Chapter One

Ann was sitting behind the fattest man she had ever seen in her entire life. The back of his neck looked like two rolls of sausage meat beneath a severe brush cut and his buttocks dwarfed the pad of the secretarial chair he used as he watched over a dozen TV screens stacked in rows along the far wall of the room. He was a black man and she was paralyzed with fear of him. Not because he was black and close to three hundred pounds while she, on the other hand, was a petite housewife weighing in at close to one hundred pounds. No that wasn’t it at all! It was because she knew, at some point very soon; he would turn and ask for her. She would go to him and he would look up at her. He would then tell her to take off her clothes.

They were below a small office complex; three or four floors. There were no lights in the basement room they called theBullpen, only the flickering blue light of the monitors throwing shadows about the dark concrete block walls. She looked over “Fat-Boy’s” bulky shoulder and saw that each monitor was wired to a corresponding camera; each focused on a private office space. They were cheap black and white TVs, some images were blotted out with snowy interference; vertical black lines scrolled up the screens of others. She strained to make out the images of desks and chairs. On some of the screens she saw the movements of men hunched over briefcases, papers scattered on desktops. One monitor had a large man in shirtsleeves with a maze of tattoos; he was talking to someone across the room. Then, as Ann watched, the camera briefly caught the image of a woman. Her back briefly filled the screen; the long arch of her spine, narrow shoulder blades. Ann leaned forward to look closer and her guts wrenched. Once again, she realized that she was not in this office on the merit of her typing skills. As she eavesdropped, a slim bare arm extended to hand over a stack of papers and then was gone; the man with the tattoos watched lustily after the woman’s naked backside.

God, what am I doing here, a voice screamed, tearing holes in the fabric of her brain. She wanted to jump up, bolt from the building but she was too scared. Too scared to stay; too scared to run. So instead, she just sat, chewing the inside of her lip and trying to control the jigging of the foot that was curled around the leg of her chair.

It was Ann’s friend, Betty, who had suggested this.Friend? Oh really? she scoffed to herself. Ann and her husband were facing up to the fact that they were in the unenviable situation of being desperate for cash. Caught up in the slowing economy, they were at risk of losing their home. His accounting job with a brokerage firm suddenly evaporated one day and desperate for work, he had taken the only thing available: inventory control at a local warehouse. His marginal salary covered the mortgageor the monthly groceries and expenses, but not both. Ann had confided in Betty that forec