The young black girl named MarKesha appeared in the doorway wearing her new white leather bustier. She saw us, our guns, and screamed.
A tenth of a second distraction was all I needed.
I swept my Glock from The Major’s forehead to Anna Green Eyes, fired twice.
She fell. I released The Major and kicked Green Eyes’s gun away.
The Major quickly reached into a desk drawer and had a 9mm half way out when I brought my Glock back to her.
“Seems Anna has more value,” I said. “You, on the other hand?”
With my gun I gestured for The Major to take a seat in the middle of her sofa. She did, keeping her hands flat on top of her thighs.
I knelt by the wounded Anna and said, “Unless you’ve got a doctor client that can get here in fifteen minutes, you’re gonna bleed out. Tell me what I want to know and I’m sure The Major will get you help.”
“Fuck her!” The Major spat.
“No, fuck you, ya skeezy dinosaur!” Anna replied.
“Okay, maybe I was wrong,” I said to Green Eyes. “Either way, you’re done. I’ll help you as much as I can. But you’re cashed out, so tell me what I want to know—”
“You tell him, we all die!” The Major shouted.
Contrary to popular belief, most people who’ve never been shot before and suddenly find themselves with a hot bullet burrowing through their flesh will likely give up any information required to staunch the pain: bank PINs, where grandma’s jewels are hidden, battalion coordinates. With a through-and-through bullet wound gushing blood on her right side, Anna Green Eyes told me what I wanted to hear.
I performed quick triage on her, enough so she wouldn’t bleed out. Then I said to The Major, “Show me where you keep the women.”
“Go to hell, you bastard.”
I smiled, pulled out my phone and punched a number.
“White Girl?” I said. “Listen, it’s—yeah, I know I’m an asshole—listen, is Duke in?”
“Okay!” The Major said. “Jesus! Just don’t—please!”
I disconnected. “How ’bout that tour.”
Thirty-five
“I have two master’s degrees,” The Major said with a renewed sense of superiority. She led me down a wide first floor staircase to the “dungeon” where the majority of her business was conducted. “A degree in psychology from Northern Michigan and a degree in pharmacology from Miami University. Does this surprise you, Mr. Snow?”
“No,” I said, keeping my gun trained on her back. “A lot of shitty people have degrees.”
The eight second-floor private rooms near her office were reserved for the crème de la crème of The Major’s S&M clientele. Black Card members with money to piss away on even stranger, more specialized sexual proclivities.
Downstairs was another matter.
Below the first-floor leather pub chairs, bottles of eighteen-year-old single malt whiskey, Waterford crystal, side tables bearing copies of The National Review and The American Spectator was “the Dungeon.”
“Some people don’t physically react the way others do,” The Major said, intent on educating me in the art and science of sadomasochism. “They have deeply recessed psychological and physical pleasure and pain receptors. As a result, they have higher pain and pleasure thresholds. Their sexual needs are mostly normal, but they simply can’t achieve an endorphin release unless these higher pain and pleasure thresholds are met. It’s about the very human need to feel a transcendental physical release. We’re professionals, Mr. Snow. We provide a needed service. We know what each client needs to achieve an acceptable level of euphoria.”
“Wow,” I said as we reached the Dungeon “That’s very interesting. You know what else is interesting? The physics of bees in flight—but you don’t hear me fucking yammering on about it. Now move.”
Oddly enough, I was beginning to gain an appreciation that such a place could successfully exist in socially and politically conservative Michigan.
God Bless America.
The Dungeon, all black tile and flickering LED torch lamps, was expansive and subdivided into suites. As we passed one of the suites, a door opened and a tall woman with spiked white hair emerged, leaving the door slightly open.
“Lilith,” The Major said. “Everything good?”
“He’s ‘kiting’ now,” Lilith said. “I’m gonna warm his bottle.”
The Major felt obligated to briefly explain to me what ‘kiting’ meant: The human body and mind as a “kite” lifted high on sustained endorphin release through the stimulus of pain.
I told her I didn’t give a shit.
Before Lilith closed the door, I glanced in the room: tied to a large horizontally suspended metal tube circle, dressed in a diaper and displaying a number of welts on his chest was the guy I got my evening sports report from on one of the local TV stations.
The Major finally came to a black metal door with a keypad.
She pressed five numbers. There was the heavy chunking sound of a lock disengaging.
She opened the door and we entered.
There were no vases full of flowers here. No framed artwork or leather pub chairs. It was a forty-by-forty concrete room with one sink, a toilet with no walls and twenty filthy cots. Hanging off the railings of two cots were handcuffs. It smelled of sweat, damp concrete and unflushed urine. There were empty two-liter bottles of soda pop and fast food wrappers strewn on the floor, along with a large waste can overflowing with empty water bottles, and paper towels and soiled panties. A spot on the concrete floor looked like someone had tried to scrub blood away.
“Jesus,” I said, looking around at the hovel.
“I was going to—there were plans—to make this more—accommodating,” The Major said.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“We’re giving them a life!” The Major suddenly bellowed. “These women! What the hell else would they have? Hiding from immigration? Always on the run! At least now they’ll make more money in a day than most people see in a goddamn month! A fucking year!”
“You made choices for them nobody has the right to make.”
I gestured with my Glock for her to move toward the toilet. I grabbed a set of handcuffs from one of the cots.
“You’re a stupid fuck!” she yelled as I handcuffed her to the toilet plumbing. “You don’t know the shitstorm you’re starting! They’ll come for you! They’ll cut your balls off and feed ’em to ya! You hear me?”
Leaving the room, I pushed the heavily insulated door closed.
Then using the butt of my gun, I hammered the keypad into a useless collection of broken LED lights, disconnected wires and smashed circuit boards.
Several women in various stages of S&M dress emerged from their suites.
“The fuck’s going on?” one of the women asked as I passed.
“Toilet’s backed up,” I said making my way back down the dark hallway, past the screams, howls, moans and whip lashes.
Back upstairs, there was a blood trail through the foyer to the back of the house. I looked out at the four-car garage. One of the garage doors was up, the garage itself empty.
I was just about to walk out of the kitchen when I noticed something small and shiny on the floor.
A green contact lens.
Walking out to my recently acquired Harley bike, I called Tomás and filled him in on what had transpired.
“Holy shit,” Tomás said. “And you went without me?”
“I didn’t think your heart could take it, mi amigo.”
I gave him a download on the information I’d just acquired and how we had to act fast.
“I’m in,” Tomás said without hesitation. “But seems like we’re gonna need more than us for this one. Makes me wish Frank was here.”
“Me, too.”
“What about the FBI lady?”
<
br /> “How ’bout we discuss this in front of your gun locker?”
“Now you’re talkin’, cabrón.”
Thirty-six
“So, let me see if I’ve got this right,” Tomás said. “Some new organization’s running rogue ICE units and neo-Nazi biker gangs to grab up girls and move ’em out of the city while they move new girls in?”
“Yep.”
“And the girls they’re moving out pay for the new girls coming in?”
“Uh huh.”
“Why?”
“That part I haven’t quite worked out,” I said. “One or the other makes some sort of perverse sense. But opposite and simultaneous paths along a single pipeline? The rogue ICE units look like they’re only responsible for moving women out. Maybe double-dipping selling some of the women as drug mules. But who’s moving new women in—and why?”
“I think the ‘why’ is pretty obvious,” Tomás said. “Prostitution. But this? This is a big undertaking just to run a few new whores through strip clubs, casinos and hotels.”
“Let’s agree to call them sex-workers. Being forced into selling sex—or choosing to sell sex—doesn’t make these women ‘whores.’ It makes them victims, survivors or entrepreneurs.”
“You gotta stop watching public TV,” Tomás said. “How’d Barney Olsen fit in?”
“This organization probably ran ICE and biker payments through Olsen,” I said. “But let’s say he starts skimming payments and women to feed his own habits. With the heat two dead women brought, this new organization probably had no choice but to disappear Olsen. There’s something very—antiseptic—about whoever these people are.”
“Guess we’ll know more about these fuckers tonight.”
“Guess so.”
We sat in old webbed aluminum lawn chairs in front of his open gun locker. Elena was back to breathing fire, leading a DACA sit-in at City Hall. The folks at City Hall were damned if they knew what to do about the sit-in.
Then again, they were damned if they knew what to do about anything on any given day.
“I’ve never asked you this before,” I said while admiring Tomás’s newly acquired Winchester SX4 rifle. “But exactly why do you have so damned many guns?”
“I ever tell you my pops got robbed at gunpoint?” Tomás said.
“No.”
“Oh, yeah,” Tomás said. “My mama, too. Me and my sister was with ’em both times. All we had was migrant cash. We didn’t know nothin’ about banks. What migrant does? A week’s worth of back-breaking work—” he snapped his fingers “—gone. Both times. The looks on their faces—like they’d failed each other. Failed us. Robbers even made us take our shoes off—the ‘wetback wallet.’ Nothin’ like lookin’ into your parents’ eyes and they look back at you like they failed you. Looking down the barrel of a gun is when you realize what real power looks like. When you realize how valuable life is. And how quick and cheap it can be.” Tomás took a long pause. Then he said, “Your mom ever tell you stories about the four sun gods?”
“No.”
“Creepy old Aztec stories about how the universe was created and destroyed four times by four suns. Four times people have inhabited the earth. And four times, wiped out by the fifth sun. All because the gods grew jealous of each other. Started pissin’ on each others’ golden boots. The fifth sun rides in, wipes out the old gods and everything they created and ushers in a new age. I look around, Octavio, this ‘new age’ ain’t that cool. The gods are at it again and we’re smack dab in the middle of their pissing match. You know I ain’t much for ghost stories or religion. But if the new ‘gods’ are thinking about catching me unaware and in the middle, I’m unloading every weapon I got. Every bullet. Every clip.”
Tomás and I talked about tonight’s mission and the conflagration we were soon to set off. I hadn’t managed to get much out of Anna Green Eyes, but what I did get from her while she bled on the floor of the Major’s study was vital: a freighter—the Federal Shoreland—docking tonight, the Nielsen Emery Terminal at the Port of Detroit. An iron ore freighter taking on fuel and crew supplies.
And eight women.
Seven or eight well-armed men guarding the ship and human cargo.
That’s what Anna Green Eyes said I could expect.
“You won’t even get past the fucking gate,” she’d said to me. “These guys chew Boy Scouts like you up for breakfast!”
“Well, they’d better come hungry.”
If Anna Green Eyes said seven or eight well-armed men, then Tomás and I had to be strapped for fifteen or more.
“You figure they’re BMC biker crews?” Tomás said.
“Yep. But they’re still just the wranglers. The hired help.”
“Still,” Tomás said. “Ain’t nothin’ sweeter than kickin’ Nazi ass.”
Once we selected primary weapons and ammo, we loaded secondary artillery into the covered bed of his everyday Ford-150. Then we went to my house.
I pulled up Google Earth and we took a detailed look at the Nielsen Emery Terminal, a sprawling shipyard with two freighter loading docks, two berths for repair, stationary cranes and rail loading gantries. There were stacks of freight containers and five long, low corrugated metal buildings where various and sundry goods and equipment were stored. A sixteen-foot-tall fence topped with razor wire ran the serpentine one-mile length of the terminal. There were two entries with roll-away gates large enough for trucks, and a gate security booth manned 24/7.
“It’s possible they’ve added security or moved things around,” I said, staring at the laptop screen. “No telling how old these photos are. But I’m guessing nothing’s changed much. They rarely do at freight yards. Only hang-up we could face—”
“You mean besides getting shot?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Besides getting shot. This is a Foreign Trade Zone shipyard. And that means some areas are outside of US Customs jurisdiction.”
“Which means they’re out of US cop jurisdiction,” Tomás said. We were quiet for a moment. Then Tomás said, “We really are flying by our ass-hairs on this one.” He squinted at the overhead photo of the docks and said, “Well, we can’t go in here on account of there’s water. We got no boat and I ain’t fuckin’ swimmin’. So, it’s looking like the southeastern security gate. How many cameras you figure?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen,” I said, “manned by a couple of regular Joes just trying to make this month’s mortgage payment. Our guys are probably huddled around Dock 1 and any freight containers on the dock ready for loading.”
“That’s where the women are?”
“That’s where the women are.”
We gave each other a fleeting look, leaving volumes unspoken: Volumes that men and women for millennia had written in blood. The stratagems and campaigns, insurgencies and wars, lost soldiers’ names and riderless horses, all covered over by indifferent epochs of sand.
There are things you come back from. And things from which you never return.
“Time?” Tomás finally said.
“Be here at nine,” I said.
“You wanna have dinner with Elena and me?”
“No,” I said. “You guys go ahead.”
“What are you gonna do?”
I was going to do exactly what Tomás planned to do: Immerse myself in the sight and sound, smell and feel of someone I hoped would remember me should I this very night pass from existence. Someone who would accept me into the DNA of their memory and add me as another thread in the diaphanous fabric of their soul.
No, not Tatina.
She already knew my soul in both what was said and unsaid, felt and anticipated.
Why give her a reason to worry six thousand miles away.
No, Tatina would know how much she had meant to me. She would receive a cashier’s check in a bouquet of roses, an Octavio Paz poem—“Touch”�
�and a note that simply read, “I’m sorry.” Money doesn’t make loss or mourning any easier. But it still provides a bit of cushion at the end of the fall.
The ladies of Café Consuela’s agreed to stay open late for me.
I offered a cash incentive.
“You think we wouldn’t do this for you without your money?” Martiza said before ordering me to sit in the restaurant’s lone booth.
“Never insult me with your money again, Octavio.”
Sitting across from me in the small restaurant’s solitary booth were Jimmy Radmon and Lucy Three Rivers.
“So, what’s the occasion, Sherlock?” Lucy said.
“No reason,” I said. “Just thought it was as good a time as any for the three of us to sit down and have a meal together. And no, this isn’t me matchmaking. Whatever happens between you two is your business.”
Jimmy and Lucy gave each other a nervous look before bringing their eyes back to me.
“Can I have a margarita?” Lucy said. “I mean, I know I’m only nineteen and . . .”
“I’m not a proponent for underage drinking,” I said. “But in this case, yeah, sure. Regular or strawberry?”
“They make strawberry margaritas?” Lucy said, her eyes lighting up.
I looked up at Martiza and, in Spanish, I said, “A strawberry margarita. Light on the tequila.”
She smiled and nodded.
“Just a Coke for me, ma’am,” Jimmy said.
We didn’t order. We simply ate whatever the ladies of Café Consuela’s made for us: Chicken Posole soup with homegrown poblano peppers and fresh radishes; queso empanadas; the house grilled shrimp and blackened salmon Quesadas; chicken and grilled vegetable tacos with homemade chipotle sauce; fresh guacamole and chips.
I supplied the salsa.
“You’re learning,” Martiza said after tasting half a teaspoon. “Si—you’re learning.”
This I took as high praise indeed.
After dinner, I took Jimmy aside and said, “You still got that envelope I gave you last year?”
“Yessir,” Jimmy said.
“Good.”
“I ain’t never opened it,” Jimmy said. “You told me not to unless you—I know what it is, Mr. Snow. And you already done did enough for me. I don’t never want to open that envelope.”
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