Right?
I refined my Google search to sex trafficking in the United States and forced myself to look on. My eyes blurred with tears as I read firsthand accounts from girls who’d escaped. Adolescents, barely on the cusp of adulthood, who were promised money or fame or fine clothing, and who instead received nothing but a short life on a dirty mattress in the back room of a modern day brothel. Most of them never saw a dime of the spoils earned from the exploitation of their bodies.
I read stories of preteens who were snatched off the streets. Often, they were drugged, raped, and beaten into submission by a sadistic pimp. Their spirits broken, their childhoods stolen, their lives eventually lost.
And what of the victims who hadn’t escaped? For every one who broke free of this life and somehow gathered the courage to discuss it afterward, there were countless whose stories went unvoiced.
This seemed like some alternate reality — some other, darker version of the nation and the city I’d come to love. This was America. The best country in the world. Yet, for all our prosperity and progress, it seemed that the gross majority of us — myself included — walked around with bags over our heads, so blissfully ignorant and caught up in our own lives that we didn’t even blink when children disappeared from our streets without a trace.
I felt a chill race down my spine as I stumbled onto a website with statistics. Though data was scarce, there were a few persistent trends. For one, the girls were almost always poor immigrants, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. They were usually undocumented, so no one took notice when they vanished. Plus, even if someone were to notice, the girls had no real legal status in our country — no protections against predators. As a port city with a large unregistered population, New York was one of the biggest trafficking hotspots in the country.
Could Vera somehow be caught up in all of this?
I wasn’t sure. But it seemed far too coincidental that several young girls were now missing from the same neighborhood. And now that I’d dragged Miri into the fray, I was even more obligated to find out what was going on.
My fingers traced over the shiny silver cuff on my right wrist. I thought of Vera, her beautiful warm brown eyes dulled and lifeless as heroin thrummed though her system, while a man grunted and sweated and stole her innocence for a flat rate in a cheap motel room, or on a seedy street corner somewhere. Her inner light snubbed out into eternal darkness, on a semen-stained mattress in a room full of strangers.
My eyes pressed tightly closed at the images I’d conjured, unable to bear the thought of my sweet friend meeting such an end.
Jamie’d always said that the people who most deserve our help are the ones who’d never ask for it.
Vera hadn’t asked, but she needed someone to stand for her. To fight for her. And maybe there were more qualified people out there, who’d do more good than I could. Maybe I was the wrong girl for the job. But I’d never be able to meet my own eyes in the mirror again if I didn’t at least try to figure out what was going on.
It was time to pull the bag off my head. Time to stop shielding my eyes from the world around me. Time to see past the illusion, and expose the truth.
No matter how dark that truth may be.
***
“Why are you dressed like Catwoman?”
“We’re on a stakeout. This is total stakeout attire.” Fae gestured down at her all-black ensemble.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure the point is to blend in,” I noted dryly. “You look like a burglar.”
“But a sexy burglar,” Simon added consolingly, leaning over the center console to wink at Fae as she settled into the backseat of his car. “The Jimmy Choo biker boots are a nice touch. I approve.”
“Aren’t they cute?” Fae said, brightening immediately.
I rolled my eyes heavenward, praying for some kind of divine intervention as Simon peeled away from the curb and out into the flow of traffic. I was riding shotgun in the rust-bucket sedan he charmingly referred to as “Lola” and was seriously regretting the fact that I didn’t know anyone else in the city who had a car. Not only had Simon made me explain, in detail, why I needed to borrow it, I also was forced to accept the fact that once I explained, there was no possible way he’d let me do this on my own.
Not that I couldn’t use his help. After all, he’d spent his college years as a semi-professional celebrity stalker. A simple stakeout would come practically second nature to him, at this point. But where Simon went, Fae soon followed. And, though I loved my best friend, when the name of the game was stealth, she wasn’t the first person who came to mind. With her knockout good looks and designer fashion addiction, she made a lasting impression everywhere she went — which just so happened to be the exact opposite of my intentions for this mission.
Alas, beggars can’t be choosers, so here we were, crammed into what I think at one point in ancient history had been a Volvo, but now more closely resembled a dumpster with wheels. There were so many mismatched replacement parts in various colors, it was impossible to tell what the original hue had been. None of the four doors were the same shade, nor did the trunk match the hood. What resulted was a patchwork of lemon yellow, dark red, shiny green, and matte blue, that came together in the approximate shape of a car.
Totally incognito. A trained police officer would never spot us tailing him.
I groaned and began to bang my head against the dash, wishing I’d never dragged the two of them into this. It had all the makings of an impending disaster and, frankly, I’d have been better off alone, on foot, holding a large sign that said “HEY SANTOS, I’M FOLLOWING YOU!” Because, let’s face it, even that spectacle would probably draw less attention than Fae and Simon’s secret-mission shenanigans.
“Baby, you’re gonna mess up my dash if you keep that up,” Simon chided.
I glanced at the dusty, peeling, faux-leather dash incredulously, wondering what Simon’s version of “messed up” looked like. Fae giggled from the backseat.
“This is going to be a disaster,” I muttered.
“Chin up, sweets.” Simon grinned at me. “I’ve got mad stalker skills. Just you wait.”
***
As much as I hated to admit it, Simon was kind of right. He did indeed possess mad stalker skills.
Finding out which station Santos worked at had been easy enough with the help of the internet. Once I’d finished my own search last night, Simon and Fae had come over. I’d quickly brought them up to speed on the Miri situation and they’d helped me hatch a plan to track down Santos. They were excited enough about the adventure we’d schemed up; whether they actually believed any part of my crazy theory or were just going along with it out of friendship, was a different matter entirely.
Simon had the wheels and the surveillance experience. But it was Fae, the Yoda of flirtatious Jedi mind-trickery, who really came through for us in the end. She called the station during her Wednesday lunch hour, while the more seasoned officers were likely to be out grabbing food, and caught a young recruit in her web. A few minutes of giggling at his lame jokes were enough to charm the love-struck rookie into slipping up about Santos’ shift schedule — especially after she mentioned how much she wanted to come by in person to “thank that nice older officer named Santos who’d helped her when her heel got stuck in a grate last week.” The young officer, all too eager for a chance encounter with the girl on the phone, promptly revealed that Santos came in each evening to work the night shift, from 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
Fast-forward six hours, and the three of us were on our way to the 6th Precinct Station, in the heart of the Village. I supposed the only plus side to our mission was the fact that Simon and Fae were too distracted channeling Bonnie and Clyde to press me for details about my first three days of work with Sebastian. If I told them what had happened Monday night, they were liable to obsess for hours on end, dissecting each remark and gesture Sebastian had made until I was forced to throw myself from the moving vehicle. And, honestly, I’d been doing
quite enough of my own obsessing, especially in light of Sebastian’s unexplained absence both yesterday and today.
We pulled up across the street from the police station and found a parking space about half a block down. According to Simon, that way we were close enough to watch who came and went, without being obvious about the fact that we were watching. I decided to take his word for it. The photograph of Santos I’d printed out last night was sitting on the dashboard, so we could be sure we’d spotted the right guy. I studied it as Simon hopped out of the car and crammed a handful of quarters into the meter. Fae was busy in the backseat, rooting around her seemingly bottomless black hobo bag.
“Aha!” Fae exclaimed, pulling a small item from her purse.
“What?” Simon asked, sliding back into the driver’s seat.
“Tell me those aren’t what I think they are.” I groaned.
“Binoculars!” She laughed excitedly, pulling the lens caps off and lifting them to her eyes. She fiddled with the focus knobs for a minute, turning fully around in her seat to check her view of the station through the rear windshield. “Oh yeah. These babies are ready to rock.”
“I’m not even going to ask why you have those,” I told her.
“She has a hot neighbor,” Simon explained. “Sometimes he hangs from his chin-up bar and does crunches…”
“Enough said.”
“Guys!” Fae interjected.
“Usually he does core workouts on Thursday nights,” Simon added. “You should come next week. It’s quite a show. We make popcorn and everything.”
I giggled.
“Guys!” Fae repeated.
“But anyway, I keep telling Fae she needs to ask him out. Those ab muscles alone would be rea—”
“GUYS!” Fae yelled, finally managing to get our attention. “Isn’t that him?”
Simon and I whipped around in our seats, trying to catch sight of whoever Fae had spotted leaving the precinct. The man was walking this way, toward one of the unmarked police cars parked across the street. Dressed in street clothes with a black duffle bag slung over one shoulder, he didn’t look like the uniformed officer I’d been expecting. I had to glance back at the photo on the dash to confirm it was him.
“That’s our guy,” I murmured quietly, watching as Santos climbed into his vehicle and pulled out onto the street. We were silent and still as his car rolled past ours and joined the flow of traffic.
“Let’s get him,” Simon added in a hushed tone, turning over the ignition until the car rumbled to an unwilling start.
“Why are we whispering?” Fae whispered.
“I don’t know, it just seemed appropriate,” I said, laughing as we pulled away from the curb and started to tail Santos’ car. Traffic in the city was rarely navigable at any time of day, but thankfully we were an hour or so beyond the nightly post-work jam that tied up each avenue in gridlock. There were enough cars to conceal our presence, but not so many that we lost track of Santos up ahead.
“The trick is to stay a half block behind them,” Simon advised us. “Use directionals and follow traffic laws. Go the speed limit. Otherwise, you draw attention to yourself.”
“Okay, Mr. Bond.” I snorted.
We followed Santos’ car for an hour as he looped around the Village, cut down through Alphabet City, and zigzagged his way across Chinatown. He stopped a few times — once to grab a coffee at 7-11 and again to grab a burger and fries at a greasy spoon near Columbus Park — but other than that, he was pretty much the most boring target of all time. As the minutes ticked by and gradually turned into hours, Fae passed out cold in the backseat and even Simon began to yawn.
It was past eleven. We were about ready to admit defeat and head back to Simon’s loft for the night, when Santos took an abrupt turn and headed for the bridge that crossed over the East River to Brooklyn.
I looked over at Simon, my brows raised in question.
“We’ve come this far,” he muttered, taking the exit that would lead us across the bridge. Twenty minutes later, we followed Santos into a rundown neighborhood on the west coast of Brooklyn. Red Hook or “The Point” as it was best known by its residents, was a gritty, working class district that jutted out into the bay, bounded on three sides by water. The former industrial port had at one time been viewed as a great location for gentrification, with transplanted businesses breathing new life into its downtrodden streets. Over time, though, the isolation and inaccessibility of The Point, coupled with a crumbling economy and a lack of funding, had stalled the efforts to revitalize, leaving Red Hook in a limbo state — half gentrified, half in ruins.
It seemed Santos was headed for the still-impoverished section, where overgrown weeds and garbage filled the vacant lots interspersed between Civil War-era brick row houses and Brooklyn’s largest public housing projects. Along with the empty warehouses that lined its waterfront, the neighborhood was marked by strips of deserted businesses and a series of ramshackle boat docks that no longer saw any traffic. During daylight hours, it wasn’t the most genteel of places; at night, it seemed even more desolate. It was empty of life — the forgotten, destitute, dark southern twin to Manhattan’s effervescent, ever-vital boroughs.
The traffic was thin here, with fewer cars to hide amongst as we trailed Santos deeper into the neighborhood. Simon put on the brakes and let a little distance grow between our cars. We slowed to a crawl when Santos turned onto a small side street by the water and parked in front of an abandoned brick warehouse. Its windows were boarded up, its foundation was chipping away, and if I had to wager a guess, I’d say it had probably been constructed at the start of the 20th century, when the Industrial Revolution swept the nation with a wave of new technologies and Brooklyn bloomed with factories and manufacturing plants. The building sat on the very outskirts of The Point, abutting a private dock which likely once served as a lively distribution port for shipped goods.
Now, the pier was dilapidated — the perfect counterpart to the factory it formerly serviced. Many of its wooden support beams hung down into the bay, waterlogged and termite-eaten with age. The planks were so brittle, one miscalculated stride might find you stepping down on sawdust and open air.
Santos’ brake lights glowed like twin red halos on the dark street around the corner. Simon cut his headlights and shifted into park on the cross-street just before the intersection — far enough away that we could watch inconspicuously through the vacant lot across from the warehouse. Fae stirred awake when the car jolted to a stop.
“Where are we?” she mumbled, her voice slurred with sleep.
“We’re not in Manhattan anymore, Toto, that’s for damn sure,” Simon whispered, his eyes following Santos as the officer climbed from his car and looked around.
“Otherwise known as Brooklyn,” I murmured, following Simon’s lead as he hunched down in his seat to avoid being spotted.
Fae wrinkled her nose in distaste as she peered out her window at the garbage and graffiti littering the abandoned streets. This was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated bars of her usual late-night stomping grounds.
Though many of the overhead streetlights had burned out and been left in disrepair, there was enough light from the few remaining illuminated posts to make out Santos, his black duffel still in hand, as he crossed the street and walked out onto the pier abutting the warehouse. He walked confidently, as though he’d been here many times before, and casually shifted the bag’s strap over his shoulder as he lit a cigarette. I held my breath and watched as he took a few slow drags, his eyes cast out over the still, gray waters of the Hudson. When he’d finished his cigarette, he turned back for the warehouse and approached a rusted metal emergency exit door on the side of the brick building. The jarring sound of his fist pounding against the metal reverberated in the night. Santos waited calmly before the door, wholly unaware of the watchful eyes trained on him.
After a few seconds, what looked like a slotted metal peephole slid open, allowing whoever was inside a glimpse at S
antos. He was obviously recognized, as the door immediately swung open to admit him. It closed behind him as soon as he stepped through the entryway.
It didn’t open again for two hours.
Fae was snoring lightly in the backseat and Simon was nodding off sporadically, slumped over the steering wheel with drool pooling in one cheek, when the warehouse door finally creaked open and Santos walked out. I elbowed Simon in the stomach and he jerked awake with little grace.
“Whaaasgoinon?”
“Look,” I hissed, pointing toward the windshield.
Simon wiped the drool from his face and turned his eyes to Santos.
“Duffel.”
“What?” I asked, thinking he might still be half asleep and babbling nonsensical dream words.
“The duffel bag,” he clarified. “Look how full it is.”
I looked. He was right; Santos had definitely picked something up in the warehouse. The question was, what?
“When he went in, it was limp. Now, it’s practically exploding,” Simon noted.
“That’s what she said,” Fae chimed in from the back seat with a faint giggle.
I rolled my eyes. “Really, Fae?”
“It’s two in the morning.” She shrugged. “My humor isn’t exactly on-point at the moment.”
“So what’s in the bag?” I muttered.
“Could be anything. Money, drugs, you name it.” Simon’s brow furrowed as he watched Santos start up his car and pull away from the curb. “But he was in there for more than two hours. His shift is pretty much over now, and he barely patrolled. I don’t think that’s standard operating procedure for an NYPD officer.”
We all fell silent as we contemplated what that might mean.
Simon waited until Santos was a few blocks out of sight before starting the car and steering us back to Manhattan. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I needed to find out what was in that duffel bag. And then, I had to come back here to see what was going on behind the tightly sealed doors of that warehouse.
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