Taming Cross (Love Inc.) (8 page)

“His name is Carlos. He’s a hustler in Mexicali. Most nights he’s at a seedy little strip club called La Casa del Amor, off Boulevard Islas Agrarias.”

I pull out my cell phone, jotting down what she said, then cut my eyes up at her. “Seedy by American standards or Mexican standards?”

“Mexican.” She fans her face.

I slip my phone back into my pocket. “And if I want to talk to Carlos, I should…mention you?”

She nods. “Mention Priscilla sent you.”

“He’ll know where the church is?”

She nods. “It’s hardly a secret.”

I think this over. Figure it’s the best I’m going to get. “Thank you, Priscilla.”

I start walking to her door, and she grabs my arm. “You’re not going to tell, are you? You’re not going to share the e-mails? I’m repentant. I’m helping you.”

I nod. She is helping me. But I’m leaving the decision to Missy King.

CHAPTER NINE

I want to drive toward Mexico as soon as I leave Priscilla’s house, but that would put me crossing the border at night. And I know that’s not a good idea. I exit her neighborhood the back way and spend some time driving around the city, trying to be sure she didn’t put a tail on me. For all I know, my father warned her I might pay her a visit.

When I feel reassured that no one’s on me, I stop at a Target in the burbs and stock up on supplies. Some are for Meredith, some for me. Maybe I go a little overboard with the girl stuff, but if I find her, and I can get her to leave with me, I want to have everything she needs. Everything she hasn’t had this last year—or however long it’s been.

It seems possible to me that we might have to hide out for a little while, at the shop or maybe somewhere else when we get back to the States. I think I’ve got the essentials covered (I am NOT buying tampons or any of that other stuff), but I’m reminded again that I really don’t have a plan, and what little I’m going on comes from the mouth of deviant porn star.

I wonder, as I cross the parking lot to the Mach, if a year or a year and a half—I don’t know exactly when they sold her—is long enough to ruin someone for good. I hope not.

I check into the Hampton Inn and soak my shoulder in a hot shower. It’s stiff and sore from the way I’m riding the bike, but I don’t feel a pain attack coming on, so I’m fine.

The next morning I’m up before the sun is. Just can’t sleep. I pull on the jeans I wore yesterday, my scuffed up boots, and a long-sleeved ringer that's got a grease stain near the collar. I think of Suri as I clomp down the stairs. She still hasn't called me but I called her last night and left a message.

I use an old rag I grab out of a janitor’s cart on the first floor to scuff the Mach up some—more inconspicuous that way—and check my map again. Almost six hours to Mexicali, and La Casa del Amor.

Thoughts of the strip club bring up thoughts of Marchant Radcliffe and his whore house, the ridiculously named ‘Love Inc.’ I've gotten to know the guy, and he's decent, but I can’t get over 'Love Inc’. I think he should call it Blow Jobs for Big Money.

I only got to know of the place because Lizzy sold her virginity there. To pay my medical bills. She even opened a savings account for me, which I haven't been able to get her to close yet. I'm not touching the money, and I think she knows that. It’s not like I was penniless when I had my accident.

Sometimes, when I think about it too long, I hate her for it.

And the two million dollars—yeah, two million—just sits there. I thought about investing it and giving it back to her with gains, but realized the first time I tried to read the
Wall Street Journal
—even the front page—that I’m no investor.

Her groom to be, on the other hand, could probably double it before the wedding.

Hunter West.

His name still leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and I know I have no right. I was a whore just like good Mr. West, so who am I to judge his past?

Speaking of pasts: Missy King. Meredith Kinsey. I torture myself, imagining her fate. Wondering, for the thousandth time, if Meredith really is Missy King, or if this is some elaborate plot my father cooked up to throw me off the trail.

And if she is, what happened to her? How did she go from crusading college reporter to sex slave?

People like you happened to her.

As I weave between a Mack truck and a van, I think about how true it is. The guy arrested on drug charges back in Georgia was probably her boyfriend. Maybe she fled to Vegas, where she didn’t have any money, and she met my father, who probably promised to take care of her.

I used to think of myself as one of the good guys. Sure, I slept around, but every woman I was with wanted to be there, too. They wanted the sex as much as I did, and when it was over, we usually parted as friends. I try to stay away from anyone who might want something else.

See? One of the good guys.

But for almost a year, I knew what happened to Missy King and I pretended I didn’t. I believed she deserved what she got. Innocent women don't fuck married men, right?

The thought makes me feel nauseated.

I let fate stay its hand while I sat on her secret. While I protected my father. I let him get away with something abhorrent, and then, that night outside Hunter West's house, I paid for it. Jim Gunn, evil fucker that he is, was doling out justice in my case. I still want to kill him—preferably after feeding him his balls—but I know by the time this is over, I'll see just how much I deserve what I got.

I take a sharp curve around a clump of cacti and my body tenses at the feeling of off-balencedness I get from steering. I’ve got a fucked up left hand, and I can't even ride a bike without losing my damn nerve. No way I'll be saving anybody.

And for the first time yet, I wonder if I'm really going to Mexico to die.

Almost six hours later, I cross the border at Mexicali, the capital of the state of Baja California, Mexico, with my passport and a story about motorcycling through the country. In the bottom of my bag is a second passport, for 'Meredith Carlson'.

It's my hand, I tell myself. Because I'm disabled now, I need to feel like I can actually do something. But doing something is telling the cops. Not riding into a drug cartel’s turf.

As I get into the bustle of Lazaro Cardenas Boulevard, with its half-dozen lanes of thick traffic baking under the hot sun, I take a very stupid risk, balancing with my left shoulder and hand and sticking my right into my pocket, where I grasp Meredith's picture and throw it out into the wind.

The second after, I’m wrenched with regret. Just another sign that I'm pathetic. A lump of emotion rises in my throat, but I swallow hard and navigate the traffic. I focus on finding my way to Islas Agrarias Boulevard, which will take me to a little side street—Av de Los Serdan—where I should find La Casa del Amor.

I'm in shoulder-knotting traffic for almost an hour, feeling the sweat drip through my hair and down my neck, wondering what will happen when I get to the strip club, when I finally spot the turnoff onto Islas Agrarias. My phone isn’t working like my provider told me it would, so I’m relying on visual memory of the map as I look for Calz Tierra something, the smaller street that will take me to the even smaller Av de Los Serdan.

The roads here are paved but it’s been a while. Small, square business signs, nothing but colorful paper plastered over plywood squares, line Islas Agrarias, advertising party spots, a lawyer’s office, free colas. There’s no grass anywhere—just piles of sand that sprinkles across the road as a dry wind slaps me in the face.

I squint through the sweat in my eyes, pass an old brown Jeep, and get into the right lane, where I think I see Calz Tierra. Yeah, that’s it. Calz Tierra…something. I can’t read the words. My eyes are too blurry. I make a slow turn onto it with my heart hammering in my chest, taking in the few food shops and businesses that, to me, look like little more than roadside stands. I pass a fruit vendor and someone selling something that looks like lottery tickets, and then I’m here: Av de Los Serdan. La Casa de Amor.

If there's one thing I've learned from spending time at St. Catherine's Clinc, it's that I lived a mostly selfish life before. It didn’t start off easy, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a selfish girl with dreams and desires all centered around myself.

My mother died in childbirth—her labor came on too fast, and I was born in the car—and after a month nursing bottles from my father, I wasn't gaining weight, so my Aunt Britta and Uncle Walter took me in. They had a one-year-old, my cousin Landon, but still, they made time and space for me. I saw my father on the weekends until I was four, when he was involved in a one-motorcycle wreck on a lonely Georgia highway outside Albany. Just before I started kindergarten, my aunt and uncle adopted me and made me Meredith Kinsey.

Aunt Britta always made sure I looked nice and knew the things a girl should know. Cross your legs when you're wearing a skirt and don't talk to strange men. Don't go close to big vans with dark windows. That kind of thing. I did okay, I guess, until I hit puberty, and by then I'd started feeling...left out. Maybe it's because Aunt Britta was dark-haired, with brown eyes, and I'm so fair, or maybe it was because she used to introduce herself at teacher conferences as my aunt. I wanted a mother and a father. My childhood was consumed by wanting to be normal. A normal child with a mom and a dad. Not an orphan.

When one of Landon's friends kissed me on a freshman/sophomore class trip to the aquarium, I felt so good...and it wasn't too long before kissing boys became my thing.

It made me feel brand new; alive and wanted. Usually I'd go to bed and hug my pillow and I'd dream of marrying whoever I was kissing at the time. I would marry my crush and we would have a baby, and when I got six or seven months pregnant I would just go to the hospital and stay until I had the baby. No dying in the car. After that, we'd be a family. I wouldn't be the left-out little girl. I would be the mother. I would have a daughter with strawberry-colored hair just like mine, and when I took her to the grocery store, our outfits would color coordinate.