by Sacchi Green
Mags paused, shrugged, and looked from Ash to Cleo and back. “’Course, when I got too old to believe in such things I chalked them up to tricks, or maybe hypnotism. Gran told me never to tell anybody about it, and I never did.” She paused, seemed about to say something more, then came out with it. “Gran was the only one who ever believed in me. I just want to thank you for letting me believe in her again, and her friend. I don’t think they’d mind me telling you. Just one thing, though.” The square jaw lifted, and the ice-blue eyes raked them. “Don’t even think about leaving me back here every time! Next time I go along, too, and get my fair share of the fun.”
Chapter 9
Twelve had been busy with her “creative” online work, putting together a video with a few shots of the party house and the vans and the running girls, from enough of a distance that nobody could be identified.
There was a long shot of the front door, though, showing the street number, fuzzy but not impossible to read if you really tried. There was also a shot of the street sign down the road. She gave it an enticing clickbait tag, “Sex Slaves Freed by Mysterious Strangers,” and added text emphasizing the proliferation of sex traffickers in the Boston area.
“No telling how many guys who see this will go looking to get some for themselves,” she admitted, “but you still need to raise awareness. Folks might start to speak up if they see something suspicious, and trapped girls could be watching now for a chance to escape.” She’d photoshopped an image of a black, open hand on the side of their van, with the words “The Shadow Hand” curving beneath it. Then, in a comment, she’d tagged a couple of local newspapers and the state police.
She showed it to Ash before posting, pseudonymously, and Ash, to Cleo’s amazement, let her do it. “We need to use everything we have, as long as we can. This is like cheating the casinos, only worse. We’ll have to move along one of these days, or be gunned down.”
Their next target was the motel on the south shore. They chose a day when Twelve had info on another party and got there a little before sunset. The location had once been a main road near the coast, now bypassed by the superhighway, but even in its best days, the motel had been strictly low budget. From the sad remnants of a fake windmill and bridge, Cleo judged that the miniature golf course out front must have been pretty cheesy.
Mags, who’d gone so far as to close the bar for the night so she could come along, insisted on being the scout on this mission. The others waited with the van and Val’s truck and Mags’s jeep around the corner of a boarded-up former carwash. Between that cinder-block building and the motel, a stretch of scrubby pine saplings had grown up, too sparse to hide a vehicle but enough to provide some cover for Mags, who went ahead on foot.
Twelve got antsy waiting. “Ash, put me on top of the van! I want a better view for recording.”
Ash’s look would have made a presumptuous Army recruit shake in her boots. Cleo almost felt sorry for Twelve.
Ash was silent for a moment or two, and only Twelve’s muted squeak alerted Cleo and the others that the girl was very slowly rising through the air, up, up, just past the top of the van, then horizontally onto the flat roof of the carwash. Twelve stumbled to her knees and quickly stood, her mouth twisting in disgust. “This place is covered with seagull shit!”
“Now you have a seagull’s view. Sit down and deal with it. And be quiet.” To Val, Ash murmured, “You folks get her down when we’ve got what we came for.”
Mags signaled just then that vans were being loaded with girls. Ash went to join her, and Cleo followed with the rifle she’d brought along just in case.
One van was backed up close to a service entrance and girls were being hustled quickly into it by a pair of guards. It was hard to tell, but Cleo thought at least six were loaded by the time the van’s doors closed. Another backed up, and when the process had been repeated both headed for the gate, which swung open by remote control. A third van was parked outside the fence by the motel’s front entrance.
“Go get our van and truck up closer,” Ash told Cleo. “Make sure that coil of rope Val has in the truck is accessible.”
Cleo brought their van up to the edge of the pines just as the second transport vehicle cleared the gate. All at once, the sound of grinding metal sliced through the air, and the leader’s front left wheel twisted ninety degrees sideways. Then the second van spun sideways too, and the gate clanged shut behind them. When both drivers got out, they were shoved hard together by an invisible force, and before they could recover a heavy rope came at them through the air like a great flying serpent, trussing them together and knocking them to the ground, where all they could do was roll around on the gritty pavement.
Val ran for the first van, sliding open the side panel and yelling for everybody inside to get the hell out. Mags did the same for the second van.
Some girls moved quickly, seizing the opportunity for escape. Others were sluggish, as if in shock, or, Cleo supposed, already drugged up for the night’s activities. One was being more or less carried by another, and not as many came out of the first van as had gone in. Cleo realized for the first time that this rescue business was more complicated than she’d thought. What if somebody didn’t want to be rescued? Sex work as a choice was a woman’s own business, wasn’t it? As long as it really was a choice?
That thought was ripped away by the tingling of Cleo’s scalp, a warning of incoming fire.
“Get down!” she called even as gunshots sounded from the motel windows. She crouched with her rifle behind the cover of the van’s front tires, returning fire.
Ash began to mentally lift the girls sprawled on the ground and hurl them unceremoniously into the rescue van while Cleo kept firing sporadically, pinning down the shooter in the motel until Val hollered the all clear and she sprang back into the driver’s seat.
The remaining van outside the front entrance had started to move in pursuit. Ash called out to the rescued girls, “Any more of you in that one? Any others we can get out?”
“No!” came the response, so Ash flipped the pursuing van on its side, leapt up into the front passenger’s seat, and they were off. A quick stop to transfer the girls to Val’s pick-up and Mags’s jeep, and Cleo drove Ash in a different direction in case of further pursuit. “How many laws have we broken tonight?” Cleo called to Val as they parted. Val just shrugged and grinned.
Cleo took the long way back, along the meandering scenic route, where once in a while the bay could be glimpsed between run-down vacation homes through the gathering dusk. She could sense the tension that still gripped Ash, and didn’t think it was just worry about the ethics of the nonconsensual rescuing of people. She waited, with one hand on Ash’s thigh, and felt the moment when Ash took a deep breath and came out with the truth.
“I wanted to smash more things back there! It’s scary how much I wanted to throw those vans around, bang them together, flip them upside down. I couldn’t do it with some girls still inside. But when they started with the guns… I wanted so hard to smash them into tiny shards I could barely see straight. The sound of clanging metal, the surge of power, the rush of it all.”
Cleo felt her way cautiously. The last time—well, the only time—she’d seen Ash hurl a heavy vehicle high in the air, the effort had drained her so badly that she’d almost passed out. Granted, tipping the vans had been far less dramatic, but Ash’s strength hadn’t seemed to be affected at all. More like enhanced. She’d changed since the desert. “Do you still wish you’d gone that far?”
“Yes. In my gut, at least, I do. It’s like…like getting almost to orgasm, so close, sooo close. And then, suddenly…not coming.”
Cleo couldn’t resist. “And you’d know so much about that, of course.”
Ash dug Cleo so hard in the ribs it was a good thing she had an iron grip on the steering wheel. “No. And no. In my mind, I’m proud of not giving in all the way to impulse. The punks i
n that van deserved to die, and I hope they got bruises and a broken bone or two, but things would get too complicated for us if murder entered into it. I stayed in control. The thing I’ve needed most to learn, according to the major.”
Cleo pulled off the road onto a farm lane and stopped. “Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“Oh yeah. A story about how god-damned dangerous I am.” Ash couldn’t quite conceal a shiver. “Something you’d better know.”
“You think I don’t? But tell me about it anyway.”
Ash hesitated for a moment. “That day I left the base, in the Black Hawk, I was…I don’t know. Keyed up, tense, thinking of you standing down there watching me go.” She paused. Cleo’s hand found hers this time, squeezed it, and she went on. “The last thing I thought I would do was fall asleep, with all that noise from the rotors on top of everything else. But I got used to the rhythm, and I did sleep, for quite a while. When we began to descend, the rhythm changed. I woke up groggy, annoyed at the new sound and vibrations, about to reach up to stop them—and if the major hadn’t stopped me just in time, I’d have made us crash.”
Cleo was shivering now too, inside, but she kept her voice steady. “Good for the major. I’ll bet she reamed you out, and not in a fun way.”
“She was mad. But she was disappointed in me, too. That hurt almost as much as knowing what an idiot I’d been. ‘For God’s sake, learn some control before you kill yourself and everyone around you!’ she said. And later, she said, ‘I’d hoped….’ I got the idea that she’d had some other plan for me but changed her mind.”
To fill the sudden silence, Cleo said, “Never fly anywhere without me along. I’ll keep you awake. But maybe McAllister just didn’t happen to feel like flying with you anymore right then. Who could blame her?” At which Ash, of course, pinched her leg, hard.
Or did she? Cleo noticed that she was still holding Ash’s left hand, the only one that could have reached her. Cleo began to consider some other kinds of scenes that might be very interesting indeed. No-hands spanking, for instance.
This was not the time to bring that up. Not even when Ash said firmly, “Now that impulse was very much controlled.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Cleo pulled her hand free and started the engine. “Anyway, now we’d better go see how our latest crew are getting along. Jana will have had time to settle them down a bit, so maybe we can even get some useful info.”
Jana was waiting with the new girls back at the Galaxy Bar. Val and Mags were decompressing in the office with something strong from the bar. Twelve sat at Mags’s desk, oblivious to anything besides her laptop.
The main room looked more like a Girl Scout sleepover than a rescue scene. Most of the girls were sitting with mugs of hot drinks, coffee and cocoa. The girl who’d had to be carried out lay slumped on the bench of a booth with Jana’s coat as a cushion. The others seemed pretty much okay, although one kept her head bent and stroked the front of her shirt over and over as though it were a pet kitten, so it was hard to tell what condition she was in.
Jana introduced Cleo and Ash to the group, mentioned each girl by name, and asked calmly what the two would like to drink. Cleo opted for cocoa, Ash for coffee. Jana waved Ash into her own chair and went to the office kitchenette. Many of the chairs had been stacked against the wall, as usual for ease of sweeping up when the bar was closed, so the girl named Edie got up to offer Cleo her seat, but Cleo just grabbed one from the stack.
“Is everybody okay?” she asked, genuinely concerned.
Edie seemed to be taking on the role of spokesperson. “Yes ma’am,” she said, “we’re all right, except for Huan.” She jerked her head toward the booth. “She’ll sleep it off, but still not be exactly okay.”
Ash had smiled at Cleo’s uneasy reaction to being called “ma’am,” but now she turned serious. “What’s Huan on? How bad? Should we take her to the hospital?”
Heads around the room shook energetically. “No, not the hospital,” Edie said quickly. “She mostly only gets that bad when they’re taking us to a big affair. She knows they’ll beat her for not putting out well enough, but she can’t face any of it without being high.”
“Addicted?”
“Yes’m, but not as bad as some.”
“As most,” somebody muttered.
“Is that why some stayed in the vans when they could have escaped? Couldn’t leave their drug suppliers?” Ash’s question was more of a statement.
“Yes’m,” Edie said. “That, and being afraid you were the police.”
“So,” Ash mused, “if word got around that we aren’t police, maybe we could get more out.”
“Maybe.” Edie sounded doubtful. She shot a quick glance at another girl. Cleo looked closer and noticed her distinctly Asian features, with smudges where she’d tried to rub off the obligatory make-up. Without it, her face had strong lines and a grim, determined look. Right. She was the one who’d carried the girl now dozing on the couch, whose face looked Asian as well, what could be seen of it.
“You look like cops.” Her blunt statement fell just short of antagonism.
“You still came with us,” Cleo observed.
“Yeah, well, I figured our chances of getting away were better with you than with those fuckers.”
This was getting interesting. Cleo prodded her a little more. “You mean your chances of getting away from us were better?”
“What else? But that was before I saw some strange shit. If cops can do what one of you did…” She looked directly at Ash, who held her gaze for a long moment before responding.
“We’re not cops,” Ash said at last. “What’s your name?”
“Chiu.”
“Chiu, we were in the Army until recently, so I guess we might look like law enforcement, but trust me, I have at least as much reason to avoid the law as you do. If, in fact, you do.” She looked over at the girl in the booth. “Or if she does.”
Cleo had been putting together those same pieces of the puzzle. This scene was worthy of a movie. Chiu was clearly American-born, or as close as made no difference, with just a slight trace of Boston accent. And she’d noticed at least some of Ash’s more interesting contributions to the escape. They already knew that most of the Asian girls trafficked through the massage parlors were illegal in more ways than one, and often didn’t speak much, if any, English, so they had nowhere to escape to, and feared the law even more than their captors. Chiu was an outlier.
Ash pushed on. “I’m not convinced that you were forced into sex slavery. But she was. Is that why you got involved?”
“What, you think you’re the only ones interested in getting girls out of all that?” Chiu tried to stare Ash down, but finally shrugged. “Yeah, this was personal.”
Once she got started, the words kept coming. “Huan is a distant cousin on my mother’s side, scammed into being smuggled in for a nonexistent job. I met her, briefly, when we traveled to China for a family funeral two years ago, and recently we heard that she’d left for the Boston area but hadn’t been heard from since. We thought…a friend and I thought… Well, my friend paid to go to one of those big orgy deals, and recognized Huan from a photo I had. Lucky, in a way. If she’d been trapped into the massage parlor trade I’d probably never have found her. There’s just too much of that going on, shipping girls back and forth between states, bringing them up here mostly from New York.
“So anyway, we figured she’d be at the next one, too. Our plan was for my friend to attend, and for me to infiltrate, pretend not to speak much English, get dolled up and mingle. Between us we might be able to sneak her out. If I couldn’t get her away then, I could play stupid and confused, say I was Huan’s cousin, and get into the van that would take her back to, well, wherever.” She shook her head like a dog coming out of a lake and scrubbed reflexively at her face. “Plan A didn’t work, but Plan B did. Sort of. I’ve been coo
ped up in that place for three days. It’s a good thing you got to us before I cracked and did major damage to at least one of those goons, never mind the guns.”
Ash had visibly reverted to the stern Army officer faced with a terminally stupid soldier. “And your so-called friend,” she barked, “let you get away with all this?”
Chiu’s chin went up. “Okay, Plan B was all mine. I did it on the spur of the moment, without telling my—oh, what the fuck, telling her—what I was going to do. I’m in more trouble now than you could ever imagine.”
Cleo could imagine it, all right. “This friend could pass for a John going to a gang bang?”
Chiu nodded and hung her head, not quite hiding the ghost of a smile. “Oh yeah. She can pass, all right. But I need to use somebody’s phone to let her know I’m okay.”
Cleo dug her old flip phone out of her pocket, with an apologetic shrug at not having anything more hi-tech. Chiu took it with muttered thanks and disappeared into the restroom.
Jana returned just then with a tray of hot drinks and plates of food she’d heated in the microwave. Cleo’s stomach growled.
Jana’s aura of everyday casual hospitality came over as completely natural, but Cleo could see that it was also expert nursing. These brutalized victims needed a good, warm dose of the ordinary just now. Even the compulsive fabric stroker looked up long enough to grab something to eat.
Later, though, they’d need something more than a brief interlude of normality. Cleo knew that from personal experience, although her long-ago abuse had been briefer and less dramatic than theirs, and she’d managed to leave some significant scars on her tormentor. She just had to hope that between Jana’s connections and Mags’s knowledge of activist organizations, these girls could be helped.