by Linda Ladd
“You know the answer to that. Lucy’s never been at stake before. That’s the difference.”
Frank said nothing, just sat there, sullen and silent. Novak and Lori exchanged glances, but neither could blame the guy. Lori’s expression told him she was worried about Frank, too.
“We’ve got a good plan and a strong element of surprise. But it’s going to be one step at a time, knocking those houses down like dominoes and so fast the next target doesn’t have time to be on the defensive.”
As the day dragged on, Novak fought impatience. Frank was the wild card and wouldn’t listen if things got dicey. He had murder in his eyes. After an evening spent combating jittery nerves and perfecting strategy, they loaded their gear into the Jeep and left just after two o’clock in the morning. The county roads proved to be dark and deserted, and traffic on the Interstate was light. Heavy rain had moved back into the Houston area, which would help them launch surprise attacks. Most people were at home, sleeping, unaware of the ugly underbelly of the city and what went on in houses imprisoning helpless, exploited girls. They were children in big trouble that they’d probably never get out of without help. Far from home, separated from anyone who loved them, tricked, drugged, and used, with little recourse to escape the awful things they were forced to do. If all went well, their nightmare would end tonight.
All the properties were located south of Buffalo Bayou and west of the south Loop. They had plotted the best course to take down the properties fast, one by one from east to west. Hennessey had chosen the houses fairly close together but in separate neighborhoods in separate towns, quiet and unassuming, where probably nobody had a clue what was going on inside. The first place on their list was located in a suburb called La Pointe, not far from Sylvan Beach Park. They found it easily, the property being the last house on a dead-end street, thereby making it perfect for their purposes.
Nearby residences had well-maintained yards, small street frontage but deep lots full of old trees and only a few fences. The house they sought had one, a five-foot-high chain-link fence that would be no impediment to entry. No dogs were in sight, and no guards loitered around, either, which was surprising but didn’t mean they weren’t inside the house toting handguns. The homes they passed were dark except for a couple here and there. Hennessey had chosen the site well, setting up in a nice, private, innocuous-looking little hellhole for abducted girls. No one would guess what went on inside that house. Novak wasn’t sure, either. He hoped he found girls to rescue instead of sleeping quarters for a dozen heavily armed thugs.
Novak pulled the Jeep up beside the opposite curb about thirty yards down the street from the target driveway. There were cars parked along both sides of the street, so their vehicle would not draw undue attention. Treetops tossed in the wind, but the rain had slackened. Novak turned off the motor, and they sat silently in the shadows watching the place. Nothing moved, inside or out. After a few minutes, they climbed out and headed down the sidewalk, light drizzle spattering their jackets. Novak and Frank took one side of the street because Novak wanted to stay close to Caloroso in case something triggered him and he went batshit berserk.
Lori crept down the opposite side of the street on her own. Novak didn’t worry about her; she was calm and collected now that the mission was in play. Novak carried his .45 in his belt holster, a sawed-off shotgun, and a baseball bat. Frank had a SIG 9 mm and an AR rifle that could do some serious damage anywhere at any time. He’d also stuck his favorite Ruger inside his back waistband. He’d come to make waste, all right. All their weapons were attached with silencers.
Lori Garner had chosen well, too. She carried a sweet little Springfield rifle and a weighted sap and had a loaded grenade belt strapped around her waist. She carried a gasoline can with her good arm. She had grown quiet on the drive over, hardening her resolve as she had probably done not so long ago in Iraq. Her training showed in the way she walked and held herself. She looked as relaxed as anybody could be under the circumstances. She would not screw things up. Any other time, Frank wouldn’t, either. He was a battle-hardened warrior and conditioned for any fight, but not when it came to his daughter. That made him a particularly well trained, violent time bomb with a hair trigger. Not always the best person to have your back.
They approached from the side yard, crouching low and using the bushes growing along the fence as cover. There were two cars in the driveway, a white panel van and a black Lexus. As planned, Novak vaulted the fence first and headed out back with Frank close behind him. Lori headed straight for the front door. The house had no basement, only a crawl space. The back door had a low stoop, but the kitchen window blinds had been left open. Nobody was inside the kitchen or could be seen in the living room beyond. He could see the flickering light of a television set. Lori would be out front waiting for him to go in first. In a house this small that meant most of the people inside were in the bedrooms, hopefully sound asleep. That would be nice.
Once in place, Novak wasted no time. He took a step back, kicked the door as hard as he could. It slammed wide open and banged against the interior wall. He went in first, hard and low, with Frank at his heels. Lori would be coming in the front when she heard them force the door. First thing Novak heard was a female scream coming from the back of the house followed by heavy footsteps thudding down the hall to his left.
Novak took cover behind the kitchen wall, and when the first guy showed in the doorway, he swung the baseball bat as hard as he could against the man’s chest. The guy went backward hard, hit the wall, and crumpled to the floor, the breath knocked out of him. Frank clubbed him in the head with the butt of his rifle and went into the hallway with Novak behind him. Two guys burst out of bedrooms down at the far end. One got off a shot at Frank but missed him, so Frank shot him dead and then did the same to the other man, both put down with double taps to body mass. Frank was a good shot, fast on the draw and clean, always had been. He never wasted a bullet. Now they could hear multiple women screaming their heads off. Maybe they’d found the girls. Only seconds had passed, and Novak rushed down the hall toward the female voices, stepping over bodies as he went. The first door on his right was locked. Frank moved around him to the next door. Lori yelled all clear from the front of the house. Novak stepped back and kicked the door open. Caloroso did the same at the next bedroom.
Four women were inside, all screaming and cowering in a corner just across from him. All of them were naked except for underwear and plastic gloves on their hands. Novak had heard of this practice before. It was done so they wouldn’t steal the cocaine and hide it in their clothing. There were four card tables set up, covered with black plastic tablecloths. Large bags of the white powder sat atop them, alongside boxes of baggies and small weighing scales. One man was inside the room. He sat in the far corner at a table containing stacks of bundled money. He was on his feet, a phone in his hand, but he dropped it and ducked down behind the table and got off a shot at Novak. Novak hit the floor, too, and stayed down as he fired back. His first slug hit the guy in the shoulder, spattering a swath of blood on the wall behind him. The second one hit his upper thigh. The man screamed in agony and dropped his weapon, clutching his bleeding leg as he groaned and writhed.
“Clear,” Frank yelled from the hall.
The women had stopped yelling now, huddling together and hiding their faces and attempting to cover themselves with their hands. The odor of gunpowder and smoke hung in the air, thick and caustic. Novak walked over to the wounded man and shoved him onto his back with his foot. He picked up the phone and made sure he hadn’t gotten off a call for help. He hadn’t.
The man on the floor was middle-aged, somewhere in his late forties perhaps, heavyset with a beer belly and a bushy, unkempt black beard. He had not been there to stand up against armed intruders. He was a money counter and overseer. He looked terrified and clutched his bleeding wounds. He started pleading for his life in a heavy Irish accent. Novak kept his we
apon centered on his chest and motioned the women outside where Lori was waiting in the hallway. Novak looked down at the money counter. A leather-pronged whip was hanging off his belt.
“Where are the girls you traffic? Tell me where you keep them, and I won’t kill you.”
The man kept shaking his head, but Novak was pretty sure his fear had more to do with what Hennessey would do to him if he revealed anything to Novak. When he answered Novak, he was breathless, his words coming out between groans of pain. “You just...made a big mistake, man. Timmy’s gonna come after you.... He’s gonna cut off your head.”
Frank appeared in the doorway. “The other bedrooms are empty. Sleeping quarters, it looks like.”
Novak frowned. This guy wasn’t going to tell them anything. He let Frank hold the man at gunpoint while he returned to the hall. The guy he’d put down with the bat was having trouble breathing, but Lori had prodded him up onto his feet. Novak pushed him against the wall and jabbed him in the stomach with the end of the bat. The man doubled over, gasping and holding his belly, and collapsed down on his knees. “You tell Hennessey that Judge Locke didn’t appreciate his visit the other night. You got that?”
The man groveled on the floor, holding his stomach and retching.
“Tape him up,” Novak told Lori. He walked back inside the bedroom and looked down at the wounded bean counter. “What’s that whip for?”
No answer. Now he was weeping like a woman and begging for mercy.
“He beats us with it!” cried one of the girls. She had an accent, too, but hers sounded Chinese or Korean.
That did it for Novak. He clubbed him in the back of the head with the bat and put him down. He was still breathing.
Frank was already herding the women down the hall. Novak followed them and watched as they cowered together against the wall. “These guys traffic women. Are you part of that? Do they sell you?”
That brought a bunch of frightened sniveling and weeping and shaking of heads. They were all Asian, young and fresh-faced, probably shipped to the States from China and Hong Kong. They kept their eyes averted, terrified to look at him. Finally the boldest one peeked out at him and garnered enough courage to speak. “We bag...powder for man. He make us.” Her words were hard to understand. The others continued to tremble and moan and press together under the threat of their guns.
“They don’t make you go with men for sex?” Lori asked the girl, not one to beat around the bush.
The frightened girl shook her head but still wouldn’t meet their eyes. “We not good. We not pretty.”
“You got clothes to put on in here somewhere?”
Timid and shaking, she pointed a finger at a bedroom down the hall, eyes downcast, still afraid to look at him.
“Lori, take them in there and get them dressed.” Then he spoke again to the frightened women. “Listen up, all of you, you need to get the hell out of here and never come back. You got that? Understand? Get out of this town as fast as you can, or they’ll find you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The woman who had spoken before nodded and spoke rapidly to the others in what sounded more like Cantonese than Mandarin. He understood enough to know she had translated what he’d said. After that, Lori hastily herded them off down the hall.
“Frank, we’re taking that product off their hands; the cash, too.”
Novak followed Frank inside the money room. The guy on the floor was unconscious. Novak found his car keys in his pants pocket. He gathered up the bundles of hundred-dollar bills and headed back to the bedroom. The girls were getting dressed, and he tossed a bundle to each girl. “Take this cash and get out of town as fast as you can. Don’t stop driving until you reach the next state. Don’t ever come back here.” He turned to the girl who’d spoken before. “These are the keys to the black car sitting on the front driveway. Can you drive?”
She nodded her head vigorously.
Novak wasn’t so sure she was telling the truth, but he hoped she was. “Take the car and get the hell out of here right now.”
Shocked into silence, they all just stood there and stared at the money in their hands.
“Go on, get out of here! You’re free! Don’t come back. Go!”
That did the trick. They sprinted down the hall and fled out the front door.
Frank came out of the bedroom. “There’s probably a hundred thousand dollars in here, maybe more. I got those guys’ billfolds and the keys to that panel van out front.”
“Good, we’ll take it with us. It might come in handy down the line. Gather up the rest of the money and all the cocaine you find. Lori, you search for business records or tally sheets or anything else we can hand over to Leslie. I’m going to tape up the guys who’re still alive. Make it quick. We’ve already been here too long.”
Novak left them searching through the bedrooms and walked through the living room to the front door. It was standing wide open. He searched the street. Their shots had been muffled, but the thugs’ gunfire was not. If somebody had heard them, he’d have to deal with that. The neighborhood was dark and quiet. One porch light had come on a good distance down the street, but moments later it went off. Nobody came outside to investigate, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t called the cops. The four women had piled into the Lexus and were backing out of the driveway. The driver kept hitting the brakes and jerking the car to a stop. She hadn’t driven much, if at all, but was getting the job done. They finally took off, the car weaving around at first but gaining better control as they rounded the far corner a good distance down the street and went out of sight. Novak picked up the can of gasoline Lori had left on the front porch. He walked back inside, and he and Frank dragged all of Hennessey’s thugs out into the grass and dropped them back a good distance from the house. Two were dead, and two were wounded but would live. He wanted them left alive to tell Hennessey what had gone down.
If Novak got lucky, Hennessey would take the bait and pin the drug heist on Locke. If they turned on each other, Novak’s job taking them down would get a hell of a lot easier. Back inside, they gathered up the cocaine in a duffel bag, splashed gasoline around the living room, and trailed it out a good distance to the backyard. Throwing the can aside, he struck a match, dropped it, and watched the fire streak through the kitchen door, wanting the house to burn to the ground in a nice little pile of ashes for Hennessey to pick through. It was their first volley over the bow, and there would be plenty more to come.
They stole the white van. They backed it out and dropped Lori off beside the Jeep. At the first intersection, Novak called the fire department and an ambulance on a burner phone and then tossed it out the window. By the time they were a mile from the burning house, several sirens were shrieking toward the fire. Novak turned the van and headed for the next house on his list with Lori following right behind them. The raids had just begun but had started out in spectacular fashion.
Chapter 18
They wreaked havoc for the rest of the night. The second house they burned to the ground was right off Fairmont Parkway near San Jacinto College Central, followed by one in Golden Acres off Vista Road. All turned out to be drug houses, much like the first one; so were Novak’s fast brutal takedowns. All had girls forced to measure and package Hennessey’s drugs, mainly cocaine and weed; another house handled only pills, including oxycodone, crystal meth, uppers, downers, you name it. Hennessey had a big operation going on in east Houston and was raking in a ton of money with his illicit drug trade. A nice chunk of that money was now in Novak’s hands. Apparently shocked that anyone had guts enough to attack them on their home turf, guards were almost too easy to take out. Most came out wounded but still alive. Hennessey might be a bad dude, but the people manning his workforce were no better than the judge’s flunkies. They had grown complacent, no doubt believing their own violent reputations. Their hired guns did well against poor and helpless victims, but put them up a
gainst three trained military veterans and it didn’t turn out so well.
House by house, guards ended up bound and gagged and laid out in nice neat rows behind blazing houses, just like their heads would be lined up once Hennessey found out he was now missing his ill-begotten cash and product. They had one place left to smash up, and Novak hoped to God they would find Lucy Caloroso there, because they hadn’t found her or any other preteen girls yet. This next place was on West Harris Avenue in Pasadena. It turned out to be larger, better guarded, and more isolated. Maybe they had found the crown jewel of Hennessey’s criminal empire.
They parked the van a good way down the street and proceeded up on foot through a wooded area. This place turned out to be a warehouse, small but surrounded by parking lots on all four sides. The structure was set apart from a couple of smaller buildings that could possibly house offices, but most of them were dark and boarded up. Lori told Novak it looked like the place she’d been held captive in New Orleans. Now she was getting some payback for the abuse she suffered at these guys’ hands, and that payback was about to get a little sweeter. Hennessey’s operations were going downhill as fast as a runaway stagecoach on an icy slope.
Two white panel vans identical to the one they’d stolen were parked outside the front near a well-lit exterior door. There were three additional street doors, one on each side of the warehouse, so there were four altogether, plus several truck doors to unload cargo. The property was more secure than the houses they’d destroyed, enclosed all around by a twenty-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. The gate was held together with a heavy steel chain and industrial lock.
Before they moved out to the fence, they searched for surveillance cameras along the roof but didn’t see any kind of security other than the locked gate. Novak found that hard to believe. No guards posted on the outer perimeter made little sense to him, not in Hennessey’s line of work. The judge had better security at the mansion, and it had been piss-poor. Novak took a giant mental step backward and appraised the situation. Maybe Hennessey really was overconfident, considering he murdered all competitors and scared off everyone else with body mutilations and bloody decapitations. Hennessey probably had a good part of the Houston police officers paid off. Possibly Jonathan Wagner’s organization backed him up with men and business connections. This last place could be a trap. Even so, Lucy might be inside, so they had to go in.