Shadow Hand

by Sacchi Green

  “Sixteen, at least!” Cleo’s fake indignation held a hint of relief.

  “Can’t we just watch from the parking lot and follow the obvious Johns coming out? Any guys who go in and come right back out looking like randy roosters should lead us right to the spot.”

  “Mags is right,” Ash said. “That’s the safest way, and safety is our highest priority this time. We don’t just want to get a few girls out; we want to know where they’re kept, follow the vans back so we can keep an eye on those places.”

  “Can’t we get a few girls out before they have to put out?” Cleo was perched on the corner of the desk. “I can fix a magnetic gadget to attach and track the bad guys’ vans without following them. Kind of like a bugged GPS.”

  “I could go inside the party joint,” Twelve said. “I’d warn the girls and tell them to get in our van.” Five heads began to shake. She was small, and looked about fifteen if you didn’t look too closely; then you’d see faint lines around eyes burning with a fierce intensity you had to hope was sane. “Really. I’ve known guys like the ones that dig these things. There’s always some that want a girl to be young and skinny and kind of scared looking. ‘Course, sometimes skinny girls have real sharp knees and know how to use ’em.” She looked around. “Plus, I’m the only one with hair long enough to blend in.” She patted her wispy blonde ponytail.

  “No.” Ash’s take-charge voice made everyone straighten up. “Not this time. We may come to that, but we need to know much more. First comes surveillance at the bar, and following some of the customers to the site. Then we watch for the delivery vans to arrive, if they haven’t already, and look for a chance to plant the magnetic bugs on them. If they don’t hang around until the end, we wait for them to come back to collect. No risking the troops when we have so little information.”

  “But what if we see a real good opportunity to snatch a girl or two?” Twelve asked.

  “Check with me first. Or Cleo.”

  Val shook her head. “Sounds mighty chancy. Car chases, girl-snatching, danger every step of the way.”

  “So you’re in,” Cleo said with a straight face.

  “God, yes! Can’t tell you how much I’ve missed danger!”

  Chapter 8

  They found the party place, a country estate that had seen better days but at least had plenty of parking space along a wide, curving drive. Two white vans and a gray one were at the far end of a narrow uphill driveway, each with a thug leaning against it. Cleo figured she and Ash together could take out at least two of the thugs, but that would raise too much noise and frenzy. So would Ash doing some long-distance takedown.

  Ash parked the van they’d bought out of sight behind some shrubbery while Val’s truck waited near the highway end of the drive. Mags had reluctantly remained back in Boston, tending bar and staying available in case anything went so wrong they needed help, like ambulances. Or lawyers. Or bail. Or all of the above.

  “So much for our planning,” Ash griped, looking uphill at the guarded vans. “Maybe we should just call this a trial run.”

  “We can still get the vans bugged if somebody makes enough of a diversion.” Twelve toyed with the case of magnetized tracking gadgets. “I could walk up there crying, saying my sister is in there.”

  “Forget it. You go back to the truck with Val and Jana. Cleo and I have, ah, Special Forces training. If we can sneak up on the enemy in the desert, doing it here with grass and trees should be a cinch. We’ll get those bugs attached.”

  Twelve looked pissed, but handed Cleo the case and trudged back down the driveway.

  “Special Forces?” Cleo’s eyebrows lifted.

  “I came mighty close to saying ‘ninja.’ C’mon. We can do this as long as the magnet part hitting the van doesn’t make much noise.”

  “It’s a magnetized strip as flexible as plastic, but be careful anyway.”

  Cleo did feel like a ninja as they made their way through the grounds in the dusk until they had a reasonable view of the rear panel of one of the vans. She held up a bug, Ash focused, and it was gone, landing gently but firmly where nobody was likely to see it at night. A few more maneuverings, and each van had two little extra bits of technology stealing a ride. The occasional conversational exchanges of the guards, mostly dirty jokes followed by their guttural laughter, were undisturbed. Ash and Cleo, however, were disturbed when they got back to their van to find Twelve twenty feet in front with a video camera, filming the house and surroundings.

  “I need to keep records of all this,” Twelve said, as though it were self-evident. “You never know when you might need them, or when something wild might happen.”

  As if she’d just clicked a link, something did happen. Sounds of screaming and yelling and general uproar erupted.

  Twelve pointed toward it with her camera. Cleo vaulted into the driver’s seat. The engine leapt to life with a feral roar, and Ash yanked the door open just in time to get in. As their van raced up the drive, a young girl stumbled downhill, screaming, sobbing, weaving, while another girl yelled and punched and kicked at the goon in pursuit. The other punks cheered him on.

  “Ash!” Cleo shouted, veering as the crying girl tripped. Before she could fall, Ash’s invisible grip steadied her and she staggered onward. Then the other girl, tossed aside by their pursuer, nearly fell but recovered and ran after him, a second goon now coming on fast behind her. Ash focused on one guy and then the other, lifting each a foot or so and heaving them into the thick shrubbery lining the drive.

  Cleo slowed, braked hard, and spun the van around so it was side-on to the fleeing girl. “Grab her!”

  Ash swung the door open. “Get in!” she called, and girl seemed to leap into her arms, although her legs flailed as though she were still running. “It’s okay, you’re safe now,” Ash insisted, but the struggling only increased.

  “She thinks we’re just another white van.” Cleo spun the vehicle again to point uphill. “I’m going back for the other one.”

  The second girl stood her ground as though daring Cleo to hit her, springing aside when Cleo slowed, and pounding her fists on the van’s side. Ash made the rear side panel slide open, and the girl jumped in under her own power.

  “Don’t hurt her!” she gasped, then grunted as Ash heaved the still struggling girl over the seatback onto her.

  “Tell her it’s okay. We’re here to help. Just hang on.” Another swerve headed them downhill.

  “Watch for Val’s truck!” Cleo yelled out the window as they passed Twelve, still fervently filming it all. Up the hill, the gray van was revving its motor, ready to follow.

  Ash got on the phone to Val. “Move out fast, pick up Twelve by the service driveway, and try to follow us. Block any gray or white vans pursuing us on the highway as best you can without getting in trouble. We have passengers.”

  “Roger that. We got Twelve already.” Val’s truck, with Twelve hanging out the window recording, was behind them before the gray van turned onto the main road.

  “Get Twelve the hell inside!”

  “Roger that in spades!”

  Cleo wove deftly through the evening traffic. “Why did they have to build the football stadium twenty miles from Boston? I don’t know the side roads around here.”

  “If they look like catching us I could try—”

  “No!” Cleo knew Ash had the power to toss the pursuing van over onto the roadside, but she might have to be in real emergency mode to work up enough adrenaline, or whatever it was that fueled her. This wasn’t an emergency. Yet. “Think of the unintended consequences of a car crash on the highway!”

  “Right.” Ash turned to check on their passengers. Cleo dared a quick rearview glance as well. The hysterical girl was quiet now, held tight in her friend’s arms. The friend looked back at Ash with challenge in her eyes.

  “Who the fuck are you guys? What do you want fr
om us?”

  “We’re just getting you away from those scumbags. If you have someplace safe to go, fine, we’ll make sure you get there. If you don’t, we’ll find someplace for you. Is she hurt? Does she need medical treatment?”

  “Just a first aid kit. Scrapes and bruises and a nasty cut, but not bad enough for stitches.” Her tone had moderated, but she was still wary.

  “How about you? That’s quite a bruise on your cheek.”

  “We get those all the time, and worse. Nobody cares as long as our faces don’t get too marked up for too long. This time I’d be in for a beating, though, for fighting and getting myself bruised.”

  Cleo, in fleeting glances, knew by Ash’s clenched fists that she was itching for some target to attack.

  “Tell Val to veer off at this next exit and meet us at the bar,” she shouted. Ash managed to phone those directions before Cleo yelled again, even louder, “Hang on, everybody!”

  The gray van was passing them, threatening to shove them off the road. Cleo slowed just enough to let it by. It edged in front, angled to cut them off, and Cleo braked abruptly, swung into a controlled skid, crossed the highway and the median strip with huge thumps as their wheels went up and over the low curbing, and sped down the road in the opposite direction.

  An exit onto a country road, a series of turns onto smaller roads, and they were safe from pursuit. Cleo pulled off in the lot of a closed gas station. “Everybody all right?” She could see in the rearview mirror that the girls were huddled together as low as they could get.

  “I guess nobody broke anything, anyway,” Ash said. “But is our van all right?”

  “I’m about to check.” Cleo got out and circled the vehicle, inspecting the axles and suspension, and then the wheels and tires, though she already knew by the feel. “She’s fine. I wouldn’t ask anything of her I wasn’t sure she could handle.”

  Half an hour later, they reached the familiar streets of Boston. Val and Jana’s truck was parked in the alley behind the bar, next to the back entrance to the office.

  Once inside, Jana examined the girls with a nurse’s expertise and an extra dose of gentleness. She shooed Cleo and Ash out of the room when the girl who’d first run began to tremble. Twenty minutes later she beckoned them back in.

  “I’ve arranged to take them to the shelter tonight, and tomorrow I’ll be notified if they need any more help from us. Lida here,” she motioned toward the fiercely protective girl, “says she knows somewhere she and Annie can go, but it’s a long way away.”

  “You’ll be okay?” Ash went closer and took the hand Lida held out to her.

  “Physically,” Jana confirmed. “But…there’s no telling.”

  Cleo, both tense and exhausted, tuned out their conversation. Her hands felt like they were still clutching the steering wheel, interpreting every jolt and vibration of the van. She would have paced if there’d been room in the office, but there wasn’t, so she headed for Mags and the coffee machine set next to a microwave oven in a corner, and after a few gulps of the hot brew she asked, “Where’s Twelve?”

  Mags jerked her head toward the back of her desk. Twelve sat cross-legged on the floor behind it with her camera plugged into her computer. Cleo couldn’t see much from that angle, but she could tell that Twelve was viewing her videos, tapping out a quick rhythm on the keyboard and nodding from time to time.

  Suddenly, as Cleo watched, Twelve stiffened. Her tapping abruptly ceased. She looked up, saw Cleo, stared at her intently, looked back at the computer screen, then surveyed Ash across the room with the same searching look. In less than a minute she had the computer shut down and was up and away out the back door.

  Next morning, the six crusaders met again in Mags’s office.

  “Well, they found out at the shelter what was going on, what made them run.” Jana paused. “This isn’t easy to hear, but we need to. The younger one, Annie, would disassociate from herself, from her mind, when she was forced to service customers. In fact, she’s been kind of drifting full time lately. The other one, Lida, looked out for her as much as she could. Last night, Annie was taken by three guys together, all drunk, in a room with a mirror on the ceiling. What they were doing to her…well, Lida wouldn’t say, but the boiling point came when one of them threw up on Annie. She suddenly woke up, in a sense, saw herself and the scumbags in the mirror, and snapped. She made a commotion and ran for it. Lida shoved her own John into a full bathtub—he was fucking her in the bathroom—and ran after her.” Jana paused, rubbing her eyes. “The rest you saw.”

  “We got them out totally by accident,” Cleo said. “But maybe, if word gets around, other girls will be watching for us.”

  Twelve had been uncharacteristically silent. Now she declared, emphatically, “We need to advertise. And we need a logo. A brand. And a catchy name.” She looked defiantly at Ash. “I thought maybe something like ‘The Avenging Angels,’ and we could have a big decal of angel wings on the side of the van, covered over when we don’t want to be recognized, and then we could whisk off the cover dramatically, and…”

  “Not angels.” Ash said.

  Cleo was relieved that Ash wasn’t quashing the whole idea. Yet. “We can think of something else,” she said soothingly. “Maybe just words, like ‘Here to Help,’ or ‘Freedom from Sex Traffickers,’ or, I don’t know, something shorter.” She met Ash’s eyes, took a deep breath, and felt like she was diving off a ledge. “Something like ‘The Shadow Hand,’ with a silhouette of a dark hand. I dunno. Something like that.”

  Ash was silent for a long minute. Then she turned to Twelve. “Come by our place around two o’clock and you and I and Cleo can discuss this.” Then, to the others, “We’ll all get together here tomorrow night, if that’s okay with you, Mags.”

  Twelve arrived just past two o’clock. She seemed excited and nervous and didn’t look Ash directly in the eye. Cleo’s skin tingled. She guessed what Twelve was going to say next.

  “Guys. I’ve been going through the videos from last night, and…well, I guess you know what—”

  Ash cut her off. “Does anyone else know?”

  Twelve took a deep breath. “We all do. It’s pretty clear. Annie was lifted into the air by an invisible force and flung into the van. The tracker devices suddenly appeared on the vans when you guys were nowhere near close enough to them. What the whole gang wants to know is…what exactly do you two mean when you talk about ‘Special Forces’?”

  Cleo held her breath, waiting for Ash’s reaction.

  When it came, Ash’s tone was remarkably mild. “You saw something like…a shadow hand? Is that what you mean?”

  “You got it! I won’t tell anybody outside the group, but we really need to trust each other and know what we have to work with.” Twelve seemed unfazed by the revelation of supernatural powers in her friends. She saw how Cleo was looking at her, and recited, “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

  She saw their blank faces. “That’s Shakespeare. From Hamlet. Talking mostly about ghosts, but it fits. For instance, I can do things with computers and other tech that go beyond anything that can be explained. I don’t complain, don’t get a tech superhero complex, I just go with the flow. So one of you—I’m betting Ash, ’cause Cleo was driving—can pick up a running girl and haul her into a van without reaching out and physically grabbing her. Not to mention sticking magnetic bugs on vans while much too far away.”

  Cleo, still tense, watched Ash’s face. Denying Twelve’s discovery, making a big deal of it, would just encourage more snooping. But Ash had apparently decided to go with the flow, too. “Speaking of magnetic bugs,” she said mildly, “let’s see what they can tell us.”

  Twelve took the hint and suddenly it was back to business. Maps were unrolled and marked. Three different locations. Twelve tapped the map with her fingertip. “This is a ru
ndown motel. I ran past it this morning. ‘No Vacancy,’ back lot parking with a six-foot-high wire fence.” She ran her finger along the highway to another marker. “Motel number two, on the south shore. I looked it up on Google Street View. Also ‘No Vacancy,’ and gate fencing again.” At the last marker she hesitated. “Val checked this one out earlier today. She says it’s an abandoned warehouse near the airport. She saw two white vans parked out back.”

  That evening, the meeting in Mags’s office centered more around these new locations than on Ash’s talents. Her curt explanation about a mysterious virus she’d caught in the desert was accepted, if not exactly believed. She did a few no-hands tricks to show a little of what she could do, tossing around barstools, juggling beer steins, untying Jana’s shoelaces and drawing them out of her shoes to twist and twirl in a spiraling dance in the air. Their friends laughed and applauded and did their best to show this was cool with them.

  For her part, Cleo was as impressed as anybody. Ash really had been getting in some practice while they’d been apart.

  “Some weird shit over there in the desert,” Val said with a wink. “I always hoped to stumble across Ali Baba’s cave, but no such luck.” And then, turning serious, “Anything you want to throw at me, Ash, I’ll catch.”

  Jana nodded and put her arm around Val’s substantial shoulders. They had Ash’s back.

  Mags didn’t say much until the others had gone. After shifting and straightening the papers on her desk, she finally, in an uncharacteristically low tone, said what was on her mind.

  “Back in Idaho, west of the Bitterroots—” she looked briefly up at Ash, who knew that country. “A long, long time ago, my Gran used to take me to visit an old Nez Percé woman, a friend from back when they were the only kids for miles. Gran’s folks were about the only ones farming that stretch. Anyway, that woman could do things—not exactly like you, Ash, or not that I know of. Mostly things with water. She could make it go uphill, or jump up in a cloud of droplets that made rainbows in the sun, and she always knew where to dig to find a well. There were other folks who claimed to be able to do that last one, but her way was different, more like calling the water to where it hadn’t been before.”