by Madyson Grey
As they approached the apartment door, they could hear voices coming from inside Cantu’s apartment. Officer Martin, who was Bradshaw’s partner, caught up with them just before they got to the door. He told Officer Bradshaw that backup was on the way and that they were to hold off until the other policemen arrived. So they retreated around a hallway corner out of sight if anyone should open Cantu’s door.
Rafael went back outside to wait for the officers to come so he could show them the way inside. He checked on Victoria while he was out there and told her what was going on.
“Be careful in there,” she warned him. “I don’t want you getting in the middle of anything dangerous.”
“I’ll be careful,” he promised.
Two patrol cars rolled up just then and he went over to them to show them inside the building, and fill them in on what he had observed.
“When we get in there, you go back to your car and go home,” one of the policemen told Rafael. “We’ll take it from here. We appreciate this lead. I just hope it’s the one we’ve been waiting for.”
Just as Rafael and the policemen got to where the first two were waiting for them, Rafael’s cell phone signaled that he had a text message. He looked at it quickly when he saw it was from Victoria.
Three men just drove up and are headed for the basement door, it said.
He relayed the message to the policemen who all stepped around the corner into the cross hallway. They heard the men come in the back door.
“I hope he got some good ones this time,” one voice said.
“Yeah, me, too,” said another.
“A couple of that last bunch were so uncooperative that I had to eliminate them,” First Voice said.
“Wonder where these are from?” Second Voice said.
“Dunno. Thailand, I think,” said First Voice.
Then the men rounded the corner into the hallway that fronted Antonio Cantu’s apartment and were startled to see the hall filled with six police officers. The officers blocked their escape route, and then questioned them as to what they were doing. Rafael hung back behind all the officers.
“Just going to visit a friend,” First Voice said.
“Heard there was a friendly poker game going on here,” said Second Voice.
“I enjoy a good game of poker,” Officer Bradshaw said. “Don’t you?” He directed his question to Officer Martin.
“Oh, yeah,” Martin answered. “Shall we join them?”
“You knock on the door, since they’re your friends,” Officer Bradshaw told the men.
The men looked warily at the policemen, but complied. The policemen stayed back more or less out of sight until Antonio opened the door.
“Welcome, friends,” Antonio Cantu said in a friendly tone when he saw the three men.
The three glanced nervously at one another, and then stepped inside the apartment. Antonio’s eyes grew wide as six police officers followed. There were young Asian women all over the small living room. They appeared to be merely teenagers.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” Antonio asked Officer Bradshaw, who was the first one in the room.
“We had a report of suspicious activity in this apartment,” he replied. “Who are all these girls and what are they doing here?”
The girls had all huddled together when so many men came in all at once. They all looked frightened and seemed to look to one girl in particular for reassurance. She appeared older than the rest and seemed to take charge of the younger ones. She whispered to them in a foreign language. One of the officers, who was Asian, stepped over to the girls and spoke to them.
“Where do you come from?” he asked in Thai.
They relaxed a little when they heard the officer speak in their native tongue.
“You can tell me. I am here to protect you,” he said. “I am a police officer.”
Finally the one who seemed to be the leader of the girls spoke.
“We come from Thailand,” she said softly in Thai. “We were promised good jobs to make money to send home to our families.”
“You have been lied to,” he told them. “You will come with us and we will take care of you.”
“Will you put us in jail?” the Thai girl asked.
“No. No jail. We will take you someplace safe. Then we will send you back to Thailand.”
“No! We can’t go back to Thailand without money. We were promised money and jobs. Our families will be shamed if we come home without money,” she protested.
The officer sighed. He understood their situation. But he also knew that they had entered the country illegally, whether willingly or not. Now there would be a lot of red tape to cut through to get them work visas. Then there would be English lessons before they could possibly get jobs. Decent jobs. He knew what kind of jobs they were facing if they stayed with these sleaze-bags.
Under pressure, and with promises that the law would deal gently with him if he cooperated, Antonio had begun to talk. Rafael, who was lurking in the hallway just because he was so curious to know what was going on in the apartment, heard his confession to being one link in a sex slave trade that began in Thailand and other countries of the Far East, ran through the docks in Long Beach, through a very long series of tunnels that ended at the adult bookstore in Long Beach, and then made another stop at Antonio Cantu’s apartment, where select men were called to come over and choose the girls they wanted.
When the first of the policemen began exiting the apartment, they were surprised that he was still there.
“Go home,” one of them told him. “We’ve got things under control.”
“I also own the building in Long Beach where the girls are passing through,” Rafael said.
Even to him it sounded irrelevant, but he was stalling for time, just to see this thing through.
“How can we contact you if we need to again?” one of the officers asked him.
Rafael handed the officer a business card.
“Call me at this number,” he said.
Men in handcuffs escorted by policemen began coming out of the apartment. The girls were ushered out last by the Asian officer, whose name was Sakda.
“What will happen to these girls,” Rafael asked Officer Bradshaw who stopped to speak with him.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “There are a couple of agencies that we work with that teach the girls some English, and help them secure work visas. They can’t go home until they have earned some money, or else their families in Thailand are shamed.
“These girls come from villages where the people are mostly uneducated still. The human traffickers prey on these people, promising them more money than they could hope for in a lifetime over there, if they will allow their young daughters to come to America.
“It’s a sick business, but such a huge one that we can’t seem to even make a dent in it. Hopefully we can save these girls, but there are thousands more just like them out there being used and abused by low life like the ones we just arrested. I read just the other day that there are estimated to be ten thousand sex slaves just right here in LA.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Rafael exclaimed. “Ten thousand? In LA? That’s unreal!”
“I know, but unfortunately, it is real. We chip away at it little at a time, like tonight, but it’s like trying to patch a broken dam with chewing gum. If you could take tomorrow and show one of us where you saw the container being unloaded, we could stake out that dock for a while.”
“I will be more than happy to help in any way that I can,” Rafael said emphatically. “I’m just glad that I called you tonight. I was afraid that maybe it was all just an innocent get-together of a group of friends, but it just seemed suspicious to me.”
“We would rather be called out on a suspicion, only to find that nothing is wrong, than to miss an opportunity like this to right one wrong, even if it is a relatively small one,” Officer Bradshaw said. “Thank you for your help. Someone will be in touch with you in the morning. Oh, m
ay I have your phone number please?”
“Here’s my card,” Rafael said, handing him a business card.
Rafael walked outside with Officer Bradshaw trailing the rest of the group. Just as one officer was putting Antonio in handcuffs, Antonio’s cell phone signaled an incoming message.
“May I check that please,” Antonio asked politely.
“Make it quick,” the officer said.
He reached into Antonio’s shirt pocket where the cell phone was, pressed the incoming message icon, and held it so Antonio could read it.
“You might want to read this yourself,” Antonio said, nodding to the officer.
The officer turned the cell phone around so he could read it. Then he hurried over to Officer Bradshaw. Bradshaw was reading the text just as he heard a cry from Rafael.
Chapter Five
“Victoria!” he yelled. “Where are you? Hey! My wife’s gone!”
Rafael sprinted the ten yards or less to where the knot of policemen stood. Officer Bradshaw extricated himself from the knot to step to Rafael’s side.
“Mr. Rivera, we have just received a disturbing message on Mr. Cantu’s phone,” he said.
He turned the cell phone around so that Rafael could read the text message. When he did so, his knees buckled and he gave forth such an anguished moan that everyone turned to look at him.
Tell your landlord that if he ever wants to see his wife alive and whole again that he will forget everything he’s seen tonight and tell the cops that he made a mistake. Tell him to bring $500,000 in non-sequential bills to MacArthur Park tomorrow at twelve o’clock noon sharp. Go to the children’s playground and look for a boy on a bicycle wearing a red sweater and give him the case with the money in it. The boy will give him an envelope, and then he will walk away. Obviously he will come alone. Once I have the money, he will find his wife alive at the location written down inside the envelope. Probably.
“Mr. Rivera,” Officer Bradshaw said, grasping Rafael’s arm to steady him. “Rafael, we will help you with this. We are here for you. We will do our best to see to it that your wife is returned to you safely.”
“Find out who this text is from,” Rafael said pleadingly. “Surely Antonio knows who sent it. If he doesn’t, you can trace it, can’t you?”
“We’ll find out where the text originated,” Bradshaw said. “Would you like for one of my men here to escort you home? It might be safer for you, you know.”
Rafael couldn’t even think straight. His mind was going in all directions imagining all sorts of horrible things that could be happening to Victoria even now. His stomach began churning, too, and he thought he might throw up. All he could think about doing was tearing around Los Angeles looking for Victoria. He wanted to kill whoever had taken her.
“Can’t we go look for her right now?” he said roughly. “I need to find her now. Now!”
“Calm down, Rafael,” Bradshaw said, laying a hand on Rafael’s shoulder. “Our best bet of getting your wife back to you safely is to follow the kidnapper’s instructions. However, you won’t be alone. We’ll salt the park with undercover officers long before you’re supposed to go there, so they will look natural. You won’t even know who they are, and neither will the kidnappers. We will start doing our homework tonight to find out just who this man is and where he hangs out. Just leave it all to us. We will do everything humanly possible to see to it that your wife is returned to you safely.”
“I hate to see you lose this bust,” Rafael managed to say. “I hate to see those young girls just dumped back into the horrible life they’re destined for. But I’ve got to get Victoria back.”
“You just leave everything to us,” Officer Bradshaw repeated. “We haven’t lost this bust yet. Now you go home and try to rest. You need to be alert tomorrow. Take a sleeping aid if you need to, so you can sleep tonight. Do you want to have a police escort home? It might be safer for you if you do.”
“Yes, please,” he finally managed to say. “I shouldn’t have left her out here alone. I should have brought her in with me. How could I have let this happen?”
Rafael was rambling and he knew it, but he couldn’t help it.
“It does you no good to blame yourself now,” Bradshaw told him. “You need to focus on how you’ll raise the two million and have it ready by noon tomorrow.”
“That’s no problem,” Rafael said absentmindedly. “Except that I’ll have to go to a couple banks to get that much. That will take a little time. Right now I’m going to ask Antonio who sent this message.”
“No, let us handle him,” Bradshaw said, laying a restraining hand on Rafael’s shoulder. “We’ll handle this.”
“Hey, Joe, ask Cantu who sent him the text,” Bradshaw called over to another officer.
In a couple of minutes the one called Joe came over to Officer Bradshaw and told him what Antonio had said.
“He says it’s from the head dude of the smuggling ring in this area. He says if we’ll cut him a really sweet deal, he’ll help get Victoria Rivera back. Says he met her a while back and liked her. Doesn’t want to see anything bad happen to her.”
“OK, tell him we’ll talk,” Bradshaw told Joe, whose nametag identified him as Joseph Frost.
“Go home now,” Bradshaw instructed Rafael. “Try to sleep tonight. You’ll need to be in top form tomorrow.”
“All right,” Rafael conceded. “You want to call me, or should I just be at the station at eight in the morning?”
“Might as well just come on down. Then maybe we can help you get the money from the banks. If the bank manager knows it’s an emergency, they may give you more than they would otherwise. Drive a different car if you can.”
“Okay, see you in the morning,” Rafael said.
He turned and went to his car. The passenger’s side window had been shattered, he supposed when Victoria refused to open it to a stranger. He started the car and then waited for his escort to signal him to go. As it turned out, he had a police car in front of him and one behind him. They both had his address and directions of how to get there.
He followed the patrol car as it turned and twisted and zigged and zagged for several miles, in an effort to lose anyone who might be trying to follow them. They took a circuitous route, doubling back several times, and even taking a couple of dead end streets, turning around at the ends of them to make absolutely certain that no one was following them.
It took an hour to reach Rafael’s home because of the efforts put forth to lose a tail, if there was one. They needn’t have bothered, because the kidnappers had Victoria holed up, and knew that all they had to do was bide their time until Rafael delivered up the money the next day. However, neither the police nor Rafael knew that at the time, and they were taking all the precautions necessary to keep him safe.
Rafael dreaded facing Lena and having to tell her what had happened to Victoria. He knew that she would freak out, and he couldn’t blame her. He was feeling very freaked out himself. But he didn’t see that he had any choice. Unless she was asleep when he got home. But that would only stall things until morning.
When he arrived at home, he thanked the officers for seeing him safely home. One of them even went into the house with him, to make certain that the house was safe. When they passed through the kitchen, Rafael found a note from Lena stuck to the fridge with a magnet.
Victoria and Rafael, My dad fell, and I have gone to be with him and my mom in the hospital. I will probably spend the night with them. I hope this is all right with you. Love, Mama.
Rafael was instantly both sorry for Lena’s folks, and relieved that she wasn’t here to have to learn about Victoria. Maybe he’d have her home before Lena even knew anything had happened.
He bade the officer good night, secured the house, set the alarm, and went upstairs to the master suite. He rooted around in the medicine chest looking for sleeping pills. He finally found some over-the-counter ones and took a couple. Then he showered and got into bed.
It wa
s awful being there in bed without Victoria. His mind conjured up all sorts of horrible scenarios about what could be happening to Victoria. Would they rape her? Would they kill her? Would they torture her? He finally turned on the TV, hoping it would distract his mind until the sleeping pills kicked in. It didn’t really work, but the sleeping pills did kick in fairly quickly, as he wasn’t accustomed to taking them.
Rafael did sleep soundly all night, much to his relief when he awakened the next morning and realized he had actually slept. He rose and readied himself for the day. He didn’t feel like eating, yet he knew he needed something to keep his strength up for the day. He couldn’t find anything in the kitchen that appealed to him, so he took off and went to a diner for breakfast.
As soon as he’d eaten, he drove to the police station where he was to meet with Officer Bradshaw. Bradshaw should have been off duty that morning, but since this was a high priority case, and he had started it the evening prior, he insisted that he be allowed to see it through that day. He had gone home and gotten some sleep, following his own advice to Rafael, but returned to the station before eight o’clock Tuesday morning, when he shouldn’t have reported for duty until two-thirty.
Dressed in street clothes, Bradshaw accompanied Rafael around to two banks, withdrawing enough money to make up the five hundred thousand that the kidnapper was demanding. It was difficult to get that much money in non-sequential bills, but what they ended up doing, was taking apart the bundles, and mixing the bills all up.
This process took the better part of two hours, so it was about ten-thirty by the time Rafael was all set to deliver the money to MacArthur Park at noon. He was so nervous his hands were shaking. Now to have to wait for an hour and a half was going to be torture to him. He stopped at a convenience store and bought an extra large pop, just to have something to sip on while he waited.