Retta Mae Wagons was an instant hit.

The johns loved her. She was the most requested girl in Dannyboy Marley’s stable. This pleased the pimp and also made him insanely jealous. A strange combination if ever there was one.

When Retta Mae Wagons wasn’t hooking, she was reading.

Retta Mae was a voracious reader. The employees of the New York Society Library on Seventy-ninth Street between Madison and Park avenues couldn’t recall a member quite like Retta Mae Wagons. The young girl read everything. And quickly. At least she said she did, and the librarians believed her. All the employees of the New York Society Library played games guessing what Retta Mae Wagons did for a living because she was so pretty and so eager to learn.

They never came close.

Dannyboy Marley doubled then tripled Retta Mae’s fee. Nineteen-year-old Retta Mae Wagons was pulling down an average of ten thousand dollars a week. Half of that was hers, more money than she ever dreamed she’d earn. Some of the money went to helping her brothers and sisters. The rest she put in a new savings account she started to help poor black kids from her old neighborhood go to college. There wasn’t enough money to help both her family and bright but disadvantaged high school kids, not yet, but that was her goal. To set up the Retta Mae Wagons Scholarship Fund for Underprivileged Kids. Give some smart dirt-poor teenagers like she used to be the chance she never had to go to college. She was getting there. Retta Mae was taking baby steps, but she was getting there.

And then the thing happened that all pimps and some whores dread the most. The event that for some strange, unexplained reason often screwed up plans, destroyed wishes, occasionally lives. Frequently forever. Young, beautiful, bright Retta Mae Wagons made the mistake of falling in love with a john.

His name was Rasheed Jamal.

In the beginning of the year 2011, Linus Major was a full-fledged member of the janitorial staff at New York City’s Museum of Natural History. He felt quite good about that. He looked rather spiffy too, dressed as he was in his blue long-sleeved shirt with the white word MAINTENANCE above his left pocket and the white L. MAJOR above his right pocket. He wore museum-issued blue work pants and was given a stick broom, which he happily pushed up and down the museum’s long marble corridors. He also emptied the garbage receptacles into large green Hefty bags.

Linus loved his job.

When he wasn’t sweeping he was studying the dinosaur exhibits one after the other, memorizing all the pertinent facts. And the exhibits were endlessly fascinating, or so it seemed. After all, New York City’s Museum of Natural History was one of the finest dinosaur museums in the whole world. Linus spent whatever spare time he could muster studying the Tyrannosaurus rex—aka the “Tyrant King”—and the huge Hypselosaurus priscus, the tallest and longest dinosaur ever. He never tired of walking through the museum’s corridors mesmerized by the agile, bipedal hunters, the Herrerasaurus and the Eoraptor found in Argentina and the flying Peteinosaurus, the reptile with the elongated fourth finger. What a place to study a subject that interested you, he joyfully reflected over and over again.