The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

“I heard there was a party and, and, and you were looking for . . . girls.”

“There is indeed a party, and we are definitely looking for girls,” though he used a much cruder word. “And you are a fine specimen.”

“A hundred dollars, up front,” Graciella said.

It was a phrase she had used before, I heard it in her voice, and it sank my heart in my chest.

“A hundred dollars?” The boy shook his head as if this was news to him. “That’s a lot of money. What can you do to earn a hundred whole dollars?”

“I can do whatever you want,” she said defiantly.

“That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say,” he answered with a wicked leer.

A second male appeared, maybe eighteen, maybe not quite. He reached around the first boy and stuck a lit joint in his mouth. “Another hooker?”

The frat boy took a long drag on the joint, held it, and with smoke seeping out said, “Come on, Tony, we don’t say hooker. We say ‘professional sex worker.’”

“Uh-huh. Get her in here, because Oliver has some dudes needing some professional sex work.”

The first boy drew Graciella after him and shut the door. I had a pretty good idea what I would see happen at this party, and though I dreaded it, I felt I had shown weakness earlier, and now that I was established as the more experienced apprentice, I wanted to show Haarm that I was tough enough to see and

do what was necessary.

I led the way through the door.

Inside the lights were low, the walls dirty and scrawled with graffiti. Ancient wallpaper hung in tatters in places, and the paint on the ceiling was bubbled and scarred.

There was a depressing familiarity to the environments in which we saw Graciella now. This room smelled more of mildew and less of grease than the abandoned Memphis garage where Graciella had been raped, but the sense of decay was identical.

Two battered couches, a coffee table with one leg replaced by cinderblocks, a mattress, four men, two other women, if you could call these dead-eyed young girls “women.”

There was one difference from the previous scene: on the table was an array of drugs and paraphernalia.

The boy who had answered the door was not the one in charge. Neither was the second boy. The person in charge was younger than both, but his dominance over the room was expressed in the way he occupied an entire couch by himself, arms spread wide over the back, legs up on the coffee table, laptop open, a small pile of cash resting beside him.

“Hey,” this boy said. “My name is Oliver. Who are you?”

“Candy,” Graciella lied. She did it in an easy, practiced way that made me think we had leaped ahead at least a few weeks in time.

Oliver was handsome and charismatic, with a lush mane of black hair, dark, dreamy eyes, and a body that had spent significant time in a gym, probably with the help of some steroids.

There was relief on Graciella’s face. This was better than what she had recently endured, it was clear on her face. Her eyes darted to the money and Oliver saw it and smirked.

“Let’s take one thing off the table between us right now, Candy,” he said. He shuffled through the money, pulled out two twenties, and handed them to Graciella. “You can keep that. That’s just for walking in here. You can walk right back out with those two twenties. Or . . .”

“Or?”

Oliver shrugged. “Or”—he patted the couch beside him—“you can sit here with me and chill for a while, smoke a little weed, and we see what’s what.”

Graciella hesitated with the money in her hand. Forty dollars would buy her a meal and maybe a place to spend the night. On the other hand, more of that pile of money might mean finding a steady place, maybe a place she could stay in long enough to find a job. The calculation was all over her face.

She sat down beside Oliver, who nodded and lit a joint that he handed to her without inhaling himself. Graciella took a hit and coughed out a cloud of smoke.

“Would you like a beer?”

Graciella nodded. One of the other boys, now clearly subservient to Oliver, fetched a bottle from a cooler full of mostly melted ice.

“So, tell me your sad story, Candy.”