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Page 23.

"Yeah." Her voice was dry and matter of fact. "I was desperate. My dad died some years ago. He was an Air Force guy. I was actually born in Germany myself, so I know Europe a little bit. We moved back to California when Dad got out. We lived near San Diego, where I went to school in Chula Vista. Dad died in a car crash that wasn't his fault, but Mom didn't get much of a settlement. We did manage to pay off the mortgage. I was in college at San Diego State when Mom told me she had cancer. She was getting treatments at the University hospital, and was doing okay for a while, but the insurance motherfuckers put a lien on the house. We were going to lose everything, which hurt especially bad because it was everything my parents worked for all their lives. So my so-called boyfriend, Ronny Shit Head, he got this offer. He knew some people. Well, he was a shady character anyway. There were these people, outside the so-called health insurance system. The health care denial industry. If I went to work for this agency in L.A., they would pay my mother's hospital bills, as long as I did whatever they wanted me to. It's a long story, Rick, but I was like a call girl for a while, got traded around between some oil zillionaire Arabs, and then somebody brokered me off to this Chinese zillionaire who has a taste for chewy blue-eyed blondes. So I became his property until I just ran away the other day."

Rick felt his stomach churning. "Poor baby. I thought I had a shitty deal."

"We both do, it seems." She looked away to one side, as if eyeballing a whole stack of crappy options and facts in the matter. "I did try to get Mom to move with me to Canada after Dad died. They have universal health care, like everyone else outside the United States. She wanted to stay in California because of the weather, her friends, and my dad's ashes being in a cemetery there. So we stayed, she got cancer, and we lost everything."

"Wow," Rick said with a huge sigh. He took one of her hands in both of his, and she let him hold it. "What about this Chinese geek? Didn't he have the money to pay for your Mom's health care?"

Hannah's features twisted into a wry look. "Wan just wanted sex. We never talked much. I think I amused him. He has about a hundred girls like me planted all around his mansions from Paris to Tokyo, from Rio to New York City. I was just one of his harem slaves. And then—"

Rick squeezed her hand, seeing that the next thing was coming out with difficulty.

This was where she really started bawling in a keening, high, heart-broken voice. "I found out that they let my mom die anyway. They denied her the care she needed because of some fucked up technical reason, like she had a cold once so it was a preexisting condition or whatever. I wasn't even there while she died. I was getting fucked by this rich animal, this wealthy predator, and my mom died all alone, asking for me, in a cheap rental unit after they took her house away. That was the house my parents bought together when they were young and full of hope, and it must have broken her heart worse than dying. That and never seeing me again."

Rick held her as she lay against him, wracked with tears and broken sobbing.

"That's really my main regret," she said as she regained her composure and washed her face at a small corner sink. "I wish I could have held my Mom's hand as she was dying. When I found out what happened, I started to really hate Wan and the brokerage that gave me to him, and the creep back home who put me into this mess—I will never mention his name again. And the corporations that do this to us day in and day out. And nobody seems to get it. We don't have to live like that, but they tell us it's the American Way. Apple pie, with rat poison."

"American roulette," Rick said as he rose and stretched, yawning. "I have to confess—it's something you don't think about in the U.S. It's always going to happen to someone else. Until the trigger clicks, the bullet goes off, and you lose the lottery."

"And nobody wants to talk about it," Hannah said as she toweled her face dry. "Like somehow you were bad and it's your fault. I don't know if I ever want to go back."

He changed the subject. "This your place?"

She shook her head. "Fincoff was his name. The guy you saw murdered."

"Fink off?"

"Yeah, something like that. I swiped Wan's most priceless treasure—the chemical formula for a new kind of aircraft fuselage, rocket skin, whatever. I overheard him talking with one of his Paris CEOs. He had it locked in a compartment. They were going to meet some big shots and present the idea to them. I grabbed it and ran."

"And here you are." So the execution of Fincoff had something to do with her theft of this criminal's deadly weapon.

"Yeah. Well, I thought it would go better. See, I made a few friends during the months that Wan kept me as his harem girl."

Rick couldn't get over it. "How in the hell—?"

She brushed it off with a shrug. "It's the latest thing. You can sell yourself for three to five years, usually—like, you can become an indentured servant, kind of. It's totally legal. Foreign zillionaires love owning Western people—it's status, prestige, and sometimes good sex, they figure. Stupid people in our country think it's hip, erotic, sexy, whatever. Lot of poverty. It's the new lottery."

He echoed, "Pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. I can see if you're desperate, you'd play. I'm sorry about your mom."

"Thanks." She brushed her fingers against his face. "You're nice. Anyway, if you do it, the story on the street is you can walk away set for life. Money means nothing to these rich people. It's like we're living in a new Middle Ages."

"Feudal times," Rick echoed. "I read history. Someone else wrote that it's like a new Gilded Age, but global."

"I've had plenty of time to read," she said. "Here, I brought some lunch for us."

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