The record keeper a murp.., p.13
The Record Keeper (A Murphy Shepherd Novel), page 13
I nodded.
Casey was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. She rarely small-talked. I waited. “You think he’s down there?”
I turned and waited for the remainder of the question.
She studied the streets. “The man who trafficked me?”
I nodded.
She stared back through the window and chose her words. “Is he the same man who blew up Freetown?”
For weeks she’d been hammering me to help find him. Another nod.
“Is he the reason you just returned from Georgia?”
“Yes.”
“You know who he is?”
“I do.”
“Will you tell me?”
“No.”
“You going after him?”
“I am.”
She leaned closer. Her shoulder pressed to mine. She had become as much my daughter as Ellie. I saw no difference. Neither did she. “Can I come?”
“No. And not just like ‘sort of no,’ but ‘completely no.’”
“What if you need a translator?” A legitimate question, as Casey spoke a half dozen languages.
“I’ll hire one.”
“What if you need someone to . . . drag you out of a burning building?”
I pointed at Gunner.
“Funny.”
Then at Clay.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re really not going to let me help you?”
“Nope.”
“What if I can be helpful?”
“I want you free of him, not consumed by him.”
“What about you?”
It was a fair question, so I dodged it. “I’ve been free of him. Now I’m going to bring his playhouse down.”
“But consumed?”
I laughed. “One of us has to be.”
“That’s not fair.”
I turned. “Casey . . . don’t let him hold you captive from a distance. He’s just a man.”
She nodded. “And when I close my eyes, I remember what that man did to me.” Having voiced her fear, she turned and walked off.
Karen slid her arm in mine. She was skinnier. Pale. Looked as if she’d aged. I wondered if she’d been working too hard. Her arm was trembling slightly. She whispered with a smile, “Before you leave, can I get five minutes?”
“Sure.”
“I’d like you to meet someone.”
Her mischievous smile betrayed her. “New man in your life?”
She weighed her head side to side as Clay stepped to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, if I could please have your attention.” Clay had survived being blown up and burned over half his body. Undeterred, and with the help of most every woman at Freetown, he’d taught himself to walk again. Not to mention dance. Although I think he could walk long before he actually did. If ever I saw someone milk an injury . . . But given the fact that he’d spent five decades in prison, he’d earned the right. Clay had absolutely no trouble whatsoever being the center of attention.
“Folks, if you’ll take your seat.” The room hushed as Clay cleared his throat. “I know you all didn’t come here to hear me, so I’ll be brief.” Clay smiled and chose his words. “Prior to the fireworks show at Freetown that got a little out of hand”—laughter rippled across the room—“Casey had educated much of the civilized world on trafficking. On being trafficked. Since that time, she has become the voice of the voiceless. And while she and Ms. Karen have set publishing records, she has done one thing that can never be measured. Maybe more than any other. She’s given hope to the hopeless. Speaking as one who was once hopeless, I can attest that there is no value you can place on hope. Please welcome Casey Girl.”
Whenever Casey spoke publicly, she never spoke alone. Angel always stood alongside her. A shoulder against the memories. An arm to hold her when she stumbled. Casey, shadowed by Angel, stepped to the microphone but paused as the applause held her at bay. Summer and I watched in wonder as she stood. Confident. Having shed her shell. Casey had become comfortable in her own skin.
When she did speak, you could hear a pin drop. And she was looking at me. “I was lying on the floor of a shower. Some house in South Florida. Have no memory of how I got there. In the week prior I’d”—Casey held up her fingers like quotation marks—“‘serviced’ more than a hundred clients. Which in English means I’d been raped for profit fifteen times a day. One after another. To keep me busy, or rather get the most money for my time, my traffickers had put my available schedule on the dark web. Sold thirty-minute slots. I’m told I was profitable. But that ‘profit’”—more quotation marks—“I never saw a dime. Selling flesh is different than selling drugs. Drugs you sell once. Flesh you sell a thousand times over. To help me forget, to transport my mind out of the hell in which my body lived, I did a lot of drugs. Anything I could. Whenever I could. Because of that, I don’t know how long I’d been on that ship. A year. Maybe two. Anyway, they brought in some new girls. Fresher. Less mileage. They relegated me to a closet. Truth was, they’d had complaints. Said I was no longer desirable. Which makes me wonder, what had they done to me that even the worst of the perverted and whacked human beings on the planet couldn’t satisfy themselves with what was left of me?”
Casey paused and shook her head. “I know you’re here because you have heard my story. Or read it. And you are amazed at what you call my ‘courage.’ But here’s the thing . . . if I tell you my story, like all of it, half of you will throw up. You’ll never print it and I will find myself speaking to an empty room because none of you have the stomach for it. I certainly didn’t. Hence the drugs. Truth is, I am anything but brave.”
Casey studied her hand. “I once ‘worked’ on a cattle farm, and during a break between clients, I saw a man shoot a horse he’d ridden ten years because the horse had grown old and blind and the cowboy didn’t want to pay to feed it.” She paused. “They made sure I saw that. The visual served as a deterrent. To make sure I didn’t run off.
“So . . . back to the shower. In the tradition of shooting horses, my traffickers fed me a cocktail intended to make my heart explode. Or my brain. Didn’t matter to them. Just as long as one did. Then they packed up the desirables, moved the party, and left me . . . on the floor of that shower. So I lay there. Counting the drumbeats in my ear. Just waiting for the boom.
“Then I heard a whisper. Felt a body. One of the new girls found me.” Casey pointed across her body to Angel. “Pretty girl. They were gushing over her. I’d seen her on the ship and we’d talked. A little. She didn’t know it, but they’d posted her picture on the dark web and were hosting an auction. She was forty-eight hours from being air-lifted to the highest bidder—currently a guy in Russia. No one would ever see her again. Take one look at her and you can see why the numbers were impressive.” The audience squirmed as they didn’t know how to respond. So they didn’t.
“I was seconds from eternity. And freedom. She? Just hours from a living hell. One I’d been living. We? Brought together in some sadistic plot.” Casey studied the audience. “She knew none of this when she found me in the shower. And for some reason, in the first act of kindness I’d known in . . . years, she stole some ice, a bunch of it, and packed me in it. Talking to me all the time. Telling me to hang in there. ‘You’re gonna be okay.’ I was too high to tell her that I didn’t want to be okay. The ice countered the drugs, lowered my heart rate, and kept me alive. When I woke, the ice had melted and I was a Popsicle but somehow still alive. Sort of. Some sort of weird drug-induced coma. Alone. Dying a slow death. No voice. No hope. But I was shivering so hard I thought my teeth would crack, so I climbed out and turned on the shower before fading off again. Somewhere in that haze, I decided I hated all men. And would forever. I knew with my last dying thoughts that nothing would or could change the fact that every time I looked across a room like this and saw men like you, I’d hate every one of you. And so I lay there, using my last breaths to scheme how I’d hurt men if I found any of you alone in a dark room. What I’d cut off. Because in my experience, which, to say the least, was extensive, you’re all the same. You’re cold, heartless, and you only care about you, which is why men like you would pay so little to do what they did to me.”
Nobody moved.
Since I woke up from my Rumpelstiltskin nap, Casey had continued to improve physically. Thanks to Gunner, she’d even quit taking sleeping medication. But emotionally she was not healthy. Having grown stronger, she began fighting the memories she couldn’t shake. Memories in which she constantly found herself helpless. And muted. She told us, “It’s like drowning every day only to find that someone lets you up long enough to suck in a breath of air just before they shove you down again.” She spent a lot of time shooting pistols in my underground range, becoming proficient with several different weapons systems, and had applied for her concealed carry permit. Don’t get me wrong—I had encouraged her to do both. I wanted her both to be and to feel empowered to defend herself, but I get a little squirmy when the driving motivation is hatred bordering on rage.
And possibly revenge.
Some might cry foul and suggest that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. I won’t argue. For me there can be, and has been, a fine line between rescue and revenge. And to be honest, I’m not sure I can always tell you where one ends and the other begins.
Her tone changed. “I watched a TED Talk last week where a computer hacker attended a conference—of the media. Many of you were there. He used your Bluetooth connection to hack your phones. What he found was consistent with the rest of the male population—over half of you have a daily porn addiction. Yet you argue you’re not hurting anybody. No big deal. Just a little peeky-boo. Nobody’s the wiser. But in economics you are creating what is called ‘demand.’ And throughout the history of the world, wherever demand exists, someone meets it with what is called ‘supply.’” Casey pointed to herself. “I.e., me.”
She paused to let that sink in. “I am supply. But it doesn’t end there. What starts as a porn addiction becomes pay-to-see. Then pay-to-experience. But that, too, gets old, and the pay-to-experience that used to satisfy no longer does. So now you pay-to-experience someone younger. Someone fresher. Soon the age drops. From eighteen to sixteen. Then fourteen. Twelve. Ten.” Casey studied the room. Most everyone had grown uncomfortable. “A wise man once told me that a man with a theory can never argue against a man with experience. I have seen with my two eyes ‘normal’ men like you satisfy themselves with five- and six-year-old boys and girls. If that’s not enough, they then posted the videos on the dark web and sold them so other miscreants could gorge on their carnage.”
Silence.
“Do I make you uncomfortable? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you wanted me to tell the truth.”
She continued, “So there I was. Floor of the shower. Content to hate men forever. No problem. With whatever life I had left, I was going to live it hating men like you.” Casey shook her head. Tears appeared. “Then I heard this voice. Through the steam. And if I’m honest, the last thing I wanted was to hear a man’s voice. For a man to save me. To be beholden to a man. Men did this to me. I was lying in that shower, shot full of enough heroin to kill a moose because some man valued himself over me. But he wasn’t the only one. Two days prior, they had marked me ‘half price.’ I remember seeing a line of men out the door. All of whom valued themselves more than me. Otherwise, why were they in that line?”
Her voice softened. “But then I felt these arms beneath me. I’d known enough men to know that these were a man’s arms. More often than not, arms like these had pinned me down. Beaten me. Shoved my face into the wall. Or dirt. Or . . . caused me to do what I did not want. But not these arms. These arms were rocks. But . . . tender rocks. They lifted me. Carried me. And while this man was carrying me, I was thinking to myself that the one thing I hated most in the world, a man stronger than me, just rescued me. What’s worse, I’ll probably live because of this idiot. What’s a girl got to do to get a break around here?
“And if that’s not bad enough, when I asked him, ‘Why?’ he told me something I’d long failed to believe. Couldn’t believe. He said”—her voice cracked—“‘Because you’re worth rescue.’ I thought he was talking about somebody else. Maybe that new girl. Maybe he’d gotten us confused. Maybe her family had spent a bunch of money to get her back. But he kept carrying me. And he carried me out of hell. Then he got me help. Cleaned me up. Sat with me. Asked nothing of me. Took nothing from me. Moved me someplace safe. Where nobody can hurt me. And when I got there, I found a family that tended my wounds. Both outside and in. Then, because he was once someone who needed to heal, he gave me a pen and told me to ‘tell the truth.’
“Somehow I found I had a voice. What’s more, he wanted to hear what I had to say. I thought he’d lost his ever-loving mind. Are you kidding me? Why would he want to listen to anything I had to say? Yet he did. Every word. And somewhere in that fog of remembrance and creation, I turned around and looked in my cracked rearview and I found he’d done the one thing I believed no one could ever do. Certainly no man.” The words were long in coming. “He had restored my hope.”
She waved her hand across the room. “As evidenced by the fact that all of you are sitting there staring at me.” A pause while she read their faces. “But now I have this problem. I can’t hate all men, because he is one of you. No, he’s the best of all of you. And—” She stepped to the side, pulled Clay onto the podium with her, and stood locked arm in arm. Angel on one side. Clay on the other. “Then he gave me Clay.” Clay had become the face of Casey’s security. Even now, walking with a cane and nursing his own burns, he stood chest puffed. Swinging his cane like a sword. The media were eating out of his hand. Casey pointed to Bones. Dressed in a suit yet wearing his collar. “Then he gave me Bones.” Finally, not to be left out, Gunner jumped up onstage and, standing on two legs, put his paws on the podium, tongue dangling, tail wagging. Gunner had become the face of Freetown and his applause was louder than Clay’s.
Casey laughed, but her tone was still slightly acidic to those whose ears were attuned to listen. “My world is now full of men who are nothing like those I knew, and I would trust all of me to any of them.”
Clay sat back down and Gunner returned to Ellie’s side. “That said, the soul is like Velcro, and when you brush up against someone else, especially when there are no clothes to separate you, part of you clings to them and part of them clings to you. Soon you find yourself carrying pieces of souls that you don’t want and don’t want you. But you can’t help it. It’s like being handcuffed to a stranger on the subway and your stop never comes.”
She pointed to her book. “In your hands you hold the story of who I was. Casey Girl. Now I’m trying to figure out who I am. And yet, when I close my eyes, the faces return. The countless men. Twenty-four-seven, they play like a slideshow across my eyelids. I want to be me, whoever that is, but I’m left carrying them. I spend my days trapped inside memories I don’t want with people I don’t want and who don’t want me.” She shook her head. “The farther I travel from that hell and the healthier I become, the more my memory returns, and the more clearly I see. You should know that I’m approaching twenty-twenty. My question is this: What do I do with all those who gave so little and stole so much? What do I do with these men who live rent-free in my mind? Am I not of value? Do you not see me?”
The room was silent.
“A few weeks ago, we were talking. Me and the one who rescued me. He heard this bitter tone that you now hear in me, and he told me again, ‘Write it down. Tell the truth. Let it out.’ When I asked why, he pointed at my chest. ‘This thing you’re holding on to—this rage—is the poison we drink thinking it’ll kill someone else.’ So . . . once again, I am. Reminding me that those men stole pieces of my soul, and I want my pieces back.” Casey paused. Making eye contact with many in the room. “Why? Because in the blurred edges of my mind, I remember . . . I’m a daughter. A friend. One day I’d like to be a wife and—if my body can—a mom.” Casey was whispering now. “It’s my love letter to the me I used to be. And to all those like me.”
With that, Casey turned, and both she and Angel exited the stage as the salivating press jumped to their feet and applauded.
Karen watched Casey with admiration, only to whisper in my ear, “She’s a publisher’s dream.” Karen shot a glance at me. “Almost as dreamy as you.” She half smiled, then shook her head once and looked away. Staring out the window. Central Park. After a pause, she said, “I wish . . .” Karen trailed off and disappeared into the crowd.
I kept to the shadows while Casey signed books and posed for pictures. Women of all ages, and even many men, stood in a long line for just five seconds with Casey. Ever at her side stood her support team: Summer, Angel, and Clay.
Not to mention Gunner.
Chapter 16
An hour into the signing and picture frenzy, Karen found me in the corner. Overwatch. “Got a second?”
I followed her. Down one hallway. Along another. Through an open glass atrium and then through two huge oak doors and into the executive office of suites, where I found a young woman sitting on the floor playing Legos with a small boy. Karen sat next to the boy and watched the imaginary Star Wars world being constructed. Gunner followed me in, saw his opportunity, and seized it, licking both the woman and the boy. The kid retreated to Karen, and the girl laughed and petted Gunner, who got what he wanted. Karen sat the boy on her lap and wrapped her arms around him. He was six. Maybe seven. Small for his size. His eyes scanned the room, landing nowhere, and the vein on the side of his head told me his heart was beating fast. I knelt, picking up the now-trampled Star Wars figure, and pieced him back together, snapping the lightsaber to the hand. Then I handed Luke Skywalker to the boy.
