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tomorrow.”
    Caroline turns and before Exley can stop himself he reaches out, embracing her. She stands with her back to him, body rigid, all bones and hard angles, and when he drops his arms, releasing her, she closes the door in his face.

Chapter 5
     
     
     
     
    Dawn steps through a curtain onto the narrow runway that rams a path into the crowd of drunk white men. When a spotlight cuts through the haze of cigarette smoke, fingering her, she stands dead still, like she’s lost. Looks it too, in her thrift-store jeans and plain white shirt, her hair hanging loose, like a civilian who has wandered in here by accident. She plays it up, all wide-eyed and innocent. Her hook.
    The regulars hoot and the newcomers stop their shouted conversations, drinks halfway to their mouths. Used-car dealers and motor mechanics and copier salesmen, escaping their pale wives for a stolen night of dark meat.
    Then, as the opening bars of “I Bruise Easily” ooze out of the sound system, Dawn gets her ass moving, the ass that fills the jeans out too nicely. Her mother’s ass. Yet another reason to hate the bitch. If Dawn angled her butt just right you could balance a champagne glass on it, and it’s a magnet for the scores of booze-blurred eyes.
    Dawn stays deep inside herself, letting the music take her, those words of vulnerability and pain deafening her to the surge of drunken yearning that comes at her like a wave, avoiding eye contact with the men, spinning away from the hands that grab at her.
    At the start of the first chorus she unbuttons the shirt—just a plain white bra underneath—shrugs it off and lets it float to the ramp. Unclips the bra and drops it, freeing her small breasts, her dark nipples prominent as thimbles, making the trash out there believe she’s turned on. Dawn unzips her jeans and works them loose, revealing her white panties, like a virgin girl would wear. When she steps out of the denims, letting them fold into a heap in time to the last swell of music, the lust in the room could ignite a mountain fire.
    The guitar intro of the old Police ballad “Every Breath You Take” fades up and as she slides the panties down her thighs—the spotlight almost surgical as it exposes her trimmed pubes and the folds of her vulva—there are gasps and throttled oaths. This is the closest most of these men have come to beauty. It still sometimes astonishes Dawn, when she sees her naked body in a mirror, that the years of hell have somehow left no mark on her. No tattoos, no knife scars, no needle tracks, no Aids melanoma—just her smooth caramel skin that makes every vicious bastard out there want to violate her.
    Get in line.
    Still dancing, Dawn arches herself back until her hands touch the tacky ramp, singing along inside her head to Sting’s words of obsessive love, not letting herself feel the hundreds of eyes that rip at her flesh. She pushes up on her hands and comes back to standing, as lithe as a yogini, just as a fat pink man heaves himself up onto the runway, cheered on by his buddies, moving his beer gut in time to the music, writing a love letter in the air with his dick.
    He reaches for her and she steps back and he stumbles and falls to his knees, still trying to paw her. She dances around him, never once lets him touch her. Never allows any of them to touch her. Not like the other girls, who encourage the men to grope them and eat them out on the ramp, getting the pathetic losers all worked up so they can take them into the filthy cubicles in the rear and fuck them for money.
    The man stares up at her, a look of confusion and longing on his drunken face. Vernon smashes a path through the men with his shoulders and elbows, shoving them out of the way, ignoring spilled drinks and curses. He grabs the drunk by the shirtfront and lifts him into a right hook that snaps the man’s head back and brings a smear of blood to his cut lip.
    Vernon drags him from the ramp, has him sprawling across a table,