He took her hand

He took her hand in his and kissed her fingertips.

Her nails were cracked and chewed and none-too-clean but he paid that no heed.

"The first thing I want you to know," he said, "is that you are safe here."

She stood there, looking puzzled. Was this some odd role-playing script?

He looked into her eyes and saw the fear that she was trying so hard to hide. His heart swelled with anger. What kind of a world thrust a girl, a mere girl, out into its coldness and demanded that she face rape, even death, as the possible price for her daily bread?

She had no way of knowing what lurked in the hearts of the strangers who paid for her favors.

"Whose child are you?" he wondered.

"I am going to get us something to eat," he said, shaking off his thoughts. "Take yourself a good, long bath while I am gone. Scrub off all that make-up. "

He had prepared the bathroom for her with all the things a woman could want -- bath salts, lotions, a loofah. He wondered if she had ever known such luxuries.

He slipped out of the hotel room, in search of Chinese take-out and some new clothes for her that didn't look like a Halloween hooker costume.

Someday he would explain to her, someday, after this business trip of his was over and he had brought her out of this city and into a real home, that lives are saved in many ways, and that she had saved his as much as he had saved hers.

That he had been on his way to the Fourteenth Street bridge that night with no intention of returning, when she had called to him out of the darkness.

It was a come-on she offered, nothing of interest to a man in his state of mind, and he had brushed her off and kept walking.

But her words, "Are you lonely, mister?" echoed in his mind as the bridge loomed before him, garish and terrible -- and then, in the sad shadow world of his mind, something flashed or something snapped.

Death was darkness upon darkness. Death by his own hand, in those deep, pitiless waters, beneath the hard lights of this bridge, was a coward's solution.

"Are you lonely, mister?" she had asked. Yeah, he was. But the East River's icy embrace would bring no solace. And she would wait there in the darkness for other fools like him to wander by, until, until --

He spun around. He retraced his steps to where she was still standing, her face reddish in the glow from her cigarette as she leaned against the bricks of some building.

"Meet me at the Pemberton Motel -- you know where that is? Good. In an hour. Room 245."

She knocked at the door one hour and 13 minutes later.