Soft Targets

by John Gilstrap

  It showed two girls—her girls, Ashley and Kelly—both naked and both terrified. They clung to each other, trying their best to hide from the photographer that which the photographer no doubt wanted most to show.

  A blindness fell on Irene—later, that would be her only way to describe the surge of rage that bloomed deep within. It rose like a wave from her gut to her jaw, and it continued to expand without limit. It consumed her. Devoid of intent—devoid of any conscious thought at all—Irene rose from her seat, her pistol in her hand. Ramus tried to back away, tried to run, but he was trapped on the sofa with nowhere to go. And he was far too slow.

  Irene smashed the butt of her weapon into Ramus’s mouth, shattering his teeth and mangling his lips. Blood erupted in a spray from the lower half of his face, but before he could raise his hands to protect himself, Irene shoved the muzzle of her weapon through the bloody mess and pressed hard, driving the metal nib of her front sight as deeply as it would go, hopefully past his tonsils and into his throat. She prayed that it tore tissue away at every centimeter.

  “Those are my daughters,” she hissed. She brought her nose within inches of his, close enough that she could feel the blood spray as he choked and struggled to breathe. “So tell me again how you want your lawyer. Pretend this gun is one of the dicks you’ll be sucking in prison, or pretend that it’s the tool that’s going to launch your cervical spine into the sofa cushion. Either way, imagine how unprepared I am to listen to anymore bullshit from you.”

  Irene had never seen such terror in a man’s face, and she enjoyed the hell out of it.

  “When I give you your throat back, I want one thing from you: I want to know where Tony Mayo took my daughters.” She took a little more care retracting the pistol than she had inserting it. If he couldn’t speak, he was useless.

  Finally blessed with the ability to breathe again, Ramus gasped and drooled blood. “Okay,” he said. He again started to move his hands toward his face, but then he thought better of it. “Yes, I know Tony. He brought those pictures to me yesterday. I was appalled. Horrified. How could anyone—”

  Irene raised her pistol for another round and he recoiled.

  “No!” he begged. “Not again. Okay, I’ll tell you. But like you said before, this is not a confession. This is merely information I overheard.”

  Irene’s pistol remained frozen in space, less than an inch from the trench it had plowed through his incisors.

  Ramus turned his head and spat a bloody wad onto the fabric of his sofa.

  “Please don’t hurt me anymore,” he said.

  “You said he came to you yesterday,” Irene reminded. “What did he say and what did you say?”

  Ramus hesitated. “The gist of it was that he had these girls he wanted to sell.”

  Big Guy took a giant step closer. “And he knew that that’s the business you’re in. Selling little girls.”

  Ramus seemed to sense the room’s desire to tear him apart. He drew his knees to his chest. “You asked!” he shouted. “You can’t ask me and then hurt me for the answer.”

  Irene paused, stunned. Did she really just hear a plea for justice from a man who sold children into slavery? Was there no end to the degree that the world could tilt from its intended axis?

  Yet, the words resonated. She did in fact insist on honesty, and she needed to steel herself for what the honesty brought.

  “It’s not me,” Ramus said. “I know a guy. When Tony told me that he had those girls for sale—honest to God, I think that this stuff is disgusting—”

  “So you gave him the name,” Irene interrupted. She wanted to cut through the lies.

  “Well, yeah. And I might have mentioned that there was a shipment going out this morning.” He checked his watch. “Soon.”

  Irene didn’t know how to channel her rage. She didn’t know how she could ever justify to herself or anyone else the tiny speck of bloody tissue that clung to the front sight of her SIG. She had violated this man just as surely as if she had raped him, and now she wanted to execute him.

  “Tell me the rest,” she said. “All of it. The when and the where.”

  Ramus hesitated and not unreasonably. He seemed to understand that his future had collapsed into this very small slice of time that was defined by his next words. “I tell you this and you let me go, right?” His voice was beginning to sound hoarse as the swelling progressed. “You promised that you’d let me go. That at least you’d give me a head start.”

  Irene’s jaw locked.

  “That’s what you said,” he repeated. “You said you weren’t after me. You wanted Mayo. That’s what you said.”

  In her periphery, Irene saw Big Guy take a threatening step forward, and she raised her hand in rebuke. That was, indeed, the promise she’d made. “Finish your thought,” she said. “Where and when?”

  Ramus focused his eyes on a spot somewhere on the floor beyond Irene. Could that be shame she saw? Was that even possible?

  “This morning.” He looked at the clock that sat atop his artificial mantel. “Soon. Before seven. There’s a U-Lokit Storage place near the entrance to I-81, about ten, twelve miles from here. That’s where he was going to take them.”

  “Why?” Irene asked. “What is at the storage place? And why is the time important?”

  Ramus’s shoulder sagged. “There’ll be a truck. A shipment. Your girls will be part of the shipment.”

  Shipment. The word seemed so cold, so awful. Human cargo. Human beings—children—reduced to chattel. Irene looked to the rest of her team. Jonathan seemed to be locked in a place of deep sympathy and Boxers was red with rage.

  She rose from her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “And a deal’s a deal. Now’s the time for you to start running like hell.”

  Chapter 9

  The U-Lokit storage yard sat closer to the city—if, indeed, it was reasonable even to call this little burg a city. People who thought of the artsy parts of Asheville, or of the wealth that surrounded the Biltmore Estate, would never dream that a neighborhood such as this even existed. Scroungy and overgrown it was a place of mid-rise commercial buildings that may have thrived in the sixties or seventies, but had not witnessed anything close to prosperity in the recent past.

  The storage yard itself was mostly hidden by what might have once been a small textile mill in which little glass remained in the arched windows of the brick façade. A barely paved road wrapped around the building, and but for the tiny sign that appeared to be temporarily attached by two nails to a telephone pole, there would have been no sign at all. This was the perfect setup for the drug trade, or for vehicle chop shops. It was far enough off the beaten path not to be accidentally stumbled upon by concerned citizens, and police officers on patrol were also unlikely to cruise by here.

  As Boxers pulled the turn, he seemed to understand the importance of the timing. Ramus could not have been more specific. Be there by seven o’clock, or miss the transfer, pure and simple. Irene sat at the front edge of the backseat on the passenger side, her MP5 slung and ready to go. The sun was well above the horizon now, so visibility would no longer be an issue, but that was a condition that cut both ways. As they would be able to see the bad guys, so would the bad guys be able to see them.

  This was all such new territory for Irene. Her shooting encounters in the past had always been as part of the Hostage Rescue Team, and as such, she was never a first responder. In fact, in general, the FBI was rarely the first to encounter bad guys, and certainly not in an uncontrolled environment. If they crashed a door, it was because they’d planned a raid carefully, and with such overkill that the odds were impossibly stacked against the bad guys. If HRT made a move, it was usually after local police had exhausted their own capabilities, which by definition meant that the physical and emotional terrain were well known by the time they arrived on the scene. That built-in delay and preparation time explained in part why the total number of FBI agents killed in the history of the Bureau numbered less than half the n
umber of local police officers who were killed in any given year.

  Now, as she found herself charging head-first into the unknown, with the only fixed variable being the fact that kidnappers and killers were on the other end of the journey, her normal tricks for settling her mind and concentrating on the vital elements of the operation were no longer useful. Without them to concentrate on, only fear remained, and fear was never a useful emotion when the only chance for success lay in outright aggression.

  “Hey, look up ahead,” Boxers said, pointing over the steering wheel and past the windshield. “We’ve got a car approaching.”

  “According to the map, he’s got to be coming from the storage place,” Jonathan said. “There’s nothing else at the start of this yard.”

  Irene scooted forward until her knees were on the floor and her head was level with theirs. It was a nondescript beige sedan—a Ford Taurus, maybe—and the road was too narrow to allow the vehicle to pass their van.

  “Stay to the center and slow down,” Jonathan commanded. “Make him stop.”

  Only the other driver had no intention of stopping. He pulled the Taurus hard to his right and over the curb to continue on his way. As they closed the distance that separated them, Irene’s heart jumped. She recognized the driver. “That’s him,” she said, pointing. “That’s Tony Mayo.”

  Boxers hit the brakes hard.

  “No!” Irene shouted. “Let him go. If he’s leaving, it’s because he’s dropped the girls off.”

  “Or it could mean that it didn’t work out and he’s got them with him,” Jonathan countered. “If he recognized you—and judging from the way he was driving, I think that’s a good possibility—they could be in even more danger than before.”

  “No,” Irene said again. “He dropped them off. I’m sure of it.” She was of course sure of no such thing, but she couldn’t imagine the alternative.

  “You’re just going to let that asshole go?” Boxers said. Clearly, it was an unthinkable option.

  “It’s not about him,” Irene said. “This is about Ashley and Kelly. Everything else is secondary.”

  He started accelerating again, but only after he emitted what sounded like an extended growl.

  Jonathan turned and winked at her. “Good decision,” he said.

  “Get ready,” Boxers announced as they cleared another curve. Directly ahead stood the entrance to the U-Lokit yard, its metal gate propped open, the chain designed to keep it shut dangling limp, with the big padlock still attached. Just past the opening, the road split into a Y.

  “Park it here,” Irene said as Jonathan was taking a breath to speak. “If the worst happens, at least they won’t be able to drive out without a lot of work.”

  Jonathan smiled. “I was going to say that very thing.”

  “Get a room,” Boxers grumped as he threw the transmission into park and opened his door.

  Ten seconds later, the three of them were reunited at the front of the van, each of them armed for war.

  “Two directions, three people,” Boxers said. “What do you want to do, Boss?” He directed the question to Jonathan.

  “Is your Spidey-sense tingling?” Jonathan asked. “Where do you think they are?”

  Boxers pointed to the branch on the left. “Down there,” he said.

  “Then that’s yours,” Jonathan proclaimed. “Wolverine and I will go right.”

  “Oh, sure,” Boxers said. “You always get the girl.”

  “I’m not a girl,” Irene protested, and the instant the words left her mouth, she cringed. As if any of this had anything to do with any of that. “Both of you go left. I’ll go right.”

  “Actually,” Jonathan said, “Big Guy is the original chauvinist, and I will be with you on the right while he covers the left on his own.”

  Irene inhaled to argue, but Jonathan raised his hand to cut her off.

  “You can argue and waste time,” he said, “or you can just agree. The result will be the same either way.”

  No one spoke to Irene that way, yet here he was doing exactly that. Rather than respond, she started walking down the right-hand branch of the roadway. While she made a point of not looking, she was pleased to hear Jonathan’s footsteps behind her. She imagined that Boxers could handle himself, irrespective of what came his way. Hell, when you were as big as he, she imagined that you were pretty much bulletproof for anything that wasn’t launched from an airplane.

  Irene led with her rifle. She kept it pressed to her shoulder, her finger just outside of the trigger guard. If anyone posed a threat, she was prepared to send them to the Great Beyond at two thousand three hundred feet per second. With thirty rounds in her magazine, that was a lot of Great Beyonds to be dispatched, and under the right circumstances, she’d be delighted to sign her name to every one of them.

  Two hundred steps into her journey, while cloaked in the shadow of the first building, she saw a truck and she drew to a stop so quickly that Jonathan bumped into her. It was a big box truck, something appropriate to a moving and storage company, and a man stood on either side of it, each of them sporting a Tec-9 in plain view. Scary-looking in the way that a wasp looks deadly, she recognized the gun as a gang weapon that had all of the accuracy of a nineteenth-century musket, but at a thousand times the cycling rate. Irene saw that as a check mark in her column on the advantage chart.

  “We’re in this deep,” Jonathan said. “It’s too late to just watch.”

  “You take the one on the left,” Irene said.

  “I was just going to say that, too,” Jonathan replied with a grin. “Are we arresting or shooting?”

  “We’ll let them decide.” Irene led the way into the low-angled bright sunlight, her rifle pressed against her shoulder, the front sight covering her target’s center of mass. He could have been anybody, a middle-aged white guy in casual clothes that blended in with anyone, anywhere.

  “Federal agent!” Irene shouted. “Don’t move!”

  Her guy then did exactly the wrong thing. Not only did he move, but his movement brought the muzzle of his weapon up and toward her. She shot him twice in the chest and he dropped like a sack. Three more gunshots on her left told her without looking that Jonathan had dispatched the other one as well.

  Irene picked up the pace. The dead guys were only guards, maybe one a driver. That meant that there were others, who now knew that a gun battle was underway. With surprise no longer a factor, all she had left was speed. She started to run. As she vaulted over the body of the man she’d killed, she heard a rumbling sound, and she instantly knew what it was. The trailer’s rolling overhead door was coming down. She dug deeper for even more speed.

  She slid to a stop on the back side of the truck just a second or two before Jonathan, and she saw a man’s legs on the far side of the door, disappearing from the top down as the panel slid shut.

  “Don’t!” Irene shouted. “Don’t move! Federal—”

  Before she could finish, Jonathan fired five shots through the door. There was a thump, and then the door drifted open just enough to reveal a dead man sprawled facedown on the wooden floor.

  Irene looked to Jonathan, who gave a halfhearted shrug. “I figured we were shooting, not arresting,” he said. “I got confused.”

  It was unquestionably the right move. If the guy had holed himself up in the vehicle, that would have complicated things beyond measure. Still, closing a door didn’t pose a threat, so how could she justify the use of deadly—

  As the door drifted up farther, with a little help from Jonathan, the growing seam of light revealed a dozen or so children, mostly girls and all under the age of nine or ten. They sat huddled in a clump toward the front wall of the cargo bay, their clothes tattered, and some in no clothes at all. The space reeked of filth.

  Irene found her hand at her mouth, suddenly unable to breathe. Her vision clouded with tears. What kind of monsters—

  “Who said you could shoot the place up without me?” Boxers’ voice boomed as he appeared
from around the corner. “I’ve told you before—” He stopped abruptly. “Ah, damn,” he said, and an instant later, he was inside, among the children. “Don’t you worry, little ones,” he said in a tone so soft that it surprised Irene. “You’re safe now. The bad men can’t hurt you anymore.”

  Seeing Big Guy spring into action like that broke a kind of spell that had frozen Irene in place. As horrifying a sight as it was, this was no time for her to freeze up. “Ashley?” she called. “Kelly?”

  None of the children answered up. None of them said anything.

  Irene pressed her hands against the floor and hoisted herself up into the cargo bay. She tried not to look into the body’s eyes. Good guy or bad, dead was dead, and dead was always unnerving. Boxers had produced a small flashlight from somewhere, and as he passed it over all those pitiful, terrified faces, none of them looked familiar to Irene.

  Where were they? Where were her little girls? Had Mayo in fact changed his mind and driven off with Ashley and Kelly in the back of his Taurus? Had he seen these pitiful faces himself and determined that he couldn’t go through with it? Perhaps his breed of monster came with his soul still intact. And if that were the case, then she’d just let him escape.

  How could she know? The only people who could possibly answer her were all dead. Suddenly, all of this seemed stupid and shortsighted.

  “None of them?” Jonathan asked.

  His words broke her emotional spell yet again. She shook her head no because she couldn’t trust her voice. Good God, what had she done?

  She spun around and darted back to the opening. “Ashley!” she yelled. “Kelly!”

  “Maybe we can chase down the car,” Jonathan offered.