She nodded but couldn’t help herself from looking back to all the women. Most of them were openly crying now, collapsing into the arms of their rescuers.
“What now?” Briggs said, looking shaken.
“Well,” Schmidt replied, “first, we get them all taken care of. Then? We get these two assholes out of here and booked.”
Briggs nodded, glanced at the women and then glanced away quickly. “It’s not human.”
Clopton nodded. “No. It’s not.”
“And, well, I’ve got two granddaughters at home, ya know?”
“Hmm,” was all Clopton could manage.
Then Briggs asked a big question. “So. Who are they?”
Clopton put her hands on her hips. “No idea. Yet. But what I can tell you is that they’re probably all from Thailand, some from a city called Pattaya. Most of them look very young. So, I’d say they were either sold by their families for food or outright kidnapped from their towns or villages.”
“Man, oh man,” Briggs said, shaking his head again. Even though the night was cool, sweat had dampened his forehead.
“We got ’em, though,” Schmidt said with the smallest hint of encouragement.
Clopton sighed. “Yeah. But last week we missed the ones at the Long Beach port.”
“Long Beach?” Briggs asked, a look of shock coming over his face.
“Yeah. That group was supposedly out of South America, primarily Ecuador and Peru.”
Some of the women were sitting on the ground while others remained standing. Those that were covered, or partially covered, were shivering, and those that were still stark naked had gathered in a circle, buttocks out, huddling for warmth.
Briggs looked at Clopton. “Same guy?”
“Yep,” she said through clinched lips. Then, almost spitting out the words, she added, “Güero Martinez.”
“Well. One more step in getting to him, right? And, if nothing else, tonight you saved these ones.”
He had no sooner said the words than a younger sheriff, with blue eyes and a square jaw, came walking forward with one of the women. She was short, perhaps five feet, and wrapped in one of the ambulance blankets, her face smeared with dirt and grime and her hair plastered to her head. Her lip was cut and she squinted against the harsh glare of the overhead dock lights.
“Sheriff Briggs? This lady speaks English. She wants to talk to you.”
“No!” the woman shouted, startling them all. “Not him. Not you! Only . . . her!” It was with a painfully bony finger that she pointed at Clopton. Her body looked severely malnourished from the long trip across the ocean, which she and the rest of the women had no doubt been forced to make with barely any food.
Clopton nodded and swallowed hard. Of course. The woman before her would probably never trust any man, ever again. “How can I help?”
“No help. Too late.” The woman said as her lips curved downward and her eyes began to fill with tears. She stumbled and half fell toward Clopton, who caught her by the shoulders. “Dead. In back of box. Five dead. You no help in time!”
The night froze. Schmidt looked to the ground and Briggs took a step back. Two, actually. Probably one for each granddaughter who, but for the grace of birthplace and luck, might not be the ones home safe and in bed tonight.
Clopton, meanwhile, had been knocked completely speechless.
The woman’s eyes widened in agony. “Five. Five dead. One . . . one my sister!” she moaned.
Her small hands gripped Clopton’s forearms with incredible strength. “You!” she screamed. “Understand? You?”
“Y-yes,” Clopton managed.
Then, for some reason, no doubt based in the sheer desperation of it all, the woman asked one, final question with a face full of agony and sorrow. “Why?”
Not a soul on Dock 42 had an answer.
Chapter One
Detective Evan Parker was back in that haze again, that fade-in, fade-out state of consciousness filled with a staccato soundtrack of screams and terror that was threatening to take him halfway across the world. Big sun. Massive desert. Small lives.
No. No, you’re not there. You’re here.
Yet “here” remained an elusive place to identify as he moved his finger over the map of his mind. All he could see was “there.” The sound of bombs exploding and Molchan screaming out orders filled his ears. The outpost . . . happened after the ambush with Waheeb. . .
Get ahold of it, Parker. Pin down the timeline. Now.
The ambush was a few months before the outpost. Rounds were whizzing over his head like wasps. So. Many. Damn. Rounds. But still not loud enough to drown out Waheeb’s screaming. Frantic, desperate screams for help. The shrill cries of a man absolutely certain that he was being dragged away to his death.
“Mr. Parker! Mr. Parker? Please! Please! Please!”
Waheeb—their translator, a local, his friend, a kid—was now in the hands of the Taliban. He was Parker’s responsibility, but chaos had made a mockery of promises and duty, and that blistering desert sun had burned every scrap of hope to ashes.
“Parker!”
Another voice. Female. How?
“Parker!”
There were no females in his unit that day. But her voice sounded familiar.
She was from another ambush. A different one. One that was happening here and now.
He was gripping the sides of his head, trying to keep the madness from spilling out his ears. Where am I?!
It finally came to him: he was in The Mayan nightclub in Downtown Los Angeles.
And the ambush had happened to his partner, Campos.
Yes. Campos was shot.
By Jin Yeung. The Korean thug that Parker and Campos had come to arrest for the gangland murder of Hymie Villarosa.
But things had gone wrong somehow and now this woman was screaming at him. He wanted to beg her to stop using his name, because each time she did, it exorcized his past and brought Waheeb’s voice back.
The woman. “Parker! Snap out of it!”
Waheeb. “Mr. Parker! Help me! Please!”
Stop. Focus. How? The Mayan. How did everything get flipped upside down?
Again, a searing realization.
By Hector Villarosa. The gangster who liked to quote Gibran.
He had come out of nowhere. Not to kill Jin. No. That might’ve actually made some sense. Instead, Hector had shot one of the bouncers on duty, then chased him into a room down the hall and gunned him down. “Here” . . . was now.
He was still in the hallway, sitting next to the body of Jin Yeung, whom Parker had shot and killed after Jin had been distracted. Distracted by . . .
Don’t. Don’t even try to think about that. No. You will go insane. Completely.
He opened his eyes and the woman who was screaming at him came into view.
“Parker!” Screamed Sargent Emily Davenport, the leader of the LAPD tactical unit that had helped storm The Mayan. She had just led a group of four men to the end of the hallway where Hector Villarosa had chased the bouncer before ordering them to fan out and enter the room behind their AR-15s. But now? She sounded confused.
“I’ve only got one body down in here.” A pause before she added, “Looks like he worked here. Deceased. Nobody else, Parker. You said there were two.”
“What?” Parker said in utter dismay as he wiped at his eyes.
“You sure nobody came back out your way?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “Everything went down back-to-back. He’s gotta be in there.”
Silence. Then the sound of stuff being banged and shifted around. They were obviously doing an even more thorough search of the room. But by the sight of Davenport’s gun, which was already lowered, they had zero expectations of finding anyone.
“We’ve got nothing in here, Parker,” Davenport said, sounding skeptical now.
“That . . . I mean, it can’t be. Is there a trapdoor? Or an attic in there? Or a—”
“No trapdoors, no attic doo
rs, no side doors. Nothing. You’re sitting near the only way out.”
Ansel, another tactical unit member, was standing over Jin’s body, and now he too looked at Parker with concern.
Parker shook his head and replayed everything that had happened in his mind. Words of anger had been shouted between Hector and the bouncer, about who loved someone or didn’t. Then? A single gunshot had been fired from the room Davenport was in now. Parker had turned in that direction, resigned to the fact that Jin had probably escaped, right before Jin lunged out of the meat locker door right next to where Parker was sitting . . . with the perfect chance to kill him.
Before he’d been distracted. No . . . that was a lie. His gun hand had been struck by . . .
Don’t even think it. It’s impossible. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t. Ghosts don’t exist. Don’t even say his name.
“Shit, Parker. Tell me what I’m missing here,” Davenport said as she walked back up the hallway toward him. Another member of the SWAT team was radioing in the body right when Murillo came charging in from the dance floor, his face twisted with worry.
“Parker? You get hit?” he said.
Parker grimaced. “No.”
“Good.”
“Campos?”
“He’s doing okay, all things considered. The bullet he took in the side is just a flesh wound. The one in the shoulder looks worse. Paramedics are trying to cart him off now, but he wouldn’t let them take him until he got a status report on you.”
“Tell him I’m fine,” Parker replied wearily.
“Okay. Sit tight. I’ll be back,” Murillo replied before he disappeared back into the club.
Disappeared. Like Napoleon had. After appearing, for one split second, to divert Jin’s aim before he could shoot me.
Parker grimaced. He’d gone ahead and done it: thought of the name of his previous partner, Detective Napoleon Villa, who’d been shot and killed in action four months earlier at Evergreen Park.
Parker glanced up at Ansel and saw it there, in his face, the fear of a curse or something, and who could blame him? Parker had been a detective for less than a year and had one dead partner and now another wounded.
As if he’d brought the damn war back from that desert with him.
Davenport and the rest of the tactical unit gathered around him. She held out her hand, helped him up and asked, “There’s no one else down there, Parker. You sure you’re okay?”
Parker shrugged. “Well. I thought I was. I don’t see how that guy got out of here, Sarge.”
He was taller than Davenport. “Lean over,” she said. When he did, she put both her hands in his hair and swept them over his scalp.
“What are you doing?” he asked, almost defensively.
“Checking to see if you took a blow to the head without realizing it. I don’t feel any lumps, but did you?”
“No.”
“Okay. So, you aren’t concussed. I’m gonna go with shock.”
“What?”
“You obviously blacked out at some point, Parker. Maybe after shooting this douchebag at such close quarters, in this tiny-ass hallway.”
An uneasy silence fell for a moment before she began barking orders to fold up the operation. She told one of her men, Baldwin, to stay with the body down the hall and told Ansel to head back into the club to help clear it. “I’ll stay here with Parker and Yeung’s body.” She added with a long sigh, “Let the captain know we’re back here when he arrives.”
Ansel nodded and melted away.
“That’s not possible,” Parker said.
“What’s not?” she replied.
“I didn’t black out.”
She looked at him sympathetically. “Look. Okay. Maybe not. But something happened, and if you did black out you might not remember it anyway.”
Parker’s frustration came to a boil. “I’m telling you, Sergeant, that I didn’t—”
Davenport cut him off and lowered her voice. “I’ve gotta have something to put in the report, Parker.”
He froze.
“You understand, right?” She looked him in the eye and nodded, as if to coach his answer.
Shit. I had a meltdown of some kind. I knew it. I’ve been slipping lately. And she knows it, too. Or suspects it. And now she’s trying to cover for me. Why?
Reluctantly, he nodded back.
“Good,” she stated flatly.
Slowly, he began to feel stronger. Before long, the paramedics showed up, confirmed the two deaths and called for the medical examiner. By then, Parker was ready to leave but Davenport was insistent that he sit back down and let the paramedics check him out one more time. He had some cuts and bruises from the mad scramble through the crowd, but that was it.
“Any ringing in your ears?” one paramedic, in his mid-thirties and with a thick beard, asked.
No ringing, but Parker could still hear him, Waheeb, screaming, his voice tiny now, from miles down in his brain.
“Well,” Parker said, glancing up at Davenport, “a little.”
He looked again into Parker’s ears. “Yeah. I don’t see any hemorrhaging. It should pass in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If not, you might’ve damaged your eardrums and you’ll need to get it checked out, okay?”
Parker nodded, feeling guilty, but then realized that he wasn’t lying entirely. Maybe his ears were ringing a little.
So begins the long road to rationalizing all that’s happened here. Bullshit!
He told himself not to think so negatively, that this would all be explained somehow. Still, he had to see it for himself.
“Sergeant?” he asked, looking at Davenport.
“Yeah?”
“Now that we’re done here, can I take a look at that room for myself?”
Another hard look. It was obvious that she didn’t think it was a good idea, but she understood. “Sure. Let’s go.”
Parker stood again and made his way down the hall with Davenport. When they turned the corner and entered the room, the world almost went upside down on him again. Not because he saw the body of the bartender sprawled over a pallet stacked with bags of potatoes, nor because Baldwin was looking at Parker like he had a screw loose. Not even because Hector Villarosa was, indeed, nowhere to be found. No. Not for any of those reasons.
His world tilted because of the energy that was still vibrating in the room, like the sound of a tuning fork between each and every molecule in the air.
He’d experienced this sensation before. Only once. And what a coincidence; he’d been with Napoleon at the time.
It was in the driveway of Victoria Brasco’s house, during the Fasano investigation, right after that Gray Guy had come and gone.
And there it was again: the number one lesson, above all other lessons, that Napoleon had told Parker during his training.
There was no such thing as coincidences.
Hector Villarosa was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’d started to lose his mind within seconds after he’d murdered David Fonseca, the bouncer at The Mayan nightclub who had stolen Marisol, Hector’s longtime girlfriend.
Tonight was supposed to have been a one-two-three kinda moment. One, he’d set up Burro, a member of his crew who was angling to usurp Hector, to kill David. Two, in one move, he’d eliminate his rival for Marisol’s heart and free himself from the gang life, effectively giving Burro a crew that Hector no longer wanted to lead anyway. And three, since it was the gang that had cost him Marisol’s love in the first place, he’d get her back. Instead, the entire world flipped upside down and gave him a one-two-three kinda moment he never could’ve imagined.
It started with the appearance of the businessman in his gray suit, who had crackled into existence out of nowhere and spoken to him like some angel of God, and now this: an exploding tunnel of light that vibrated with an energy that made his bones hurt beneath his skin. There was color, then darkness, then a kaleidoscope of images, before Hector realized he was being whisked through a tour of the memories of hi
s life, most of them blurry holograms of himself that his eyes could barely take in and his mind could hardly comprehend.
Then, finally, there was here and now. They had come to a stop, to one moment in particular: the night when the Giant Fried Chicken Leg had blocked the doorway to his bedroom.
He was seven. It was a ridiculous nightmare. How in the world could a chicken leg ever hurt you? But that was when he first began to understand that anything you feared could hurt you.
Or, more importantly, anything that hurt you should be feared. The Gray Man’s voice was like a bow across a cello, deep and reverberating.
“W-what are you talking about?” Hector stammered. “And who the hell are you?”
Hell has nothing to do with me, boy. And who I am is not important right now. This is about who you are, Hector. Focus. What happened on the night of the chicken leg?
Their swerving, topsy-turvy ride here had come to a static halt, in this bedroom, twenty-one years in the past. Hector was nauseated, but he couldn’t tell if it was from the travel or the destination. Still, he felt compelled to think, hard, by the man that was now talking in his mind, so he did.
“I called out. I was scared.”
Who did you call out to?
“My mother.”
And what happened?
“She didn’t come.”
Did she hear you?
“Yes.”
He could see himself curled up against the headboard, his Iron Man sheets pulled up to his throat and clenched so tightly in his hands that his little knuckles were turning white.
How did you know?
“Her bedroom was right down the hall, close to mine. She shouted out to me.”
She shouted “out” to you, or “at” you?
Hector thought, long and hard. There was no sound to the memory, just sight. “I dunno. I can’t hear her.”
No, Hector. It’s because you do not want to hear. Now, hear.
As if an amplifier had been plugged in somewhere, Hector winced as he heard his seven-year-old self screaming. “Mom. Mom! Mom!”
Then his mother’s reply. “Hector! Kayate! Shut up!”
The Parker Trilogy Page 32