Fair warning. There's no sex in this chapter. But there is the aftermath of rape. It's a cop story.
Also: I've left it in this genre in order to keep it with the other chapters. But sorry, there's also no incest.
Thanks for reading. As you'll see, Johnny Rand is really in for it now.
*****
It had been, as someone once wrote, another shitty day in paradise. It had been in the 70's in Lake Arrowhead and I was driving back home from the cabin of an old cop friend. I'd had some wine and one shot of Rye over the long course of lunch and dinner and I was wide awake and sober. Which was a good thing. I was headed down a very curvy forest road towards the 210.
My headlights caught a flash of movement ahead and to the right. I slowed the ZL1 and focused on it. It was a woman - no, a young girl, maybe 13 or 14, running naked in the gravel to the right of the road. As I got closer I could see that her feet were a little bloody.
I sped up a little, got past her, then stopped the car and got out. She stopped running before she got to the car.
"Hello," I said. "My name is Johnny. And you are...?"
She stared at me.
"This will go a lot better if you talk, too," I said.
She started shaking.
"Oh, shit," I said to myself, and ran towards her. She screamed and backed away from me.
I stopped and held my hands up. "I was just going to give you my coat," I said.
She just stared at me.
"I'm a cop," I said. "Or I used to be a cop. I'm still sort of a cop. Okay, we're still working out whether I'm a cop or not. But I can get cops here right now, if that's what you want."
The stare.
"... or you could get in the car with me and I'll take you to the cops, or to the hospital, or anywhere you want to go."
Nothing.
Think. Little naked girl running down the road. Running away from something, probably something really bad.
"I will protect you," I said. "I will start by taking you to a place where women will care for you, then when you're ready, you can tell us all what you want us to do."
"Protect me, yeah," she spat.
"I swear it," I said.
She stared at me some more.
"If you get into my car, I promise you three things. I will not hurt you in any way. I will take you to a place where you will be loved and cared for, for as long as you want to stay there, and nobody there will hurt you in any way. And if people have been hurting you up until now, I will rain hell down upon them."
"Why should I trust you?"
"Well, I can't think of a reason," I said. "Except that it's a long way to Highway 18."
She stared at me some more, then got into the passenger seat. I covered her with my coat and started the engine. I made a call.
"2501," Jay said as I'd taught her.
"Johnny."
"Oh, hey honey. Are you on your way home? We were thinking of starting without you."
"I have a situation."
"Oooo, is it a situation that we can deal with by groping and playing and stuff?"
"Jay, I'm in trouble."
Silence. Then, "Wait one. Girls!" A pause. "You're on speakerphone, Johnny."
I looked over at the girl. She was hard asleep.
"I'm bringing in a girl, age 12-15, I don't know, that I picked up along the road running naked away from something. I have no idea what. I'm going to need all hands on deck to help."
"Got it," Jay said. "When will you be here?"
"Couple hours, I think," I said. "I didn't plug it into the nav." I thought a moment. "Can you call Jen and see whether she'd be willing to come over? She would know the protocol for care and who to call and..." I looked at the little girl - still passed out. "And maybe a rape kit."
_____
The girls met me in the driveway. The little one I'd picked up hadn't woken up and couldn't be woken, so I carried her into the house and into one of the spare bedrooms. I cleaned and dressed the wounds on her feet. I made a quick check over the rest of her body to make sure that there was nothing else that needed triage attention. I had made Dawn come with me so that while I did this there would be somebody else in the room. I placed her on the bed and pulled the sheet up over her.
"Nobody here thinks you're going to ravage her while you're fixing her and putting her to bed, Johnny," Dawn had said.
"But what if she woke up while I was doing it?" I said.
Dawn had no answer for that.
Jen was already at the house. She was arguing for an ambulance and police intervention.
"We need to get her to a hospital and get cops on board, Johnny," she said. "She needs that care, and to be able to file charges if that's what's required."
"Here's what's going to happen," I said. "We'll all wait for her to wake up, then try to get her to tell us what happened and try to get her to tell us what she wants us to do. If she has parents, we'll try to contact them and then they'll sort of take over that part."
"That's not pro forma, Johnny," Jen said.
"Tonight, pro forma is she's going to get a lot of sleep, one of us will be in there with her at all times until she wakes up, and then we'll figure out what's next."
----
Being pretty much back on my former schedule, at 5:15 AM I was out by the pool doing calisthenics and wing chun forms. It took me a while to figure out that the little girl was in a lounge chair watching me. And a little while after that to remember that I was naked. And so was she. I hopped sideways into the pool.
When I came back up and shook the water out of my hair, I said, "Good morning."
No answer.
"I apologize for... umm... can you maybe hand me that towel?"
"I've seen everything on a man. Are you going to be the one who fucks me now?"
"GIRLS!!"
---
Mary Beth had fallen asleep in the chair next to the girl's bed, which is how the girl managed to make it out to the patio. Mary Beth was very contrite.
I made breakfast for everybody. Eggs Benedict, bacon and country potatoes on the side. The girl, whose name turned out to be Kimmy, and who was now wearing one of my Army t-shirts which, on her, was like a dress, was ravenous. I wound up having to make more.
Between me and the girls and Meyer and Jen, we got the whole story out of her.
She was 13. Her parents had been killed in an automobile accident when she was 12, and there was no family to care for her. She had wound up at an orphanage in San Bernardino until the state could find her a foster home. Meanwhile, since the orphanage did not include a school, she was transferred to the public school closest to the orphanage. Walking distance. Which is how the people who took her picked her up.
My friend Buddy Magellas got up and started pacing at this point. Because of our long association, I could feel his anger building.
"Buddy."
"Yeah?" Pace.
"What this is, at this point, is a staff problem. We're going to get the intel, work through it, and figure out what we might do. Your anger might be useful down the road, but right now what you're going to do is sit down, listen, and ask clarifying questions."
He stared at me. I stared back. I could tell that he was working towards a high rage. I couldn't really blame him.
"Sir, yes Sir," he said, and sat down.
What Kimmy described in Lake Arrowhead was a rape cabin for high rollers. Maybe originally just a sex cabin for men to meet consenting women, but of course Kimmy was of no age to consent, and consent was not what the proprietors had in mind for her. What they apparently had in mind was large money from men who wanted to have sex with a little girl.
