Abaddon's Locusts

by Don Travis

  Henry bounced out of the chair and stalked the den stiff-legged. “But if it’s what you say, if he’s been tricked into a sex ring, why does he stay? He don’t look all muscled up, but that boy can fight when he wants to. How come he don’t just take to the road?”

  He wasn’t going to like my answer, but before I could deliver it, Paul came through the back door and yelled a greeting.

  Chapter 2

  “WHOSE BIKE is parked out there?” Upon entering the den, Paul stopped dead still. “Henry? Is that you?”

  The Navajo had made an impression. They’d only met briefly once about three years ago. Of course, both Henry and Jazz were impressive guys—as was Paul.

  “’Fraid so. Hope you don’t mind me coming over without no warning.”

  I cut straight to the issue. “He’s got a problem. Or at least, Jazz has.”

  The love of my life took a seat as I explained the situation. I wasn’t certain how he would react. The green-eyed monster had showed up briefly when I introduced Paul to the sexy teenager I’d been working with up in Farmington while searching for a wine mogul’s missing son. Paul was as secure as any man I knew, but Jazz Penrod was such a package of raw sex that he made most men—gay or straight—feel threatened. But once again, my lover fooled me. He was pretty good at that, even though I knew him better than I had ever known another man.

  “Vince, you gotta find him.” The world called me BJ, but two men referred to me as Vince: Paul and my ex, an attorney named Del Dahlman. “Check this Juan guy’s username through that fraud service you use.”

  “I can almost guarantee it’s going to be a dead end.”

  The two of them followed me into my home office so I could use my own computer to conduct the search. The NoFraud.com service I used wouldn’t lead us to a URL address unless one was exposed as a fraud. Then these guys published the internet address. Juan’s wasn’t listed, which was no comfort at all. He simply hadn’t been exposed yet.

  “Well, crap,” Paul said.

  Henry blew air through his nose. “I thought these things was easy to run down. You hear about guys getting hacked all the time.”

  “You’ve just said the magic word. Hacked. Hackers do it anytime they have the time and equipment necessary. Law enforcement has to get a warrant, hand it to the server, and wait for a response.” I took Jazz’s computer from Henry. “Don’t know if you caught it, but there were a couple of messages where Jazz and this Juan guy exchanged personal information.”

  I searched until I found the email I wanted. “Here it is. Juan Gonzales with an address of 111½ 59th NW in Albuquerque. And there’s a phone number.” I asked the two of them to be quiet while I dialed. The telephone proved to be disconnected.

  “Well, we have his name and address anyway,” Henry said with a dangerous look in his eye.

  “They’re both probably phony,” I said.

  Paul put in his two cents. “And Juan Gonzales is like John Smith. There are a million of them.”

  “Let me get my office manager, Hazel, on this,” I suggested. “She’s better than I am at locating people over the internet. Give me Jazz’s cell phone number so Charlie can start trying to trace it.” Charlie Weeks, Hazel’s husband, was a retired APD cop and my partner in Vinson and Weeks, Confidential Investigations.

  The number Henry supplied matched the number already in my records for Jazz. He also handed over the license plate number for his brother’s Jeep, after which I phoned Hazel at home. She agreed to get right on it. That done, I called my old APD riding partner, Lt. Gene Enriquez, and explained the situation. He was still at the downtown police headquarters.

  “You know this Jazz kid pretty well?” Gene asked after I explained things.

  “He was one of the local assets I told you about on the Alfano case up in the Bisti Wilderness. He’s a good kid.”

  “If I remember, you said he was pretty open about being gay.”

  “Honest and open. Why?”

  “How do you know he didn’t just go off and meet this other guy for a fling?”

  “Because he’s got his head screwed on right. He’s more responsible than that. He would have contacted his mother at the very least. No one’s heard from him for a month. At least put out a BOLO on his vehicle.”

  “Okay. Give me the details. But this means I gotta open a case. Have the brother come in and file a request.”

  “We’ll do that first thing in the morning. In the meantime, will you put out the order?”

  “Yeah. Be here at nine, okay?”

  When I hung up, Henry asked what a BOLO was.

  “Be on the lookout,” Paul answered. “But tell me something. You say that’s Jazz’s computer. If he was going outa town to meet someone, wouldn’t he take it along?”

  “He’s got a smartphone and a tablet, whatever that is. He claims that gives him access to anything he needs. He usually leaves the laptop at home when he travels around.”

  “With photos like that on it?” Paul asked. “What if his mother saw them?”

  “Nobody walks on Jazz’s privacy. Only reason I did was I’m worried about him. If he turns out to be all right, he’ll give me hell for peeking at his photos.” Henry scowled, showing his uncertainty. “And I hope that’s the way it goes. BJ, you sure we gotta involve the Albuquerque cops in this?”

  “We need their help. And somebody, Jazz’s mother or uncle Riley, needs to go to the Farmington PD and file a missing person’s report.”

  “Riley promised to go in this morning. Gonna ask for that Sgt. Dix Lee we met back when we was working together.”

  “Good. Henry, you’ve got to get over your aversion to authority. If this is what I think it is, the feds will be involved.”

  “Which ones?”

  “I don’t know much about it, but when the victim is a US citizen, the FBI is called in. I think they have a Domestic Sex Trafficking Program. If it’s over-the-border stuff, ICE will be involved. That’s US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’re both a part of Homeland Security, so it’s apt to be an interagency thing. A task force, maybe.”

  “Crap. What if he just went to meet a guy, and they got wrapped up in each other?”

  I leveled a look at the hunky Navajo. “Do you believe that?”

  He blinked. “Naw. Something’s wrong. So let’s get the big bad Feebees involved. Whadda we do now? Set around and bullshit one another till the sun comes up?”

  “Nope. We’re going to check out 111½ 59th NW—even if it is a fool’s errand.”

  AS I suspected, there was no 111½ 59th NW, but there was a 111. The short, frazzled woman who answered my knock seemed startled to confront three strange men on her doorstep. Even so, she stood her ground and answered my questions. She didn’t know the man in the photo I’d made from the picture on Jazz’s laptop and didn’t recognize the name Juan Gonzales… except for a cousin in Brownsville, Texas, who didn’t look anything like that. She did, however, remember a small, vacant apartment in the building behind her house that was in such bad shape, she and her husband converted it into a storage area when they bought the property five years back. She thought that might have been the “half” added to their address.

  She was patient enough to search through her cigar box of records and come up with the name of the prior owner of the property, a man named Alberto Suarez. Something else Hazel would have to check out for me tomorrow.

  After that, we returned to the house and talked Henry into sharing Paul’s savory, reheated cheddar potato casserole and spending the night in our guest bedroom. After I called Charlie and brought him up to date so he and Hazel could kick off their searches while we were at Gene’s office, we retired.

  I seriously doubted Henry would get much sleep. He was wound up over his brother’s disappearance. Nor did I rest well, despite being worn out from watching the small black dragon on Paul’s left pec prowl as he performed his bedroom gymnastics. Very well too. Even Pedro—that was the name Paul gave his tattoo—seemed a
little weary after that performance.

  Chapter 3

  HENRY COULDN’T quite hide his discomfort at shaking hands with a policeman—even a friendly one—the next morning when the two of us met Gene in the downtown stationhouse. I could see that my ex-partner was aware of the Navajo’s attitude, and no doubt he would run Henry’s ID through the system the moment we left. I was wrong; he’d already done it.

  “You always get in fights when you go to the Blue Spruce?” Gene asked.

  “Mostly.”

  “It’s a good place to find them. Bad place for staying out of them.”

  “You got that right.”

  The Blue Spruce was an Indian bar out on East Central near the fairgrounds. The place was notorious for its police calls. On the other side of the coin, it was a good spot for cops short on traffic tickets to make quota.

  “Your brother like to fight too? Or is he all sizzle and no steak?”

  Henry’s face clouded for a moment. “He’s better at starting them and standing around watching ever’body scrap, but he’s good backup when it’s needed.”

  After that, Gene settled down and guided Henry through filling out a request to search for his brother’s car. There hadn’t been any results overnight, but none were expected, unless Jazz was moving around. Or someone was using his Jeep. There were a couple of Juan Gonzaleses in the system, but when I hauled out the photo of Jazz’s email contact, none of them matched.

  Henry tapped his finger on the photograph. “Don’t you guys have some kinda gizmo where you can compare photos and make an ID?”

  “A facial recognition program, you mean?” Gene asked. “Scuttlebutt says it’s on its way, but we don’t have a system yet. The state boys have something, but I’d have to have probable cause for an arrest before I could even ask them to run a search.”

  “My brother’s missing, and he was talking to this guy. Ain’t that enough?”

  “No evidence this guy’s the cause of your brother’s disappearance. Hell, for all we know, he and his new friend are just out having a good time. But I think BJ’s right on this, Mr. Secatero. Your brother’s caught in the sex trade racket.”

  “Call me Henry, and just because my brother’s gay don’t mean he goes around selling his body. Never has. Never will.”

  “Look, fella—” Gene pointed a stubby finger at Henry and nodded at me. “—don’t get your back up. I rode with this guy for three years, and we never had trouble over him being gay. But the human trafficking racket is getting to be big business. Some people figure there are more people in slavery today than before the Civil War. And I made some calls this morning and found out more kids than we’d like to admit disappear from Indian reservations. I grant you it’s mostly women and girls that get caught up in the sex part of it, but some boys and men do too.”

  “Jazz wouldn’t stand still for that. He’d just walk out the door and go home.”

  “Unless they’re holding something over him,” Gene said. “I’ll admit he doesn’t fit the pattern. He’s older than the norm, and he’s male. Most are female somewhere around the ages of thirteen to fifteen or sixteen. Usually, the traffickers claim a debt’s gotta be paid or threaten somebody—maybe a family member—with bodily harm or death. They’ve got lotsa ways of making victims toe the line.”

  “Not Jazz. He’d go postal.”

  “Some of them do, but they’re overpowered or done away with. So maybe he did fight them.”

  Either the implications of that remark went over Henry’s head or he chose to ignore them. “I can’t think of a damned thing they could threaten my brother with. He knows his dad and me can take care of ourselves. His uncle Riley will make sure his mother’s okay. There ain’t nobody else.”

  Gene held up the photo of Juan I’d given him. I hadn’t shared the naked ones. “What about this guy? Maybe they’re threatening to take him out.”

  “Jazz doesn’t even know him. Not really. Few months on the internet is all. Why would he prostitute hisself for a stranger?”

  “I can think of one scenario,” I said. “Drugs.”

  Henry came out of his chair with a face like thunder. I tensed. “My brother don’t do drugs. Never has. Got in fights as a kid because he wouldn’t even try weed with some guys.”

  “What if something like this happened?” I asked. “He’s intrigued by this Juan Gonzales fellow and agrees to meet him in Albuquerque. We know that much from the laptop.”

  “Yeah. Robinson Park.”

  “Juan turns out to be everything Jazz is looking for. A decent guy seeking affection… maybe even love. But that’s not who he really is. When he takes Jazz home or to a motel, there’s someone waiting for them there. They overpower Jazz and start feeding him drugs. Hooking him.”

  “Makes him dependent on them,” Gene put in. “Once he’s hooked, he’ll do anything for a fix.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?” Henry demanded. “They can get plenty of guys off the street to whore for them. I get propositioned ever’ time I walk up East Central. Bet you do too, BJ.”

  “Why go to the trouble, you ask?” Gene held up Jazz’s photo. “Look at that. That’s prime beef on the hoof to slave traders. What could be better? A kid from the reservation. Probably nobody will put up much of a fuss if he disappears. Like I say, he’s older than usual. He’s a fish, not a minnow. But Christ, this kid doesn’t even look eighteen. He’d have to prove to me he was twenty-one if I caught him in a bar.” Gene shook his head. “You have any idea how much he’s worth to a slave trader? Stateside, twenty to thirty thousand dollars. Overseas? Who knows?”

  “How would they get him out of the country?” Henry asked.

  Gene spread his hands. “There are different circuits to different places. I’d guess Albuquerque to El Paso and then across the border to Juárez. How? Put him beside them in a car or truck with fake papers and just drive across. After that, take any of a dozen established routes overseas.”

  “Oh God!” Henry said. “He might be out of the country by now.”

  “Possible,” Gene replied. “But I understand they don’t move victims around as much as they used to. He could be in Albuquerque or across the border. No way of knowing.”

  After Gene finished putting the fear of God into Henry, the two of us piled into my Impala parked on the street outside the station and drove to the parking lot behind the historic building at Fifth and Tijeras NW where I maintained a suite of offices. We entered by the rear entrance and walked up three stories. Henry showed some curiosity at the hollowed-out core of the building, which left the offices hugging the outer perimeter of each floor and accessible by a balcony open to the atrium.

  “How’s Paul?” were the first words out of Hazel’s mouth as we came through the door. From the way she eyed the big handsome guy at my side, I gathered she was worried.

  “Great. He went to the country club for some aquatic meet he’s in charge of. As soon as that’s over, he’s coming here. He’ll be with us on this one. He senses a story, I think.”

  I rushed through introductions before we gathered around the small conference table in the corner of my private office. Hazel determined that Jazz’s cell phone was not on the grid anywhere. Someone probably removed the battery. Charlie used a contact at the phone’s carrier to kick off a search for Jazz’s call history, but it was too soon for a report.

  Hazel gave us one piece of information we might be able to sink our teeth into. She had located Alberto Suarez, the former owner of 111 59th NW, and he agreed to talk to us. Henry and I raced downstairs for the Impala and headed south to Barelas.

  ALBERTO SUAREZ turned out to be a widower who lived in a small home that looked a great deal like 111 59th. His complexion was as dark as the adobe bricks of his home and his skin about as flaky. He greeted us with old-world courtesy and invited us inside. Within minutes I realized his willingness to talk to us was because we were someone to talk to. Henry’s teeth were on edge by the time I managed to pry the conversation a
way from the inadequacy of his social security checks and the joy his Meals on Wheels lady brought him.

  Mr. Suarez scratched his balding pate and nodded when I asked about the renters in the “one-half” part of his former street address.

  “I remember them. Wasn’t no family named Gonzales, though. Best I can recollect, they was called Flores. The man worked in construction when he could find work, and the woman stayed at home with their daughter, who was around seventeen at the time. They had a son too. Don’t recall his name, but he was grown-up and already left home. Come to think on it, the youngster mighta lived over on the other side of the border and just stayed with his folks when he was visiting from Mexico. I don’t recall if his name was Juan.”

  Suarez ran a hand across his bald scalp again. “Coulda been. Lotsa Juans around, you know. That’s the same as John to an Anglo.”

  I took out Juan Gonzales’s picture and held it up. “Do you recognize this man?”

  Suarez accepted the photo and fumbled around on a lamp table beside his worn overstuffed recliner for a pair of glasses. He moved the photo back and forth until it was in focus.

  “This fella’s older, but it could be the Flores boy. I recall him as being a good-looking kid, but kinda soft. Still, he was one the girls made a fuss over.” He pursed his lips. “Still looks good, but life showed up in his face, didn’t it? Looks rougher now. His eyes, I guess.”

  “Try to remember his first name,” I said.

  “Coulda been Juan. But I think it was Jose.”

  Mr. Suarez could add little to what he’d given us. He lost contact with the family once they moved out of his little apartment. Then he sold the house and moved to the Barelas area.

  On our way back to the office, I used my hands-free cell to phone Gene Enriquez and provide him with the name of Juan or Jose Flores to search for a mug shot matching the photo I’d provided.

  PAUL HAD completed his swim meet and greeted us with questions when we arrived back at the office. He was ready to pitch in and help with the search for Jazz. He readily admitted that a story about a man, not much different from himself, being caught up in the human trafficking industry was something he could probably sell to his magazine and publisher contacts.