Chapter 1

Well beyond and a little behind Songbird’s right tip tank, Las Vegas lay fuzzy and indistinct in the distance. The air over southern Nevada was often bell-clear, but it wasn’t on this day. That didn’t matter much to the pilot, and she really wasn’t paying a lot of attention as she flew the aging but well-maintained Cessna 310 to the northwest a mile and a half above the ground.

She had flown this route a lot over the last ten years. It had to be well over a hundred times; she couldn’t have said how many off the top of her head. She knew she could look it up in her logbooks if she wanted to, but it really didn’t matter. She knew where she was going so well that she didn’t even have to think about her navigation any longer.

This trip would have taken her less than half the time in Skyhook, her slightly younger and considerably faster Learjet 24A. For once she’d chosen to fly the Cessna, mostly because it would draw less attention than the shark-like white executive jet she was so well known for flying. That was fine with her; she needed the time to think. Somehow things had always seemed a little clearer to her when she was behind the yoke of one of her planes, but that wasn’t the case this time. In fact, she didn’t know exactly why she was making this trip at all. It wasn’t for the same reason that she had made the trip so many times in the past, but somehow she felt she needed to make the journey, if for no more reason than to try to get things into perspective.

Now, as she pulled back the twin throttles and started her long descent, she reflected that so much had changed in the last twelve months. It was just a year since she’d landed the Southern Airlines Airbus at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi after terrorists had attempted and failed to hijack the airliner, leaving the flight crew incapacitated. The aftermath had totally reordered her life, and much of it in ways that were not welcome to her. For years she’d had what she considered to be a stable and comfortable life, if not exactly what most people would consider to be a normal one, but that was no more. Now, she was seeking a new balance, a new perspective, and it wasn’t proving as easy as she had hoped it would be.

The dry desert miles crept onward below her as she descended, thinking that perhaps this trip wasn’t such a good idea; more than once she considered pushing the throttles open again, turning around, and heading back to Phoenix. But she didn’t; she had friends ahead of her, and possibly the only friends available who could understand some of the things that troubled her. The only other person she could talk these things out with was her new husband Will – but he was in Qatar in the Persian Gulf. She missed him intensely, but there was no hope of being able to talk to him face to face anytime in the foreseeable future. For a woman who was as independent and self-reliant as she had been in the past it seemed very strange to be considering these things without him. In the past few months she had come to realize that he filled a part of her life that she had long considered to be something that didn’t matter.

After a few more minutes the Cessna was closer to the nearly barren desert floor, and things on the ground seemed to be moving past her now, rather than just hovering far above them. It wouldn’t be much farther, now.

Since she had been flying by Visual Flight Rules (VFR) she hadn’t talked on the radio since she’d left the Phoenix Terminal Control Area; she’d altered her course slightly to avoid the equivalent control area in Las Vegas since she didn’t want to be bothered with them at all. Now, she changed her course toward where she was going and tuned one of her radios to a different frequency. She pushed the button on Songbird’s yoke, and said into the boom mike on the headset she wore, “Antelope Valley Unicom, twin Cessna four eight alpha is on a long final for runway two six.”

Still miles ahead of her and on the ground, in the office of the Redlite Ranch, Nevada’s largest and most luxurious legal brothel, the words came out of the speaker attached to an aviation-band radio. “Now, that’s strange,” Shirley Hoffman, the house manager, remarked to no one in particular.

“What’s strange?” Yvette, a tall, well-built, exotically dressed girl with long, bleached blonde hair replied to the elderly, gray-haired house manager. Shirley knew that Yvette’s real name was Mary Stefanski, but she was probably the only person on the premises at the moment besides Yvette who knew it. “Work names” were the custom at the Redlite Ranch, as they were at all the rest of the Nevada houses, to give the working girls a degree of protection and anonymity. Brothels are mostly an evening and night business and it was morning, so it was still slow around the place; Yvette was on duty this morning and had dropped by the office to pass some time talking a bit over a cup of coffee.

“That’s Jennlynn,” Shirley replied, a frown on her heavily lined face. She had been a house girl and later a manager, which is to say “madam,” at Nevada bordellos for much of her life. However, the rest of her life had been spent out on the Bar H Bar, the family ranch well to the north of the Redlite, where the sun and the dry Nevada wind had taken their toll. “She hasn’t been here in months, and she’s flying her Cessna instead of her Learjet.”

“Jennlynn?” Yvette replied. “You mean Learjet Jenn? I’ve heard of her but I’ve never met her. I thought she wasn’t active any longer.”

“So did I,” Shirley nodded, “and that’s what makes it strange. She hasn’t been here since she married my grandson a couple of months ago, and it had been a while even then.”

“What’s she like? I mean really?”

“She’s usually very friendly and a lot of fun to be around,” Shirley shrugged. “She’s been working here longer than anyone else, almost since the place was started, although she was only a weekend girl, not a regular. Ever since that deal with the hijacking last year, she’s been far and away the nation’s best known prostitute, and she doesn’t like it one damn bit.”

“I remember seeing her on TV after she landed the airliner. When that dumb blonde reporter tried to make a big deal of the fact that she worked here, I thought Jennlynn was so mad that she was going to murder someone.”

“She has a temper all right, although we’ve almost never seen it around here,” Shirley smiled. “But you’re right, I know Jennlynn well enough to know that she was ready to scratch that girl’s throat out with her fingernails. Fortunately that missionary guy who landed the plane with her managed to get the lid back on. But I’ll tell you what, there are a lot of Learjet Jenn stories around here, and they’re just about legends. Some of the older girls here were around to see some of them.”

“I’ve heard a few, like her taking on some Air Force guy in a fighter plane in her Learjet and beating him real bad.”

“She did,” Shirley smiled. She remembered it well; she’d been here then too. “That was one of the wilder days we’ve ever had around here.” Since she knew that Jennlynn would still be several minutes from landing, she turned back to the project she had been fiddling with on her computer. Once again she reflected that she could have never dreamed of a computer in a bordello back at Maybelle’s in Ely, when she’d turned out as a high school girl clear back in 1943. Of course, in those days no one could have ever dreamed of a place like the Redlite, either. What a difference sixty years made!

Shirley couldn’t help but be curious about why Jennlynn would be coming here at all. Back in December, Jennlynn had been pretty serious about her intention to hang up her spike heels – in other words, get out of the business once and for all. Except for the summer ten years before when Shirley first knew her back at Bettye’s Ranch near Beatty, before the Redlite had been built, being a Nevada house prostitute had never been Jennlynn’s primary business. It had mostly been a hobby, a way to get away from the high stresses of her real-life and well-paid job as a design engineer. It had also been a way for Jennlynn to keep her furious sex drive under control; it was much safer – and more rewarding – than picking up a guy in some bar, even if there was no money involved. But only a small part of Jennlynn’s considerable fortune had come from working at the Redlite; much more came from her day job at Lambdatron Corporation in Phoenix, her charter flight operation, Skyhook Aviation, and some canny stock market investing.

Shirley also knew that her grandson Will – Jennlynn’s husband – had told her to spend a weekend or two at the Redlite if the stresses became too great while he was in the Persian Gulf, as a sergeant in the Air Force. However, Jennlynn had sworn she was going to keep it straight while he was gone. Had she changed her mind?

Unable to restrain her curiosity, Shirley left her computer, got up, and went out to the staff lounge behind the kitchen. Customers were not allowed in the lounge, but there was a good view of the runway and the mountains in the distance beyond. Yvette followed her, and both of them looked out past the far end of the runway where the white dot of the twin Cessna came into sight. They watched as it touched down on the runway a mile or so away, slowed down, and taxied up to the tie downs outside the back gate.

Jennlynn swung the Cessna around to stop over a set of tie downs, interestingly enough not the ones marked “Reserved for Learjet Jenn.” The props came to a stop, and after a minute or more Jennlynn got out of the right side, came down the walkway on top of the wing, and turned to tying the plane down.

Many Nevada bordellos have a fence around them to prevent girls sneaking off and doing some business on their own; it keeps the money in the house and helps with the control of STDs. The Redlite was one of these, although it was there by county ordinance, rather than the desires of the management, which allowed the girls to come and go more or less as they needed after they’d completed their first shift there. If the managers found the girls couldn’t be trusted they wouldn’t be asked back. Shirley had always told the girls the fence at the Redlite was there to keep people out, people like angry husbands and mad protesters.

Jennlynn had had a key to the back gate almost since the beginning; Shirley and Yvette watched as she unlocked the gate and walked past the outdoor pool – not in use at this time of the year, of course – and came into the lounge. She looked a little strange; she was wearing jeans, a sweat shirt, and a denim jacket instead of her usually elegant apparel. Her flamboyant near-black hair had been pulled back into an unruly pony tail, and she wore not a drop of makeup, so she didn’t look much like she normally did when she was here.

“Well, good morning, stranger,” Shirley said as Jennlynn came in. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“It’s been a while,” Jennlynn agreed. “How have you been, Shirley?”

“About the same as ever, just that much older. Have you heard anything new from Will?”

“Not really,” the tall, slender woman replied. “I talked to him last night and he’s just about as bored as ever. He’s supposed to be a minder for the press that shows up around the base, but there hasn’t been any in days. Someone once said that war is an organized bore, and I guess Will is proving it.”

“They’re not having a war yet,” Shirley pointed out.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Jennlynn sighed. “With any kind of luck it’ll be as quick as it was the last time and he’ll be home in a couple of months. But somehow I can’t believe it’s going to happen.”

“It sounds like he’s about as safe as he can be.”

“Yeah, well, maybe, but that doesn’t keep me from worrying about him.”

“At least you get to call him up and talk to him,” Yvette put in. “I remember my grandfather telling stories of when he was in the Pacific during World War II, and only occasionally getting letters from home, and then months late.”

“Yeah, I suppose I shouldn’t complain,” Jennlynn shook her head.

“Jennlynn, I should have introduced you two,” Shirley said. “This is Yvette. She’s on her second trip here and is taking hold pretty well. Yvette, this is Jennlynn Swift, otherwise known as ‘Learjet Jenn, the fastest woman in the state of Nevada.’”

“Was Jennlynn Swift,” she protested. “I try to think of myself as Jennlynn Hoffman these days, and Learjet Jenn, well, I try not to think about that at all.”

“You’ve gotten to be pretty famous with those names,” Yvette said.

“It wasn’t something I wanted,” Jennlynn sighed. “I was perfectly happy being an anonymous weekend house girl every now and then, and if I had my way I still would be. But I guess I don’t get my way on this one. Shirley, that’s part of why I came up here. I have some things I wanted to talk to you and George about.”

“George isn’t here. He’s in Texas dealing with some of his business down there.” George Bush – not related to the sitting president of the same name but resenting the fact that they shared it – was the owner of the Redlite Ranch. Shirley and Jennlynn knew he still had a lot of involvement in housing developments in the Houston area, although these days he made his home here in the barren desert of Antelope Valley in a modest house behind the bordello.

“Oh, well, I probably should have called ahead, but I just got to the point where I had to talk about this with someone who knows what I’m talking about. I don’t know anyone in Phoenix who might understand me.”

“I don’t know that I can help but at least I can listen to you. Would you be interested in a cup of coffee?”

“Sure. It always helps to have something in your hand.”

“Yvette,” Shirley said. “Why don’t you go up to the kitchen and get Jennlynn and me some coffee?”

“Get yourself one, too,” Jennlynn told her. “You might as well sit in on this. You might be able to offer some fresh insights, since this will probably mostly be new to you.”

“Sure thing,” the blonde replied. “Thank you for asking.”

As Yvette left for the kitchen, Shirley said softly, “This must be something that’s bugging you pretty bad.”

“Yes it is, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy to explain.”

Shirley and Jennlynn were seated in lounge chairs a couple minutes later when Yvette returned with the coffee. “All right, Jennlynn,” Shirley said as soon as the younger girl was seated. “What’s this all about?”

“The nation’s most famous prostitute business,” Jennlynn said. “You know I don’t like being called that, but I suppose it’s a good description of the way things have become. I can’t tell you how many supermarket tabloids I’ve seen with someone pretending to be me on the cover, but it’s at least a dozen, and I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them. It’s never been me, always someone made up or tricked up to look like me, but it means that I represent something in people’s minds that isn’t the truth.”

“You can’t do much about that,” Shirley shook her head.

“I know that, but even that fame didn’t come from being a prostitute by itself, but as being one who landed that airliner. In a way I can live with that, since I accomplished what I did as a pilot, not as a prostitute. It was the media who wanted to dig up dirt rather than look at the real story. But then I think I really screwed up when I agreed to do that newsmagazine feature last fall.”

“I think it was a pretty good representation of you and the business,” Shirley said. The story, entitled The Fast World of Learjet Jenn had been done by a World News Network reporter/producer by the name of Brenda Hodunk, and had been well done and sympathetic, rather than exploitative. It had been rebroadcast on WNN several times. Shirley turned to Yvette and went on, “That was a real hoot shooting it, too. They set up in the front lounge and did a long interview with Jennlynn and shorter interviews with George and me. We told everyone if they didn’t want their faces on camera to stay the hell out of the room, and it was so empty in there it almost echoed. There was only one girl willing to even just walk through, so she got interviewed a little. It brought in a lot of business and got a lot of girls interested in coming here to work, too.”

“I saw that,” Yvette responded. “It was part of the reason I decided to give this place a try. I used to be a call girl with an agency up in Portland. I don’t make the money here that I did there, but this is so much safer and there isn’t any chance of being arrested.”

“Yes, and maybe that’s sort of the point,” Jennlynn shook her head. “I can’t help but wonder if maybe I made the life sound too appealing. I think the way we do it here is a good way to do it, and let’s face it, prostitution is going to happen whether it’s legal or not. But Yvette, you just agreed that almost any other way than this to go about it is going to be riskier for the girls.”

“Well, yeah, that’s the way it works. As far as I’m concerned it’s about the best way to be in the business, and there are a lot worse ways.”

“There are,” Jennlynn agreed. “I even said it on Fast World, but I keep thinking I didn’t make a strong enough point about it. Then I really got my nose rubbed in it.”

“What happened?”

“Do you remember on Fast World when I was talking about the way we do things here, and I said I knew a girl who had been a street hooker and had barely survived the life? I mean, I was contrasting that life to the one we have here.”

“I remember,” Shirley said. “Although you didn’t go into any detail. I thought you were just making someone up to make a point.”

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t,” Jennlynn sighed. “Let’s just say she’s a friend of a friend, and let it go at that. I found out about her working the street last fall before the idea of Fast World came up. We were in a group talking about something else so I didn’t get the chance to go into it with her as much as I would have liked, and I’ve since found out that she doesn’t talk about it much. She’s got good reason not to.”

Jennlynn let out a long breath before she went on. “A couple of days ago I got to talking about it with her again, and this time we were one-on-one. I, well, I pushed her a little, and I guess she thought that considering who I am she could talk about it with me when she couldn’t discuss it with her straight friends, and all I can say is ‘Holy Christ.’”

“Bad?” Shirley asked.

“Bad. Very bad. You name a bad thing a girl in that part of the business can have happen and it happened to her. Drugs including heroin to keep her in line, beatings, literal slavery – she was even sold from one pimp to another for cash a couple of times. She told me the story in a hell of a lot more detail than I wanted to hear. I mean, you hear about those things and it’s one thing, but to hear her tell about it, it’s another. A girl under the last pimp she had committed suicide, and she was looking to do it herself when she managed to escape instead. She had me in tears, and she was crying pretty hard herself.”

“You’re right,” Yvette shook her head. “It was part of the reason I decided to pull out of Portland. There was a pimp who wanted to add me to his string, and I was like ‘no way,’ but he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I know he planned on roughing me up until he got his way. I could just see me sliding down into that world of shit and becoming a crack whore, so I ran.”

“We don’t see much of that here,” Shirley shook her head. “I saw some of it when I was younger and working in rougher places, though. Hell, there were places that wouldn’t hire a girl back then unless she had a pimp to keep her in line. I’m told there still are. I often wonder what happens to girls like that.”

“I know what happens,” Jennlynn replied. “Just exactly what happened to my young friend. She was just lucky to get out of it, but she’s managed to shake the bad crap and put her life back together. She’s back in college now, a pre-seminary student of all things.”

“That’s something you don’t hear every day,” Yvette smiled. “How did she shake all that, including the heroin?”

“She found faith in God,” Jennlynn replied flatly. “Yvette, I know it’s not very well known about me but I’m from a very religious family, so I grew up with that stuff. The way my parents treated me washed a lot of that out of me. But this girl somehow found God, and her faith gave her the strength to just turn her back on all of the bad stuff. She told me that God took away her heroin addiction. I suppose I still believe in God, maybe not that much, but this kid’s faith was strong enough that it gave her the strength to do it. Maybe it was a crutch for her, but it was a crutch that worked. If something like that were to happen to me I doubt that I would have that kind of strength.”

“It’s good to know that things like that happen,” Shirley said. “But I still don’t quite see the problem you’re having.”

“It’s pretty simple,” Jennlynn replied. “Like it or not, I was sort of representing all prostitutes in the documentary. Call me a spokes-hooker, I guess. I can’t help but wonder if doing Fast World might have led some girls, maybe many girls, into that life without their realizing that I was describing the best way that it can be done, but they’re all too liable to end up in the worst. It makes me feel guilty as hell if I screwed up someone’s life by doing it, and maybe a lot of lives. And if I did, what can I do about it?”

“All right, it makes sense now,” Shirley said. “I don’t know what to tell you, but there’s someone here you ought to talk to. Yvette, I think Justine ought to be awake by now. Why don’t you find her and invite her back here for some coffee and a little chit-chat.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.