Operation Reunion

by Justine Davis

  As he said that, Tate slanted a look toward Hannah, hoping she would put two and two together and take some comfort in the covert message. He couldn’t tell by her expression if she’d believed him—or even understood what he was trying to tell her. He wasn’t even sure if she’d heard him say that Caleb had sent him.

  Terror, he knew, had a way of blocking out everything else.

  The man relaxed a little, then laughed. “Good one,” he pronounced. “That’s where she and some of those other girls come from, some backward hole-in-the-wall called Paradise Ridge.”

  Tate tried to sound casually uninterested. A man making small talk, involved in a meaningless conversation that would be forgotten before he walked out the door. “Is that where all the girls are from? This Paradise Ridge place you just mentioned?”

  His question was met with a nod. “This batch is. They picked up others from—” He abruptly stopped his narrative. His eyebrows narrowed over small, deep-set eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”

  Tate shrugged. “Just trying to find out how big a selection you’ve got—in case things don’t work out with this one,” he explained.

  “Oh, it’ll work out,” the man promised. There was no room for argument. He looked at Hannah pointedly. “She knows what’ll happen to her if it doesn’t. Don’t you, honey?” The smile on his lips was cold enough to freeze a bucket of water in the middle of May.

  This time, instead of fear rising in Hannah’s eyes, Tate thought he saw anger. Anger and frustration because, he guessed, there was nothing she could do right now about the anger she was feeling.

  The other man was apparently oblivious to her reaction. It was clear that fear was all he looked for, all he valued.

  “Don’t want to wind up like your girlfriends now, do you?” he taunted her.

  Things suddenly fell into place. The annoying little troll was referring to the two dead girls Emma and Hannah’s brother had initially discovered. Solomon Miller, a so-called “repentant” Amish outcast had brought them straight to the bodies, hoping to use the fact that he was informing on his “boss” as a bargaining chip.

  Initially part of the group of men involved in the sex trafficking ring, Miller had become the task force’s inside man, trading information for the promise of immunity once all the pieces of this case came together and they got enough on the men running this thing to take them to court—and put them away for the next century or so.

  If they didn’t wait until they discovered exactly who was behind all this and bring him—or her—in, if they just grabbed up the two-bit players they were dealing with in this little drama, the operation would just fold up and relocate someplace else.

  And Amish girls would continue disappearing as long as there were sick men to make their abductions a profitable business.

  No, they had to catch the mastermind in order for this operation to be deemed a success.

  “Don’t threaten her,” Tate warned. When the guard shot him a malevolent look, he told him, “I want her to be willing to be with me, not because she was threatened with harm if she wasn’t.”

  The guard looked at him as if he wasn’t dealing with a full deck. “Hey, man, don’t you know? It’s better when they fight you.”

  The world would be a much better place if he could just squash this cockroach, Tate thought, struggling to hang on to his temper. With no qualms whatsoever, Tate would have been more than willing to put everyone out of their collective misery—himself included.

  But instead, he was forced to tamp down his temper and nonchalantly tell him that “We each have our preferences.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re the man with the bankroll,” the guard grumbled resentfully.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Tate was grateful for the elaborate lengths the department had gone to in order to give him a plausible backstory. His brother, Gunnar, had funded his huge bank account.

  Whoever was running this sex trafficking operation wasn’t a fool, Tate concluded. He was very, very careful to get everything right. That included vetting his clients rather than just accepting them at face value, or going with hearsay.

  Nothing was simple anymore, Tate thought. Not even the peddling of flesh.

  “So it’s settled?” Tate asked the man. The blank look he received in return forced him to elaborate. “I can have a private session with her?”

  “Soon as I run it by the boss” came the reply.

  “And how long is that going to take?”

  He knew things had to progress at their own pace, but he hated the idea of leaving the girl alone with this thug for another moment, much less for another day or two. There was no telling what could happen in that amount of time, and he didn’t want to take any more chances than he had to.

  “Anxious?” the other man jeered, enjoying himself. He liked having the upper hand and, in this case, he clearly got to call the shots. “Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. She’ll be ready for you then.”

  Just what did that scum mean by “ready”?

  A premonition had a shiver zipping down Tate’s back, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about the circumstances. Tate was well aware that if he pressed, if he remotely said that she looked ready now or tried in any way to hurry this along, the whole thing could just fall apart on him. There were steps to take and he knew it.

  That didn’t make taking them any easier.

  If this was rushed, the people they were after would smell a setup and not just back off but vanish into thin air, taking the young women with them. He’d seen it before.

  Hell, he’d been part of it before—having an operation unravel on him that allowed a killer to be set free. The man was ultimately taken down and brought to justice, but not before he’d killed several more young women. Young women who wouldn’t have died if he had done his job right in the first place, Tate thought ruefully.

  That wasn’t going to happen again, he vowed. This time, he was going to do things by the book. Even if that meant he had to find a way to physically restrain himself.

  “What time tomorrow?” he asked the guard.

  “We’ll get back to you about that,” the man told him, affecting a superior attitude.

  Tate narrowed his eyes, looking as cold as the man he was dealing with. Colder. “I don’t like being jerked around,” he said in a voice that contained an unspoken warning.

  “Nobody’s jerking you around,” the other man promised, sounding more than a little nervous that this encounter could turn physical. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said again, this time far more amiably.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Tate said, not bothering to tone down the note of sarcasm in his voice. He looked from Hannah to the man, wondering if she even realized how breathtakingly beautiful she was. She reminded him of a rose newly in bloom. “In the meantime, I don’t want anyone touching her.”

  The other man began to smirk again. “She really got to you, eh?”

  Tate was aware that men like the one he was dealing with directly understood only one thing: money. It was the only language they spoke. However, he hadn’t been given the suitcase that was to be filled with the cash he was to trade for Hannah. That came tomorrow.

  Whatever cash he had on him at the moment was his own, but it was only paper as far as Tate was concerned. Paper that was capable of buying both him and Hannah a little peace of mind.

  Taking out his wallet, Tate removed a hundred-dollar bill. As the other man eagerly put his hand out, Tate tore the bill in half and handed one piece to him.

  “What the hell is this?” the man demanded. “Some kind of stupid game?”

  “No game,” Tate assured him. “You get the other half of the hundred when I come back tomorrow and see for myself that she’s all right.” His eyes bored into the other man’s dark ones. “We have a deal?”

  The other man cursed roundly, then shoved his half of the bill into his pocket. “We have a deal,” he retorted grudgingly.

  “Good.” Tate
turned on his heel and crossed to the door.

  Tate could almost feel Hannah’s eyes watching him as he walked out of the suite.

  Tomorrow seemed like an eternity away.

  ISBN: 9781460307007

  Copyright © 2013 by Janice Davis Smith

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