It's Friday at 4, an hour before the shift clears and I finally get a three-day weekend, when Marty sticks his shaved head around the corner of my temporary office and says, "Hey, Juan, you got time for a quick one?"

I wish he meant beers like we used to share when we clocked off back in the patrol days, but I know better. It's been deskwork ever since "the accident." People drag themselves off the street and into the police station. I take a statement and pass it off down the line. Like processing meat. Repeat. Repeat.

"How bad does it look?" I say, knowing that the past three statements soaked up two hours apiece. Nasty stuff out there in the city. People can't make sense of it, and they don't have to, because that's my job. It's why the paragraphs I write are always short, and why the detectives come back with questions. Wish I had answers, so I tell them it's the lunar cycle or the heat wave or something in the air. They know what I mean.

"Just a single. A woman. Prostitute. Well, probably a pro. I can't tell anymore with how these people dress. You want me to kick it to Julie? You look like you're about spent," Marty says. He wears the uniform of a sergeant.

I owe Julie too many favors already, so I say, "Send her in. What's she saying?"

"Hell if I know. Take her statement and go home," Marty says and disappears down the hallway.

"You checked her, right?" I say. Had someone get a knife through the metal detector last week.

Marty's gone, though. Or maybe he pretended to not hear me. Marty's like that.

I wait a beat and pull up a new report on the computer. The heat from the overworked monitor cascades across my face. Matches the boils the sun wrenches into the city outside. How long has it been since this thing was turned off?

My nose detects the woman before I see her step into my office. I thought I'd get used to it by now, and I did back when more moderate temperatures didn't bake the pavement outside into cookie dough. But now, with the heat, it's like living under a fold of fat. The ones without air conditioning, the ones living outside more than they'd like to, suck in the grease more than people like me, relegated to a desk out of the sun.

"Watch this one," Marty's voice says from somewhere down the hall as the woman takes a seat. He might claim she's dressed like a pro, but I give her the benefit of the doubt given the heat. Those scabs up her arm don't help her case, though. She looks like a cross between Courtney Love and a ditch. It's a shallow observation given we haven't even talked yet, but these are the things they pay me to notice. Regardless of the training, I can't tell if she's 14 or 41. Too much bark on her.

"Water," the woman says, her voice so dry it sounds like it could crack in half.

It's not an uncommon request. I grab a bottle of water from inside my desk next to the tissue packs and slide it over to her. She drains it without pausing and sets the bottle back on the desk.

"Are you OK?" I say as she holds her stomach in pain.

"Yeah, yeah," she says.

"Take a minute if you need it," I say and fold my hands on the desk. People don't open up if you act like a courtroom stenographer. "I help record police reports, statements from everyday people and that sort of thing. This isn't an interrogation or anything like that. I just take down information. Nothing more, nothing less."

"I know what a police report is," the woman says.

On second thought, I place my hands over the keyboard. I say, "Then let's start with your name."

"Penny," the woman says.

"Alright, Penny. How about a last name?" I say.

"That's it. Penny. That's what they call me."

"Who calls you that?"

"Mr. Nickel and Dr. Dime," the woman says, although I can't tell if that's supposed to be a joke. I've learned to withhold judgment. It's not the most ridiculous thing I've heard today.

"Penny it is," I say and type a few lines. "What can I help you with today, Penny?"

She swallows and looks around the room. "Can I have another bottle of water?"

I oblige her, but it's not the first time someone's come in off the street for a break in the A/C and a free drink instead of filing a police report. She's got two minutes before I call Marty back in. I tell her the 10-year-old true story we've been telling for 30 years prior.

"Had a person come in the other day, I won't tell the name, saying they had something urgent to tell police. So they brought this person into a room like this, sat them down and took a report. Turned out this person made it up for a shot at a free lunch on the force's dime. We spent a lot of time and money chasing something that didn't exist," I say and watch her drink.

"So?" Penny says, her eyes on the floor. It's out of habit.

"Just a story to pass the time," I say, glancing at the clock.

Penny stares back at me with eyes like two cigarette burns on a dirty pillow. "I seen somethin'."

Now we're getting somewhere. I return to typing. "What did you see?"

"I get, like, a free pass, right?" Penny says.

"You mean immunity?" I say.

"Yeah, yeah, right, that. Like where I don't get in trouble 'cause of the way I seen something," Penny says.

I can't count the number of times someone asked me about that, but my response is always the same. "Tips will be kept anonymous. We won't let anyone know you were here or what you told us."

"Yeah, yeah, but I won't go to jail or nothin', right?" Penny says.

I shrug. "Honestly, it's not up to me. I take down what you have to say and give it to detectives. They might make an arrest or they might not. Even then, it's up to the district attorney to decide whether to press any charges."

"Bullshit."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm not telling you nothin' 'less I know I ain't going to jail," Penny says.

I give her the standard response. "I promise that you can tell me anything you want, and I'll let you get up and walk out of this office."

Notice I only mentioned the office, not the police station. It's not like we'd sit on our thumbs if someone confessed to a murder.

She seems satisfied regardless. Maybe Marty was right when he said people like her only think in five-minute increments. He'd say it's stupidity. I'd say it's survival. Been there before.

"I'm listening," I say after Penny goes quiet.

She props her elbows on the desk and holds her head in her hands as she recounts what's easily the most bizarre story I've heard all week. Maybe all month. Maybe.

"You don't know about this, but we do. Us, you know, girls like we who are, we, um...," Penny says, trailing off.

She doesn't want to say she's a prostitute, not in front of a police officer. I don't blame her, just like I don't fault her for not admitting the drug use so obvious I'm getting a contact high just looking at her.

"The women you work with?" I say with a knowing look, trying not to lead her on too much and contaminate her statement.

"Yeah, yeah, them womens, you know," Penny says. "We know all about this one guy. Lots of stories goin' around about him. But I never seen him 'til last night."

"Is this gentleman someone I'd be familiar with?" I say.

Penny says, "Nah, nah, you never heard of this guy before, 'cause you're not out there. You too busy with your own thing. This stuffs been going on for, like, years. No one reported nothin'. But after what I seen, I gotta say something to someone, because it's bad. I mean, real bad. Got a minute to myself, so I came here."

Those moments don't come often. There's a reason we at the department shifted to thinking of prostitutes more as victims of human trafficking rather than outright criminals. That's the theory, anyway. Don't tell Marty that.

"Penny, do you have a safe place to go after this?" I say.

She rolls her eyes. "You and the Jesus people give me the same line. Poor, little me, too dumb to know the score. Ain't no one waitin' for me outside. Ain't no one waitin' for none of us. We ain't even automatic, that's what's goin' on. We independent. That's why I'm here."

I keep typing, making a note that "automatic" means continuing to engage in prostitution without the presence of a pimp, usually due to jail time. That's to avoid consequences upon the pimp's return, and to fund his legal fees. Of course, as with everything else, the Internet is changing that. Pimps will be extinct in a decade or two. Human traffickers, though, those are a different story. They smuggle people in and out of countries on the promise of good jobs, then hold an enormous amount of debt over these women's heads. Between being in a country illegally and having few or no resources, prostitution is the least bad option.

Penny sounds like she's homegrown. It makes me wonder how she went from "automatic" to being "independent."

"Go on," I say.

"The daddies, they're all gone," Penny says, referring to pimps. "I mean dead. Dead and gone."

I raise an eyebrow and say, "Oh, yeah?"

"On our tracks, with the other wifeys, yeah, there ain't no more. None of them other daddies is lookin' to come by neither," Penny says.

My typing speed picks up. I say, "Are you saying someone killed them?"

"You just listen, listen up," Penny says. She waits a minute to rub the pain apparent in her stomach. Then, with a look that could've walked out of a grave all on its own, she says, "I know where the dead ones go."

The heat must be getting to me. "What?"

"This guy, he's been killin' 'em. Thought it was all a story the daddies told their wifeys at night, like the boogeyman or somethin'. Nah, nah, it ain't no story. He is real. It is real. He's more an it than a he, but it looks like a he. I know it because I seen what I seen last night," Penny says. She nods and leans back in her chair.

"What, uh, what exactly did you see?" I say, my fingers unable to keep up with my thoughts. There's something about the way she says things. It's in the back of her voice, in the part that didn't have the humanity ripped out of her. She took a huge risk by coming here.

I reach for the tissues as Penny struggles to relate what she saw, but she waves them away.

"Nah, nah, I'm good. Cryin' makes you look stupid," Penny says. She goes on to refer to her illicit clientele as dates. "Anyway, one of the wifeys, you can call her Dollar in that computer you got, took a date back to the normal place. Never seen this date before, but we started getting new dates since we was independent now. Branch out. Keep all the money for us wifeys so we can save up.

"Dollar comes runnin' to me, like, a few minutes later. There's this big thing wrapped around her leg. It's like a cord or something, but it's, like, alive, too. I don't know, like a snake. But not a snake. And Dollar, she's seen some shit, but this is the worst I seen her.

"Then I seen this bright light, and it makes me see spots, but then I seen that cord draggin' Dollar away, too. Didn't see who was on the other end of the cord, though. I'm mad as hell, 'cause Dollar is like my family, so I run after them. We go down some alleys over to that bakery that burned down. There's still a door to a room there. I seen it drag Dollar into that room, and she's all hollerin' and reaching for me and I can't even help her because I'm too far away but I'm running as fast as I can because, oh, my god, I can't believe she can be gone like that.

"Just before the door closes, I see inside, and what I seen inside is all them dead daddies stacked up like boxes or something, and now I know the stories are true. It ain't you people, the 5-0. It ain't someone moving in on someone else's turf. It's this, this, thing. That's what's killin' everybody."

It takes me a minute for my fingers to catch up with her story. I need extra time to cover all the slang for the political suits who like to review police reports. In layman's terms, she found a room full of dead pimps and at least one dead prostitute. The rest is a little fuzzy. A cord or a snake got her?

I don't look at her like I believe her, and I sense she can tell. Probably used to that look, to shouting fire and hearing only her voice in return.

It's been a long day. I'll salvage what I can and get the hell out of here. I clear my throat and say, "Dollar took a man on, as you say, a date. Do have a description of him?"

"Nah, nah, no one does," Penny says and winces. Something about her stomach again. She looks down to the floor. "You don't believe me."

I finish typing and save the report in the computer. "It's not my job to believe you or not. I'll give your statement to the detectives. They'll follow up on it if there's anything there."

"What about you?" Penny says, keeping her eyes to the floor.

I hate these types of questions. Now I'm the one reaching for a bottle of water.

"The police take missing persons cases seriously. If you can provide names and descriptions, it'll help our investigation," I say.

"If there's an investigation."

I clear my throat again. "Yes. If there's an investigation. Look, it's not my job to..."

Penny shakes her head and wobbles to her feet, clutching her stomach as she heads out of the office. Doesn't say a word or look back. Just braces herself with a hand on the wall and makes her way down the hallway toward the exit.

I finish the water and pull up a different screen on the computer to wrap up for the day. Marty, looking more cautious than usual, slinks into the office.

"You want a disinfecting wipe for that chair?" he says with a grin.

"Wasn't that bad," I say.

"Drugs?"

"Probably."

"Yeah, you never know what these pros are going to say. I actually don't mind it. Only humor I find on the job anymore is the shit dopers make up. They get pretty creative," Marty says. "Was this one entertaining? At least make the end of your week interesting?"

I keep typing. "I can't tell yet."

"No?"

"Depends. Any shakeups in human trafficking lately? Vacuums created and filled?" I say.

Marty rolls his eyes and says, "Prostitutes and pimps. That's what they're called. Human trafficking is a term made up by people on college campuses who live in places where they don't worry about streetwalkers at stoplights. But for the record, no, there's nothing big going on in human trafficking, professor."

But would anyone notice? Who reports these people to the police if they do go missing or wind up dead?

"From what this woman told me, someone took out a bunch of pimps and is now going after the prostitutes. One of them died last night," I say, borrowing Marty's terminology.

"Probably why I haven't heard about it," Marty says.

"Because it's recent? The statement is in the system if you want to look at it," I say.

"No, dummy, because pimps and pros don't pay taxes anyway. We work with them, but that doesn't mean we work for them," Marty says and shrugs when he sees my reaction. "Don't give me that look. I'm telling you how it is, not how it ought to be. We play the bleeding heart game, and we'll be chasing our tails with every prostitute that comes in here claiming she was raped."

I hide my face behind another bottle of water. Marty gets like this.

I say, "We do investigate claims of rape, though."

Marty sighs and runs a hand over his shaved head. "Yeah, of course, but only if it involves someone who can be raped."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, come on, buddy. You're such a true believer sometimes. They're prostitutes, for fuck's sake," Marty says. He changes the topic when he hears someone walking in the hallway. "Let's get something to eat. You like Thai? I found a new place. I'll give you a ride."

I can't say no, even if I want to. Marty changed since the accident. Or maybe I did.

I grab the crutches leaning against the wall and let him walk me to the car. By the end of the weekend, between physical therapy sessions and boring TV, I forget all about Penny's story.

But Penny didn't forget about me.