Addie reached her eleventh year, and Daddy crawled in bed with her one night. He smelled like sour sweat and booze as he pressed his hard thing against her and then drove it in while blood-soaked sheets and her silent tears flowed. Addie’s sisters were in the same room and heard all of it. No one spoke of the event or acknowledged that it was real, and Mrs. Jones remained selectively ignorant. But she knew damn well, and Addie could tell by her mother’s eyes, increased drinking, and growing indifference toward Addie. This went on until Addie turned fourteen and ran away one night while Mrs. Jones was working and Daddy was on the road somewhere. Addie got as far as Winston-Salem, where she met the first man who ever took care of her.

There had been many since, giving her cain and crack, cigarettes, fried chicken, whatever she wanted. She was twenty-three when she stumbled off the Greyhound in Charlotte some months back. Addie didn’t remember it much, seemed like last she recalled she was in Atlanta getting high with some rich dude who drove a Lexus and paid an extra twenty dollars to urinate in her face. She could take anything as long as she wasn’t present, and the only turnstile to that painless place was drugs. Sea, her last and final man, beat her with a coat hanger because she had cramps and couldn’t make any money one night. She ran off for the countless time in her life, headed to Charlotte because she knew where it was and it was all she could afford after grabbing some old lady’s purse.

Addie Jones, who had not been called by her Christian name in too many highs to remember, had an Atlanta Braves duffel bag she’d stolen from one of her tricks. In it she had a few things, and both hands had been gripping hard as she had walked along West Trade, nearing the Presto Grill, across from the All Right parking lot where Punkin Head was waiting in its van, fishing. Most of its best catches had come off buses, all those fuck-ups washing ashore like biological hazards, their stories the same. Punkin Head knew this for a fact, having crawled off one of those buses itself some time back.

Fifteen minutes later, Addie had been inside that dark blue van, and Punkin Head knew it had a find this time. Not only did it want this girl for itself, but the johns out there were going to fall hard for her perky body and sultry eyes and swollen mouth. Punkin Head christened its new creature Poison, and the two of them began their unfriendly takeover. Other pimps were flip at first. Then the killings began, and cops were everywhere. There were stories of bad hollowpoints and something painted orange and something else about a spider. All got scared.

“What’ll be?” Remus asked Poison as she smoked a cigarette and stared out at the street.

“Some bacon,” she said in an accent that no longer sounded white or even American.