"What's the floor?"
"Poured concrete with a drain in the middle of the corridor." My mouth is going and I can't stop it. "You can hear which way somebody's walking by the drain. If they're coming toward you the water sound comes after their boot and if they're going away it comes before, because of the pitch, and I know that because I listened to it for nine years and there was nothing else to listen to."
Amara puts her hand down.
She doesn't say anything for a second.
"Okay," she says.
That's all she says. But something's gone out of the room and something else has come into it, and Razor's not sitting the way he was sitting.
"Keep going," Amara says.
"The men who work it call it the Ranch."
Her eyes haven't left my face.
"Five of them on a given night. Four drink and sleep and count wrong. One doesn't." Flat. Even. "He counts twice a night, doors and faces. His name is Wes. I don't know his last name and I'd know his walk in a stadium."
"Ms. Bacani?—"
"I'm not finished."
She stops.
"Clients come to the property. They pay, they come out, they get a room in the client building for however long they bought, and the women get brought up to them." I'm looking at the middle of her desk. "No cameras. That's what they're paying for. They're not buying a woman, you can get a woman anywhere. They're buying a place where nobody's watching, and nothing's ever happened and nothing ever will."
Razor's hand goes to his mouth.
"Tucson. Phoenix. Scottsdale, further out than that, and I've heard planes." My voice is doing exactly what I need it to do. "There's a strip somewhere. I've never seen it. I've been listening to it for years."
The room's gone very still.
"Nine years," Amara says.
"About. I lost the exact number somewhere in the middle, and I've tried to get it back and it won't come." It sounds like a woman on a recording. "I was twenty-two. I'm thirty-two. You can do the rest."
Finn makes a sound.
I don't look at him.
I haven't looked at him since the zipper and I'm not going to, because I'm standing on something and it's the only floor I've got.
"What were you used for?" Amara looks directly into my eyes.
Plain. No softness anywhere in it.
There are four women in this building who've sat where I'm sitting. I'd bet the ledger on it.
"Sex," I say.
Dante turns his face to the wall.
"They beat me when a man complained and they starved me down about forty pounds, because a woman who can't stand up can't run." Facts. "I've been pregnant. More than once. They ended all of them, some with pills, one on a table in the client building with a man I don't believe was a doctor. I lost the number of those too."
Here it is. My reality.
I've said it out loud in a room with four people in it and the building didn't fall down.
