By this time, I knew I had to think really fast and not let him know I was scared, so I pretended that we were just out there to have sex and didn’t give him any fight because it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. I asked him what his name was, and he said it was Bob, but didn’t give me his last name. He reached in the back seat and pulled out a brown paper bag—like a grocery bag. I could see it was stuffed with all kinds of women’s underwear, like you can buy at Victoria’s Secret. He held up the bras and panties and stuff and lots of the things were torn or dirty. He wanted me to put some of it on and I said I couldn’t do that.

I don’t know where he got it from, but he was holding a gun. It was a “short” gun, like I guess you call a hand-gun. He held it up against my head behind my ear. He made me give him a blow-job. I didn’t want to because he had these weird bumps or something all over his penis, but he kept the gun to my head all the time I was trying to get him off. It seems like it was forty-five minutes that I kept trying, but I kept gagging because of the bumps. That made him real angry.

I was sure he was going to shoot me. He never lost his erection and he didn’t ejaculate. Finally, I just started talking as fast as I could and somehow I convinced him to take me back to Seattle. I told him I had this friend who was really lonely and that she had been looking for a guy just like him and she would be a perfect date for him and he wouldn’t have to pay her or anything. I gave him her phone number, but it wasn’t really her number—I just made it up.

All the way into town, I kept talking and talking, because I was afraid he was going to pull off someplace and try again, but he took me back to the bus station. I didn’t call the police because I didn’t trust them. One time I got arrested for prostitution and this one cop opened up my shirt and just looked down at my breasts, and there was no reason for him to do that. So when this happened to me, I decided I wasn’t going to tell them anything. I wasn’t hurt and I wasn’t dead.

The nightmares didn’t go away, though, for a long time. See, when I was younger, my stepfather fooled around with me and then he raped me. I told my mother but she wouldn’t believe me. I found out then that nobody believes you when you tell the truth. Especially the cops. I just kept it to myself for all these years. I’m in a straight life now and I have been for a long time. I’ve got a good husband, and I told him what happened. When I saw this guy’s picture in the paper, I recognized him. I knew that I had to tell somebody.

What did he look like? Pretty average. Not too tall. Not too heavy. Just a guy. But I still feel that I came this close to getting killed, and the funny thing is that when I got into his car, I had him pegged as harmless…. I never would have believed that he could murder all those girls.

Diantha G. [To the Author]

December 2, 2001

Part One

1

FOR DECADES, Tukwila, Kent, Auburn, Des Moines, and Federal Way depended on the Pac HiWay for their commercial sustenance, entertainment, and transportation to either Seattle or Tacoma. The road, like the river, has changed continually over sixty years. It began as Highway 99, and then it was “Old 99” when the I-5 Freeway opened. Some spots are called Pacific Highway South, except where it passes the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, where it has become International Parkway. Despite the newly sophisticated name, fancy street signs, and the median planted with shrubs and bulbs, this part of Pac HiWay remains the “SeaTac Strip” to many King County residents.

Heading south from Seattle for the twenty-six miles to Tacoma, the highway was two lane in the 1930s and 1940s, a pleasant drive out of the city on Saturday nights to dance at the Spanish Castle, gamble at a permanently anchored ship on the Duwamish River, or eat fried chicken at Rose’s on the Highway.

There were little motels, which were referred to as “cabin camps,” decades before the Hiltons, Sheratons, and Doubletrees, before the Super-Eights and Motel 6’s, and even before the Ben Carol, the Three Bears, and the Legend motels. And, of course, 99 was the only highway to take to Portland and on to California, passing through the center of towns along the way.

Roads age and change the way people do, so subtly that nobody notices the first faint wrinkles and loss of rosy innocence. Often, the good things are just gone one day and few remember when they disappeared. The Spanish Castle and Rose’s burned down in unexplained fires. Manca’s In-and-Out hamburger drive-through went out of business. The Midway Drive-in, said to be the first outdoor theater in America, stopped showing movies at some point and became a thriving weekend swap meet.

The marginal hotels and motels became seedier, a club called Dandy’s that featured topless dancers and male strippers took over Pepo’s Gourmet Hungarian Restaurant at the corner of Pac HiWay and 144th, and then Pepo himself died while still in his forties.

“Pepo’s corner” became the center point for something else entirely.

In the old days, sections of Seattle where love for sale was commonplace were far from the SeaTac Strip because it was much too remote from downtown. The airport was hardly a draw because it wasn’t all that large. Instead, undercover cops watched for prostitutes and pimps along downtown’s Pike Street and out on Aurora Avenue in the north end of the city.

Over time, the Pac HiWay became a tunnel of contrasts. In 1954, the airport was a single structure with no jetways and no underground trains, but it morphed into a huge spiderweb of gates, jetways, and ramps with two runways. Indeed, today’s SeaTac Airport is one of the nation’s hubs, and the King County Port Authority Commission foresaw the need for more and longer runways. Through its power of eminent domain, the commission bought up whole neighborhoods of little postwar houses with perfect lawns, whose occupants had long since grown used to the roar of jets directly over their roofs. The Port paid fair-market prices and scores of homes were loaded onto trucks, leaving behind many miles of wasteland both north and south of the airport. The grass grew tall around the houseless foundations and the neglected trees and shrubs left behind. The trees still blossomed and bore fruit, although no one was left to appreciate them.

By the early 1980s, the whole ambience of Highway 99/Pac HiWay/International Parkway had been transformed. Serious motorists raced along the I-5 Freeway a mile to the east, and the strip became a local roadway, full of businesses that catered to those who flew in or lived and worked nearby, some of them long-standing, some new: fast food, overnight lodging to fit any budget, lock-smiths, bicycle repair shops, hot-tub sales, one stupendous gourmet supermarket—Larry’s—and any number of 7-Elevens. The Little Church by the Side of the Road was still there and so was The Pancake Chef and the Lewis and Clark Theater, but its once magnificent single auditorium was sliced into a utilitarian multiplex. Don the Barber, who shares his shop with his twin brother, Dick, has cut hair at Pac HiWay and S. 142nd for decades, and they still have hundreds of “regulars” who stop by to joke with Don or have serious conversations with his more taciturn twin.