It didn’t take much more than another second before I realized that I was hearing bed clothes.Blankets.Sheets.Something like that.
Then a light came on.
My eyes had gotten so used to the dark that for several seconds I wasn’t able to see anything.Finally, as my pupils adjusted, I could squint around at my surroundings.
A room, roughly twelve by twelve feet or so.Maybe a little less.Institutional green.Plain to the point of looking like a prison cell.Two bunk beds, one on each side of the room, with a chest of drawers between.Four drawers.And three Russian girls, long blond hair falling over their scantily clad charms, sitting up.The top bunk on the left was empty, and I had a pretty good idea who used to sleep there.
I tried a smile.“Hello.”
They stared at me.And stared at Rachel, slumped on the floor.Finally, one of them said, in accented English, “What happened?”
To Rachel, I assumed.“They hit her.”
She glanced at the other two.All three of them slithered out of their beds and gathered around Rachel.A second later, they had dragged her to the nearest bunk and laid her out.One of them checked her pulse and said a couple of words in Russian.Or Ukrainian or Belarusian or wherever they were from.
The spokesperson had hair that was a little more honey than the others’, and while they were all pretty, her face was heart-shaped and sweet.“Her pulse is strong,” she told me.“She’ll wake up soon.”
Good.At least we wouldn’t be stuck in here with a corpse.
“My name is Gina,” I said.“I came here to find out what happened to my… um… son.”
My purse was in the car, with my cell phone in it.Smart move, Gina.Not only didn’t I have a picture of Zachary to show them, I had no way of calling for help, either.
Next time I was going sleuthing in the dark, I’d definitely stick my phone in my pocket.
Although, given the circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to keep it anyway.The bad guys would have taken it before they shoved me in here.So it was a moot point.
“His name is Zachary,” I added.“He came to Stella’s last night.Not tonight.Yesterday night.He has red hair, like mine.”
I put a hand to it.I wasn’t sure how much they understood, so it was best to keep things simple.Only one of them seemed to be comfortable communicating with me.Perhaps the others didn’t speak English well enough.Or at all.
If they were in the US doing what I thought they were in the US doing, that probably didn’t matter.
“I spoke to him,” the girl with the honey-colored hair said.
“You’re Tatiana?”
She nodded.“It was only a few words.He didn’t… he wasn’t…” She flushed.“Yuri took me away for a customer.”
Right.I could read between the lines on that one.Zachary wasn’t there to buy sex, and other men were, and she was expected to take care of them.
“He wanted to know about Anastasia,” she added.
I wandered over to sit down on the bunk next to Rachel’s feet.“Anastasia used to be one of you?”
She nodded, and sat down opposite.The two other girls swarmed up to the bunk above her head, and curled up, listening.It was possible they understood more than they could communicate, so I kept my questions simple.“How did you end up here?”
A shadow crossed her face.“Newspaper ad.Modeling.”
I glanced up at the top bunk.“You two, as well?”
They both nodded, so at least they’d understood that much.
“And Anastasia?”
“Anastasia is smart,” Tatiana said.“She knew it wasn’t modeling.But she wanted to come to America.”After a second she shrugged, “Everyone wants to come to America.”
The land of opportunity.Or at least the land of more opportunity than Russia.
