by Denise Wells
I nod in response and head down the hall to the elevators. Research and records takes up the entire space, a few floors above us in the building. While the bulk of our records are electronic, there are still originals of files dating back fifty years or more that we haven’t digitized. Partly because we’re a smaller branch office and don’t have the manpower to do so, and partly because the government moves slow with most things.
I took Jenny out a couple times last year, but nothing came of it. For a few reasons: one, she doesn’t really do it for me. Two, since she has a crush on Mack, I don’t really do it for her. Three, I don’t like to date. Hookups and one-night stands? Sure. But dating is tough since most women don’t understand the lifestyle—long hours, canceled plans, secret phone calls and trips, little explanation on my whereabouts. My guess is its hard for anyone to stay trusting under such circumstances.
And the fourth reason, the one I hate admitting to myself and that I’ve never admit to anyone else, I’ve got a crush on Quinn, the ex of my best friend, David. But even if I liked to date, I could never date her because of David. It would weird him out, I’m sure. And if they ever slept together, it would creep me out even more.
Mack had a solid relationship with a woman named Daria for a while, but they broke it off after a year. She owns a bar in town, and we have lunch there often. Multiple times a week. He won’t admit it but I think he still loves her, which is why he’s not interested in anyone else.
“Jenny, how’s it going?” I call out to her as I reach her desk. She looks up at me with a smile, we parted as friends and on good terms but I also think she’s friendly toward me so I’ll put in a good word for her with Mack.
“Hey, Reed. It’s all good here, how are you?”
“Can’t complain. Mack said to tell you hello.”
“He’s so sweet.” She sighs. “Tell him I said hi, back.”
“I’ll do that. Hey, we need your help on something.”
“Whatcha got?”
“Can we run facial recognition in multiple databases at the same time?”
“Sure, it’ll take longer, but I can do it.”
“Great, can you add this to my earlier request and target NCIC, CODIS, and NDIS? Let me know when you get anything back?”
“Will do.”
I slap my hand down on her desk. “You’re the best, Jenny. I owe you one.” I point back at her as I walk back to the elevators.
“You owe me like twenty,” she calls after me.
“I’m good for it!” I yell back as the elevator doors close.
Mack and I head out to talk to the victim, the woman who made the report which started the investigation. He drives while I recap a synopsis from the file. Like with the coffee, in theory we trade off driving, but really Mack does most of it. Unlike with the coffee, it’s not because he’s a better driver, it’s because I don’t mind being a passenger.
“Paula Nelson, age twenty-three, works as a hair stylist, not the first time she’d used the app, but it was her first date with this guy. According to her, he was normal, they had a nice time, nothing too out of the ordinary. One minute she was in his car to go from the bar to dinner, and the next minute she’s waking up in a strange room, where some other girls are lying around, and a different guy is trying to stick her with a needle.”
“So, guy number one does the date pick up and the drugged drop off—he must have roofied her or something similar. And someone else maintains the girls and the house.” He looks at me when he talks then back at the road again.
“That would be my guess. Then once at the house, the girls get hit with something more dependency friendly, maybe a little H? Get ‘em high out of their minds, they won’t care much about what’s going on.”
“Where was she found?”
“By her own account, she’d been walking for hours, but who knows how the aftereffects of what he gave her the first time affected her memory or ability to gauge time. They picked her up over by where route five and sixty-seventh avenue intersect. Not a lot out there.” I shrug. “Says she thinks it was a house she ran from and not a commercial building.”
“Residential brothel?” Murphy asks.
“Probably.”
We’re silent the rest of the trip until pulling onto the street where Paula Nelson lives. An upper middle-class neighborhood with larger tract homes, lush green lawns filled with holiday decor, towering oak trees, and well-maintained roads and sidewalks.
“It should be that bluish house here on the right.” I point out the house to Mack and he parks on the street in front of a “Caution: Reindeer Crossing” sign. Only a couple of cars on the street, not surprising with just a few days to go before Christmas.
We head up the front walk between rows of fake candy canes lining either side. An older woman with graying hair opens the door before we knock. She’s dressed in a robe and slippers despite the eleven o’clock hour. Not that I’m judging, sleeping until eleven in the morning sounds great, if I could do it. My body won’t let me go past six in the morning at the latest.
“You looking for Paula?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.” I pull out my badge to show her. “I’m Agent Roberts and this is my partner, Agent Murphy. We’re following up on a report that Miss Nelson made recently and we're hoping to have a quick word with her. Might that be possible?”
“Call her Paula, that’s her name, she hates the Miss and Ms. stuff. She’s in the shower. But you all can come in and wait, I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”
We follow her into the house, and she offers us a seat in the living room while she goes to get the coffee. The house is spacious with a lot of natural lighting. A huge Christmas tree sits in the corner with a pile of wrapped presents beneath it. The smell of cinnamon pinecones fills the air.
“Nice place,” I tell Murphy.
He nods in agreement.
The woman returns, balancing three mugs of coffee between her two hands. Mack stands to help, taking two from her. She makes a point of setting out coasters on the coffee table between us, so I use mine.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how are you acquainted with Paula, ma’am? Mrs. . . . ?” I pause, waiting for her to tell me her last name.
“Nelson. I’m Mrs. Nelson. Paula is my daughter. She came to stay with me after all this transpired.”
“Do you know much about what happened?” Mack asks while my phone dings with an incoming notification from research and records:
MESSAGE: Call in when you get a second. Got a match on your sketch. You’re not gonna like it.
I interrupt Mack to show him the message, then excuse myself to step outside and call in to Jenny.
2
Quinn
“This is exactly what best friends do for one another,” I tell Daria from my perch on the other side of the bar.
“I love you like a sister, you know that,” she says, her Russian accent slipping in as she talks. She’s been wiping at the same spot on the bar top for a few minutes. “But, sweetie, you would explode up my whole operation, and I can’t afford for that to happen.”
“I would blow up your whole operation.”
“I know, that’s what I just said.”
“The word is blow, not explode.”
She waves her arm at me in response.
“You have no faith in me.” I frown and try to give her my wounded puppy-dog look.
“Okay, fine. Prove me wrong.”
“How?”
“Carry a tray of beer from here to the holiday tree and back.”
“Pfft. No problem.” The bar isn’t even busy at this time of day, so it will be easy to do. “And it’s a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree.”
“Ha! That is not me getting one of your American words wrong. I don’t discriminate the holidays. That’s not just a Christmas tree, it’s an everything tree.” She spreads her arms as though encompassing everything in the bar. “And you can’t spill the beer.”
I give her my best brin
g it on look. She sets a tray on the counter along with six pint glasses which she fills with water, not beer, from the beverage gun behind the counter.
I grab it with both hands.
“One-handed.”
“It’s too heavy for one-handed,” I complain.
She takes it from me, spins it in the air like pizza dough, and lifts it overhead by the tips of her fingers, then walks back and forth behind the bar a couple times.
“Well, sure, easy for you to do, you’re the pro.”
“All my girls can do that.” She brings the tray back down to the counter; I examine it carefully to make sure nothing spilled.
It didn’t.
I huff loudly and roll my eyes, then slide off my bar stool, take the tray and hoist it over my head, careful to balance my palm directly in the center. Then I begin a slow and measured walk to the other side of the bar. The tray wobbles precariously above me and I keep my other hand up and at the ready in case it falls.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
I count my steps, watching the floor to make sure I don’t trip over anything. I feel like when I was a kid trying to balance a library book on top of my head and walk. When I reach the other side, I place the tray down on a tall table and raise my fists in air. “Woot!”
Daria raises one brow at me. “Now come back and wind your way through all the tables.”
I take a minute, but I do it, and with barely a spillover on the tray.
Daria nods, impressed.
“You didn’t think I could do it,” I taunt.
“True. Now, you do that same walk in one-tenth the time when the bar is filled to capacity with a basket of burgers in your other hand, and then we’ll talk.”
Or maybe not impressed. “Daria!” I whine.
“Quinn!” she mocks.
“Fine. Let me do the other thing.”
“There is no other thing.”
“Yes, there is, come on.”
She stays silent.
“It’s either that or I borrow money again.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I say, doing a happy dance in little circles. “Why is it so much easier for you to let me kill a bad guy than it is to serve some drinks and burgers?”
She shrugs. “I can send backup to take care of it when you fail an assassination. But here, at the bar, so many more bad things can happen. Broken glass, spilled beer, bad cocktails, cold food, wrong orders, unhappy customers . . .” She trails a hand in the air showing the list goes on.
“I could somehow make all those things happen while I was out trying to kill someone too you know.” I smirk.
She grabs the empty glass in front of me and refills it with Diet Coke.
“Thanks.” I take a long sip. “I can’t believe that you think I can handle myself better as an assassin than as a bartender or waitress.”
“I didn’t say you would make a good assassin.” She smiles.
I twirl my glass in the condensation dripping from it onto the bar top. “So, how long do you think you’ll keep up this vigilante stuff, anyway?”
“As long as it takes.”
“You can’t kill every bad guy, Dar.”
“Of course, I can. Or at least I can try. Each trafficker we take out of commission saves countless lives in current and future victims. The man who took my sister, he had seventy-five women working for him. And that was just that day. Who knows how many he’d already gone through or how many more he’d plan to take? Seventy-five women, Quinn. It’s disgusting.
“Think about it,” she continues. “I’ve been hunting these people for over five years. I’ve had the girls working with me for two years. We still take out at least one a month. And now, with the help of the girls, we are growing our list of informants, I could kill one man a week who victimizes women in this way and not run out for years.
“Meanwhile, these scums just keep getting richer and kinkier. They are like those bugs in trash, always growing back, unless we kill them outright. And California is the number one state in the nation for the greatest number of trafficking victims. Doesn’t it scare you that there are so many? That I never run out of targets?”
She’s on a rant now, I hadn’t meant to get her worked up about it. Human trafficking and modern-day slavery are hot buttons for Daria. Her sister was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. It was by chance that Daria ran into her on the street one day about a year after she’d disappeared. Her sister, drugged out of her mind, was being dragged down the street by a guy. For some reason, that she’ll swear is fate, instead of saying anything Daria followed them all day, only to find her sister was living about thirty minutes away, held captive in a residential brothel as a sex slave.
Daria came up with a plan on her own to rescue her sister. She went back a few days later to free the women and kill the men. She would have succeeded too, but her sister had OD’d the day before. To this day, Daria regrets not confronting her sister on the street, even though that would have gotten them both killed.
That kill was just the beginning and launched Daria’s side business/hobby: killing bad guys. Specifically, anyone involved in human sex trafficking.
“So, what? You just keep killing bad guys indefinitely?”
“Yep.”
“And you aren’t worried about running out of money?”
“Nope.”
“I wish I had rich Russian relatives who left me a bunch of money.”
“No, you don’t.”
Not only is Daria crazy wealthy, but she’s a total badass. I’m not. Rich or a badass. I’d like to be both, but I’ve got a few things working against me. She’s tall. I’m short. She’s thin. I’m curvy. She has eagle eyes. I wear contacts. She owns two very successful businesses. I’m under-employed. She can take down a man twice her size with one hand. I can barely count on one hand.
Okay, I’m totally exaggerating with that last one. But you get my drift. Daria is like an Olympic gold medalist at life and I didn’t even make it to the tryouts. What’s worse is she’s got a handsome ex who’s still madly in love with her and constantly trying to win her back. While I’m perpetually single, salivating after the one who got away. I say got away as though I once had him. But I didn’t. He, Reed Roberts, friend-zoned me a long-ass time ago after we first met, and I’ve never recovered.
Technically, my boyfriend at the time introduced Reed and I—and the two of them are best friends—so back then being in the friend-zone made sense. Guy code and all that. But David, that’s the ex, he and I broke up a while ago and we only dated for a few months. So, I figure anytime now Reed will come to his senses and realize what a catch I am.
Daria’s handsome ex, Mack, and Reed are partners in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Sector (CIS). Which is how I still get to see Reed from time to time, when Mack sees Daria and I’m around. Unfortunately, it’s always with the same outcome. I try to get his attention; he doesn’t acknowledge I exist.
I return my attention to Daria; she can be close-lipped about her life before she came to the US. But her story is fascinating. Making me want to be just like her. Prompting me to ask, “What would I need to do to become one of your Darlings?”
“Train.”
“Okay.”
“And train. And train.”
“I’d have to know how to shoot, right?”
“Shoot, stab, strangle, also self-defense, boxing, martial arts. My girls train three hours a day before they come to work here at night.”
Daria has four women she employs to work at the bar who also work for her as contract killers/vigilantes. But the bar is really a cover for her Dirty Darlings, the name she uses to refer to her group of trained killers. It doesn’t hurt that they are all crazy attractive and in shape. It’s like Coyote Ugly met Charlie’s Angels and they morphed into Daria’s Dirty Darlings.
“I’m not very interested in training three hours a day,” I admit to Daria.
>
“I didn’t think you would be.” She continues to move around behind the bar, wiping the counter, checking and rechecking alcohol bottle levels, stacking glasses. The same things she’s been doing for the last hour.
“This looks like a bunch of busy work, and I’ll bet you could better spend your time elsewhere. How about you train me right now to work at the bar?”
“No way.”
“Not as a bartender or anything. I’m talking behind the bar, like what you’re doing now, the little stuff that doesn’t require much talent. Or let me bus tables, sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms. Come on, D. There’s got to be something I can do.”
“What if we don’t work well together, huh? What happens to the friendship?”
“What are you talking about? We work fine together.”
“I would be your boss, Quinn. You would have to listen to me.”
“I can do that.”
“And obey. Like a dog.” She smiles.
I put my hands up like paws and pant with my tongue hanging out, always willing to show that I’m a team player.
“Okay, come on back here and I’ll show you how to run the glass dishwasher.”
“Is it different from a regular dishwasher?”
“Not by much.”
“Great!”
She shows me that along with a few other things and then we head back to the bar so I can fill out the employment paperwork. I’m giddy with excitement over finally having a job which is clear to Daria.
“You understand this is the shit job, right? The one that no one wants?”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay.”
“So, if one of the girls call in sick, can I cover for them as a bartender?”
“Probably not.”
“What about as a waitress?”
“Definitely not.”
“Hired killer?”
“Please stop talking.”
“Well, I need some incentive to work hard. You know, like knowing there’s potential for growth and promotion.”
“Working hard for the sake of working hard isn’t incentive enough?”
“No. This is America, land of reward and external motivation. We need to know we’re getting something out of it.” I wink at her.