzlingly handsome, well spoken, with charm in spades. The rich knew how to smooth over any kind of unpleasantness. He’d come into the hospital room, understood the situation in a glance and had taken over the conversation. Within five minutes he discovered that the social worker enjoyed rock music, promised her front row seats for the upcoming Springsteen concert at Petco and escorted her to her car.

The look he’d given her as the hospital door closed behind her terrified her. He’d been escalating as her errors multiplied. Now her mistakes included the way she spoke, dressed, ate and breathed. More or less everything she did was wrong now, and subject to punishment. And his rages were getting worse. She knew she wouldn’t survive the next time.

Alice—the person she’d been before becoming Kerry—had shifted painfully on that hospital bed and had been surprised to hear a crackling sound. A card, which obviously the social worker had managed to slip onto the mattress as she was saying goodbye.

On it had been a beautiful bird in flight, a number and the words CALL NOW in big block print. The number didn’t have 619, the San Diego prefix. Alice didn’t know where the number was, who the person was that the social worker thought could help her. She didn’t know anything, except for one thing. If she stayed, she’d be dead within the week.

So, with a broken wrist, a damaged liver and a slight concussion, with an IV line with glucose and a powerful antibiotic running into a needle on the back of her hand, she’d escaped. She’d pulled the IV line out, pulled her clothes out of the little closet that had been provided and ran. If Tom had had any idea that she’d have the nerve to run away, he’d have taken her clothes away, no question.

But she’d never run away. That was the quickest way to a fatal beating she knew of.

When she emerged from the basement of the hospital and walked four blocks to hail a cab, she knew that she was running for her life. If Tom ever found her, her life would be over.

With shaking hands, she called the number and set in motion the events that led her to Seattle, to the life of a waitress in a dive, barely making ends meet, with no future to speak of. It wasn’t much, but it was still definitely better than being six feet underground, food for worms.

Sam Reston had saved her life and she wondered if someone had saved Irene’s. Of course, Irene wasn’t her real name. Whoever she was, she was a good kid and had somehow stumbled onto the same awful planet of dangerous men Alice/Kerry had.

God, she’d had no idea that place had even existed until she’d married Tom. And Irene still seemed a little shell-shocked herself.

Kerry knew Irene was in trouble when she told her a man had been asking for her. Irene had turned icy white and just like that, Kerry knew. Turned out the guy was harmless, just wanted to go out with Irene. That was normal, Irene was a pretty woman. But the guy after her wouldn’t want to go out with her. He’d want her dead. Irene had landed on Kerry’s planet. That was when she gave Irene Sam Reston’s number. Just in case.

Where was Irene? They’d gotten into the habit of taking tea at Kerry’s a couple of times a week. Kerry was good at decorating. She’d turned Tom’s home into a showcase. And even on a nothing budget, she’d managed to turn her hole in the wall into something inviting.

Both of them avoided public places. Kerry’s little bolt hole had been a safe haven for them both. Kerry never told her story, and neither did Irene tell hers. They didn’t need to. They both knew.