Fall from Grace (13 page)

She laughed; it was a cruel sound. “Yeah, right. That’s funny. The best you can. Which is fucking nothing, if you ask me. Grace has been dead for more than a week and you cops keep coming in and asking the same goddamn questions. If that’s your best then I hate to see your worst. Don’t you guys fucking talk to each other once in a while?”

“So you do remember when you saw her last?” I said, ignoring the comment. “A week ago?”

She let out a disappointed sigh. “Yeah, okay, I remember when I saw her last. She was heading out to work and—”

“By work, you mean out to the streets?”

“Man, you cops are fucking morons. Where the hell do you think she was going? To her corner office to hang with the gang by the water cooler? Of course she was heading out to the streets, to make a few bucks because we were a day late on the rent.”

“You didn’t go with her?”

That question caused Jackie to lose all of her street toughness and she became a little girl, a girl about the same age as my daughter. I tried to imagine how she’d arrived at this point in her life, what had happened to her to cause her to end up selling her body on the street and living in a dump like this.

The desire to sit her down and spend hours asking questions about her life to get her story was almost overwhelming, but there was no way I could do that because I was here for Grace’s story, not hers. Although Jackie’s life story was probably just as heartbreaking and sad, she was doomed only to be a character in Grace’s story. Maybe if she died, I could delve a bit deeper, but probably not. The paper had only room for one story of this kind, despite the fact that I could fill issue after issue for years with only the life stories of women and girls like Grace and Jackie.

She looked down at her feet and I barely heard her say, “I was sick. I had the flu.”

“So you stayed home, while she went to work?”

“Yeah, she wanted to stay home, feed me soup and shit like that. She was always doing shit like that, but like I said, rent was due so I told her she had to go to fucking work ’cause I couldn’t.”

“So she left and that was the last time you saw her. Did she say anything?”

She nodded, but said nothing at first. Tears finally appeared and her eyes turned misty. She choked back a sob or two. “She said she’d be back in a couple of hours.”

“But she didn’t come back, right?” It was an obvious question, but I was looking for a reaction.

“Nope,” she whispered, the tears now flowing down her face.

“Did you report her missing?”

Despite her tears, she laughed. “Yeah, right. What good would that do? Nobody gives a shit about a missing hooker.” She looked at me for a second and then nodded her head. “Especially you cops, because it makes things easier for you. Just one less street worker you have to worry about, right?”

And she was right. Every year, hundreds of women like Grace were reported missing and nothing happened. If she was white and not a sex trade worker, not someone with a “high-risk lifestyle,” there would be a major search, front-page coverage, television vans stationed outside her home, helicopters provided by the army to aid in the search, and pleas from police for tips. And if she was found dead, no effort would be spared, no stone left unturned, to find her killer.

But for Grace and the others like her, nothing happened when they were reported missing, because prostitutes went missing for a number of reasons and not all of them grim. And if a missing prostitute was found murdered, the investigation was usually perfunctory when compared to one involving a “regular” citizen. Once it was declared unsolved, it was filed on another list that no one really looked at because we are probably all scared by the number of woman on that list. Or we don’t really care because it was just another dead Indian hooker that got what she deserved because of her choice of career.

In order to not feel overwhelmed by the hopelessness of it all, I returned to my line of questioning. “So she said nothing else when she left?”

“Nope, nothing else.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I told her what I always told her when she left,” she said, choking back sobs. “I … I told her to be careful. To stay away from the yellow pickup.”

My heart jumped at the sound of the words.
Yellow pickup.
That was the second time I’d heard that. “What does that mean?”

“Yellow pickup?”

“Yeah, stay away from the yellow pickup. I’ve heard that before. What does that mean?”

Jackie shrugged “It’s just something we tell each other, like don’t eat yellow snow, stay away from the yellow pickup.”

“Yeah, but why? Why should you stay away from the yellow pickup?”

Jackie said nothing but she bent over, rolled up her right pant leg, and showed me a mass of scar tissue on her knee. “About a year or so ago, I get into a yellow pickup, seemed like a decent guy, nice smile and friendly. Old guy, you know, a bit of gray hair, older than you but okay looking. I don’t know why he’s picking me up, but I figure, what the hell, a john’s a john, don’t question, just do the fucking job.

“So we get a few blocks away and he grabs my arm, not in a nice, ‘hey, let’s fuck’ kind of way, but in a ‘you’re not getting out of this truck and there’s nothing you can do about it’ kind of way. So I jabbed him in the eye with my fucking finger, and when he lets go, even though the truck’s still doing about fifty, I opened the door and jumped out, fucking up my knee.

“Grace wanted me to go to the hospital but I said, ‘No fucking way,’ they’d just want to know why and call the cops. It bled for a day or so but then it stopped and I kept a bandage on it for weeks and it fixed itself up all right after a while. It looks bad but it’s okay. But that’s when we came up with, Stay away from the yellow pickup. It means just that, but it also became our way of saying, Be careful.”

“So you think she got into a yellow pickup?”

“Yeah, maybe, but what difference does it make? She’s still dead, right?”

I nodded and decided that I could no longer keep track of her comments, and slowly pulled out my notebook. But she didn’t really see me. She was probably realizing that she was lucky not to have ended up in a farmer’s field and then starting to feel bad that her friend did.

“So can you describe what this guy looked like, the one driving the yellow pickup?”

It took her a few seconds to come back and then she shrugged. “Yeah, sure, but will it make any difference?”

“It might,” I say. “It might, but to be honest I really don’t know.”

She nodded, agreeing, but before she did, she saw the notebook. “Hey, you’re not a fucking cop, are you?” Jackie said. I looked up from my notebook and saw her staring at me, her face impassive, despite the tears.

“No. I’m not,” I said. And then I told her who I was and what I was doing.

“Jesus fuck piece of shit.” I was unsure whether she was describing me, herself, or the situation. I started to apologize but she didn’t hear me. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall, not caring about the mark it left. “You know, because I haven’t been out working, I’m a bit short on the rent and fifty bucks would really help. I mean, I did help out with your story so there should be something in return.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have fifty bucks.”

“Twenty, then. Even twenty would help out.” She leaned closer to me, the scared teenager completely gone. “I’ll give you a blow job. You’re not a cop so it would be okay.”

I sighed, pulled out my wallet, and gave her the twenty. I passed on her offer of a blow job.

16

I was walking back to the car, furiously writing notes about my interview with Jackie, when a voice said, “I knew you weren’t a cop,” and I was shoved forward and slammed to the ground. My knees connected with the concrete with a bash of pain to my legs and a shudder so hard that blood spurted out of my mouth as a few of my molars bit into my tongue. I was hit again on the back, this time with something harder, the heel of a boot or a rock that cracked my shoulder, knocked the wind out of my lungs, and drove my head forward to bash into the side panel of my car. There was a blast of light from the collision and then I fell into a well of darkness.

Sometime later, a year, a week, a second, I awoke into the light, a hazy and painful light that jabbed at my head and felt as if it had scraped the top layer of skin from my body. I had a few friends who suffered from migraines and they had told about the agony that light could cause; I now understood them. I couldn’t breathe and first thought it had to do with my injuries and that over time the ability would come back.

There was also something heavy on my chest, and as my vision slowly began to refocus on the real world, I realized that the weight came from a knee pressing against my chest. Jackie’s neighbor was putting his entire weight on that knee as he leaned forward, his face just inches from mine. Even then I had trouble making him out through the pounding in my head and the haze in my eyes.

Something flashed in front of my eyes, a mirror, a piece of glass, I wasn’t sure. But it was sharp, I was sure of that because I felt the point of it pressed against my face, like a sting from a wasp.

“Bet you thought that was funny, didn’t you?” Jackie’s neighbor growled at me, the bitter smell of cheap booze and cigarettes blowing into my face. “Bet you had a big laugh over the crazy neighbor who thought you were a cop, who thought he was about to get arrested or shot for being stupid. Bet you thought that was pretty funny. But nobody’s laughing now, are we, John?” He called me John because that’s what he thought I was, a john doing an in-call visit with Jackie.

The wasp sting moved away from my face and a second later I felt it against my ribs. “Having trouble breathing?” he hissed. “That’s okay because where you’re going, you won’t have to worry about breathing. The knife will just slide in nicely and you’ll bleed out like a fucking pig. I know you’d like me to say that it won’t hurt but it will. Bad.”

I felt the pressure of the knife pressing against my ribs, and even though he had broken the skin, he hadn’t gone deep enough to cause serious injury. Despite the state of my vision and the pain coursing through my body, I knew he was partly bluffing.

He might have assaulted people, beat them up either in fights or just for fun, but he had not killed anyone. That was a big step that many didn’t take, despite the anger, pain, and horror of their lives. It was a big line to cross, even for those who had a history of violence.

But this guy was close, he was near the edge, and it wouldn’t take much for him to step over and take me with him. I had to find some way to stop him, and the only thing I could think of in my terrified state was my pants pocket, something that I hadn’t taken out the night before and how that might appease his anger.

I was still unable to breathe and that worked in my favor because it made me move my hand slowly toward my pocket. He didn’t even notice until my hand was all the way in. And when he did, he pressed more of his weight against my chest, something cracked, and a flare of pain burst through me. He added more by twisting the knife. But he didn’t push the blade in deeper, he only made the wound slightly bigger.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he screamed. “Are you stupid enough that you want to die now?” He grabbed my wrist with his other hand and yanked it out.

The bills fluttered in the air and it took a second for my assailant to realize what they were and why I had put my hand in my pocket. Then the weight slowly eased off my chest and the knife pulled away from my body. In that second, I gulped several swallows of air and managed to squeeze enough strength in my body to push and roll away.

I half expected another attack, this one with the knife stabbing in deeper and my life thumping away as my heart pumped the blood out through the wound, but for a few seconds there was nothing. Only the sound of feet scuttling around me as Jackie’s neighbor scurried to gather up the bills from my recent banking escapade.

I had no idea how much money I had gathered—I never counted—and I wondered if it was enough. Enough that he would leave me alone and let me live, I hoped.

I crawled toward my car, the vehicle now a sanctuary instead of just a means of transportation. And every inch I crawled brought an anthology of agony—my head hammered with every double beat of my heart, every breath brought a gasp of agony and spit of blood, every scrape across the concrete brought a sandpapering across my skin and a torment of bones and joints bruised and cracked by the attack. But still I moved on because I had no choice.

Even with my offhanded bribe, every second I spent near Jackie’s neighbor would make it more difficult to escape. I had almost made it to the car, when I felt a knee slam against my back. My head snapped forward but I was lucky; it didn’t hit the sidewalk. With my hands pulling me forward, my head connected with my right forearm and it provided a cushion from the cement. It wasn’t much of a cushion—there was still a blast of light and pain as I connected—but it was much better than the skull making direct contact with the ground. I figured I had, at the very least, a concussion, but there was a good chance that I didn’t have a permanent, or fatal, head injury.

The knee in the back hurt like hell, but the fact that I was still able to breathe told me that Jackie’s neighbor had accepted my offer. He wouldn’t kill me, but that didn’t mean I would be let off easy. “You’re lucky I need the money, asshole,” he whispered in my ear. “But if I see your ugly face around this neighborhood again, John, I will fucking kill you. Make no mistake about that. I will kill you.”