“Well, all right,” she breathed. “But it ain’t pretty. I’ll be tellin’ you things ’bout myself, too, and I hope you don’t think too badly about me, or about Tonya, neither.”

“Amber,” I said. “The only people I judge harshly are those who intentionally hurt other people. Not the ones who get hurt or hurt themselves.”

Amber reached out and took my hands again.

“Well, this is the way it was....”

The dying girl took me through a morass of corruption and depravity. A tale of young girls—the poorest of the poor—lured into the lowest and most defiling level of the underground sex trade—a trade that flourishes under our very noses. Girls held in near slavery. Held by threat, abuse, violence, and drug addiction. Girls made to prowl the nocturnal parking lots of the large commercial truck stops, providing sexual services for the drivers.

Amber told of how the girls are recruited with promises of fancy clothes, jewelry, big money, and great living in swanky hotels. The reality is anything but that. They live in cheap dives and are treated as virtual slaves. Talk back to a pimp, and get a fist in the mouth. Complain, and take a beating. Try to run away, and it’s really bad—that’s when a girl just might disappear for good.

After a while the girls descend into despair and drug use. The pimps supply the drugs, and the cost is taken out of her meager earnings. In fact, everything is deducted from their supposed pay: food, clothes, housing, and doctor’s visits. And once the drugs kick in, the girl comes to find she now owes more money than she’s making. That’s about the time she hits bottom.

“It has to be organized to operate on the scale you’ve told me about. Who runs all this, Amber?”

“Used to be that man, Big Smoke Wren, until he got his’self burnt up in that fire. Since then, I don’t know. Some of the girls say it was that nephew of his, that Leon. But that cain’t be. Leon, he so stupid, he cain’t scratch his ass wif both hands. No, they use Leon when they really want to scare somebody—or to git rid of ’em fo’ good. That Leon, he crazy, and I mean evil crazy.”

“So you don’t have any idea who runs things now?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “Weren’t long after Big Smoke burnt up that I got sick, and they chunked me out. Since then, I ain’t heard nothing.”

“But why doesn’t anyone go to the police?”