by T. J. Jones
Always the businessman, Rashad made the most of the situation. He had a very good friend in the US Congress, a regular visitor at the Castle in the Sand that had noticed his young consort, and eagerly volunteered a place for her in his Washington penthouse. Dinar would be rid of her, and the Congressman could pass her off as his intern, a foreign exchange student that he had graciously allowed to stay with him should the wrong people become aware of her presence.
Chrissy Michaels, painfully wise to the ways of the world, had no illusions about what was expected of her in exchange for being returned to the United States. Unfortunately for the Congressman, his wife arrived unexpectedly while Chrissy was expressing her gratitude on the hardwood floor in the living room. The whole thing might have been swept under the proverbial rug had the Congressman's wife not been accompanied by a pair of journalists doing a human-interest story about her charity work, and instead walked in on the biggest story of their careers. Chrissy's charity work wasn't appreciated by anyone, and within a week the Congressman was ousted from his marriage and his Congressional seat, as well as being investigated for a litany of financial indiscretions.
Chrissy Michaels was returned to Seattle to spend a few years on the therapist's couch. She would go on to write a best-selling book about her experiences as a captive. "The Castle in the Sand" was a catchy title that one of her fellow captors had coined. I hear there might be a movie.
The Congressman knew better than to drag Rashad Dinar under the bus with him, but the press spared no expense digging up details about the man involved in the Congressman's downfall who had a suspicious link to the young girl in question. As more details were exposed concerning the Congressman's activities, the Federal court prosecuting the case issued a subpoena for Dinar's testimony. That meant the days of coming and going to the US unfettered were over. His passport had been tagged, and he would be stopped by TSA should he try to leave or enter the country.
Susan Foster was ecstatic. "Do you know what this means Slater?"
"That fourteen-year old girls are a lot smarter than when I was in middle school?"
"Pig." Maggie hit me. "She's not responsible for anything that happened to her."
"I know, I'm kidding! Any idea if he got into the country before this all happened?"
"No. He has his own plane, but according to flight records he isn't here. He might have snuck in on a commercial flight using a different name, but he'd risk being ID'd. My guess is that he's laying low in Dubai or Algiers right now, but I can't be sure. But it's the beginning of the end for him, at least in this country."
"Not good enough if we don't nail him for what he did to Davey and your sister, not to mention all those other girls."
"I'm not giving up on that, but at least we're making his life miserable. His oil numbers are down and we've been stopping most of the trafficking. The good guys are winning for a change."
"You need to catch my uncle." Maggie sighed, picking up her coffee. "Maybe he'll testify if it looks like the whole organization is falling apart."
"I said I was done dealing with him, but if it means putting Dinar away, I would be willing to forget that I have a big scar on my left butt cheek." Susan smiled ruefully. "I don't know if it was Gary's idea or not, I'm just glad the officer came through it alright."
"You're the one who told me not to trust him." I reminded her. "If it wasn't his idea, I'm pretty sure he didn't discourage them. He wanted out."
"And don't forget, they killed those dogs." Maggie glanced at her phone. "Angela has news, something about Gabriela and trouble with a friend?"
"She just got a new cellphone so she probably has a bunch of new friends."
"This one needs help. Angela wants us to come home to talk about it."
"She gets a phone and the first thing she does is call Daytona?" I asked. "Susan warned me about this."
"She didn't call her old manager, she called one of the women she worked with." Angela defended Gabriela.
"Manager? Is that what they're calling it now? Are you sure this isn't her being manipulated by that pimp?"
"No, it's her being worried about the other three women that he has working the streets for him. She called them to tell them she was alright, and to make sure they were still alive. And it isn't about them, it's about the new girl they brought in to replace Gabriela. Gabriela's friends said she isn't going to live through another beating."
"Are you going to take in another girl?" Maggie asked. "Are you sure you're ready for that?"
"No I'm not, to either one. This girl has family in Miami. The three hookers Gabriela knows want to help her get away and get to her Grandparents house."
"Out of the goodness of their hearts." I rolled my eyes.
"Stop being so cynical." Maggie said. "We don't care about the motive, we can still help a young girl get out of a bad situation."
"So why not just call the cops?" I suggested. "We just left Susan, this is what she does."
"We could do that, but I'm guessing there's an immigration issue. I have the resources to keep ICE from taking Gabriela, but not everyone has that luxury."
"And how do we know it isn't a setup? I know Gabriela wouldn't send us into a trap, but we don't know what is going on with these other women. Maggie and I go down there and that pimp and his buddies jump us. I'm guessing he's still not happy that we took Gabriela and he would love to stick his knife in me. Sounds like a setup."
"Fine, then I can go myself." Angela said stubbornly. "I'll take my gun."
"You know we're not going to let you do that." I sighed.
"I was hoping you wouldn't." She laughed and winked at her sister.
"You two aren't fooling me, I know you're plotting against me. Just don't think this will work every time." I had to salvage something. "I want to talk to Gabriela, see if she thinks we can trust those women."
"Gabriela!" Angela called her, and she came skipping down the stairs with Duchess at her heels. Angela tipped her head in my direction. "Show him the picture, la imagen."
"Si, Senor Slater, mira. Su nombre es Marie"
I was picking up a lot of Spanish. The girl named Marie might have been sixteen, and judging from the picture, had taken a good beating recently. Of course, if it were a trap, playing on our sympathies would be a part of the plan, but that was a chance we would have to take.
"Fine, we need to know where we're taking her, and it needs to happen during the day. I'm not going to try to grab another girl off the street at night when they might know we're coming. Call that hooker and set something up, something in broad daylight where the chances of getting shot at are minimal."
"No worries Slater." Maggie chuckled. "And we don't have to take your new truck, we'll borrow Angela's Escalade. The windows are darkened, so at least they won't be able to take our pictures again."
"It's the guy getting those pictures I'm worried about. If Dinar isn't already after us, we're sure as hell going to make him mad by taking another young girl away from him."
"Good! Maybe he'll get the message and get out of our country!" Angela blustered.
"Not likely, but it would be nice." I agreed.
I skipped work the next day and Maggie and I drove to Daytona shortly after lunch. Most of the working girls were still asleep at that time of day and their pimps were just rolling out of bed for the first time, cursing their growing prostates before catching a few more winks. That was my hope, I couldn't pretend to know the particulars of that life style.
I had always thought of it abstractly, people I didn't know participating in the world's oldest profession, unfortunate, but a victimless crime. Except it wasn't. And not all the victims were the obvious ones like the fourteen year old immigrants sold into slavery by some Coyote, or the young woman seduced into drug addiction by some fast talking pimp. Davey Templeton had worked at a Modeling Agency, telling young girls he could make them into stars. I was pretty sure that he had believed that, but when he realized his mistake, he had paid for it with his life
.
Everyone agreed that the pimp on the corner was a reprehensible human being, and certainly men like Rashad Dinar and his buddy the Congressman were, but they were just part of a bigger culture. Maggie had said it, without customers, there would be no prostitutes, and maybe no Dinar's. Maybe, if there were no college kids lined up to stuff dollar bills in her pants, Honey would go back to California, marry Derrick, and get a waitressing job.
"Penny for your thoughts." Maggie said.
"About all they're worth. Actually, I was thinking about Honey. I kind of feel sorry for her. Must be because I'm forty now, I'm getting soft."
"You've always been soft, but that's what I like about you."
"Maybe it's because I was raised by a single Mom, but I think you can appreciate the fairer sex without taking advantage of them or beating them senseless."
"Some wise old man once told me that the world has an annoying habit of being what it is, not what we want it to be."
"Sounds like a pretty smart guy to me."
"Old, really old guy." She grinned at me. "But the world keeps changing Slater, and all we can do is try to help it along. It would be nice if we could do it the easy way, but that will never work when you're dealing with people like Dinar."
"I'm guessing Gabriela's pimp isn't going to want to do it the easy way either. Hopefully we can grab the girl and slip away unnoticed."
It almost worked that way.
Vera, the woman that had been in contact with Gabriela, had talked with Maggie and formulated a plan of sorts. According to Vera and Susan Foster, the streets to the west of the White Sands bar and strip club were a popular spot for lonely men looking for "dates." Those same streets were also lined with seedy looking motels and two story brick apartments that might have been hotels, back in the days when full service had meant something different than it now did.
Almost all of the hotels and apartments had signs out offering an hourly rate, which was a pretty good indication of the clientele. After dark, these streets would be flooded with girls displaying their wares, while lines of cars crept by and negotiated with them. There were a few early birds, running to the store for cigarettes or eggs, talking and laughing with their friends and shaking off the gloom of the previous night. Most of them were girls, not women. Most were twenty or under, and many weren't old enough to buy the cancer sticks they had hanging from their mouths.
"Those girls will have lung cancer, you watch." I commented to Maggie.
"Slater, half these girls will overdose within a year if they don't get murdered by some drunken John. Cigarettes are the least of their worries."
"A lot of them don't look old enough to be down here."
"They look eighteen, mostly. But there's one that can't be a day over sixteen." Maggie nodded at a tall redhead. "Give her a year, she'll pass for thirty."
"They made it seem so classy in Pretty Woman."
"They make everything seem classy in the movies Slater. Keep your eyes peeled for a tall blonde with a black scarf. We're supposed to just circle the block and she said she'll flag us down."
"I see anything that doesn't look right, and we're out of here. I still say it's a setup."
"I don't think these women would be out here if it was a trap, they would have heard about it. Hookers talk amongst themselves."
"And you would know this how?" I asked.
"They're women aren't they?"
"Now who's being sexist? Like I keep saying, I can't win."
"Then stop trying." Maggie dropped her window suddenly, put her fingers to her mouth, and whistled loudly. "That's her, and she has the girl with her."
"I didn't know you could whistle like that, I'm impressed."
"Pay attention Slater, down the street!"
The tall woman named Vera came running across the street and opened the back door of the SUV, then pushed her companion in. "Ramone is coming, get the hell out of here!"
Ramone was the same pimp that had held Gabriela captive and he wasn't happy. Also, he had a gun. He fired one shot in the air just to scatter the herd, then started running in our direction. There wasn't time to make a u turn and there were too many people in the way, although they were disappearing like gazelles when a lion starts to look hungry. Which is to say, as fast as they could run. Ramone started bringing his gun down to shoot at us.
"Get down." I yelled and put the accelerator to the floor. We weren't more than a hundred feet from Ramone and he did get a couple shots off before I chased him onto the sidewalk with Angela's Escalade. I wasn't really trying to hit him, but he stumbled over the curb and I had to pull hard on the steering wheel to keep from running over his legs. By the time he got to his feet, we were half a block away. I took the first turn up a side street before he could get a shot off. "Everybody alright?"
"Fine, let's just get the hell out of Daytona." Maggie glanced back at the girl behind her and spoke rapidly to her in Spanish, then looked grimly back at me. "She says Ramone will kill the woman that helped her get away, but she wouldn't come along."
"Hopefully that doesn't happen. He certainly was trying to kill us. Call the cops and tell them shots were fired."
"On my cell? They'll know it was me."
The girl in the backseat reached over Maggie's shoulder and gave her a phone. "Use mine." She said in very good English. "We can toss it in the canal when you're done."
"You speak English?" I asked, looking at her in the mirror.
"I attended a very good school in Venezuela, before the trouble. You will take me to my Grandparents in Miami?"
"That's why we're here." I nodded. Maggie called the police and gave a remarkably vivid account of seeing a man that would match Ramone's description shooting at several women.
"The police will not come." The girl in the backseat said. "They are afraid of the man Ramone works for, but thank you for trying. Throw the phone away, please."
"Next bridge we cross." Maggie promised. "Sure you don't want to get the numbers from it first?"
She lowered her window and looked out at the water in the distance. "He will send me pictures of Vera after he is done with her. I cannot look at that."
It was a quiet ride to Miami. Marie sat stoically in the back seat, expressionless and wooden, showing no joy at having just been rescued from a brothel, or concern for the woman we had left behind. Maggie's attempts at sympathy and conversation were met with one word answers and vacant stares. But as we neared Miami the sun cast long shadows across her face and I saw tears streaming down her cheeks.
Her grandparents lived on the north side of Miami in a simple single story house that was well kept but far from extravagant. They didn't speak any English, and I never figured out how they had known of their granddaughter's plight. They hugged us and shook our hands and then cried and hugged us some more, while Marie stood watching solemnly and never said a word. Finally, when we climbed back in the Escalade and prepared to leave, she approached the window.
"I hope that this is the end of it, but the man who gives the orders, he will try to find me. He will try to find you too, so beware."
"We know the man you're talking about, Marie." Maggie explained. "We are going to see that he is in jail for the rest of his life."
It was the only time I ever saw her smile, and it was humorless. "I wish that were true, Senora. Godspeed."
"I say we drive back tonight if you're okay with that."
"You drive, I'll nap." Maggie leaned against me. "We did good Slater. I hope Marie was wrong about Vera. What an awful life."
"One girl at a time is better than letting Dinar have his way."
"Dinar, or my uncle? And is there any difference?"
At about two in the morning, an hour from Jacksonville, my phone buzzed. Nothing good ever happens that time of night. Maggie was asleep and I opened the message which included a video. It took a moment for me to realize that I was looking at my own house, poorly lit as it was by a streetlight. Two seconds into the clip there was a blinding flash
and a cloud of smoke, followed by the sight of debris tumbling through the air and flaming boards landing close to the camera operator. My house had just exploded. There was a simple, cryptic caption. "Last chance."
Maggie stirred beside me, and took the phone from my hand, replaying the clip. "They're getting serious. Good thing you have another place to live. Were there things in there, things of your mother's that had a lot of value?"
"Letters and a few pictures, but not a lot of things I can't replace easily. Not this time. Next time he might come after you or Angela."
"We stop when Rashad Dinar is in jail for what he did to my brother. In jail or dead."
"Figured that's what you'd say."
"Wow Slater, lucky you were shacked up with your girlfriend."
"Morning Jasmine. Always nice to see your smiling face."
We stood in my front yard, surveying the damage, which was total.
"Maryanne said to let her know if she can do anything. I came over to help you and Maggie clean up the mess."
"Maggie will be here in a bit. The insurance investigator was here yesterday, they figure it was a gas leak."
Jasmine kicked a board with her tiny foot. "Maggie said it was that Dinar asshole, because you took another one of his girls."
"She shouldn't have told you that. Don't ever repeat that to anyone." I said sharply.
"Jesus, sorry."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you, but this is serious Jasmine. This guy plays for keeps. Don't even repeat his name. Maggie knows how dangerous he is."
"She's worried about you, and her uncle."
"Her uncle's a lot of things, but I don't think he would hurt her or Angela, or me for that matter."
