guess, but I’m all for comfort, and these men don’t need a pair of high heels to turn them on. Any warmish body will do.
“Hey,” I say to her.
She looks at me and flicks her cigarette, her pale cheeks tightening as she clenches her jaw.
“I’m looking for my niece. She went missing a few weeks ago. Do you think you might have seen her?” I hold out my phone to show the picture I downloaded from the website.
The woman shrugs and edges closer to squint at the phone. “That looks kind of like Kiki.”
“Kiki?”
“Yeah. She works the trucks here every once in a while. Not often, though.”
I scroll to another picture. “This is her?”
“Yeah, that’s her.” She takes a drag from her cigarette and scuffs her sandals against the cement. “She’s missing?”
“She’s been gone a few weeks. Unless you’ve seen her since then? This was the last place she was headed. About a month ago.”
“No, I ain’t seen Kiki. Have you talked to her pimp?”
“Little Dog?”
“Yeah”—she smirks—“Little Dog.” Then we laugh together at him and his rural white-boy bravado.
“Did she seem okay the last time you saw her around here?”
“I don’t know. She was so little, we used to tell her to go on home. I mean, she’s young and everything, so we worried. But mostly we didn’t want her drawing the cops here neither. No one needs that kind of attention, you know?”
“Sure, I get it. What about Little Dog? Did he seem normal to you?”
“Yeah. I saw him more recently. He was hanging out in the lot, then some big SUV pulled up, and he took off like a bat outta hell.”
“Who was in the SUV?”
“No one I’ve ever seen. Big guy with a shaved head.”
Interesting. My mom mentioned a bald man too. A bald man with a gun. I glance over the lot. “Anyone else around tonight?”
“Nah, I’m the early bird.” She grins. “Getting that worm.”
We snort-laugh together as she grinds her cigarette butt beneath her flip-flop and shakes out her hair.
“Smart lady, waiting by the showers,” I say. “That’s a good tactic.”
“Girl, you wouldn’t believe the swamp ass these guys acquire in those leather seats. No thank you, ma’am. I’ll take a clean dick any day.”
I don’t mind her ma’am at all. In fact, I hand over a ten-dollar bill. “Thanks for your help with my niece. I appreciate it.”
“No problem. I’ll ask around if you want to come back in a couple of days. I’ll have my son tomorrow night, so I won’t be here. But check in on Thursday.”
“Got it.”
“I hope Kiki is all right.”
Kiki. Just a regular, everyday underage sex worker, maybe. But something about good old Frank’s reaction is still bothering me. Time to reach out to a local pimp, it seems.
CHAPTER 13
Knowing Little Dog has been spooked by something, I decide to go with the harmless “I’m just a girl” approach to reassure him that he’s in charge here.
Hello, Brodie! I’m Kayla’s aunt from Minnesota and I’m trying to get in touch. Do you know where she is or how I can contact her??? I’m pretty worried & I just want to be sure she’s ok. Thanks so much!
I shop in the truck stop for a few minutes while I wait for a response. I grab a bag of Funyuns and eye the men around me in the store. And they’re all men, aside from the woman ringing them up. This town has always been filled with so many strangers, men coming through for work or fueling up before a long drive into the panhandle. It’s never been a safe place to be a girl.
I look at them in line, their faces unsmiling and unshaven, and I imagine any one of them might have offered Kayla cross-country passage in exchange for a daily blow job along the way. Of course, any one of them might have decided rape and murder was just as fun a pastime and dropped her body in the scrub somewhere along these two-lane highways. As a monster myself, I’m not under any delusions about the kindness of strangers.
I find it curious that men are so often the monsters, because it’s definitely not about some mythological kindness of women. We can be cruel and harsh and abusive. But we don’t lash out in the same ways.
I assume men’s anger drills down on us so specifically because women are presented at the earliest age as withholders of pleasure. Look at them over there, walking around with what we want.