The Breakfast Club

She tells him she's not working anymore. He used to take her out to eat, she says. McBee is 42 years old. She has hazel eyes and long dark hair streaked with gray and a few splashes of white paint. She wears silver rings on her fingers, green glitter nail polish and bright blue eye shadow. She has about a dozen stray chin hairs and only three teeth. The rest were knocked out about a year ago. McBee says she got into a car with two guys and one put a gun to her head. She tells the story like she's Dirty Harry, claiming she told them to make her day before she jumped out of the moving car. She knocked out her teeth, cut herself up and came home covered in blood. "My son told me next time, I'll get killed," she says.

When she worked, McBee walked around wearing the same outfits she wears now. Just pants, sneakers and a loose T-shirt. "I ain't dressing up like a hoochie mama wearing junk clothes," she says.

Twenty years ago, she was a school cafeteria cook in Hitchcock. She dated her husband for three months before they got married. She has four kids. Three were raised by her sister. She says the eldest was taken from her when he was four years old. "Because I was on drugs."

Giving $5 or $10 blow jobs paid for crack. When her husband went to sleep in their room at Allen's Motel, she told him she was going to sit outside. In the morning, she came home with nearly $200. "I said, 'Look what I found, some money on the ground,' " she says. "But he knew I was lying."

Last year, she was arrested after agreeing to give an undercover cop a $10 blow job. She says her kids told her to stop working. "I've got grandbabies," she says. "I don't do it no more." McBee says she hasn't turned a trick, smoked a rock or been arrested in about a year. Fleming says that when undercover cops ask if she's working, she always says no.

McBee isn't used to sleeping nights. Sometimes she sits on the steps of the motel. She watches women head to work. "They just walk out the door and get in a truck," she says.

McBee still walks on the business side of the street, watching cars. Habit, she says. She looks like she doesn't have any place she wants to go.

This morning three men have pulled over and asked if she's working. "I say, 'No. I'm just walking home.' "

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Fleming has arrested hundreds of prostitutes. All but one was addicted to crack. Most of them were born on the island or grew up nearby. Fleming says there are a few out-of-town girls, but not many.

When he arrests a hooker Fleming asks how and why she became a prostitute. It's always a variation on the same theme: Girl tries crack, girl falls in love with crack, girl wants more crack, girl spends all her money on crack, girl needs to make more money to get more crack. And prostitution is the quickest way for women to make cash, Fleming says.

One whore told Fleming that she made $50,000 a year. She spent it all on crack.

"They make the money and go smoke it up," he says. Since prostitutes and crack dealers work out of the same cheap motels, rocks are delivered like room service.

Another former prostitute, who smoked a rock before being interviewed, says that the average hooker spends $300 to $400 a day on crack. A dime rock only gives about a 20-minute high, she says. "Then they've got to go back." And if the prostitute is crashing in someone else's house or hotel room, the crack goes more quickly. "They've got to share it. And it goes even faster," she says. "They have to go back out there and catch another trick. It's a nonstop thing."

After a prostitute's first or second conviction, the district attorney usually offers probation, including drug rehab and counseling, instead of jail time. But the women don't always take it. "You can't force it on them. But it's certainly available," Ibrahim says.

Despite prior offenses, most women don't stay locked up for much more than a week, Fleming says. And that isn't long enough to kill the craving. "When they get out, they're hitting the streets as hard as they can," he says. Almost every crack whore he's seen go through rehab immediately starts smoking and turning tricks again.

Some hookers disappear off the streets for a year or two, Fleming says. But, he adds, they always come back. Increasingly, they're coming back to the harsh glare of morning light.