"Please, man, let me go!" The terrified girl with the runny nose could have been any age between twenty and forty. Her name was Pearl, or so she claimed. She was skeletal; with badly pocked skin and stringy brown hair. Pearl wore a man's blue work shirt, filthy jeans and tennis shoes with no socks. She kept scratching at the scabs on her arms. Years of junk and physical abuse had rendered her features generic, although at some point she might have been pretty. "Is that Oso's house?" Kenzie drawled, softly. "The blue one yonder, with an old Ford up on blocks in the front yard?" Pearl nodded her head furiously, her breath steaming in the cold air. She tried to shrink down in the passenger seat and disappear. Her voice was thick with fear. "If he comes out and sees I brought you here he'll fucking kill me, mister, no shit he will just flat fucking blow us both away." As if on cue, the front door opened and an impossibly large, busily tattooed Hispanic man in stained boxers wandered out onto the front porch.
