Without a Trace

by Michael Cross

I nod. “You rest up. We still need to discuss that giant spoon and cherry before I leave town.”

  His laughter breaks down into a series of wet, pained coughs. He grimaces and hisses, seeming to curl in on himself. A nurse steps into the room and shoos me out. She shuts the door in my face, leaving me standing out in the hallway.

  I turn and head out of the hospital. I need to make some final arrangements, and I want to get a little bit of sleep so that I’m sharp later. It’s going to be a long night, and I need to be at my best.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The night is dark and moonless. And at this time of the night, there is nobody out on the street. Before getting out of my car, I put the earwig in and adjust the mic, so it fits under my balaclava. Getting out of the car, I look around carefully, scanning the street just to be sure I’m alone. I see a few cars parked on my side of the street and a large utility van parked on the other side half a block down, but no people.

  I let out a small sigh of relief since I’m sure anybody who saw a man dressed in all black, with a mask that covered everything but his eyes, toting an AR-15 across the street wouldn’t hesitate to call the cops.

  “Testing one, two,” I whisper. “You on the line?”

  “I am on the line,” Justice replies. “And I am once again lodging a formal protest to this action.”

  “Noted,” I say. “I’m moving into position.”

  I move around to the back of the social club, keeping an eye on the windows as I go. All is dark and quieter than a tomb. At four in the morning, it better be. I take up a position near the rear delivery door and hold.

  “In position,” I say. “I’m ready for you to pop the locks.”

  “Remember, you have four minutes tops,” Justice reminds me. “Get in, get what you need, and get the hell out of there. I’m not even kidding.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Okay, counting down,” she says. “Locks will be popped in three, two, one.”

  I hear the loud clack of the locks disengaging and quickly pull open the door. I press the button on a small remote, and when I see the flashing red light, I slip it into my pocket. Raising my weapon, I step inside, quietly pulling the door closed behind me. Pulling down my night vision goggles, I turn them on. The world around me lights up green, and I can see as bright as day.

  Feeling the clock ticking, I move quickly through the floor, searching for the door to the hidden room in the basement I theorized was there. Everything is riding on my theory, and if it doesn’t actually exist, I am so thoroughly and completely screwed. There is no door in the lounge or dining areas, so I move quickly to the loading dock.

  “Bingo.”

  An electric bolt of triumph surges through me when I see the keypad and optical scanner mounted to the wall beside a door. That has got to be it. I rush over to it and look at the keypad and have to keep from letting out an excited whoop when I see that it’s a dead stick.

  “Found the door,” I whisper into the mic, so Justice can hear. “Heading in.”

  “Three minutes.”

  I open the door and see a set of stairs leading down. So, Agajanian did have a secret bunker built. Now I just need to cross my fingers and hope it’s the clearing house I want to believe is here. Moving slowly and cautiously, with my weapon up and at the ready, I descend the stairs. In the green glow from my goggles, I see bricks of coke piled high on the cutting tables. The pallet from the other night stands in the corner. They’ve already managed to process and cut half of the shipment. His workers are efficient; I’ll give them that.

  I step further into the room. It’s a big room. Bigger than I thought. It’s got room for four large desks, chairs, a couple of couches, and a full entertainment center with a flatscreen mounted on the wall. And with the cutting tables full of coke, it reminds me of a mancave Pablo Escobar would be proud of.

  At the far end of the room, I see another door. It makes me wonder what he’s holding in there. If Agajanian really is into human trafficking for the sex trade, he might be holding women in there.

  “Two minutes, Echo,” comes Justice’s voice. I grunt lowly, the loudest sound I’m willing to make.

  My eyes are focused on that door. I’m halfway across the room when my goggles light up, blinding me completely.

  The sudden intrusion of light into the night vision is painful. I growl as I pull the goggles down around my neck. I raise my hands to my eyes, wincing at the pain in my head and stagger backwards a couple of steps. I don’t have time for this. And I know whoever just snapped the lights on has me exposed.

  I can’t see them, but I can feel them all around me. It’s as if I can feel their hatred radiating off them like heat from a fireplace.

  I’m able to make out shapes. Silhouettes really. But I don’t need to see them clearly to know who it is. They set a trap, and I walked right into it.

  “I have to applaud your boldness,” comes Agajanian’s voice, snickering cruelly. “It’s one thing to insult and threaten me in my own club. It’s quite another to break in here to steal from me.”

  “What can I say?” I fire back. “I’ve always been an overachiever.”

  I feel somebody rip my balaclava off my head then grab me by the hair, wrenching my head back painfully. The mic and earwig are ripped out, cutting off my line to Justice. Then I feel his breath on my ear, warm and moist.

  “You know, Jesse,” I start, “I’m just feeling it’s still way too early in our relationship for this. I only kiss my mother.”

  “Always with the jokes.”

  “I was voted class clown back in high school.”

  “Bitch.”

  The next thing I feel is his fist being driven straight into my face. Pain explodes in my nose, and I feel the warm, tacky blood flowing down my face. I see bursts of light behind my eyes and stagger backward a step, only to be yanked forward again by my hair. I take another hard punch. This one to the stomach, and it doubles me over. I cough and gasp, trying to catch the breath that was driven out of my lungs. Some delirious part of me remembers that I’m glad I took his ring, or there would be a lot more damage.

  A foot catches me in the side, though thankfully, they miss my ribs. A choked gasp escapes me as I land on my back, trying to suck in large gulps of air. And just when I think I’m starting to catch my breath, somebody stomps on my guts, driving that hard-earned oxygen out of my body again. I just can’t catch a break.

  “Put him in the chair,” I hear Agajanian command.

  I’m pulled roughly to my feet by my hair and slammed down into a chair. My arms are secured behind my back with plastic zip ties. They’re clinched exceedingly tight.

  “This seems familiar,” I say.

  “Yeah, but this time, the shoe’s on the other foot, asshole.”

  “Oh, hey, Brian. I’d know that pathetic voice anywhere,” I say. “How’s the nose?”

  I hear the crack of flesh meeting flesh a split second before I actually feel the blow. If my nose wasn’t broken before, it definitely is now. My eyes water, but I force myself to keep control. Blood is flowing freely down my face and neck as my mouth fills with the coppery taste of it.

  “How’s the nose, prick?” Brian hisses into my ear.

  “And tell me how this feels, bitch,” Jesse says.

  A moment later, a white-hot eruption of agony rends through my left leg as Jesse drives a knife straight down into my thigh, carving into the muscle. I howl in pain. Thankfully, it’s not a big knife and doesn’t go too deep, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting like a son of a bitch.

  “Enough!” Agajanian barks.

  Jesse yanks the knife out of my leg, and I feel the blood spill out of the wound. Slowly, my vision finally starts to clear. I guess I can thank the pain for helping with that. It’s still a bit hazy, but I can actually see faces again. I see Agajanian, Brian, and Jesse, of course. And behind them are the two dudes in dark suits with the MP5s and all the warmth and expression of a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace.
r />   Agajanian steps forward and looks down at me. There’s an expression of slight amusement on his face, but it’s overshadowed by the look of intense hatred. Working my hands slowly to avoid being seen, I slip my hands into my back pocket and slide the knife I’d stashed there out. I almost drop it twice before I’m able to get it under control and open it up. Subtly, I begin to cut my way through the zip ties that bind me.

  “How’d you know I’d come?” I ask.

  “Because you’re the type of man who can’t leave something well enough alone,” he says. “We recently found security footage of you scouting the shipping yard. It was not hard to figure out that eventually, you would come here.”

  Shit. Obviously, I’d failed to see a camera. I thought I’d accounted for them all and had stayed out of their range. Apparently not. That’s okay, though. This actually works out better in the long run.

  “So what, you just had your goons living in here until I showed up?”

  He shrugs. “Basically, yes,” he replies. “And it worked out in my favor.”

  “Bully for you.”

  “Not so much for you, what was it—Echo?”

  I nod. I’ve got to keep him talking.

  “So is this the center of operations? Drugs, guns, what—girls come through here? Before you send them out?”

  His face twitches, but he says nothing. He’s good.

  “I am a businessman,” he finally says. “I provide my community, and many others, with what they want and what they need. Call it—charity.”

  “Oh, right. The ‘orphanage’. I was wondering, where is that, exactly? I didn’t see any paperwork on it.”

  “And you won’t. Too bad. But now you have to join your friend Arthur Adams. Didn’t you get our message?”

  Bingo.

  I pretend to struggle against my restraints and do my best to convincingly shout in rage. Agajanian laughs, low and deep, reveling in it.

  “It’s a shame he couldn’t live longer,” pipes up, Brian. “He was always such a reliable contributor to our charitable goals.”

  “But we had to send a message to the rest of those fucks in the neighborhood,” adds Jesse.

  I pretend to be shocked but am eternally grateful for these two pea-brains. They won’t even realize that they sealed their own fate.

  “What I do not understand is, why?” Agajanian asks, sounding reasonable. “Why come here? Why throw your life away like this?”

  “Like I said, I don’t like bullies,” I say. “I don’t like predators who prey on good, hard-working people.”

  “You would do all of this, you would give your life, for people you don’t know?” he asks, sounding genuinely curious.

  “I would. Somebody’s got to watch out for people. Protect them from scumbags like you,” I spit. “Why not me?”

  Agajanian smiles. “Because you are obviously not very good at it.”

  “You sure about that?”

  He cocks his head and looks at me curiously. I just give him a mischievous grin as I continue sawing away at the ties.

  “Let’s just kill him, boss,” Jesse says. “Cut his damn throat.”

  “I say we cut his balls off first,” Brian adds. “Then you can cut his throat.”

  “Will both of you morons be quiet?” Agajanian snaps.

  He stares hard at me, and I continue to smile.

  “Why are you smiling?” he asks.

  “Because I know what’s about to drop on your head,” I shrug. “And you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Right front pocket,” I say. “Take out what’s in there.”

  I can see the curiosity in his eyes. He does what I say. He takes out the small, square black plastic fob with the flashing red light. He turns it over, looking at it from all angles.

  “What is this?” he asks.

  “Your ticket to prison,” I grin.

  He opens his mouth to ask another question, but he doesn’t get a chance.

  A series of muffled explosions rock the floor above us. Before anybody can react, we hear booted feet storming heavily down the stairs.

  “Freeze!” barks a loud voice.

  As men in black tactical gear swarm into the basement with their weapons up, Agajanian kicks me square in the chest. The blow topples me backward, and I hit the ground with bone-jarring force, knocking the wind out of me once again. I close my eyes tight and grit my teeth, knowing what’s coming.

  And a moment later, all hell breaks loose.

  It turns out Agajanian did me a favor by knocking me over because that very instant, I see the blinding flash of light and feel the concussive wave of a flash-bang grenade. Had I been sitting up, that would have really sucked. But being in the position I’m in, my face turned up to the ceiling and my eyes closed, I barely feel a thing.

  All around me, though, I hear the shouting, panicked voices, and the hammering rattle of gunfire.

  I do my best to scuttle out of the way in the ensuing chaos, but it’s no good. Someone turns to run and then trips over me, falling with a heavy crash to the ground. I chance to open my eyes, and just next to me, I see Narek Agajanian sprawled out on the floor, with a whole SWAT team’s worth of guns trained on him.

  I look back up at the men in dark masks.

  “Nice of you to join us, fellas.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once the smoke clears, two pairs of hands haul me into an upright position and help me out of the zip ties. I grimace at the pain in my thigh as I get to my feet. I finally make my way up to greet a man with dark, curly hair. He kind of looks like Mark Ruffalo. I extend my hand and give him a nod.

  “You must be Special Agent Hall.”

  He nods. “And you must be Echo.”

  “Afraid so.”

  He points to my leg. “Looks like it hurts.”

  “Had worse,” I say.

  I shrug and try to play it off, not actually knowing if I have had worse. But it seemed like the thing to say. Hall looks around, sees the mountain of coke, and grins.

  “I’ve been trying to nail this prick for years,” he says. “I can’t believe it’s finally over. We’ve never been able to get anything on him to stick. But now? Now we’ve got him dead to rights, thanks to you.”

  “It’s a righteous bust,” I say.

  He turns to me, that grin on his face. “For the most part.”

  I nod. “Stick to the plan, and you’ll be okay.”

  “Trust me, I’m going to,” he says. “I’m not letting this asshole off the hook.”

  I see Hall’s men crack open the door at the other end of the room and stream in. I’m relatively certain they’re going to find women drugged to the gills in there, almost ready to be sent out into the sex trade. When his men come back out a moment later, the looks on their faces confirm it for me.

  “Special Agent Hall,” one of them calls. “You need to see this.”

  Hall gives my hand another firm shake. “Thanks for doing this,” he says. “For putting yourself in the line of fire. And… sorry about the nose.”

  “Had worse than this, too,” I offer. “And you’re welcome. Now nail this guy’s ass to the wall.”

  “I intend to.”

  Hall gives me a nod and disappears into the room. Agajanian, Jesse, Brian, and the two guards are sitting on their asses, hands zip-tied behind their backs. Agajanian’s glaring balefully at me as I tie a strip of cloth around my leg, applying some pressure to staunch the flow of blood. It hurts, but the wound isn’t deep and isn’t spurting blood like he hit an artery, so I feel safe in saying I’m going to be fine.

  “This isn’t over,” he hisses.

  “Oh, I think it is,” I reply. “Pretty sure you’re never going to see the outside of a six by six cell again.”

  “You think I can’t reach out and touch you even from prison? Or your friend the bartender?” he spits.

  I walk over to him and grimace in pain as I crouch down beside him. I look him square in the eye,
holding his gaze. I want him to see that monster that lurks inside of me. I want him to finally understand what it is I’m capable of.

  “Listen to me. If anything happens to Arthur, if he gets so much as a bad cold, you’re going to see that I can reach into that prison and touch you back,” I growl, my voice low and icy. “Only, I’m not the kind of person who’s going to make it quick. It’ll take days. Maybe weeks. And then maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you die. But I promise you, the pain you’re going to endure is a kind of pain you can’t even conceive of.”

  He glares at me still, but in his eyes, I can see the first flickers of uncertainty. It’s faint, but it’s there all the same. After all, I brought the FBI down on his head. He doesn’t know what else I can do. Reaching out, I flick his nose hard.

  “Better pray for Arthur’s continued health and longevity,” I say as I get to my feet.

  “Oh, and Jesse,” I say, fishing in my pocket, “I can’t thank you enough for your help in cracking this case. You provided the information necessary to lock you all away for a long, long time. So here’s a little gift from me to you.”

  Jesse’s face contorts in utter rage. “You mother—”

  He’s interrupted as his skull ring bounces hard against his head and clatters on the floor. He howls in pain as I walk away. That’ll leave a nice big welt for his mugshot.

  Turning around, I see Hall and his men carefully escorting women out of that locked room. They’re half-naked and dazed. I shake my head in disgust.

  Catching Hall’s eye, I gesture to him that I’m leaving. He nods and immediately gets on his radio. My path back to my car is free and clear. Not a single person stops me to ask questions, and I’m allowed to drive off.

  After a couple of minutes, I open the car’s phone line. “Call Justice,” I instruct.

  “Calling Justice.”

  A moment later, the connection is made. Justice picks up before the first ring even ends.

  “Are you okay? What happened?” she exclaims. “I’ve been worried sick. When I heard them—”

  “I’m a little banged up, but I’m fine,” I tell her. “Plan went off without a hitch.”