Capture by Roger Smith Read Free Book Online

a mop and a bundle of soiled towels. Unglues a used condom from one of the towels and drops it into a garbage bag.
    Dawn goes down a narrow corridor toward the dressing room, the music muted now, the voices of a couple of dancers coming to her loud and raucous from inside, the smell of tik thick in the air, and all at once she sees herself heating a glass pipe over a lighter flame until the contents bubble like fat. Gripping the pipe in her fist and taking it to her mouth, her cheeks falling hollow as she sucks, eyes closed. Feeling that complete release as the smoke fills her and blows the top of her head off, and every care in the world flies away and leaves her blissed out, like God himself has anointed her.
    Fuck, Dawn, get yourself together. She stands, calming herself, letting the drug-lagged talk wash over her.
    “And she say—” A cough.
    “What she say?”
    “She say no!”
    “No?”
    “Ja. No.”
    “So what you say?”
    “I look at her and I say, I kick you back deep in your mother’s cunt.”
    “Of course, yes.”
    “Of course.”
    Dawn sees Brittany, sleeping with the soft toys, and that gives her the strength to go into the room. Two long-time veterans of the skin trade are lazing naked in their chairs in front of the mirrors, bouncing a styrofoam cup of tequila and a tik pipe, their dark brown bodies patterned with varicose veins, bruises, burn marks and Cesarean scars, breasts heavy from suckling unwanted and unloved babies, coarse pubic hair waxed away to narrow landing strips to allow fast access to their plumbing.
    Dawn looks at them and sees herself in ten years, if she doesn’t do something—any fucken thing—to get herself away from this.
    They check Dawn out and the fat one says, “Excuse us, Lady Di.”
    Lady Diana, a name that came from God knew where and has stuck. The way it works on the Flats with these bitches who want to pull you down. Dawn calls them the Ugly Sisters, because she is the fairest skinned of them all. One of those stupid private jokes that gets her through the night.
    Dawn ignores them and drops her towel, knowing her beauty hurts them more than her words could. She sits in front of the chipped mirror, wipes her sweaty face, repairing her make-up.
    The club owner, Costa, comes into the dressing room, as immune as a butcher to the spread of naked flesh. He’s a sallow-skinned man in his fifties, with hair the color of cigarette ash and a soft paunch that swells above the stone-washed jeans that his colored trophy wife insists he wears.
    “I tell you not to smoke that shit in here,” he says. The pair laugh like hyenas, blowing their tik smoke in Costa’s face.
    “The cops give you hassles, send them to us and we suck their cocks like always,” the fat one says, making kissy sounds, pink gums visible through her missing front teeth.
    Costa sits down beside Dawn and says, “Out,” to the other two, waving his unlit cigarette toward the door.
    “It’s our fucken break time.”
    He waves at the door again. “Take it in the shithouse, then.”
    They don’t argue, wrap dirty, make-up-smeared towels around their bodies and exit, mumbling. Dawn hears “little cunt” as they go.
    Costa offers her a cigarette and when she shakes her head he inserts a smoke beneath his sad mustache and fires up. “You think about what I tell you?”
    “Ja. And the answer is still no.”
    “Dawn, you nice girl, but I can’t keep carrying you like this.”
    “The customers like me, Costa.”
    “Sure, they like you. Sure. And they want to fuck you. For good money. And you? You say, no. No, no, no.”
    “Costa, I hooked. I done it. Then I pulled myself straight.”
    He waves a tired hand at her nakedness. “You calling this straight?”
    “They can eyeball me all they like, but no man’s touched me in a year.”
    “And that makes you, what? Better?”
    “No. Fuck knows I’m not proud of what I do, but I can still look my daughter in the eye.”
    “Thing is, Dawn, you