“Lieutenant Dallas.” Her voice was smoke.
“That’s right.” To keep it smooth, Eve held up her badge. “Detective Peabody. DeLonna Jackson?”
“It’s Lonna. Just Lonna. Lonna Moon. This is my man, Derrick Stevens. This is our place.”
“It’s a nice place.”
Derrick angled himself between Lonna and Eve. “She doesn’t have to talk to you.”
“Derrick.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, baby, you know I do. We’ve got a life, Derrick and me,” she said to Eve, stepping to the side to stand unshielded. “We’ve got a place, and a life that’s a long way from what was. He worries about me going back there.”
“We’re not here to bring you trouble.”
“The trouble was already there,” Lonna said to Derrick before he could speak. “It’s hard to know it, but now I do. We should sit down. We can get you a drink. Derrick, I could use a fizzy water. How about some fizzy water all around?”
“That’d be great,” Eve told her, and went with her to a booth. Eve and Peabody slid into one side. “You were friends with Shelby Stubacker.”
“Best friends ever. Shelby, Mikki, T-Bone. I think I’d have faded away like air without them. Shelby and Mikki, they’re dead, aren’t they? Sebastian didn’t say, not right out, but I knew when we heard about . . . about what they found in The Sanctuary, I knew. I thought they just left me, and it broke my heart.”
“They didn’t just leave you.”
“It’s worse. So much worse knowing that. But it helps, the knowing.”
“You were going to have your own place, your own club—like Sebastian’s—in The Sanctuary.”
“How’d you know that?” Surprised, she stared at Eve when Derrick brought over a tray with tall glasses of water sparkling like the ceiling stars. “It’s all we talked about for days and days when we found out we were moving out. I was so scared, but I couldn’t admit it. Scared at the thought of being on our own, but excited, too. Best friends ever,” she murmured, and sipped her water when Derrick sat beside her.
“Who helped her get the forged documents, the paperwork to get out?”
“You know about that, too? I don’t know, not for certain. Shelby didn’t always tell us everything. She was the captain. She had power, but she had responsibilities. She said things like that.”
“She developed a relationship with Montclair Jones. The younger brother. Sexual?”
On a sigh, Lonna tipped her head to Derrick’s shoulder. “She didn’t see it as sex. She saw it as bartering, as currency. It took me a while to see it as different.” She smiled over at Derrick. “It took some doing for Shelby to draw Monty out. He was a little scared of her, and awful shy, but he was fascinated, too. And he wasn’t smart and straight like Mr. Jones or Ms. Jones. He didn’t seem all that much older than us, though I guess he was. Shelby gave him his first blow job, and was proud of that.”
On a wince, Lonna touched a hand to her heart. “God, that makes her sound awful. You have to understand—”
“I do. She’d been abused, over and over. She learned to survive in a way she thought gave her some control. She was a child who never had a chance to be one.”
“Most of us were.” The first tear slid down Lonna’s cheek.
“Don’t cry, baby.”
“I have to, a little. Shelby never got a chance to be happy, like I did. And Mikki, she was so needy, so angry. But my God, she loved Shelby. Loved her too much, in a way I see now Shelby could never have given back. We followed her, and she gave us direction, she gave us . . . family. We’d hook up with Sebastian’s club sometimes, for fun, for the company. And because you could learn a lot. He said you weren’t going to hassle me about the things I did back then.”
“I won’t. I understand that, too.” To cover it, she shifted her attention to Derrick, just for a moment. “Nobody’s going to hassle Lonna.”
“First time you do, I show you the door.”
“Fair enough. You brought a girl to Sebastian,” she said to Lonna. “This girl.” And laid Merry Wolcovich?
??s photo on the table. “Do you remember?”
“I do. I don’t remember her name, and it turned out she was mean as a snake. But I brought her to Sebastian when I came across some boys giving her trouble. She was giving it back, but they had her outnumbered, so I stepped in.”