Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  Three of them. I had a bad suspicion, and what came next only made it worse.

  “No,” he said, “I’m keeping them sedated. You can do whatever you like with them. Whatever you like. But you have to take delivery tonight, and it has to be cash. Yes. Ten thousand each, twenty-five if you take all three.”

  “Miss?”

  I jumped. A nurse stood behind me, looking as startled as I felt.

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  “Oh,” I said, fluttering my hand. “I’m a little lost. Which way to the washroom?”

  “Around the corner, there. On your right.”

  I thanked her and took a walk. Back in Victoria’s office, the doctor was giving Jessie the hard sell, and the computer screen had sprouted an itemized list of services. I felt a lump in my throat when I saw the total price on the bottom line.

  “I know it’s a lot,” Jessie said, all wide eyes and sincerity, “but it’s the only way to achieve my lifelong dream of looking just like a life-size black Barbie doll.”

  “We can make this happen,” Victoria said, nodding solemnly.

  “For as long as I’ve known you,” I told Jessie, “it’s been your guiding ambition in life. Still, that is a lot of money, and we did just spend several thousand dollars on those professional pole-dancing lessons for you. Let’s sleep on it?”

  Victoria beamed at us and rose from her chair. “I’ll print off a copy of the quote, and you can take it home and talk it over. I think we can really make wonderful things happen for you.”

  To her credit, Jessie kept a straight face until we left the building. The second we hit the sidewalk, she let out a sputtering gust of a laugh, like she’d been holding her breath the entire time. She crumpled the quote in her hand.

  “Man, fuck their fascist beauty standards. Do you believe that shit?” She turned to me and arched an eyebrow. “And . . . pole-dancing lessons? I was wrong, you can serve it back.”

  “I’m full of surprises.”

  “Gonna surprise me with a fresh lead?”

  We got into the car, but I left the engine cold.

  “Unfortunately, yes. The Gresham brothers picked the wrong family doctor. I heard him talking on the phone: near as I can gather, one’s dead and he’s got the other two doped up. He’s going to sell them to somebody. Tonight.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Jessie nodded toward the clinic. “Let’s go kick some doors in.”

  “They’re not here. Can’t be. I saw almost every room in the place. It’s just not that big.”

  Jessie slumped back in the car seat and squinted at the clinic doors.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll stake it out, wait for the doc to poke his head out, then follow his ass.”

  We sat in silence while I looked up and down the street, trying to guess which car was Dr. Hirsch’s. No luck.

  “Hey, Jessie?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there . . . anything wrong with my nose?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m just asking,” I said.

  “I hope she’s in on it, too,” Jessie grumbled. “Somebody needs a righteous ass-kicking.”

  The average stakeout involves all the thrills and excitement of watching paint dry. Still, Jessie made it bearable. We moved the car a little farther down the block as soon as street parking opened up, giving us a better view. We had some time to kill, so I held my post while she ran over to a Subway at the end of the street, coming back with sandwiches and two small bottles of water. As a rookie, one of the first things I learned was to never drink soda on a stakeout: it’s a diuretic, and your options for a bathroom break may be severely limited.

  Cars came, cars went, and the sun set over Detroit. We watched nurses leave the clinic, one locking up behind her, but no sign of the doctors. I hadn’t seen Hirsch in the flesh, but Jessie was confident she’d recognize him from the picture on his website.

  “You’re sure they aren’t in there?” Jessie said, slouching against her armrest.

  “Positive. Besides, if they are, the buyer has to show up here.”

  “Then we can kick in doors.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  She sat up straight, ears perked.

  “Showtime,” she said.

  Victoria Carnes strode out of the building alongside a man who must have been Emmanuel Hirsch. He was stringy and bony, with a snow-white comb-over and a mustache too big for his face. They jogged across the street together, talking animatedly, and their body language told me it wasn’t a pleasant conversation.

  “Trouble in paradise,” Jessie murmured as the doctors got into a shiny black Lexus. I revved the engine, waiting patiently until they pulled out into traffic, then I mirrored their move.

  This was the tricky part. To tail somebody properly you need at least two chase cars, preferably three or four, in constant radio contact. The idea is to periodically let one car fall back and another chase car take point: that way, your target won’t notice a familiar-looking vehicle hanging in their rearview for too long. Plus, if one car has to drop the pursuit—like if you do slip up and make them suspicious—the others can step in and pick up the slack.

  We didn’t have any of that. The darkness was our one real advantage, shrouding our faces and turning the Crown Vic into an anonymous blur. Even so, I made sure to hang back, keeping one car between us at all times. They took a twisting, turning path through the city streets, and as the drive went on our odds got slimmer. We headed into no-man’s-land, a maze of broken streetlights and empty sidewalks, and with every passing minute it had to be more obvious we weren’t sharing the road by coincidence.

  “Hang back,” Jessie said. “Give him a little more room.”

  Beyond a maze of warehouses and shuttered plants, we crossed over into Delray. The neighborhood was a ghost town, nothing but broken asphalt, boarded-up houses, and dead traffic lights as far as I could see. About three hundred feet ahead, the Lexus signaled a left turn. I slowed down, giving them as much room as I possibly could without losing sight of the car, and waited for them to make their move.

  Then I killed the headlights.

  We weren’t driving entirely blind, but it was close enough. The gathering clouds and the distant downtown lights choked the stars from the sky, and no electric lamps burned on the streets of Delray. We rolled through a fog of shadows, tires bumping on torn-up pavement, keeping the Lexus’s distant taillights in view like some urban will-o’-the-wisp.

  The Lexus turned in to a parking lot, and the taillights went dark. I stepped off the accelerator, slowing our ride to a crawl.

  I couldn’t imagine the building up ahead—a tall slab of crumbling bricks and rusted steel—had ever been pretty, but the years hadn’t done it any kindness. A faded billboard propped up on warped crossbeams showed a smiling cartoon pig serving up a tray of steaming steaks. “Lombardi Meats,” it read. “Come Meet Our Meat!”

  “Well, that’s not creepy or anything,” Jessie said.

  I pulled the Crown Vic over to the side of the road, about a block from the shuttered meatpacking plant. A barbed-wire fence ringed the parking lot, the fencing torn and uprooted here and there, but the front gate hung wide open. We kept low as we jogged across a weed-infested empty lot, trying to get a closer look.

  The Lexus sat parked and empty. A few spaces down, a pair of delivery trucks with the Lombardi Meats logo lined up near a loading-bay door.

  I gestured for Jessie to hold up. We crouched low in the grass, watching. Up ahead, a single light shone behind a wire cage, set into the wall over a sheet-metal side door. A man in a leather jacket smoked a cigarette, occasionally pacing back and forth or nudging loose rocks with the toe of his shoe. As he turned, his jacket hung open, and I caught the glint of steel on his hip.

  “How long you think this place has been closed?” Jessie whispered.

  “Years, why?”

  She pointed at the delivery trucks.


  “Those trucks look new.”

  The side door swung open. Another man, features too shadowed to make out, gave a wave. The thug at the door tossed his cigarette down, snuffed it under his heel, and walked inside.

  “Two guys plus the doctors,” I whispered.

  “At least, but I don’t imagine Miss-Find-the-Inside-You is gonna put up much of a fight. How do you want to play it?”

  “Let’s go in quiet, until we know what we’re up against,” I said. “Given what I heard on the phone, we’ve got probable cause to believe that human trafficking is in progress.”

  “You still think Hirsch is just an ordinary crook?”

  I shrugged. “Depends on whether or not he knows exactly what the Gresham brothers are. Sounded like he did. Either way, he’s going down tonight.”

  We drew our Glocks as we jogged across the parking lot, staying close and tight. Jessie covered me as I took hold of the door handle. They hadn’t locked up behind them. It opened onto a hallway lined with cinder blocks painted dirt brown, riddled with open doorways on both sides. Too many angles, too many places a bad guy could be lurking.

  Jessie put her hand on my right shoulder. I nodded. Breach and clear.

  We moved together, hustling silently down the hall, muzzles sweeping to cover every opening. At Quantico they taught us proper technique in “kill houses” with plywood walls and random floor plans. There, though, paintballs were the ammunition, and the only consequences of failure were bruised skin and a bruised ego. Tonight we played for keeps.

  We ghosted through empty rooms stripped of anything but chunks of corroded steel or the remnants of old chain belts. Machines rusted in the gloom, forgotten and abandoned. Then, around one corner, we found the operating room.

  Calling it that was a stretch. It was just another empty storage room, but circled with thick plastic sheeting that dangled from shower rings. At the heart of the room stood an operating table, beside a sturdy wooden tool bench.

  I smelled the blood before I saw it. The odor clung to every surface, metallic and pungent, so strong it pushed fingers down my throat and challenged me not to choke. Dried blood splashed the plastic sheets like some mad impressionist’s painting, and coated the operating table like a sacrificial altar.

  The operating table had restraining straps.

  TWELVE

  I turned my attention to the workbench. Scalpels, bone saws, chisels, tools for cutting and breaking the human body. Most hadn’t even been cleaned off from Dr. Hirsch’s last “patient.” What really caught my eye, though, were the only sterile things in the room: a stack of small white Styrofoam coolers, each wrapped in plastic and waiting to be put to use.

  Each one had a biohazard sticker on the side. Like the kind they put on organ-transplant coolers.

  I heard voices up ahead. We kept moving, getting closer. At the end of a short hallway, an archway opened onto the heart of the old meatpacking plant—an open floor zigzagged by a dead conveyor belt, rusty meat hooks still dangling from the overhead track.

  The doctors’ hired guns lounged at a plastic picnic table in the middle of the room, keeping a watchful eye on the rolling gurneys where two of the Gresham brothers slumbered on a chemical drip. Sound asleep, they wore their human faces. The third brother, I presumed, had ended up in the black vinyl body bag on the concrete floor. Construction lights on tripods, encased in bright-yellow plastic, provided illumination; cables ran to a small portable generator in the corner.

  “This is absurd,” Victoria said, throwing up her hands as she paced. Her voice echoed through the drafty factory. “We’re throwing money away. Do you know the aftermarket value of cambion organs?”

  “She just said the magic word,” Jessie breathed.

  Emmanuel Hirsch followed Victoria like a puppy dog on a leash, his hands fluttering.

  “And do you know how long it would take to find buyers?” he said. “We can’t do that kind of volume without the Flowers sniffing our way.”

  “So we make a deal.”

  “You don’t—you don’t get it. You can buy off the police, you can buy off the feds, you can’t buy off the hound. These men were working for the Flowers. They protect their own, and when hell comes calling, the Detroit Partnership isn’t going to save us.”

  “Heard enough?” Jessie whispered. I nodded. Time to shut this operation down.

  We slipped through the doorway and split up, her going left, me going right, crouching and using the shadows for cover. On the far side of the picnic table, she looked my way and gave me a nod.

  “Freeze!” I shouted, springing up and holding my pistol in a two-hand grip. “Federal agents, nobody move!”

  “Hands!” Jessie roared at the same time, dropping a bead on the guards at the table. “Let me see your hands!”

  Emmanuel shot his hands straight up, his jaw dropping. Victoria froze. Their hired guns both sprang to their feet, startled, one of them going for his piece. He got it clear of the holster, a squat machine pistol in black matte, just in time for Jessie to give her trigger two quick squeezes. The Glock barked twice and the thug dropped, his shirt billowing red. His partner wised up and reached for the sky.

  “On your knees!” I said, moving in with slow, careful side steps. “All of you, right now. Lace your fingers behind your heads.”

  “This is a mistake,” Emmanuel stammered as he sank to one knee. “This is all a terrible mistake.”

  Victoria didn’t kneel. She just stared at me. And whispered.

  I couldn’t hear it at first, but the sibilant lisping verse slowly grew in strength and speed, twisting like a knot in the air around my head. No. In my head.

  I swung the muzzle of my pistol, aiming for center mass. My arm felt heavy, like the gun had put on ten pounds of weight in the last five seconds.

  “You want to stop doing that,” I told her. “Right now.”

  Over by the table, Jessie moved in, reaching under the gunman’s leather jacket to take his weapon. Whatever Victoria was pulling, it hit Jessie harder than it hit me. Just enough to slow her reactions by a second or two. Just enough for the gunman to grab her wrist, spin, and draw his revolver. He held her like a human shield and pressed the barrel to her head.

  “Drop your gun,” he snapped. Instead, I turned and took careful aim. Right between the eyes.

  “No,” I told him.

  He blinked. “Are you deaf? Drop your fucking gun!”

  I kept one eye closed, sighting down the barrel. It felt good, closing one eye. Why not close both? The chant swirling in my brain said. It’s bedtime. So nice, so warm. Sleep.

  “A federal agent,” I said calmly, “never surrenders her weapon.”

  “I will shoot her!” he shouted, looking desperate. Desperate wasn’t good. Desperate people do stupid things. Desperate people pull triggers.

  “No, you won’t. Because your body drops one second after hers does. Something you should know: I took top score in my marksmanship classes at Quantico. If you’re thinking I’ll miss? Don’t. The best, smartest thing you can do for yourself is surrender.”

  Jessie sagged in his arms, out cold. I could hear my blood pounding in my veins, pumping to the tune of Victoria’s chant. Down on his knees, Emmanuel laughed.

  “Quite a dilemma, Agent. If you don’t shoot my friend Victoria, you’ll fall prey to her enchantment in short order. But if you do turn your gun to aim at her, well, my other friend will shoot your partner, then you. What to do, what to do?”

  “Last chance,” I said, even as my vision started to blur. It felt like the sights on my gun were swinging slowly, rocking like a cradle, swimming away from me. I had once chance: shoot the gunman, hope he didn’t reflex pull his own trigger, then spin and take out Victoria.

  In other words, no chance at all. Too much risk, too easy for Jessie to catch a bullet. I could save myself, sure, but not at that price. We’d both survive this, or neither of us would.

  That was the last thought that passed through my mind as my pi
stol slipped from my numb, slack fingers and I crashed to the concrete floor.

  I woke to pain. My arms burned, wrists ached, shoulders pulled taut. As my vision slowly swam back, images unblurring and becoming one, I understood why.

  They’d hung us from the old conveyor belt. Scratchy, stiff rope coiled around my wrists, tossed up and over the curve of an old, rusty meat hook. I dangled, helpless, my toes draping about an inch over the stained concrete floor. Jessie faced me, about ten feet away and hanging from her own hook, her head shaking as she slowly came to.

  They’d taken our jackets, our guns and holsters, everything in our pockets, piling it all on the plastic picnic table. Emmanuel looked over at us and smacked his lips.

  “Ah, look who’s awake. Well, Agents”—he glanced down at the Bureau ID cards in his hand—“Temple and Black, I’m going to have to ask your patience. We have a very important customer about to arrive, and dealing with you will have to wait. You’ll get your turn, no worries. Fredo, get the door, please?”

  Fredo—the surviving gunman—ambled out of sight. I took a deep breath, as deep as I could manage.

  “Clever scam,” I said. “You put the word out that you offer fix-up services for criminals, totally off the books. They show up here, desperate for help, only to discover your real business: selling bootleg organs. This is a chop shop for human beings.”

  Victoria smiled, beyond pleased with herself. “We’re performing a community service. We take beautiful, healthy organs from human garbage and bequeath them to needy people. Deserving people. Wealthy people.”

  “And not all of our patients end up on the chopping block,” Emmanuel added. “Our connection to the Detroit Partnership is quite real. Can’t go carving up mafiosi, after all. They have powerful friends. I suppose you could say that made men get our white-glove treatment, while un-made men get . . . un-made.”

  “We’ve got powerful friends, too, fucker,” Jessie grunted.

  He shook his head, gloating. “I’m afraid the FBI is quite incapable of understanding us, let alone pursuing us. Do you even know why you fell asleep? I imagine you must think it was some sort of gas, or a toxin. But what if . . . what if, my dears, I told you it was a magical spell?”