by Greg Rucka
So arriving earlier, when the town was still awake, seemed a better idea. The problem was it left me with time to kill, and time to kill brought with it nervousness. This was complicated by the need to find a place where I wouldn't draw attention while I waited.
For that, though, Nevada provided its own solution. Twenty-four hours, rain or shine, holiday or no, there is always a seat for you in a casino. At three in the morning, I left Paradise Rollers and returned to my car. There were still enough vehicles in the lot that mine had remained inconspicuous. I was glad to get out. Cigarette smoke, lights, and noise had done nothing for my nerves. To top it all off, between blackjack and the craps table, I'd lost five hundred and thirty-seven dollars.
I hoped it wasn't an omen of things to come. From the casino to the Albertson's parking lot took two minutes. From the lot to Oasis took another six, and I doused the headlights on the Jetta before I made the turn toward the still-open gates that led into the development. I slowed, lowering my window. The desert air had gone cool with the night, still dry. My stomach was already working its way through a Boy Scout's handbook worth of knots. During the entire drive I had seen only four other vehicles, none of them police, and all heading the opposite direction, and I thought that maybe I'd caught a break.
No such luck.
The spotlight hit me as soon as I was through the gate, coming from behind, its reflection in the rearview mirror blinding me for a moment. Then the other lights came on, blue and red, and the New Paradise police car that had been parked in the shadow of the wall as I'd passed pulled in behind me.
I stomped the Jetta's brakes, coming to an abrupt halt, and whoever it was behind the wheel of the cruiser had to do the same, surprised that I'd stopped so quickly. The light from the spot shifted, trying to scan the interior of the car, and I didn't turn around in my seat, staying still, furious with myself for not having counted on this, for not having a contingency.
The driver's door on the police car opened, followed immediately by the one on the front passenger side. Two cops, and I didn't need to check my mirrors to guess who they were. Again I cursed myself; I'd been so damn concerned with getting into the house, with what I'd do once inside, I hadn't considered the possibility I might not even reach the place at all.
A new light joined the glare from the flood, a flashlight beam, and I'd been right, it was the same two cops who'd stopped me before, the talker and his silent brother in corruption. It was the talker holding the Maglite, and he recognized me immediately.
"Jeezus, buddy," he said. "Can't you take a hint?"
I tensed my shoulders, tightened my grip on the steering wheel, set my jaw, still staring straight ahead, refusing to look at him. He read my body language, shifted further around toward the front of the car, now wary, pivoting to keep his eyes on me. One hand dropped to cover his holster.
"Out, asshole," he said. "Kill the engine and get out."
I hesitated, then snapped the engine off, put my hands back on the wheel.
"Get out of the fucking car, now."
"I didn't do anything," I said, and it came out as both petulant and angry.
"You're trespassing."
"Bullshit, that's fucking bullshit."
"Get out of the vehicle, keep your hands where I can see them."
I unfastened my seatbelt, shoved open my door. As soon as I was out, the other one had me into the side of the car. I kept my body tensed, pushed back, my hands on the roof of the Jetta, and got shoved a second time, harder.
"There's no sign," I said. "There's no sign, there's nothing. You can't do this."
"You want to make this hard?" the talker asked. "That what you want to do? Because we can do that, we'd be happy to do that."
I glared at him, trying to place his position behind the flashlight in his hand. He was still covering his holster, still keeping his distance. Behind me, his silent partner shifted, and I heard the ring of metal on metal as he pulled out his cuffs, and that was the cue I'd been waiting for. With an audible sigh, I let myself sag against the side of the Jetta, let every muscle that I'd been holding tense relax, let my posture shift from resistance to submission.
"I want a lawyer," I said softly.
The talker read my surrender, stepping closer, the Maglite coming down, his other hand no longer covering the butt of his pistol. He'd seen my behavior before on a hundred drunks faced with the power of the badge, the moment when reality sets in just before the cuffs go on.
"Tell you what, we'll go down to the station, sort this out."
I nodded slightly, thinking that all three of us knew damn well there was no station involved in what they had planned. The one behind me closed the cuff around my right wrist, pulled my hand from the top of the Jetta, bringing it down and behind me toward the small of my back, and that's when I moved, using my hips to pivot into him and away from his talkative partner. My right hand found his wrist, and I twisted, brought his arm up, straightening it and locking his elbow before slamming my left hand upward, into the joint. It broke and he screamed and I let go.
The talkative one had dropped the Maglite and was trying to index his pistol, but distance is everything, and I was too close to him already. I took his right knee with my boot before he could clear his holster, pounded my fist into the side of his neck even as he was going down. He landed on his side, and I stole the canister of pepper spray from his belt, gave him a faceful, then spun back and sprayed the rest of it at his partner.
Tossing the can, I took the cuffs off the talker and trapped his hands behind his back. He wore his keys on a lanyard, and I yanked them free from his belt, unlocked the set that dangled from my wrist, and reapplied them to his partner. He gurgled in pain when I twisted his arm behind him. I took his keys as well, along with his radio, then went back for his partner's. I let them keep their guns.
Both men were still mewling and gagging when I loaded them into the back of their cruiser. The residue of pepper spray was strong enough to make my own eyes water, and I was coughing when I locked them into the backseat, coughing even more when I slid behind the wheel and backed their car into the shadows beneath the wall. With the three of us in the vehicle, we sounded like a symphony of bronchitis.
I shut off the car, used the keys to lock it up, then climbed back into the Jetta. Without their personal radios, locked in the back of their cruiser, the cops wouldn't be able to call for help. From what I'd seen behind the wheel of their car, the New Paradise PD tracked their units via GPS, which meant that somewhere, someone would eventually notice that they hadn't moved in a while. How long a while that would be, I had no way to know.
But somewhere, a clock was now running, and I had no more time to waste. I crept the Jetta through the barren streets, using only the accelerator, afraid that brake lights would give me away, afraid of more of Bella Downs's bought-and-paid-for police lurking in the darkness. My visit the night before last had given me a good lay of the land, but now I had another decision to make. The cul-de-sac was a problem, because cul-de-sac meant dead end. That would leave only one route of escape. But the car would provide protection and speed.
In the end, I parked the Jetta behind the house I'd used for my surveillance, leaving it unlocked. The entire time I'd kept watch on the McMansion, I'd seen police come through the area only once, and that had been almost an hour earlier than it was now. Unless Bella had the entirety of the New Paradise Police Department patrolling her neighborhood, no one would notice the car.
I killed the dome light inside the Jetta so it wouldn't switch on when I opened the door, then checked the Glock a final time, making it ready. I got out, tucked the pistol into my waistband, at the front. Then I pulled the toolbox and the tire iron from the trunk. The toolbox was heavier than I remembered it being.
I made my way to the cul-de-sac, using every shadow I could find. I didn't know if there was a security system on the house, if there were cameras. I hadn't seen any during my visit, nor on my surveillance, but all that meant
was that I'd missed them, not that they didn't exist. It didn't much matter. There was no way in hell that Bella Downs had sprung for an alarm system that would route through a security service; the risk of cops she didn't own crashing the party would've been too great.
I closed on the building from the west rather than straight on and, when I reached the side of the house, crouched and opened the toolbox. The two antennae screwed easily and quickly into place. I double-checked that I was on power, then hit the Big Red Button, and there was no noise, and for a moment I wondered if anything was happening at all. I put my hand on the side of the case; heat was beginning to radiate through the metal.
When I checked the BlackBerry, I saw that I had no signal.
God bless and keep the engineers, I thought.
I went to the cars next, opened up my knife. I punctured all four tires on the vehicles. The Town Car, hidden in the garage, I'd have to take care of on the way out.
I headed to the front door. The double doors weren't going to yield to anything my Glock could do, I knew, but that had never been my plan of ingress. Two curtained bay windows flanked the entrance at either side, and either one of them would do quite nicely. Since my plan was to surprise the hell out of them, and since making a lot of noise would aid that, the windows were going to be my primary entry. Ideally, the crashing glass would throw them into a panic, and naturally enough, they'd then try to raise their pet police. Once inside, I'd rely on my speed and their confusion, and hopefully the combination would do the trick.
With my windbreaker wrapped around my arm, my left hand up to shield my face, I shattered the left window, three vicious blows with the tire iron that brought the sheet crashing down in pieces that rang and burst all around me. I dropped the bar, swept the glass away from the frame with my protected arm, then pushed the curtain back and vaulted up and over, into the entry hall, drawing the Glock.
Mike was the first one to respond. He came out of the hallway to my left, bleary-eyed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I'd counted on the bleariness; it was why I'd picked the hour. Nonetheless, he'd had the presence of mind to arm himself, a solid, traditional Remington pump-action shotgun, police model, in his hands, and I wondered if he and Bradley were also cops.
He saw me and he saw my gun, but, in relative terms, I had all the time in the world and he had none. I picked my shot, gave him the same one I'd given Vladek Karataev back in Batumi so many weeks ago, shattering his pelvis with a round and stealing his legs. He dropped face-first, his momentum carrying him forward on the marble floor, smearing blood.
"Bella!" he screamed.
I closed on him in two steps and then turned the third into a kick to the face. I kicked him hard, and he lost teeth. He also lost consciousness.
I started up the stairs, shouting in Georgian.
"Tiasa! It's David! David Mercer! Where are you?"
A door opened on the second floor, I couldn't see where, but I could hear it, then heard another one slam closed. Someone was running down a hallway, away from me. I kept moving, shouting Tiasa's name, racing up the steps. The hallway ran left and right, and I heard noise to the left, went that way first, stopping at the nearest door. I took the entry hard, kicking it open, the Glock ready in both hands. The room was empty. I pivoted, moved to the next one, this across the hall, a meter down, kicked it free the same way.
The door hit Bradley in the face, where he'd been about to open it, sent him staggering back. He had a pistol in his hand, but no shot, and I put one from the Glock in his knee before he could acquire one. He screamed and dropped.
That's when I saw he was naked, and that the girl in the bed was the same small blonde I'd seen while surveilling the house through my camera's lens.
God, I wanted to kill him.
I wanted to kill him all the more when he begged me not to.
He'd dropped his pistol, a Sig, the same model that I'd found in Bridgett's apartment. I kicked it away, and he clutched his knee with both hands, looking up at me.
"God don't please don't," he sobbed. "Please don't!"
The girl in the bed was staring at me, sheet pulled around her frail body. Her expression was blank, no trace of horror or pain or anger, nothing at all.
I kicked him in his wounded knee, and he screamed and flailed back, and I kicked him again, this time in the groin, then in the stomach, and then, finally, in the face. He lay bleeding on the navy blue carpet, skin torn, semiconscious. I stepped over him, grabbed the Sig from where it had fallen on the floor.
"The only reason you get to live," I said, "is because I want you to suffer."
Then I used the Sig as a hammer and hit him in the back of the head with it. The crack it made as metal met bone was nearly satisfying.
Tucking the Sig away at the small of my back, I asked the girl, "English?"
She nodded, slightly, staring at Bradley on the floor.
"People are going to come here," I told her. "Good people. By morning."
Her expression didn't change, and she nodded again, as small an acknowledgment as before.
"Tiasa," I said. "Which way?"
She pointed, indicating the right-hand hallway, the direction opposite the way I'd headed off the stairs.
"Good people will come," I promised her, and stepped back into the hall.
The house seemed to have gone silent, remained that way as I retraced my steps. Glancing down to the bottom of the stairs, Mike lay just as before. I moved into the new hallway.
"Tiasa! It's David!"
From behind one of the closed doors on the hall, I heard a rustle, a thump. I made for the sound, but this time took the entry softer, putting my body against the wall and reaching over for the handle. It turned without resistance, and then the shots came, piling one atop another, wild fire, until five holes punched through the wood, each round planting itself in the wall opposite me.
In the silence that followed, I heard someone whimper.
I pushed the door open and stepped around, raising the Glock.
Bella Downs stood in the bedroom. She was dressed in dark purple silk pajamas, a revolver in one hand and her cell phone in the other. The gun had been pointed at the door, but when she saw me she started to move it, to point it at the head of the girl huddling in the corner.
"Go away," Bella shouted at me. "Go away!"
"You stop!" I shouted back. "You point that at her and I will shoot you dead!"
The gun froze midway in its travel. Then her hand opened and it fell to the floor. I stepped in enough to catch it with my toe, pull it away from her, then went down far enough to scoop it up in my left hand. I pulled the release, swung out the cylinder. The revolver had carried only five shots. She'd used them all on the door.
"Take her," Bella Downs told me. "Just take her and go away and never come back."
"That's pretty much my plan," I said.
Then I hit her hard, across the face, with her revolver, shattering her jaw. She dropped, trying to scream, then discovered that made the pain worse. Blood gushed from her nose and mouth.
"Tiasa," I said, switching back to Georgian. "It's David, David Mercer. Yeva's husband. I'm taking you away from here."
The girl in the corner didn't rise, instead trying to make herself smaller. Bella Downs, on the floor, made sobbing sounds.
I tucked the Glock away, then knelt down, putting the revolver on the floor between me and the girl.
"Tiasa," I said. "It's me. We're leaving now. Let's go."
She raised her head slowly, afraid of being betrayed again, lied to again, used again. But when her eyes found mine, there was no relief in them, no joy on her face, no recovery to be found at all.
"Let's go," I said again.
In silence, she got to her feet, and I put a hand on her shoulder. I expected a physical response to that, a tensing of muscle, a pulling away from my grip, but neither came, and she let me guide her from the room, then down the hall, then to the stairs past Mike, still lying and bleeding on the white
marble floor. We went out the front, to the Jetta, and I put her inside.
Tiasa never made a sound. Tiasa never said a word.
And Tiasa never looked back.
CHAPTER
Thirty-five The first hints of the story were beginning to break when we stopped in Salt Lake City midmorning, after almost five hours of driving. In the motel room, while Tiasa bathed and changed into the new clothes I'd bought her, I snapped on the news, bouncing up the dial to first CNN, then MSNBC. The only item I found was on the latter.
"Acting on anonymous information, federal authorities raided a house in New Paradise, Nevada, this morning, as part of an ongoing investigation into human trafficking More on this as it develops."
That was it. That was all.
I turned the television off and the BlackBerry on, called Alena.
"You have her?" she asked.
"I have her."
"How is she?"
"She hasn't said much. She hasn't really said anything."
"May I speak with her?"
"Hold on."
I moved to the bathroom door, tapped lightly on it. The water had stopped running over ten minutes ago.
"Tiasa," I said.
She opened the door, wet black hair and jeans and a dark green T-shirt. She didn't look at me; she hadn't much looked at me, at least when she thought I was looking at her, since I'd put her in the Jetta back in New Paradise and started driving.
"Yeva wants to talk to you," I said, and handed her the phone, then moved away, giving them privacy. For almost two minutes Tiasa said nothing, listening.
Then, her voice hoarse, she said, "I understand."
She brought the phone back to me, then sat on the other bed in the room and began to put on her new sneakers. I put the phone to my ear.
"I'll contact you when we get to New York," I said. "Ask Bridgett to call her sister, let her know we're coming."
"Don't rush," Alena told me, switching to English. "It would be stupid to die now because you were speeding."
"I miss you," I said.