The first time she had seen one, she had panicked and yelled for Tony. He had come running outside and had been only too happy to chop the poor snake in half with a shovel. It had seemed to Angie the two halves of the severed snake had wiggled forever. Months later the agonizing death of that writhing snake still haunted her. Now when she did happen to see a snake, any kind of snake, she didn’t mention it to Tony at all. In fact, sometimes she wished that the whole yard would fill up with slithering rattlesnakes and that Tony would go outside barefoot, but of course that didn’t happen.
She envied them all-the birds, the rabbits, and yes, even the snakes-because they at least were free to come and go as they liked. Angie Kellogg wasn’t.
All morning long she had itched to go check in the coat closet and see if this was the morning when the newest briefcase would appear, hut she hadn’t dared, not with Tony in the house and only asleep. She had learned that he was a very light sleeper, and she didn’t want him to catch her prowling around where she shouldn’t. Later on, if he went out, which he usually did, she’d have ample opportunity to check.
Tony knew a lot about her, but not everything. Her ability to pick the locks on briefcases, for instance, was a carefully guarded secret. Every time the doorbell rang like that in the middle of the night, she knew that in the morning a different briefcase would show up on the shelf in the entryway closet. It would stay there, for a day or two, until Tony was called out of town, then the briefcase would disappear, along with the banded packets of currency inside it.
Angie understood the connection between the intermittent arrival of money and Tony’s subsequent sexual prowess. Tony regarded himself as a hell of a lay, but it was only when the money came or when he went off to do what he called a consulting job that he could come up with a decent hard-on, and those didn’t last long. By the next day, he’d be after her, demanding satisfaction despite his perpetually soft dick and blaming her when it didn’t work. Angie was enough of a pro to make it happen most of the time, but it was hard work, much harder than she had envisioned when Tony Vargas plucked her off the mean streets of East L.A. After the brutality of her last pimp, Tony had seemed a safe haven, at first. Now, though, she realized she had moved from frying pan to fire, and once more she was searching for a way out.
From the bedroom she heard Tony cough his first hacking cough of the day and flick open his cigarette lighter. He was awake then, finally, and had lit up the morning’s first smoke. It was amazing to her that in a house that spacious-Tony said there were almost 5,000 square feet under the roof-that she could still hear the tiny click of his damned lighter so distinctly. She hated that sound. It was a signal to her, as plain as if he had punched a buzzer or rung a bell. Angie knew better than to ignore that arbitrary summons.
Pulling the robe closed around her, she went to the kitchen and switched on the Krups coffee maker that had been sitting on the counter loaded and ready since nine o’clock that morning. When Tony woke up in the mornings, he always wanted a cigarette, sex, and a cup of coffee, and he wanted them in that exact order.
“Where are you, Angie?” he bellowed from the bedroom. “What the hell are you doing out there?”
Sometimes, when she came back to the bed, he’d only want her to lie there next to him and keep quiet, but today he ran his hand over her thigh. “You on top,” he told her shortly. “And take off that damned robe. I like looking at your tits.”
Angie peeled off the robe and clambered on top of him. She resented it when he wanted to do it that way, lying there with one hand behind his head, smoking his cigarette and watching her while she tried to get him hard enough to fit inside her. Maybe if he’d put down the cigarette and concentrate some, it might work better.
She played with him, caressed him, knowing that if she didn’t make it work, it would be her problem far more than his. By the time he finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray on the bedside table, she thought it was hard enough, but when she settled herself on him, what little erection there had been disappeared and he flopped back out.
“Sorry, Tony,” she said. “It won’t go in. Maybe later.”
He seized one pendulous breast in his hand and squeezed it until she yelped with pain. “It’ll go in something,” he said, pulling her down to him. “Use your imagination.”
Seething with resentment, Angie did what he wanted, plying him with her tongue and teeth, using all the tricks nine years of working the streets had taught her. At times like this, when she knew it would take forever, she tried not to think about how long it would be, tried to ignore the scratches his jagged toenails sometimes left on her leg when he jammed his knee into her crotch.
One of the girls in L.A. had told her that the secret was to put yourself on automatic and think about something else entirely, something happy or pleasant. To do that, she had to go way back, to first or second grade, before the night when, with her mother in the hospital having another baby, her father had come to her room in the middle of the night and forced himself inside her. That night had marked the end of Annie Beason’s childhood and the be-ginning of a nightmare that lasted for years. Two days shy of her thirteenth birthday, she had boarded a Greyhound bus and left Battle Creek bound for California.
Even there the nightmare had changed, but it hadn’t ended. She had expected to make it big in California. Back home in Battle Creek, she had overheard people telling her mother how beautiful she was and how she could maybe be a model some day. Annie Beason headed for California determined to become a movie star. As the noisy bus rumbled cross-country, she had decided on her stage name-Angie Kellogg, after the company her father worked for. Once she made it big, she expected to come back home and rub his red, vein-marked nose in it. And, with a different name, if something bad happened to her along the way, her mother would never have to know.
Of course, something bad had happened, lots more bad than good as a matter of fact. In L.A. there was a whole industry ready to snap up any and all would-be movie stars, the younger the better. On the streets she had learned that she wasn’t alone, that there were lots of other girls just like her, girls from families like hers where the only sign of love or affection between fathers and daughters was a stiff poke between the legs in the middle of the night. Knowing she wasn’t alone made it a little easier, but not much.
At first, as young as she was and as pretty, it was easy to make the big bucks, but Angie was bright and she noticed what went on around her. She stayed away from drugs. Girls who did drugs ended up dead more often than not, and Angie Kellogg was nothing if not a survivor. The trick was to make good money, save some of it, and stay alive long enough to get out. If you were smart and lucky, you found a rich daddy to take care of you while you still had your looks.
By twenty-two, Angie Kellogg was old for someone in her line of work. Worldly in some ways but hopelessly naive in others, she was lucky to have kept her looks. Over time, however, she had been passed down from one pimp to another until she ended up with a guy who was not only a pimp but psychotic as well. He had caught her freelancing in a neighborhood bar on her day off, and he would have killed her if Tony Vargas hadn’t stepped into the middle of it and come to her rescue.