by Barry Eisler
“Slow down, damn it,” Dox said, managing to catch up and grabbing Labee’s arm. “I think that’s him.”
The man must have been psychic. Or just very lucky. Because at that instant, he glanced back. His eyes widened in recognition when he saw them and his mouth dropped open in fear. Then he turned and took off into the market.
Dox and Labee sprinted after him, Labee slightly ahead. Immediately Sorm was swallowed up by the crowds. But the course of his passage was clear: there were shouts, and people being shoved aside and knocked down. Someone screamed, and a food cart with several fryers on it went over, coating the sidewalk with boiling oil. Labee leaped over it but there were more obstructions ahead—Sorm was obviously throwing everything he could grab as he ran and it was working, dozens of people were on the ground or milling angrily in his wake and it was slowing them down a lot. An angry Thai man yelled something at Dox and tried to grab him as he passed. Someone else shoved him. He kept running, Labee pulling ahead, faster and more nimble than he was.
A thought blossomed in his mind, crystal clear amid all the confusion:
Why would this human-trafficking kingpin be alone?
They’d been dumb not to consider it before. And now Labee was totally intent on Sorm. Tunnel vision.
Dox slowed and scanned. And saw a Thai man emerge from behind a stall, a gun coming up—
“Labee! Down!”
She crouched instantly. Dox put three rounds in the man’s chest. The man staggered back. Labee hit him twice more. The man fell.
People screamed and scattered. Sorm kept running. Labee leaped after him. Dox followed—Well, there go our well-intentioned attempts at subtlety, I guess—keeping the Supergrade up in a two-handed grip at chin level, moving as quickly as he could while trying not to overlook another—
A second man popped out from behind a stall as Labee went past. He took aim at her back—
Dox put a round in the man’s spine and kept galloping straight in, firing as he moved, hitting the man with multiple rounds. The man fell and Dox leaped right over him. He heard more shots and screams ahead and thought, Oh no. Please no.
He ran harder, not caring anymore if he missed someone, but he needn’t have worried, the shots must have been Labee’s because another man was lying crumpled on the pavement, the screaming people around him scattering.
Then they were through the crowds. He saw Sorm again, forty yards ahead, with Labee twenty yards behind him. A semi with a container attached was pulling out of the lot south of the golf course and already moving fast. Sorm ran past the front end to the other side and then disappeared as it overtook his position.
The truck accelerated more. Labee dashed out ahead of it. She took aim at the driver—
The driver must have panicked, because he hauled the wheel left. Labee fired. The truck went off the road. There was a drainage ditch alongside, and the left wheels went in. The truck shuddered, tilted—
The driver hauled the wheel right and kept the truck from going over. But he overcorrected, swerving toward the gas station now. The right wheels went into the ditch on the other side, this one deeper than the first, and the driver tried to correct again, but the left wheels were up in the air now, and the truck was tilting, falling, heading straight toward the gas pumps—
Dox saw Sorm again—running across the junkyard alongside the gas station. He must have gotten onto one of the running boards and then leaped clear as the truck started to go over.
The truck fell to its side, sheared straight through the pumps, and shuddered to a stop. The station lights all blew. For an instant, everything was pitch-dark. Then the ground beneath the container erupted in orange flame.
“Get the kids out!” Dox yelled. “I’m going after Sorm!”
31
Livia had been so intent on Sorm that for a second she ignored Carl and started taking off after the fleeing man. Then she remembered herself. And that little girl.
She sprinted to the truck. Burning gasoline was spreading fast, on the ground and along the exposed sides of the trailer. From inside, she could hear high, terrified screams.
She raced around to the back. It was already scorchingly hot. The only light was from the dancing flames, and amid all the moving shadows she couldn’t see clearly. She looked for the handle—
And saw it was secured with a chain and padlock.
The screams from inside were louder now, even more terrified. She heard palms banging on the metal sides within. She whimpered in panic, fighting back a memory of having banged on the inside wall of the container as a child, trying to get someone, anyone, to hear and help, help her and Nason—
The flames had crept closer to the back of the truck. She looked around wildly. Ten yards behind her, on the other side of another drainage ditch, was the junkyard Carl had described in the van with Fallon and Leekpai. She raced over and looked for something, anything. She saw a long steel rod—maybe a disused locking mechanism from a container. She grabbed it, thankful for its heft and solidity, and tore back to the truck. The flames were all over the trailer now. The children were keening inside.
The driver pulled himself out one of the cab windows and leaped to the ground. He saw her, pulled a blade from under his shirt, and charged, screaming.
No time to access the Glock. She screamed back and stabbed the end of the bar straight at his face. He managed to weave past, but she snapped the end in with a flick of both wrists and caught him in the neck. It staggered him. She repeated the move, snapping the bar in harder, using more arm and hip action and catching him in the jaw this time. He fell to a knee. Before he could come up, she reversed her grip and swung the bar like a baseball bat, catching him above the ear and blasting him onto his side.
Keys. Where are the keys?
She took a step toward the driver, then balked. Maybe the keys were in one of his pockets. Maybe in a compartment inside the truck. Maybe they’d been thrown clear in the crash. Wherever they were, if her first guess wasn’t right, it would be too late to try anything else.
She dashed to the back of the truck again and jammed one end of the bar into the chain, spun it to take up slack, and put all her weight on the other end. There was a groan of metal straining against metal. But then the end of the bar hit the ground and she was out of leverage.
She screamed in frustration, thinking Keys, you should have tried to find the keys. But it didn’t matter—even if she’d chosen wrong, the bar was her only hope now. She went back to the door. The heat was becoming unbearable. She got the bar through the chain again, leaving more room this time, refusing to think about how hot the interior of the container must be now, or how much gas was right under the ground. The metal groaned and she thought it would break, but it didn’t. Her weight wasn’t enough.
She screamed again. The flames were everywhere now. It was hotter, so much hotter. She planted her feet in the door hinges and used the bar to walk herself up the side, like a slow-motion pole vaulter. The chain creaked and groaned but didn’t give. Finally she was at the very top, upside down, her heels jammed in the side of the door, all the slack in the chain gone, all her weight on the bar and every strand of muscle in her thighs straining to shove the bar one more inch, just one more inch—
She was sobbing now. It wasn’t going to work. Her skin was burning, she could smell her own singeing hair—
The chain snapped and flew free. She plummeted. The end of the bar caught her in the midsection and there was an explosion of nausea and pain. Then she slammed into the ground, the breath driven out of her.
She realized with horror that her shirt was on fire. She rolled, remembering the drainage ditch, somewhere close—
She went over the edge and splashed into the water. The shock cleared her mind. She leaped out and raced back to the truck. She grabbed the lever, barely even feeling the metal searing her palms, and pushed it high. The locking bars cleared their fasteners. She wrenched open the door and dozens of shrieking, crying children began stumbling o
ut, practically trampling over each other in the extremity of their panic and streaming past her into the night. She tried to help them, dragging the fallen to their feet and pushing them along, searching face after terrified face by the light of the flames for that girl, that little girl, but not seeing her anywhere.
In seconds, the children were gone. Scattered. The container was empty.
She staggered back from the heat, holding her throbbing side, crying. She heard Carl’s voice from her right: “Labee!”
She looked up and saw the big sniper coming toward her, dragging a struggling, staggering Sorm by the hair.
She moved back farther. Carl reached her and threw Sorm at her feet. Sorm looked at the fire and shrank back from the heat.
“You got the kids out?” Carl said.
She nodded, looking at Sorm, feeling the dragon unfold, the hate inside her hotter than the fire.
“I told you,” Carl said. “He’s yours. But those pumps could blow. And the cops will be here. Finish him and let’s git.”
She pulled the Glock from her shorts pocket and pointed it at Sorm’s face. “Where is she?” she said.
He shook his head, obviously petrified. His eyes darted from the fire to the gun and back again.
“Where is she?” she screamed, flecks of spittle hitting him in the face. She put the muzzle of the Glock against his forehead. “Where is she? Where did you take her? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me where she is!”
Sorm trembled, his head shaking, mute with terror.
Carl put a hand on her arm. “She’s not here, Labee. And he doesn’t know. They’re all the same to him. They’re all the same.”
She screamed again, this time incoherently, no words, just a cry of grief and rage and despair. She grabbed Sorm’s hair and dragged him toward the truck. The heat was like a tangible thing, a throbbing, crawling force wrapping itself around her.
“Labee, no!” Carl shouted. “The pumps!”
She didn’t listen. She barely heard him. She got to the back doors, picked up the chain, and wrapped it around Sorm’s neck. His hands flew to his throat but she had already slipped the other end through one of the locking bars and hauled it hard, jerking him back against the truck. She wrapped the excess in a kind of hangman’s noose, then around and around and around his neck again. Sorm’s eyes bulged and he clawed uselessly at the links. His feet did a weird little tap dance on the ground.
A fresh rush of burning gasoline surged from under the pumps and raced toward them over the ground. She didn’t care. She didn’t care if she burned. As long as Sorm did.
And then a strong arm encircled her stomach and dragged her back. She screamed in pain—the pole had done something to her—and struggled. But the arm and the man behind it were implacable. Carl.
He kept moving her back. “Where is she?” she screamed again.
But Sorm was past hearing. The flames were all over his legs now, moving up his sides. The burning puddle was a pond now, a river, a lake, and Sorm was screaming at the center of it, his shirt on fire, his hair smoking, his skin melting, his mouth stretched wide in a rictus of perfect agony.
“Where is she?” Livia screamed again, but Carl kept moving, away from the truck, from the flames, from—
One of the pumps erupted. The truck was engulfed in a fireball, Sorm along with it. Carl threw her down and landed on top of her, covering her with his body. Pain erupted inside her. She shrieked.
There was another explosion. A third. Burning debris rained down around them. They were fifty feet away, but the air was hot as an oven.
Carl dragged her to her feet again. She staggered and he threw an arm around her waist and kept her going. She was distantly aware of him fumbling in a pocket. He took out a phone. “We’re going to need that pickup after all,” he was saying, his voice almost supernaturally calm as he half walked, half carried her. “And beaucoup quick.”
Fallon. But the thought felt faraway, disconnected.
“Right, the explosions and smoke and fire, afraid so. Just follow the big orange flames and you’ll run right into us.”
A minute later, the white van screeched to a stop alongside them. Carl threw open the door, pulled her in, and slammed it shut behind them. Fallon was moving before the door was even closed.
“We need a doctor,” she heard Carl say. He laid her down across the plank seat. “She’s burned, and I think hurt inside, too.” He looked in her eyes. “Labee, stay with me now. We’re with old Fallon. I’ll bet he can drive as well as you, or at least he’ll try to. You’re going to be all right.”
She barely heard him. She couldn’t stop crying. “Where is she?” she said again. “Where?”
Carl knelt alongside her and touched her cheek. “I don’t know, darlin’. I don’t know.”
“I couldn’t save her,” she said, and her body convulsed with a sob. “I couldn’t. Oh, God, I couldn’t save her.”
He stroked her singed hair. “You saved the others, darlin’. All of them. Every one.” His voice cracked, then he went on. “And you’re going to save more. I told you, I know everything about you I need to, and I know that.”
The sobs took her then, pain and grief obliterating everything and carrying her away to the blackest, bleakest shores. She gripped his hand and pulled him in, and he put his arms around her, and she clutched him and sunk her face into his shoulder, and her body shook with the force of her tears, and he held her close and whispered her name, Labee, Labee, Labee, again and again and again.
And then the world went dark, and she was gone.
32
One week later, Livia was back in Seattle. People were horrified at her sunburn. Stupid, she acknowledged. She’d gotten carried away. The tropical sun was no joke. And a stupid tuk-tuk accident had left her with cracked ribs and a bruised liver. Nothing life-threatening. Just embarrassing, after all the shit she had survived as a cop.
Little came in from wherever to debrief her. They sat in the cafeteria again, Livia with her mineral water, Little with his coffee. He told her a war had erupted between Thai and Ukrainian trafficking gangs. She told him that was fine with her and she hoped they all killed each other.
“You know what?” he said. “So do I.”
They sat for a moment, the silence weirdly comfortable. “Well?” he said. “Now that you’ve had a firsthand look and a chance to consider, what do you think of my offer?”
She sipped her mineral water. “I’ll tell you, B. D. After ten days out there, I don’t think there’s that much for me to do.”
“Yeah. It’s almost like the job’s already done.”
She looked at him. Did he know? Or was he fishing?
He nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said, and for a weird second it was as though he had read her mind and was responding to her thoughts. “I know.”
She waited, unnerved.
“Vivavapit,” he said. “Sakda. Sorm. And Juntasa and the senator before that. I know what you did, Livia.”
She tried to keep a poker face, but could feel herself paling in fear and surprise.
He put a fist over his chest. “And from this father’s heart—thank you.”
She looked at him, still worried, but confused, too.
“I get it,” he said. “You thought I was working some kind of angle. Well, I was. And I am. Just not what you think.”
He took his wallet from inside a pants pocket and pulled a photo from it. Little, maybe ten years younger. With a beaming teenaged girl alongside him, her arms wrapped around his neck, the side of her face pressed against his. The Little in the photo couldn’t have looked more happy. Or proud. She wondered absently why not a photo on his phone. And realized: he wanted something tangible.
“Presley,” he said. “Because her mom was a fan. She’s fifteen in the photo. Now, she’s twenty-four. Or . . .” He shrugged helplessly, stopped, and looked away.
“Just a walk to the grocery store on a summer evening,” he said. “Wanted to get some popcorn for a movie we were going t
o watch. Ratatouille. She liked animation. I still haven’t watched it. I keep hoping”—his voice caught—“maybe we’ll still see it together. You think we might?”
Livia looked at him, remembering that odd expression she’d noticed when they’d first talked about her women’s self-defense class, suddenly understanding what it had meant. She felt a strange mixture of wariness . . . and empathy. “I don’t know.”
He shook his head. “No, of course not. No one knows. That’s the worst part. Not knowing. Can you imagine what it’s like to have the kind of resources I do . . . and still to not know? To find nothing? Not one. Single. Answer? It’s like the phantom pain from an amputated soul.”
She wished she didn’t, but she knew that pain acutely. Right down to the metaphor.
“I’d end myself if I knew for sure she was gone,” he went on. “That’s the truth. I’ve wanted to for a long time.” He looked at her, his eyes brimming. “But you can’t. Because maybe that little girl is out there. And maybe she needs you. And you have to be here for her. You have to stay. You have to. No matter what.”
Livia felt her own eyes filling up.
He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Her mother found a way around that. Heroin. When she finally overdid it, I’m sure she told herself it was an accident. Maybe it even was. So now the vigil is mine alone. Mine, and maybe people like me. Because how many people, Livia, how many people could look you in the eye like I am right now and say, ‘I know what you’ve been through’? ‘What you’re going through’? Well, I can. And I do.”
They sat in silence after that. A couple of cops Livia knew came in but steered clear, probably sensing something in the atmosphere at the table.
Little told her more. He’d been looking for someone like Livia, someone motivated the way he was but younger, more capable, someone who knew the streets. Two months earlier, he had read about Senator Ezra Lone’s death from a heart attack in a Bangkok hotel. Little had connections in Bangkok and dug deeper. The heart attack story began to sound like bullshit. He learned Ezra Lone was the brother of Fred Lone, which led him to Livia. He checked ICE records, and learned Livia happened to be in Thailand when Ezra Lone expired.