“Remember, you w
ere going to tell me about what happened to Megan?”
“She went with him. She thought she’d be safe.” Her face screws up in a knowing little-girl mask. “But I didn’t trust him.”
“Who was he?”
“I never knew. He looked kinda like you.” She giggles and shakes. “They never told us their names. That was a rule. But they sure liked that young virgin pussy…” She shakes her head sadly. “They wouldn’t like me now.”
“He gave her the pendant.”
“Yeah,” she says wistfully. “Wasn’t it beautiful? They always hooked up. It was like she belonged specially to him. He didn’t like me as much. He liked blondes. Are you going to let me suck your cock now?”
“Did he mention eleven/eleven?”
Her eyes turn clear and wary.
“How do you know about that?”
I watch her closely, ready to tackle her if she tries to run. This is the same woman who had screamed “eleven/eleven” at me that night in the rain, and then had disappeared. Until now. She had said, “You’ll get yours.” I tell her this slowly, holding her hands. They are dry from the cold. Somehow this takes away the sense of threat. “You scared me,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sometimes I’m mean now.”
I ask her what she meant: eleven/eleven. I describe the tattoo on Ryan’s leg. What’s eleven/eleven?
“I don’t remember…” Her brow is knotted beyond her years. “But it’s bad.” More gears try to catch inside her head. “See, we heard it. Eleven/eleven. We weren’t supposed to. Somehow…shit, dawg…gotta remember. They brought us back same as always. But something was different. The way they were looking at us. We knew it was because we overheard something we weren’t supposed to. Megan heard more than I did.”
I ask her again what eleven/eleven means. My voice is too harsh and she draws back.
“I can’t remember!” Then, “It scared us, so after we got back, we went to Ryan.”
“These big shots brought you back?”
“Yeah, in the float plane, same as always.”
“And they let you go?”
“Yeah, but then they called Megan on her cell and wanted to meet us. But it’s not the weekend. You know? It wasn’t the usual time we go with them.”
“So you didn’t go.”
She shakes her head. “But Megan thought they were watching us. My memory…” She pushes her hands up in a gesture of futility, the bats escaping her belfry. “They thought we knew more than we did. Megan said they’d kill us.”
I just sit with her. The air coming off the sound grows warmer.
“Megan decided that only Mister Big could protect her. So she called him and he picked her up.”
“What happened next?”
“We never saw her again. That’s when Ryan got the tat. Eleven/eleven. He didn’t even know what it meant, except somehow it took her away from him.”
“He thought it was a clue.”
“I guess. He was out of his mind over her. But he didn’t do drugs. I had to go find a fix. Ended up with this other guy…god, I’m fucked up. Is Megan okay?”
I tell her I’m going to call a friend and I speed-dial Amber.
Chapter Forty-four