Stealing Childhood

by Terry Persun

  Jason raised his beer and reached across to tap Dan’s glass even before Dan picked it up. “For luck.”

  Dan sipped his water then squeezed the lemon into it. “Where were we?”

  “Koko.”

  “She can disappear.” Dan let his statement stand and waited for Jason to take it in. He drank more of his water, thirstier than he thought he was.

  “Her weak grip, small stature, averted eyes, snake totem. Especially at night, I’d think, with her black hair and dark eyes.”

  “I wonder if that’s what she did to get out,” Dan said. “And the fact that she could wiggle her way through almost anything. You know, like a snake penetrates a rat’s next to get at their babies.” Dan tapped the table with his fingers. He removed his notebook. “She wiggled her way in and out. What did she do in there?”

  “What about the barrier, the non-physical block we started talking about a moment ago?”

  Dan shook his head, trying to think through what little information they appeared to have. “I’m not getting a lot of clues yet.” He raised his eyes to look directly at Jason. “She seemed more open to you. Either because she trusts you more—I’m old and part of the system in her eyes—or she believes she can manipulate you easier.”

  “Hold on, Dad, that’s not fair.”

  “It’s not about being fair, it’s about being right. I didn’t say it was true, I said it was possible.” Dan leaned back in his chair when he saw Jason glance behind him.

  The waitress sat their burgers in front of them. “Catsup’s on the table. Need anything else?”

  “Not at the moment,” Jason said.

  She walked away.

  “I’ll take your warning into consideration.” Jason pushed a French fry into his mouth. “About another matter, you didn’t say anything about me taking the seat facing the front door.”

  Dan laughed and cut his burger in half. “You did that on purpose to see what I’d do. You know I like to be able to see everything. I figured I’d let you spend your meal being aware of who came and went. I’ll relax for a change.” Dan pointed at Jason. “See any agents show up yet?”

  Jason glanced around Dan. He lowered his gaze. “How do you know so much about all this?”

  “You know I’ve done this before, but you insist on thinking I haven’t. Do you really want to learn or do you still think you know it all?”

  “Not fair. Again.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Jason popped another fry into his mouth and reached for the catsup. “It pisses me off, but maybe I’ll try to listen more. But you have to promise to give me some credit, too. I’m not one of your students in college.”

  “I haven’t taught since retiring, but maybe it’s still in my bones.” He smiled at his son. “Maybe we both have work to do.” He gave Jason a slight nod. “They either followed or found us. Which is it?”

  “Found,” Jason said. “I saw them looking in the window before they entered. I hadn’t realized who it was until you said something. I would have figured it out though.”

  “I’m sure,” Dan said. “They’ll follow us to the hotel, too, and set a crew there to keep an eye on us.” He shook his head. “They really should be focused on the job and not us. We’re not the problem.”

  “She’s afraid you might really leave,” Jason said. “She doesn’t want to get into trouble, even though she doesn’t want your method to work.”

  Dan jotted that down. “Interesting that you might say that. If she wants me to fail, is it because she doesn’t believe in what we do or because she doesn’t want to look bad?”

  “Or she doesn’t want the operation to succeed.”

  Dan swallowed a mouthful of burger. “You’re reading this pretty well. That’s a strong possibility.”

  “You don’t think she’s mixed up with them, do you?”

  Dan tightened his lips. “If she is, she’s going down with them. Now that we’re involved.”

  Chapter 6

  On the twenty-seventh floor of the Columbia Center building, Dan walked over to the keypad and started punching in numbers.

  “What are you doing? That’ll set off an alarm,” Jason said.

  Dan finished, the door lock clicked, and he raised his eyebrows toward Jason as he pushed the door open. “I was paying attention.”

  The moment they were on the other side of the door, an agent they didn’t recognize rushed forward. “How the hell—”

  Dan pointed to his head. “Intuition.” He glanced around and found three empty chairs lined up against a wall. “Do you mind if we leave our backpacks here for the moment?” He slipped off his pack and placed it on one of the chairs. Jason did the same.

  Agent Rafsky stood in front of them when they turned around. “Who let you in? And why are you late?”

  “Let myself in, and we’re just in time. We always are.”

  “We have work hours around here,” she said.

  “And you probably go over them. Us, too. The job becomes your life. Only we don’t have to show up anywhere special.” He stood in defiance before her. “By the way, you don’t need to follow us around. You’re wasting your surveillance teams. You have our phone numbers, I presume.”

  “You know sensitive information. We can’t be too sure.”

  He squared up with her. “Listen to me when I speak, would you? We’re on the case now. You can relax. I gave my word.”

  Agent Mercer stood behind Agent Rafsky and sniggered under his breath. Dan tried to ignore him.

  “Besides,” Dan said, “you haven’t given us all the information. You haven’t included us in most of it, in fact. So, I’ll tell you this, if we’re going to help, you’d better keep us informed.”

  “Information goes both ways,” she said. It was apparent she wanted the last word, didn’t want to give up control.

  “If that’s what you want, I’m all for it.” He grabbed his backpack and walked toward her. “But it can get pretty weird.” He could feel her anger, nodded to Agent Mercer, and asked him for a couple cups of coffee.

  Jason collected his stuff and followed his dad as he walked past Agent Rofsky toward the meeting room they had occupied the day before.

  Agent Blake stood near the meeting room and opened the door for them to enter.

  Dan walked in first, then Jason, then Agent Rafsky, who closed the door behind her. When she turned back around with her finger up, Dan squelched her right away. “No! I’m here to work with you. It’s what you asked for and I’m going to deliver, but you can’t manhandle or bully me into doing it your way. You can’t tell me where to be or when to be there. You have to allow me the freedom to follow this in my own way or it’ll never work. I’ll tell you everything we do, just as you request.”

  “You’ll debrief every day?” she questioned.

  “If that’s the request.”

  “I don’t like not—”

  “Being in control. I know.” His voice softened and he took a few steps closer to her. He lowered his voice. “Rest assured, I don’t want to be in control either. I just need space. You’re still in control of everything that goes down here. And with regular debriefings, you’ll always know how things are going on our side.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her shoulders relaxed and her cheeks settled so that her eyes opened wider. Her eyes were green, her hair pulled back tightly, and she was shapely even in her pantsuit.

  “You have pretty eyes,” Dan said. Before she could respond, he raised his hand to stop her. “Just an observation.”

  Agent Mercer opened the door and carried in two cups of coffee and handed one to Dan and one to Jason. After he left the room, Agent Rafsky said, “Thank you for your reassurance, but it doesn’t change our relationship.”

  “How could it,” Dan said.

  “I’ll let you know what’s going on. I have a plan, too.”

  “You said that before, in the van yesterday. I’m eager to hear it.”

  All this time Jaso
n stood by quietly, until then. “Will we be able to talk with Koko again, now that she’s calmed down?”

  “That’ll be a problem.” Agent Rafsky’s face became stone again.

  Then Dan and Agent Rafsky said together, “She’s gone.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked Dan.

  He turned around and glanced at Jason. “I didn’t. He did.” He wandered over to one of the overstuffed chairs, turned around to sit down, and said, “I should have sensed it, too.” He shrugged. “Besides, I dreamed that I couldn’t find her.”

  “You didn’t tell me about your dream,” Jason said.

  Dan sat and drank some of his coffee. He made a face. “There must be a Starbucks around here somewhere, in fact, I saw one across the street.” He reached out and handed Jason the coffee. “I dreamed that we were in a densely populated place, looking for Koko. She could have been around any corner. The buildings were fairly rundown except for a few office buildings. Pretty straight-forward dream. There were snakes around, crawling across sidewalks, into brush near buildings, but none of them was her. Finally, before waking up, I told you, Jason, ‘It looks like she disappeared again.’ ”

  “After our talk last night. She was almost gone while with us,” Jason said. He looked at Dan from an angle. “You said ‘again.’ ”

  “It’s going to happen more than once.” Dan drew out his notebook to write it down.

  Agent Rafsky’s face looked blank, then questioning, then blank again.

  Dan peered up at her. “You wanted everything.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “Do you know what we do at all?” Dan asked.

  “I read through your file, but little of it made any sense.”

  He looked toward Jason and got out of the chair. “You explain it to her and I’ll go find someone to get us some real coffee.

  She didn’t try to stop him from leaving.

  Behind him, Jason started out with a few cryptic words, “We’re not your normal…”

  In the main offices, Dan was met by Agent Blake, the smaller, softer agent, to whom he explained the dilemma he was having. “Would you mind having someone go across the street and get a couple Vanilla Latte’s from Starbucks? Grande, one decaf, the other regular.”

  “Yeah, the coffee up here is pretty awful. I’ll take care of it.” His calm demeanor produced a quick smile.

  “You could get a Keurig®.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” Agent Blake said. “But, I’ll assure you, it’s not in our budget.”

  Another agent Dan didn’t recognize was walking by and said, “They have one upstairs.” He kept walking.

  Agent Blake nodded toward the man then told Dan, “I think he’s referring to the Starbucks upstairs. He’s dating one of the girls at a law firm up there. Maybe they have a Keurig.”

  “Office politics extended to building politics, I suppose.”

  “I’ll be back in a few,” Agent Blake said.

  When Dan got back into the room, Agent Rafsky was sitting at the table with Jason. She looked fairly relaxed as they chatted. “Isn’t this cozy,” Dan said.

  “We were talking about the job,” Jason said.

  “Without me?”

  “We just started. Agent Rafsky was explaining about how many small-time people they’ve put in jail the last few years. Not her, but the locals. It’s the size of this operation that got the FBI involved.”

  “Interesting,” Dan said.

  Agent Rafsky straightened up as Dan sat down and he knew that he might have to work through Jason a little more than he had in the past. His son, for some reason, had a different interaction with Agent Rafsky and Koko. A part of him didn’t want to admit it, but he might have to take a backseat part of the time, at least when it came to interfacing with the people involved. He could still do much of the work. The whole situation made him feel old.

  “Did you discuss Koko’s disappearance?”

  “Not yet,” Jason said. “Let’s catch him up, though.” He turned the conversation over to Agent Rafsky.

  “We’re calling the main few guys Herders because of the way they are herding the other pimps to bring girls to them. I see it as a drug operation. Only in this scenario the small timers push prostitution and make a little money, but then at a certain point can sell the girls off for a large, actually huge, amount. The girls don’t know much about it. They’re being videotaped, that’s all they know. But the tapes are live, the person taping is actually talking to the buyer, and then relaying what the girl is supposed to do directly. To the girls it looks as though it’s just a porn video or something, no sex, just nudity. They’re used to it by then. Over ninety seven percent of porn that involves Native American women is produced this way.”

  “Does Koko know that?” Dan asked.

  “Not until we brought her in,” Agent Rafsky said. “She still doesn’t know the whole story.”

  Dan took notes. He looked up for a second. “She could be in trouble.”

  “I thought you said she could disappear. Snake medicine and all that,” Agent Rafsky said.

  “You did explain this to her,” Dan said to Jason.

  “You asked me too.”

  “We’ll talk about her later. For now, what’s the plan?”

  “They operate out of an office building and a business called Growers Imports, which is why they can have different representatives from various countries constantly coming and going. A lot of times they use one of the boardrooms to show off the girls to the buyers. Our best guess. In fact, we have to guess a lot. Nothing is going our way. Blocked on all sides, information gets garbled…”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Jason said. “Too much has gone wrong and they think it could be, well, other-worldly.”

  “I didn’t say that exactly,” Agent Rafsky said.

  Dan broke in, “Where’s that building?”

  “Fife,” she said.

  “Puyallup,” Dan said. You never did tell us. Based on Koko’s name I thought it was Blackfeet, but they don’t have any reservation territory around here.”

  She ignored him. “Anyway, they’re looking to hire. It’s big business right now and several of the small-timers they work with, and who helped with the girls once they were inside the building, were picked up for drunkenness, drug charges, whatever. They need people to keep guard, keep the girls inside. That’s my understanding. Oh, and a translator.”

  “I don’t like the sounds of that,” Dan said. “So, you want us to infiltrate them? There may be a much easier way.”

  “Don’t tell me you think going into an altered state is going to help,” Agent Rafsky said.

  “Maybe you explained things too well.”

  Jason shrugged.

  Dan leaned back in his chair. “You want to pretend to be one of them so you can infiltrate their operations and break them down from the inside out.” Dan shook his head.

  “It’s a good plan,” Agent Rafsky said.

  “It’s always how you FBI Agents want to do it. Let’s say we try to come up with an idea where we don’t have to risk our necks.”

  “Sit in a chair and journey?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” he said.

  “I told him,” she pointed toward Jason, “I don’t believe in this stuff.”

  “You don’t have to believe for it to work.”

  Her expression changed from disbelief to frustration. “If that’s what you want to do, we’re going to do it nearby Growers Imports.”

  “I’m okay being close by, but if you don’t believe me why do you care?”

  “I’m trained to be on top of these things. Just in case another girl escapes I need to be there to pick her up. We have people in the area, so it will be business as usual.”

  “I’ll take it,” Dan said. “Looks like it’s as close to believing as you get for now.”

  Their coffees came and Agent Blake handed one to Dan and one to Jason. Dan removed the lid to
let his cool. He leaned the cup near Agent Rafsky. “Would you like some? I didn’t think…”

  “I like the office coffee,” she said, then got up and walked out behind Agent Blake.

  Dan leaned forward in the chair. “Thanks for filling her in. I don’t care if she doesn’t believe us, but at least now we don’t have to explain everything step-by-step.”

  “Right now, we’re up to nothing,” Jason said.

  “I know. I’m actually glad we’re going to get closer to the scene. I suspect we’re going to run into Koko again very soon.”

  “What happened to make you say again?” Jason asked.

  “You know. Anyway, we can’t lose her again if we don’t find her first.”

  “You think they’re going to take us there now?

  “Probably soon. We’ll need to get out of the hotel first, get our stuff.”

  Jason got up and paced over to the window and back. “This is going pretty slowly. Why do you think that is?”

  “She’s got something up her sleeve. She’s still holding back a lot of information and I just don’t know why. Unless it’s true that they’re blocked every step of the way. Or maybe I don’t understand her.”

  “You don’t understand a woman—surprise.”

  “I do fine with women,” he said. Then he looked around the room and shook his head. “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s going to move us to a place that’s bugged again. That’s why she wants to be close by.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Me either, until now,” Dan said.

  “Now what?”

  “Fuck these people. If they want to listen in, they can listen in.” Dan stood, walked to the table, and set his cup down. He shook his shoulders and head as though sloughing something off. He took a deep breath and opened his arms wide, palms up. He closed his eyes.”

  “Dad…?”

  In a very loud voice, Dan said, “Hey-yuh, hey-yuh,” letting the last word fade. Then he called out, “Dream bear, water snake, break down the boundaries. Let me in, let me in. Hey-yuh, hey-yuh. Obscure the liars from the truth, let only the pure find peace, open the great door. It is time… Hey-yuh, hey-yuh.” He opened his eyes and smiled at Jason who stood in front of him with his eyes wide and his face twisted into a questioning look. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, but before they could get to the door, Agent Mercer walked in.