The Taken (30 page)

“Because you’ve tried to stop it before.”

She shook her head, refusing to confirm it. “There’s too much money involved. Too much power. And I ain’t got any of it.”

“You got me,” he said, tilting his head as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

She huffed again, though her eyes softened. “And?”

“And I’m willing to listen to your story.”

Biting her lower lip so that lipstick stained her top teeth, she looked away and rolled back on her heels, as if rocking herself. Finally she looked back at Grif and crossed her arms. “How much you willing to pay for my time?”

“You get paid for every minute in your day?”

“You wanna know my story, Shaw? Here’s the Cliff Notes version. I was the original Daddy’s little girl. And when I was fourteen, Daddy decided that my use, my purpose in this world, was to provide sex for his friends and power for himself. He made me into an object and a commodity, so do me a favor and don’t judge me now if I happen to do it so fucking well.”

Grif thought, then reached into his pocket for a hundred. “I got a bill.”

She jerked her head at the bar. “And a drink.”

So Bridget and Grif left dusk outside and embraced the canned, smoky dimness of the neighborhood bar. It was perfect for their needs. People looked up at their entry, then quickly away, all complicit in not truly seeing each other. A bored but efficient server threw down coasters and took their drink orders, and they listened to a couple at the bar competing with the television for attention until she returned, and left again.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Bridget started, stirring the ice in her glass.

“She’s not . . . that,” Grif muttered, then glanced at his own glass. “And we had a . . . disagreement.”

Bridget looked amused at that. “Let me guess. Your disagreement was about her not being your girlfriend.” She laughed when he tossed her a bland look, and pointed her glass at him as she raised it for a sip. “Oh, I read the two of you like the world’s oldest, most unoriginal book the moment you stepped in my salon. She’s half in love with you, but you’re what’s popularly known as the strong, silent type.”

“Well, I’m not very popular right now,” Grif said, stirring his own drink a little too hard.

“Just stubborn and sullen, then,” Bridget said, setting her drink down. “And you’ve ended up exactly where you wanted to be because of it. Alone.”

“This analysis part of the hundred-dollar charge, or you just throwing it in for free?”

Bridget snorted at that.

“You got it wrong, chickie. Fact is, Kit Craig would have been better off if I’d never entered her life.”

“You’re probably right,” Bridget agreed, offering up a toast he didn’t meet. “But you’re here now, and you sound like you’re trying to justify your actions.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said, toasting her.

“I got good reason for staying silent.”

“Tell me.”

Bridget looked down, fiddled with her straw, then tilted her gaze over at him. “You like women.”

Grif lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “What’s not to like?”

“Yeah, you like them,” she said, nodding on a half-smile. “I can tell. After a while you can dissect a guy’s insides like a pinned frog—this one has mommy issues, this one’s a user, this one’s just an asshole.” Huffing, she shook her head. “My father doesn’t like women. It’s a testament to his entitled nature, and what he would call his ‘extreme bad luck’ that he’s surrounded by them.”

“Marrying multiple wives is bad luck?”

She glanced over at Grif with a small smile. “Would you call it good?”

He thought back to his conversation with Kit on the dance floor. “I’d call it excessive.”

Bridget leaned on her elbows. “For my father it was expected. His father’s side is an extremely traditional Mormon family. There’s a branch of Mormonism that has never given up polygamy.”

“Was there also a family tradition of pimping out their daughters?” Grif asked lightly.

Bridget’s gaze flashed, but when she saw there was no bite or meanness to the words, softened again. Shaking her head, she sipped. “No. That was Caleb Chambers’s own personal touch. He pretty much ignored me when I was a child. Seen and not heard, that was his motto. Left my mother alone to rear us.” Gaze far away, she frowned. “Left
her,
I think, without ever leaving her.

“So the other wives came, the other children, too, and then I hit my teens. That’s when he suddenly took an interest in me, and oh, it was heady.” Bridget smiled bitterly at the memory. “Daddy wanted to hang out with me? Read me bedtime stories? Sit and stroke my hair and shoulders as we talked about everything and nothing at the same time?”

She sighed with the memory, but then her face darkened. “The night I had my period he came into my room, said my mother had told him it was a special day, and that he had a present for me. He gave me a beautiful silk dress, pure white. He said I was a woman now, and a woman had a duty to obey her father and honor her family.”

“And so he honorably passed you around to his friends?”

“And waste a chance to benefit from the transaction?” She jerked her head, and paused to sip, more deeply this time. “No way. No, instead he held the first of many dinner parties, where I made a guest appearance in my new, wholesome dress. Then he proceeded to auction off my virginity.”

Grif’s stomach turned.

Bridget didn’t look at him, her voice hollowed of emotion. “He was pleased afterward. Pleased with me for shutting up and taking it. Pleased with himself for thinking up what would become his most successful, long-term business plan to date.” Bridget’s jaw clenched as she stared into her glass. “The next time he came in my room, he told me I was a good girl and I’d made him proud. He left without touching me. He never bothered with me again.”

“And your mother? Did she know?”

Bridget scoffed, and the anger he expected her to show for her father now flared. “My mother was the first wife of
the
Caleb Chambers. If she were to know such a thing—if she were to acknowledge it—she’d be that pitiable woman who married a polygamist, let him marry other women, sell his daughters, and raise whores. So she turned a blind eye, kept baking cookies, and we all went on with life as usual.”

Grif hesitated, not knowing what the situation called for, finally giving in to impulse and instinct. Gently, he closed his hand over hers. “Except it wasn’t.”

Bridget was fighting the instinct to jerk away. He could see it in the startled look she gave him, but ultimately she gave his palm an almost imperceptible squeeze before sliding hers away. “I put it behind me as best as I could. Bundled up the white dress and shoved it in the back of my closet. I tried to forget, pretend that it’d happened to someone else, somewhere else.

“And then one day, I was walking home from school, and a car sidled up next to me. It was fancy—long and sleek and black—with crystal bottles inside and plush velvet seats. The back window rolled down and suddenly there, in my real world, was the man who’d bought me. He said he’d been thinking about me a lot since our night together, that he liked me, and did I want a ride?

“Of course I knew what he really wanted, and what would happen if I got into that long, dark car. And then I thought, it had already happened anyway, and everyone had walked away with something—that rich man, my father, even my mother because her ignoring it enabled her lifestyle—everyone but me.”

Grif frowned, but gave a short nod. “So you got in.”

Her mouth pursed sourly. “After I told him what I wanted in return. He agreed, and we began having what he called our weekly ‘dates.’ He was fifty-nine. I was fourteen.”

“So fast-forward five years,” Grif prompted, because she was a bit unsteady now, and he didn’t want her to stop. But it seemed Bridget didn’t want to stop either, and she took a fortifying gulp, signaling to the waitress for another as she slammed down her glass.

Shifting to stare directly into Grif’s eyes, she studied his reaction as she spoke. “Fast-forward five years and I wasn’t just getting into limousines on suburban streets. I’d graduated to casino bars. And I dressed how I wanted. I was less discreet than before. My whole family would gather for Sunday dinner and I would drop innuendos and hints that my father would stew over and my mother would carefully ignore. Nineteen years old.”

“Nineteen years young,” Grif corrected, as the waitress arrived.

“Yes. But older than ever before.” Then, inexplicably, she shuddered. “That’s when Schmidt got into it. My father sent him to bust me, I think to scare me straight. He laid into me hard, said I’d do jail time, said he would see to it personally because I needed to get off the streets. He said I was . . . tainted.”

She looked into her fresh drink, winced, then threw it back. Grif found that now he could say nothing.

“So I went home, and I thought about it like he told me to. I considered going back to school, getting my degree, maybe even cooking school. I was good at that.” A wistful smile passed over her face only to be replaced a second later with a frown. “But then I got to thinking about Chambers—I stopped calling him Dad by then—getting rich off my flesh, and how he thought he could just roll me with this crooked cop. Once again, he told me to take it, and then just assumed that I would.

“Then I thought about Schmidt, and how that fucking pig didn’t know me from Adam, but for some reason he was acting like I was the most important thing on his to-do list. That’s how I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“How to get back at my father.” Bridget lifted her chin, her face masked with the same stubborn look she’d shot him in the parking lot. “I reconnected with our old buddy from the limo, the man who wanted me so badly he outbid them all. He had since, unsurprisingly, turned into one of my father’s best clients. This time I was the one who drove up in the fancy ride. I told him I’d been thinking about him. That I liked him. That I wanted to take him for a little ride. He got all nostalgic on me, right in the golf course parking lot. He went on and on about our first ‘dates.’ ” Narrowing her eyes, she mimicked him. “ ‘Remember when you were young and fresh and tight’ and so on.”

She shook her head in disgust, then smirked. “What I remembered was to turn on the video recorder so I could send copies of what he really did on his golf outings to his wife, his business partners, the world at large. I made sure my mother got a copy delivered straight to her doorstep so she couldn’t ignore what she’d allowed me to become. I did the same at Chambers’s offices and had it queued up for his secretary’s viewing pleasure. By that time I’d learned what I was worth . . . but I still gave the old bastard that ride for free.”

Grif whistled under his breath. The little girl with no voice and no choice had taken the sexuality that’d been prized and used against her, and turned it into an A-bomb. “And did your father send Schmidt again?”

Bridget’s bravado fell away as she nodded. “But not to arrest me. Instead, he delivered a message that I was to change my name and to cease contact with his family, effective immediately. He said I was free to whore myself to anyone who’d pay, but that I would never talk to him or my mother, my family, again. And I haven’t.”

“But you still know what’s going on in that household.”

“Some.” She shrugged. “But again, I have no money, no power. No one would believe me because what’s my word—a prostitute’s—against a cop’s? A judge’s? A Mormon businessman who owns them all?” She shook her head. “No, I’m no threat to any of them. But,” Bridget added, staring into her drink, narrow-eyed. “I know that it embarrasses him.”

“That you were a hooker?”

“That I was a street hooker. Did you and Craig go to the gala last Saturday? Did you see the girls?”

She shook her head when Grif nodded. “They’re not bad girls. In fact, their very goodness is why Chambers can command such coin. They’re told to be good girls, big girls. They’re given champagne and caviar when they should be enjoying burgers with their friends. They dream of prom dresses but are given Herve Leger instead. It’s both heady and totally disorienting for someone barely graduated from playground politics.

“I can’t believe he’s still getting away with it.” She shook her head again. “Never underestimate the power of tight, young flesh on old, loose wallets.”

“Never underestimate the power of raw blackmail.”

“That, too.” Bridget nodded. “Craig and her friend were on the right track, of course. Chambers annihilates every person he sees as a local up-and-comer, anyone who might threaten his king-of-the-mountain status, and he does it by luring them to his parties. If he’s playing it like he used to, he’s friendly at first, gets them off guard. Then locates a weakness—alcohol, drugs, anything to loosen them up. Before they know it they’re in a darkened corner with one of his ‘girls.’ ”

“And he’s got it on tape.” Must have learned that one from his daughter, Grif thought wryly. “Okay, so why is Schmidt still in the picture? He provide the girls?”

Bridget looked at Grif like he was crazy. “Schmidt works the street, and regular johns can’t score prime, green flesh. But the glitterati don’t want skin that’s been passed around too much. Even among the chosen, a few months go by, the girls’ faces become known, they get a little too familiar with the local councilman, maybe call him by his first name one time too many, and they’re gone. You think Chambers pulls a mind-spin on the men, it’s nothing compared to what happens to the women.”