by Matthew Iden
I knelt beside him and flipped open his jacket. At least two of Chuck’s bullets had caught him. The amount of blood he was losing didn’t look good. My gaze flicked to his face where curiously colorless blue eyes looked back into mine.
“You . . . know . . . any . . . poetry, man?” he asked, then he was still.
Sirens bleated in the distance. I was still staring at the face of Eddie when I heard feet crunching in the snow. I turned to see Sarah walking toward me.
“I missed it,” she said, her face a mix of anger and disbelief. “All this damn work and I missed it.”
“No,” I said, and stood. “You made it. As in, made it happen. These guys were a minute from making the handoff and would’ve been on the road in five minutes if it hadn’t been for you. Lucy would be gone.”
She looked down at Eddie. “I let him lock me in my own car. With my own cuffs. If he’d had more time, he might’ve killed me.”
I reached out and squeezed her arm. Maybe I didn’t know her well enough for the gesture, but her voice was full of self-reproach and that needed to stop. From what I’d seen, she was too good of a cop for her to lose any self-esteem on this. “He might’ve done a lot of things. But he didn’t. And he won’t, thanks to me and Chuck. And you.”
Her look was still unhappy as she stared down at Eddie, but eventually her face relaxed a fraction and I saw a tiny smile. Behind us there was more crunching of snow, more feet. We turned to see Chuck guide Lucy over to us, his arm around her protectively. I stepped forward to close the gap. Lucy had been through enough—she didn’t need to see the ugliest part.
“Singer,” Chuck said. “Is he . . . ?”
I nodded and Lucy made a funny kind of moaning sigh. Chuck squeezed her arm and she put her head on his shoulder.
“I’m so glad we got here in time, Lucy,” Sarah said, her eyes bright. “No one should go through what you did.”
“Thank you,” Lucy whispered. “Thank you so much.”
A few of the falling flakes got into my own eyes, making them water, and then I discovered that I was taking part in a group hug. Which is how we remained until a dozen local and state police careened into the parking lot, lights and sirens on full blast, spilling out of their cruisers and emergency vehicles, barking questions, all of them wanting to know just what the hell we’d done to their little Town of Motels.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The trailer had made a small concession to the holidays. Feeble white Christmas lights outlined the door, plastic holly and ivy garland decorated the tiny, scrap wood front porch, and a “Merry Xmas!” banner hung from inside one window.
There was a single light on inside. Sherrie—dishwater-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, hollow-eyed, worn down to the essence—stood in front of the window, arms crossed and staring intently at the cinder drive where it came up to the trailer. She was dressed in a pale blue sweatshirt and pants two sizes too big. She smoked Camel Lights and played with her lower lip while she watched the road. It’s where she’d stood since night had become morning and dark became light.
The six-by-eight space that passed for a living room smelled of weed and cigarette smoke. On the coffee table a box of wine lay on its side, spilling white Zinfandel onto the carpet drop by drop. Lauren was sprawled on the built-in sofa, an arm thrown across her forehead. She’d come to keep Sherrie company through the night, but had ended up just drinking most of the wine and getting baked into unconsciousness.
Sherrie didn’t mind. Lauren’s chatter would’ve driven her crazy as the hours passed without a call. She would’ve talked nonstop about what she was going to do to the place after Sherrie was gone, hardly able to contain herself at the prospect of having a trailer of her own instead of having to share with her sister or shacking up with her boyfriend. Sherrie could tune it out most of the time—what would it matter, since she was going someplace better?—but sure as shit Lauren would’ve noticed when her ride hadn’t arrived and Sherrie’s bags sat there by the door.
A cry from the bedroom in the back interrupted her thoughts and she stubbed out the cigarette quickly, then hurried down the hallway. She came back with a small bundle in a pink blanket covered in a Babar the Elephant print, a hand-me-down from another young mother that had moved out of the trailer park last summer and hadn’t had room in the car for everything.
Swaying from side to side and bouncing the bundle occasionally, she hummed tunelessly and made baby talk. A note of desperation threaded her voice. The baby usually began wailing at five and didn’t stop until it had cried itself back to sleep. But this day, to her relief, the little thing decided to stay quiet, leaving her to watch out the window, and wait.
The dark turned to false dawn and then to a true white-sky winter morning, when you weren’t sure if you were looking at the falling snow or a rising sun. But to Sherrie, the most important thing—as she felt a deep, tearing sense of depression—was that nobody and nothing came up the drive to stop in front of her trailer to take her and her baby away.
“I guess your daddy’s not coming, after all,” she whispered. A tear slipped down her cheek as she left the window and went to the tiny kitchen to fix the baby’s formula. It would start crying if she didn’t feed it soon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The last of the electronics had been destroyed and the phones smashed. The Lexus was wiped down, inside and out, and he’d hired a service to take it away to be detailed for a third time as a precaution. He’d shredded, then burned, his albums, nearly crying as he did so. They were the things he valued the most about his calling, both as a prize for him to relish and the lasting tribute to all the work he’d put into pursuing, gathering, and cataloging. He’d often dreamed of some future archaeologist or antiques hunter finding them in the ruins of his home and the shocked titillation they would experience leafing through them.
Torbett paced down to his office, absorbed by his thoughts. All of it was gone now. Thanks to Eddie and his incompetence. If he’d only listened to his own instinct . . . His gut had been telling him to drop the deal and move on, but thoughts of the little Asian girl had clouded his thinking so thoroughly that—instead of acting with the consummate care and caution that had protected him for years—he’d risked everything.
One more glance around the office, he thought. Tired eyes missed important clues, but it made him feel better to be doing something, to give himself the illusion that he was being conscientious and vigilant. Drawers, card files, and cabinets were clean and held only personal finances and the like. Boring, pedestrian, utterly normal. He turned his attention to the new laptop he’d purchased just this week. His workaday files were in place, with no trace of anything untoward. The only item which law enforcement might look at even mildly askance was the program that ran his security cameras, but even that was common enough now that cops barely gave those kinds of things a second glance, especially for the city’s wealthiest citizens.
To test the system, Torbett launched the program that patched his laptop into the split-screen video feeds of the cameras. Idly, he browsed the six panels that covered the entrances to his house, garage, and front gate.
Damn. Camera five was blacked out. It covered the glass doors of the veranda, the ones that led out to the garden. Zero visibility meant that the connection had come undone. Fixing it was a pain, and he was tempted to give himself a much-deserved break, but security wasn’t something you waited on. Torbett retraced his steps back down the hall, through the dining room, and into the parlor which led out onto the veranda.
He considered getting a ladder and a few tools first—or at least a jacket for the cold—then, impatient, decided to simply eyeball the situation to see what had happened. He unlocked the glass doors and stepped outside, looking over and up to where the camera sat.
Then, suddenly, he was looking at a mound of snow three inches in front of his face. The right side of his face was freezing
and, distantly, he realized he was lying prone, his body sprawled along the bricks of the veranda. The left side of his head throbbed with an acute pain that ran from his jaw, passed through his cheekbone, and on to his forehead. With a monumental effort, he rolled onto his side but had to stay that way, however, unable to raise himself to a sitting position. His arms were rubbery and useless. He wondered if he’d slipped on a patch of ice and concussed himself.
His eyesight was blurry and he raised a hand to check for blood. There was a little spot of the stuff, yes, but more alarming was a small noise to his right. He turned his head and his eyes widened, but he didn’t have the mental acuity to do anything except stare at the two people, a man and a woman, standing on his veranda. They looked down at him with an expression of distaste, as though they were examining a stain and contemplating how to remove it.
Both were Asian, with black hair and the same slim, athletic build. The man was taller and had the kind of piercings and tattoos that, seen on the street or on the news, made Torbett curl his lip. The girl was slender, with a mane of black hair.
“You sure you want to do this?” the man asked, not taking his eyes off Torbett.
“If it’s him,” she replied.
“Sarah scooped his car’s tags from the girl he tried to grab at the On Ramp, which is good enough for me,” the man said. “Wouldn’t fly with a grand jury, but that ain’t our problem.”
“Who,” Torbett said, having trouble forming the word. His jaw was either broken or dislocated. “Who are you?”
The girl moved closer, then knelt in the snow. She was beautiful, Torbett thought. Her face could stop a man’s heart and her eyes were a bottomless black well. As she bent her head near his, her hair swung down and brushed his face.
“I’m the package you ordered,” she said, smiling for the first time. The expression was colder than the ice underneath his body and lacked any room for understanding or forgiveness. “And I’m here to deliver.”
NOTES
I apologize for painting the town of Breezewood with an uncharitable brush. In my defense, the short strip connecting Interstate 70 with the Pennsylvania Turnpike isn’t any better than I portray it here, but the land surrounding the intersection is quite beautiful, as is most of rural Pennsylvania and Maryland. If you find yourself in the area with an extra half hour, do yourself a favor and take a few lefts and rights off the beaten path.
The Calloway Motel is a fabrication, although there are one or two buildings in Breezewood that fit the description. The On Ramp is real, although the name has been changed. The activities that go on there are only my educated guess.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Detective Billy Woolf of the Fairfax County Police, who made the transition from the department’s Gangs unit to become the single operational member of the Northern Virginia Human Trafficking Task Force. Detective Woolf was kind enough to sit down with me and guide me through some of the thornier and more misunderstood issues surrounding juvenile human trafficking from both the public perception and that of law enforcement. Thanks, Billy.
I learned a great deal about juvenile human trafficking through the Klaas Kids Foundation website (www.klaaskids.org) and what parents and citizens can do to help prevent childhood kidnappings and abuse. Visit Klaas Kids for resources, information, and help.
My editors Elyse Dinh-McCrillis and Michael Mandarano took a rough idea and helped make it into the book you have in your hands. Elyse and Michael, thank you.
Lastly, thank you to my editor, Kjersti Egerdahl, and the team at Thomas & Mercer for giving me the chance to show the world what Marty Singer is all about.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2014 Sally Iden
Matthew Iden writes hard-boiled detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, thrillers, and contemporary literary fiction with a psychological twist. He is the author of the Marty Singer detective series:
A Reason to Live
Blueblood
One Right Thing
The Spike
The Wicked Flee
Visit www.matthew-iden.com for information on upcoming appearances, new releases, and to receive a free copy of The Guardian: A Marty Singer Short Story—not available anywhere else.
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STAY IN TOUCH
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