Savage Nights

by W. D. Gagliani

  As usual, the quick fever brought on by the vision dissipated and he could breathe normally again after a few minutes.

  The food sour in his stomach, he slouched in the car seat and waited. The day grew sunny for a brief time, the typical Wisconsin wintry pale sun seeming distant and uninterested, but then the clouds rolled in and it was a gloomy end of December day again, the sky turning steely gray and mottled. Mid-morning he spotted Irina walking up the block and into her lobby. She had drawn her hair into a pony tail and wore a bright blue and yellow ski parka he was able to follow as a colorful blur even behind the line of parked cars.

  Once she had disappeared inside, Brant hunkered down again. He craved caffeine and there was a coffee shop two blocks away on Downer, a major cross street, but now it was too late and he contented himself with a run-through of what he'd learned so far that day. He looked at the cell phones on the seat beside him. He itched to dial Colgrave's number, but hated admitting to himself that he only wanted to hear her voice.

  Selfish bastard, at a time like this.

  Two hours later he was climbing the walls. It was after noon and time was slipping away. Jesus, he had to make some progress somewhere.

  There hadn't been any more visions. Both lucky and not.

  He made up his mind and dialed Sarge's number.

  "Speak," Sarge barked at his end.

  "About that special occasion we discussed earlier. I'm going to need caterers to go with the entrees. Any chance you could round up a few to be ready any time in the next couple days?"

  "I thought ahead and made a couple calls," Sarge said. "I think I may be able to supply the labor, as long as there's some airfare compensation forthcoming. And maybe a small extra fee. Sort of user fee and a commission."

  Brant grunted.

  "I take that as a yes."

  "I'm not in a position to argue. I think there may be a bigger crowd at the special occasion than I figured, so I'm going to need the help. Hope they packed their own uniforms and catering tools."

  "I'll subcontract them, so they'll use my utensils."

  "Fine. Sounds good."

  "Any news?"

  "Let's say your ID was a positive. And there's a depth chart we gotta work through."

  "Is the special guest a part of the shindig?"

  Brant thought about not committing. But he said, "It's likely he'll have to be a part of it. A lot depends on location. Do you have any venues in mind?"

  "Nah, there are too many possibilities that I know of, and we need personal access that don't come easy."

  "All right, but can you work on your end to narrow it down?"

  Sarge sighed. "I'll try, but it may take too long to do you any good."

  "I know. Just try."

  "Will do, man. Hang loose until I call you."

  Brant said, "I'll call you."

  "Yeah, okay."

  They clicked off and Brant was left with his thoughts and a rapidly cooling car. He considered the heater, but sitting in a running car might bring cops. He slouched into his leather coat and stuck his gloved hands into his pockets. Every minute he surveyed the street in both directions.

  An hour later, just as early twilight started its descent, another dark sedan crawled past and roared around the corner. Looking for parking. The second time around, the driver found a space just opening up a block behind Brant. He watched as two bulky men climbed out and headed for Irina's lobby. They were large, muscles hidden under fall-weight overcoats. Vaguely military in bearing. Ex-military, probably Serbs from one of the militias, Brant would have bet on the hunch. They paused outside her building and a lighter flared up briefly. In its light, Brant could make out the thug's lantern-jaw. Darkness returned, then they stepped into the lobby.

  He'd been eyeing the flat below Kit and Irina's, hoping for a chance to repeat his earlier surveillance, but the light in the flat was already on and he'd seen a shadowy figure in the window, so that was out.

  For the hundredth time that day he wished he smoked, just to be able to do something. But he'd learned a bitter lesson in patience down in the tunnels. Right now, his best lead to Kit might well be upstairs, banging her roommate. Again. They must have been on a schedule. That made sense, given the set-up.

  Brant had developed a theory about what was going on, but he'd wanted somebody to bounce it off of. Almost two hours later, he'd refined his theory by filling in some blanks with guesses. All he could do was wait until they were done, then see where he or they headed.

  Finally the three of them appeared in his mirrors. Both men, flanking the smaller figure of Irina who now wore a black leather parka. They headed straight for the sedan, Irina climbed into the rear, and the car roared off a few seconds later with one of the goons at the wheel.

  Brant slid in behind them and cautiously followed through the crowded, narrow streets of the east side. North, then slightly west. The freeway?

  Goddamn it, if they didn't lead him to Goran, then he'd probably wasted too much time and Kit was beyond help.

  Dead.

  Say it. Be clear about it.

  DeMarco had died, both in the vision and in reality.

  His skin crawled. For the first time in a long time, he considered praying.

  SEVENTEEN

  Colgrave slammed down her handset.

  Jesus, Brant was annoying. He'd laughed at her, sidling out of her office and through the squad room like that, and she wondered if his tunnel experiences had made him a natural sidler. Sneaky, oily almost, yet in a suave way.

  She shook her head. What the hell was she thinking?

  She angled the monitor back to avoid the glare from the overhead lighting and started several searches. On a whim, she typed "sex trade" and "sexual slavery" into the search engine. She barely glanced at the lists of hits, spotting page after page of news links. Brant was right, somebody was writing about the subject. A lot of somebodies.

  Then she tapped into a Fed database and cross-checked some of her information. "Goran" typed in with an asterisk for a first name, then an asterisk for a last name, both returned several tidbits that might have been about the Goran she knew. They were unsettling tidbits, partly because they appeared incomplete or abbreviated, as if some careful deleting had been done.

  An additional hit proved interesting. Goran's name popped up, misspelled as Ghoran, highlighted in a long description of an operation that, with collaboration from Moscow police, had closed down an organization that smuggled Natashas from former Soviet bloc countries into Europe and the Middle East. Natasha was the name often given to attractive Russian and Ukrainian girls who, with no prospects at home due to poverty, abusive households, and lack of employment opportunities, were often offered work abroad. Sometimes they were offered up as mail-order brides, though technology had moved ahead and led to Website catalogs of willing girls supposedly looking for well-to-do European lonely men. In most cases, both the work and the so-called romantic matches were thinly-disguised set-ups for prostitution and indentured labor. Most often, such girls were simply set up in brothels and forced to perform sexually for endless lists of clients in order to pay off their loans, with which they had paid to be smuggled out of the country.

  Tapping the pencil on her teeth again, she wondered whether the misspelling had thwarted the clean-up job somebody had done on the Serb.

  Colgrave read on, whistling at the numbers which, the report hinted, reflected a grim reality. These were not small operations. Brothels stocked with post-Soviet girls existed throughout Europe, Scandinavia, Turkey, the Middle East and Israel, and North Africa. The US seemed to be a major consumer of the mail-order bride version, though what happened to the girls was less obvious. Colgrave figured most of them ended up on the streets, strung out and hooking for brutal pimps. She couldn't decide which was worse — a brothel cell with a line-up of fat, balding men outside the door, or sex in anonymous cars and alleys, beatings in motel rooms, malnutrition, and eventual death from STDs, crack, ecstasy or meth.

>   Jesus.

  Colgrave thought back to her own youth, and shuddered.

  There but for the grace of God...

  She hated when her mind played this trick on her. She hated remembering.

  The beatings had started when she turned eleven. She'd heard her mother's beatings before then, of course. She knew that her daddy drank too much and lost his temper with his wife at least twice a week — on payday and on the day after payday. Her mother always seemed to forgive him the tempers, as she called them, giving him what he wanted even as he bruised her face and arms and legs. But almost as soon as little Danielle had started to grow breasts, daddy had taken to showing her his good side. Little Danielle liked the attention, until she realized what his good side symbolized. By then it was too late, and daddy had almost completely transferred his interest from his wife, who may have welcomed the reprieve, to his daughter, who came to understand all too quickly what daddy wanted for his treats and special attentions. Soon, payday was no longer a day to enjoy. It had become a day to dread, because it was just about the only day her father could afford to drink until he was drunk. And when he did, he went looking for his little girl.

  She shivered at the memory. She preferred locking out the images.

  If Brant was right and this girl Kit, this perfect niece of his, had fallen prey to the evil bastard Goran, then she was in deep shit, there was no denying the implications.

  Her breath came in hitches suddenly, and only closing her eyes and forcing herself to calm down like the doctors had suggested eventually brought her back under control. Incidents such as this had become more rare since the therapy, but they could snap at her from anywhere, anytime, and the image of Brant's niece becoming a piece of meat for those monsters lingered long and vividly.

  She stared through her half-open blinds for uncounted minutes, letting the feeling wash through her. The feeling of being helpless, of being tethered by rules and regulations. Double standards. And, worse of all, she wondered about Zimmerman and his illogical response to Brant's problem. What caused a good cop like Zimmerman to lose perspective like this?

  And what about the database sanitizing? Her nose twitched, as if she could smell the ammonia. Somebody had wiped a good bit of information on the Serb. But who? And what could it possibly mean to Brant's quest?

  Taking one last look at her view of the squad room, she reached down and unlocked the lowermost file drawer of her desk. With one hand, she dug into the space behind the files and took out her spare Glock, the compact unregistered one that lay snugly in its black low-rise holster. She strapped it to her ankle, then turned back to her monitor.

  The feeling of helplessness had intensified, so now she knew what she would do.

  Her fingers raced across the keyboard.

  Logging into database after database, starting with state and local police departments, then moving up to federal agencies — FBI, DEA, BATF, NSA, HSD, and CIA, — Colgrave built a rather complete incomplete portrait of the Serb, copy-pasting her finds — and notes about non-finds — into a separate document for her files. Then she surfed international passworded databases such as RCMP, Interpol, MI5, Surité, and every other cooperative police or security agency on her list. It was then that her door flew open to reveal Zimmerman, who stared at her for a moment before entering her office. He strode up to her desk and flipped the flat monitor around so he could see its display clearly.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he said, his voice curling into a snarl. "I told you to not waste your time or the department's on anything Richard Brant brought in. I thought I made it clear."

  Colgrave pried the monitor out of his grip and re-angled it to face her. "You're glaringly close to sexual harassment charges, Lieutenant Zimmerman," she said coldly. "I suggest you turn around and walk out of my office before I find myself making a formal charge against you."

  He snickered. "Against me? For this? For keeping you away from this Brant bastard?"

  "No, for having assaulted me and now holding your power and authority over my head."

  "What? You cunt! I never did any such thing. You know damn well we dated and had a consensual relationship..."

  "While you were married."

  "I was separated."

  "You said you were. It'll be my word against yours. If nothing else, both our careers will be in the toilet. Now, get out of my office, unless you have something constructive to say or add to my research."

  Zimmerman stared at her for a long moment, then sighed and turned on his heel.

  She detected a certain resignation in the set of his shoulders as he marched into the squad room and stared down any questioning looks. She pushed away the guilt she felt at making the threat. She wasn't like that, not really, but he'd forced her hand. Brant seemed sincere about his niece, and Colgrave knew enough about human nature to take his side over Zimmerman's irrational dislike — hatred — of anything to do with Brant.

  Colgrave turned her attention back to the databases, and the roaring silence with regard to the Serb.

  EIGHTEEN

  The dark Mercedes sedan turned onto the freeway heading south and Brant followed it, sticking close. Traffic was light enough to allow him visual contact even from a few lengths back. The Christmas holiday was fast approaching, but plenty of workers turned into shoppers daily, extending the rush hour. Fortunately it was still early and the lanes hadn't filled up yet. The gloom seemed to tint all cars with darkness, so Brant focused on the distinctive taillights as they wove a few miles south toward a suburban area. The off-highway territory was dominated by strip-malls, motels, and industrial parks, however, and when Brant followed the Mercedes off the freeway with two cars between them, he wondered which of those facilities were its destination.

  The Mercedes bypassed the large chain and residence motels and continued on down the rapidly downscaling access road, finally turning into an old-fashioned two-story motel. L-shaped, with outside entrances on both levels, and under a long common roof, it wrapped around a parking lot almost a third full. One of few local independents left, the others having been replaced by corporate chain motels, this one advertised "Free HBO" under its partly-burned out neon sign declaring it to be the HI-VIEW MOTEL. Brant watched the sedan turn in ahead of him and drove past, swerving into the Culvers fast-food restaurant next door. He edged toward the drive-through and kept one eye on the adjacent motel lot. The sedan prowled down the strip and turned into an angle spot facing the motel building, and Brant slid out of the drive-through and slowly picked his way from lot to lot by way of their connected driveways.

  He ducked below the dash when the sedan's rear door opened and he saw Irina's colorful ski jacket bounce out of the car. She headed straight through the line of scattered parked vehicles and made for the stairs at one end of the long building. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and he watched her pass one door, then another, a third, and then stop at the fourth.

  The sedan's taillights flashed and it began to nose out of its spot.

  They were splitting up.

  Brant made a split-second decision and accelerated to follow the sedan. He could always double back and check on the motel room. It was the fourth door, because in the meantime she had disappeared inside. But losing the goons might lose him Goran, and he still thought the Serb was the key to Kit's whereabouts.

  If she's still alive.

  Irina was clearly mixed up in this thing, but was it willingly? He hadn't seen anything to prove there was coercion, not really. Maybe she was forced to troll for victims, and had been maneuvered into giving up Kit. Then again, maybe she was paid for everyone they snatched on her say-so. He'd see if Colgrave could have her finances checked for large, regular cash deposits that might indicate her finder's fee or commission.

  He slammed his hands on the wheel until they throbbed.

  The Mercedes led him back to the freeway, and he kept far enough back to avoid being spotted. Traffic was heavier flowing north toward downtown, so he was forced to s
tick closer. Paranoia said they were lining up his headlights in their mirrors and wondering where they could take him out.

  Brant let a few more cars get between him and the big Mercedes, again using its taillights as a reference point. The key would be to avoid turning off right behind them, or they would surely spot him.

  The Mercedes edged to the right at the downtown turnoff, finally taking the very next exit and speeding around the cloverleaf while Brant managed to follow but only after letting a semi-trailer and a minivan slide between him and the sedan. When the Mercedes hit the cross-street, Wisconsin Avenue, a wide main artery stretching east to west, it headed east back toward the lake. As they approached the city's business district, the Mercedes headed for a neighborhood recently revitalized by one of the urban universities. Clubs, bars, and restaurants dotted this up-and-coming area, along with several remodeled vintage hotels. But then the Mercedes swept right and zoomed over the viaduct and Brant swore and swerved with it. He'd expected them to stick close to the university, where plenty of clubs saw business from students both legal and illegal. He thought it would have been a perfect setting for the occasional kidnapping, with so many co-eds venturing out at night to indulge their college underage drinking habits.

  He was lucky to keep the sedan in his sight. Minutes and a bit of backstreet driving later, Brant was now parked across the street and diagonally from the club he assumed was owned and operated by one Goran, no surname. He had given them plenty of space and had flicked off his lights in the less-traveled area, so they had led him here, to a dark side street in the slowly-developing former "industrial valley." An Indian tribe casino and Miller Park, the new baseball stadium, had begun the revitalization, and slowly change of all stripes was coming. Old building were refreshed by new facades, like the one Brant now watched through his drizzle-blurred windshield.