Face of Danger

by Roxanne St Claire

  “So you like my cousin, huh?”

  Bingo. “That took longer than I thought,” Colt said. “I figured you’d be interrogating me before we got out of Sudbury.”

  Gabe shot him a grin that probably got the guy out of a lot of trouble and into a lot of beds. “Thought I’d let you get comfortable, Fedster. And you don’t have to worry about me. Vivi’s a big girl and if she wants to get down and dirty with you, have at it. As long as you don’t hurt her, none of the Rossis will attack. Can’t speak for the Angelino side, though. Zach might cut your nuts off just for breathing in his sister’s air space.”

  “Yeah, I know him pretty well.”

  “Does he know you’re doing the nasty with Vivi?”

  “We’re not,” Colt said simply. At least not yet. “And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Vivi Angelino has a nasty bone in her body.”

  “You’re probably right,” Gabe agreed. “So you’re not fooled by the skater-girl-with-the-nose-piercing shit?”

  Colt shrugged. “That’s just Vivi.”

  “Wasn’t always,” Gabe said.

  “Yeah, you mentioned she used to be a cheerleader.” Colt kind of smiled. “Hard to imagine.”

  “She used to be a lot of things,” Gabe said. “A cheerleader, a dancer, popular. She even dated boys for a while.”

  Colt turned a little. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I’m not saying she’s into chicks or anything. I just mean, she doesn’t really get funky as far as any of us know.”

  Ever? She sure seemed like she was about to get funky with him. I want to be with you tonight. Pretty straightforward invitation to sex if he’d ever heard one.

  “Well, maybe she doesn’t call you up in the morning after she’s had a date.” Or maybe Gabe was right; she did seem surprisingly inexperienced. Wonderful, amazing, and intoxicating, but inexperienced. “And then there is always the chance that Zach might kill me for even thinking about kissing her,” he added. And God knows he’d been thinking about more than that.

  “There is that.” Gabe laughed. “Hey, we’re coming up to Lowell. You have that address programmed in your phone?”

  “I do.” Colt directed him around some side streets, down a two-lane highway, past some warehouses and abandoned mills east of town along the Merrimack River. “Turn left at the next light, then take the third right.”

  The neighborhood disintegrated around them, the old structures that were probably built to house millworkers getting shabbier with each block. Windows missing. Cars on cement blocks. It reeked of poverty and crime, and probably a meth house around every corner.

  “You armed?” Colt asked.

  “Am I breathing?” Gabe replied.

  He was good backup, Colt decided. This was not official FBI business, just a courtesy call. Whatever he found, he’d report it to the team investigating Roman Emmanuel and carry on with his end of the assignment. No one needed to know he’d taken an unauthorized government spy on the ride.

  “This is the street,” he told Gabe as they reached an intersection. “Turn right.”

  “I don’t like this,” Gabe said, peering down the street.

  “It’s certainly not Sudbury,” Colt agreed.

  The streets were deserted, but Colt had no doubt that eyes behind every window were on them.

  “It’s not the neighborhood that bothers me—it’s the street.” Gabe reached under his shirt and pulled out a top-of-the-line Walther. “It’s a dead end. With woods. I don’t like to get my balls in a sling.”

  The address was the last house on the street. They slowed in front of a two-story stucco dump that was lacking glass in one window, a hinge on the screen door, a step on the porch, and a coat of paint. A fence ran around one side; the other opened into acres of woods.

  “You wanna go in?” Gabe asked.

  “Maybe.” Colt leaned down and looked out Gabe’s window. “But I do want to know why this address would be buried in the code of RE Global, a temporary employment firm.”

  The front door opened and a girl stood there, Asian, thin, haunted. She wore little more than rags and a blank look.

  “Baby hookers,” Gabe said with disgust. “I hate motherfuckers who do that to little girls.”

  A woman stepped up behind her: mixed race, much older, almost as straggly, but way more used up. She put one hand on the girl’s shoulder and gestured Gabe and Colt in with the other. “I have girls and boys,” she called. “Twenty dollars.”

  Colt’s gut turned.

  Gabe looked at him. “You’re the Fed. What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll get agents out here, but let’s just check it out. If I can get any kind of connection to Emmanuel before we shut this down, the L.A. team will be grateful.”

  Gabe nodded. “Let me just turn the beast in the right direction in case we need to make a fast getaway.” He accelerated forward so he could make a three-point turn in the road.

  “Fifteen dollars!” she screamed, thinking they were leaving. “I find virgin for you!”

  “Jesus,” Colt mumbled.

  “She’s from Laos. I can tell by the accent,” Gabe said. “Don’t know if that helps your investigation.”

  “It might. You speak Lao?”

  “Some.” He turned the car around and shut it off. “I can say ‘Shut your fucking piehole and tell me who you work for or you’re gonna eat this gun’ in ten different languages.”

  “That ought to come in handy.”

  They got out simultaneously, walking slowly toward the woman as she inched the girl closer. Son of a bitch—she couldn’t be fourteen.

  The lady’s eyes narrowed to nothing as she checked them out. “You cops?”

  “Nope.” A Fed and a spook, but no cops. “You own this place?” Colt asked.

  “This my daughter.” If that was true, then she should eat Gabe’s gun.

  “How many kids you got?” Gabe asked.

  She gave him a once-over, spending time on the guy’s oversized pecs. “You want boy?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Two or three at once? You watch? Get a little rough, huh?” Her smile was sickening, and toothless. “That’s okay, too. It’ll cost you more.”

  Gabe said something in Lao, as slick and smooth as if he were in a bar in Vientiane.

  The woman’s eyes opened wide in shock. She screamed an unintelligible response, then looked at Colt. “I pay up, mister. I don’t owe nothing. I pay that man two days ago.”

  “What was the man’s name?” Colt asked.

  “I don’t fucking know his name,” she said, then shoved the girl forward. “She give you blow job. Then go away.”

  Colt just closed his eyes in disgust and Gabe said something else, walking toward her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, stepping to the side to let them in. “You count heads.”

  As Gabe strode by her into the house, Colt followed.

  “Get ’em all down here,” Colt ordered.

  When the woman did nothing, Gabe got in her face and said something low and indiscernible in her native language. She screamed up the stairs, drops of spit flying from cracked lips.

  Colt glanced at the little girl, whose almond eyes were filled with a mix of hate and hope. All he could do was shake his head, then she looked down in shame.

  Shit, now she thought she wasn’t good enough for him.

  “Go,” he said softly, giving her shoulder a gentle nudge. “Get the rest of the kids and bring them down.”

  She scurried away, the older woman hissing instructions at her. Whatever she said made Gabe spin around and fire a look at her, spewing out some more commands.

  The woman started sputtering in a mix of English and Lao, waving her hands, but one word jumped out at Colt.

  Pakpao.

  “Sunisa Pakpao?” he asked.

  The woman visibly paled. “I pay him. I swear I pay him when he brought last shipment. There was virgin on it! I give her to you if you leave me alone. I give
her to you! Normally fifty dollars for virgin.”

  “When did the shipment come?” he asked.

  “Few days ago. Right off boat. All from Ban Nape through Tonkin.” From landlocked Laos through Vietnam, if Colt’s geography was right. All the way around the damn world.

  “Have virgin and four boys, too,” she went on. “And more. Farm boys. They went to the western house. Plenty of good girls. Please.” She started to cry. “No Pakpao. He hurt the girls until they screamed and bleed. Nobody will fuck girl with broken bones!”

  More than ever, Colt was glad he’d shot the bastard. But how was the scum-bucket bastard connected to Cara Ferrari?

  Several more girls came down the stairs, and two young boys, all wearing the same vacant look.

  “Where is Nirachee?” the woman screamed. “And PhanPhan?”

  None of the kids answered. Some looked bored, others scared. All… ruined.

  Gabe spoke softly to one of the boys in Lao. The child shrugged in response. The woman marched off, screaming for Nirachee, and the boy leaned close to Gabe and whispered something. They had a brief conversation that Colt couldn’t hear or understand while he checked out the first floor. It was just this side of a rat’s nest.

  “Hey, Lang, listen to this.” Gabe brought the boy forward, coaxing him with surprising gentleness. “Tell this man what you just told me, son.”

  He looked terrified.

  “Come on,” Gabe urged. “This little boy just arrived here on a boat. His English is good, though.”

  Colt nodded. “Is that so?”

  “And before he came to this house, he said that Mr. Pakpao had them stop somewhere. An island.”

  Where was he going with this? “And?”

  “Mr. Pakpao taught this boy a poem about the island. Tell him,” Gabe said, an extraordinary amount of patience in his voice. “Tell him the island poem.”

  The child, maybe ten if he was a day, looked up at Colt. “There once was a man from Nantucket whose dick was so long he could suck it.”

  Nantucket. Jesus, they were bringing them through Nantucket?

  “Isn’t that funny?” Gabe asked, his look anything but.

  A noise behind Colt made him turn to look at the street, just in time to see another boy fiddling near the trunk of the GTO.

  “Hey, get away,” Colt yelled.

  The boy didn’t move.

  “If he so much as breathes on that car, there’ll be hell to pay,” Gabe said.

  “I’ll get him,” Colt replied. “Maybe he knows more poetry.” He hustled out toward the kid, who cowered on the other side of the car.

  “Take me,” the child said softly.

  Colt just looked at him, not sure if it was an unwanted invitation for sex or a plea for escape. He couldn’t take him out of here, but he’d have agents swarming this place in the next hour.

  “Soon,” Colt promised.

  The boy just closed his eyes. He’d heard that before, no doubt.

  “PhanPhan!” The woman bolted out of the house, screaming in another language at the kid, who crouched as soon she came near. “Where’s Nirachee?”

  He replied and she smacked him so hard he buckled to the ground. Gabe came tearing out as Colt drew his weapon and ordered her to stop.

  She cut him with blazing eyes. “You cop! I know you cop! I already paid, damn it!”

  A shot cracked from the upstairs window, ricocheting off the pavement. Colt and Gabe both dove for cover around the car, aiming their weapons up at the house.

  “You hit this fucking car, dickhead, and you’ll die an ugly death!” Gabe yelled.

  A child’s head came through the window, the shadow of a man behind him, a pistol at the kid’s head. “Leave or he’s dead!” the man yelled.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Get the fuck out of here or I blow this kid’s head all over your pretty car!” the faceless shadow hollered, well protected by the boy.

  The child didn’t even flinch; his death was inevitable. Maybe it would be a relief.

  “Your call,” Gabe said without turning to Colt. “We can take them all, but the kid’s gonna die.”

  “Let’s go,” Colt murmured. “I’ll have this place raided by twenty agents in less than an hour.”

  “That might be long enough for these pricks to clear out,” Gabe said, his words barely audible over the woman’s screaming.

  Kids would die if they tried to handle this themselves. At least that one in the window, and probably more. They were hostages, and so sadly expendable because the next shipment would be in anytime. Through Nantucket.

  “We can be heroes, homeslice,” Gabe said calmly. “But we’ll have some baby blood on our hands.”

  “Five seconds, this kid is fucking dead, mister!”

  Colt grabbed the driver’s door without taking his gun down, slid in, and Gabe followed, turning on the car and peeling out with a deafening roar.

  Before they hit the first intersection, Colt had his SAC on the line, reading off the location and knowing exactly how competent the agents were who would be out there, long before the local cops, who were probably on the take anyway.

  “You want to stay and supervise the raid, dawg?” Gabe asked. “Because I have to book. I cannot be seen and my ass will be burned grass if I get on any federal radar.”

  “It’s fine.” Colt didn’t want to compromise Gabe, who’d helped so much. The agents would handle the job, and he had to get back to Nantucket. He had to find out where and how Emmanuel was using the place as a way station for slaves.

  “I’m going take 495 if you don’t mind breaking some speed laws,” Gabe said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I figured.” Gabe threw him a look. “You want to go get your girl. Unless you’re planning to leave Faux Cara behind.”

  No, he wasn’t. Because he wasn’t going to spend one more minute without her. Oh, man. Where did that idea come from? “She’d kill me if I even thought about it.”

  Gabe lifted a brow. “Whipped already, are we?”

  “Nah. Just…” How the hell could he describe how he felt?

  “Just gone, it sounds to me.” Gabe chuckled. “Dude, I’d fall for an easier chick than Vivi if I were you.”

  “She’s not easy.”

  “No kidding. Complicated as hell, I’d say.”

  “And I didn’t fall for her,” he said, misery pressing down on him. He didn’t? Then what else did you call the feeling of tumbling down a fifty-foot cliff onto a rocky landing?

  In Colt’s ear, Joe Gagliardi’s phone was answered by an assistant, and in a moment he was on the phone with the man who would probably be his next boss. As he described the scene and gave him details, he could hear Gagliardi’s approval and appreciation in every response.

  “Get back to Nantucket, Colt, and figure this thing out,” Gagliardi said, ending the call. “We need to tie this directly to Roman Emmanuel.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “And great job,” he added. “When you close this case, the L.A. job is yours.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Exactly what he wanted—away from Boston and all his dark memories.

  Except Vivi Angelino would be three thousand miles away. Why the hell that suddenly mattered, he had no clue.

  Gabe swerved and passed a truck, sparing Colt a glance. “For a guy who, from the sound of this end of the conversation, is getting a juicy promo because of this, you kind of look like shit on a stick right now.”

  “Matches how I feel.”

  “I’da never guessed it,” Gabe said with a soft whistle.

  “Guessed what?”

  “That Vivi’d get a straight shooter like you all knotted up and shit.”

  “I’m not knotted up and shit.” Was he? Goddamn it, was he? He looked at Gabe as if he might have the answer. But Vivi’s cousin just laughed and smashed the pedal until they hit three figures on the speedometer.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lang barely spoke to Vivi the entire flight
back to Nantucket. He told her about the trip to Lowell in sparse detail, and she didn’t have the stomach to ask for more. He briefed the agents on the plane for the duration of the short flight, and the rest of the time he was either on his phone or lost in thought.

  The only substantive conversation they had was about Chessie’s amazing hacking skills, and her discovery that the text Vivi had gotten came from a phone registered to Joellen Mugg. Vivi had responded with a vague text about why they’d gone to Boston, and hadn’t heard anything else from anyone in Cara’s crew.

  What she didn’t tell Lang was that Chessie also figured out a way to read all of Joellen’s texts. There was nothing interesting to report in her messages, anyway. Not to mention that gaining access to those texts without some kind of warrant would probably curl his hair and earn Vivi a classic Lang lecture about rules and regs.

  But after a few hours of the silent treatment, Vivi would have welcomed the lecture. Anything to connect with him.

  Once they were at the Nantucket house, he was back on the phone and in discussions with his other agents about the official clearing of the crime scene in Cara’s master bedroom.

  Vivi was standing in her room, not quite sure what to do next, when Mercedes knocked at the open door.

  “Would you like me to move your things upstairs? I imagine it would be easier to have access to Cara’s clothes.”

  Did she want to stay in that gargantuan bedroom suite… alone? Would she be alone? Based on the way Lang was acting, probably. The reality of that tasted sour in her mouth, or maybe it was bittersweet. Lang was most likely not the best candidate for her first real sexual foray—even though she wanted him to be.

  “I guess that would be easier,” Vivi agreed. “Let me gather what I have here and take it up.”

  Mercedes helped her, stiff and silent, trudging up the stairs to the wide vestibule entryway that led to Cara’s bedroom.