The Trade Off

by Frank Zafiro

  I’d never killed a human being before. Odd how the blood smelled the same as my animal kills. A small part of me wanted to gut him, to see if the rest of the kill would feel similar to the ones I’d become known for.

  “Is he… is he dead?” The white guy watched me, uncertainty splashed across his face as he reached over his crossed arm and bit a fingernail.

  “Yep, I killed him.” I stood, glancing at the women, hiding my remorse and not certain that it was actually remorse. “So are there any more?”

  The strong one shook her head, her lips pressed tight. I nodded and returned my gaze to the piss-ant below me. “You lied to me once. I won’t tolerate another one. I’m going to ask you a couple questions and you’re going to answer. Got it? It’s really simple.”

  He nodded, swallowing, watching me. Blood seeped between the fingers pressed against his shoulder.

  I moved again to secure my back, squaring off to him but keeping the entire room in my view. “You took a girl in a red skirt, blonde hair, not more than sixteen years old. Where is she?”

  He shook his head.

  “No? No what? You didn’t take her?” I lifted the gun, and he shook his head again. I grabbed the barrel with my fingers and hammered him on the injured shoulder with the butt of the gun handle.

  He screamed. I might have cracked a few fingers, too. Oh well.

  “I’ll ask you again.” I held my voice steady. Patience wasn’t a virtue of mine and I’d just killed a man. Paranoia raced up and down my spine. Had anyone heard the shots? How long until the cops came? I trespassed on their property, I couldn’t claim self-defense under the circumstances…

  “Where is she? Was she here?” I couldn’t ask the question I really needed to know. The thought that she might be damaged like the girls on the couch or dead couldn’t settle in my mind, like a schizophrenic episode chasing down my sanity. Except I wasn’t a schizo.

  Shock and fear froze his vocal chords. Tears streamed down his face and the faint scent of fresh urine filled the air, mingling with stale marijuana smoke and the death beside the doorway.

  The girl who I’d spoken to before spoke from the couch, clasping the hands of the other two as she watched me. “She was here. Um, she left with…” She glanced at the men on the floor, then back to me, but didn’t say anything else.

  Certain the white man wasn’t moving, I focused on her. “Who? Who’d she leave with? I need to know.”

  Glancing between the three girls on the couch and me, then the men on the floor, she bit her lip. She lifted dark eyes my way and then clenched her jaw. Another moment of thinking and she offered a jerky nod before answering. “I’ll tell you but you have to take us with you. You can’t leave us here.” One of the girls muttered something unintelligible and squirmed, but the speaker held her hands firm and spoke to her. “So what if he does? Look at them. We won’t survive this.” She looked at me again. “I’m going to survive this.”

  And even if she didn’t know what had happened to Taylor, I would help that girl. She had fight and would make things work. I’d turned away from a cougar on a hunt with that same look in her eye. Some things shouldn’t be killed. “You got it.”

  “Anton took her. He takes most of the girls when they go through here and I think other places.” She motioned toward the men at my feet. “They drug the girls and screw them before Anton shows up to take them away.”

  I swallowed. “Did he…?” I left the question there. She knew what I needed to know.

  Shaking her head, she pointed at the one lying still. “No, they were busy with her and getting sucked off by another girl. Anton arrived before they could do anything with the girl in the red skirt. He took her and the dark haired girl with him and another black guy.”

  “Come on. You can show me which direction.” I bent over and rifled through the Asian’s pockets. A wet stickiness met my search of his rear pockets. “What the hell?” I turned him over, blood soaked the back of him, seeping from a crack in his skull. He wasn’t breathing.

  “Shit.” I hadn’t expected the one kill, how the hell had it escalated to two?

  The white man started screaming. “You killed him! You killed him. Oh man, you killed him.”

  I grabbed the phone in the front pocket of the Asian guy’s pants.

  “That’s his phone, man. You can’t take that.” The shot man reached out toward me, pointing a bloody finger. “You killed him.”

  “That’s exactly why I can take it. So shut your beak.”

  He stared back at me but said nothing.

  I joined the women at the couch, looking down on the nude discarded waif. “Will she be able to go with us?”

  The leader shook her head. “Probably not. She’s coked up and won’t come to for another hour or so.”

  I grabbed at the sheet lying under her and wrapped it unceremoniously around her naked used body. “That’s not good enough. Can the rest of you walk okay?” I looked them over for clothing and the wherewithal to at least make it to my truck.

  They nodded, fear holding their eyes wide and keeping their mouths shut.

  Stooping down, I picked up the girl in a cradle hold and swooped her from the couch. “Come on, ladies. Out the front door. I’m right behind you.” My gun poked from beneath the girl’s knees, still easy to maneuver with her light weight in my arms.

  I herded them out, like ducks. “Don’t look back, just get to the end of the street.” Before closing the door behind me, I looked long and hard at the still crouching man – the only one I’d left alive. “If she’s hurt, I’ll be back for you.”

  Outside, the women waited for me to lead them, safe in the dark covering of night.

  Our footsteps crunched on the gravel-strewn sidewalks and we moved like a funeral dirge around the corner to my truck.

  “Climb on in. I’ll put her in the front, if you girls don’t mind taking the back.” I rested the girl in my arms on the front seat, careful to buckle her in the best I could while keeping the sheet around her. Nothing she had I wanted to see anyway.

  Before rounding the front of my truck, I turned toward the thick bushes in front of a house that may or may not have been abandoned. In any case, the landscape didn’t appear to have been touched in years with wild branches and overgrown weeds, some reaching my hip in height. I wiped my gun with the waist hem of my shirt and shook my head. The piece was a personal favorite I’d had since I opened my first store. Still clutching it with the material protecting it from more prints, I furtively glanced left and right, even over my shoulder. The girls huddled together, not looking my way.

  With a quick flip of my wrist, I tossed my handgun deep between the falling down fences surrounded by suburban jungle. If anyone ever found it, judging by the neighborhood, they wouldn’t report it. It’d be a free weapon. But if the cops found it, the serial number would be a problem. It was registered to me. I’d have to report it missing the next time we did a store inventory. I didn’t know if that would hold up to a formal investigation or not, but it was the best I could do.

  I didn’t spare another second on ditching the gun and hustled around to my door.

  Piled in, I didn’t waste any time starting the truck and roaring from the neighborhood.

  I didn’t want names. I didn’t want to care about them. I really just wanted to drop them off at a police station, get re-armed, and then look for this Anton character. Time wasn’t on my side and I had made more than enough enemies as it was.

  Shit. Two deaths on my hands. What the hell was I going to do?

  TWELVE

  Gus

  Ryan Michaud bit his lip a lot, which made him look nervous as hell. He was a talented analyst, though. He mined data better than anyone I’d come across, and could make solid connections out of a mess of seemingly disconnected facts. Maybe that was what made him a little nervous. He saw all the angles, including all of the ones where things ended badly.

  “I ran a missing persons check,” I told him, “but got nothin
g.”

  “Local only?”

  “No. I ran it state-wide and Idaho, too. I’m not stupid.”

  Michaud held up his hands apologetically. “Sorry. Just checking all possibilities.”

  “She could have come from out of the region,” I suggested, though I doubted it.

  Michaud shook his head. “I don’t think so. He wouldn’t show her off to you if she was just being shipped through. This is probably her point of origin.”

  “My thoughts exactly. And if that’s true…”

  “Then the pipeline is working both directions.”

  I imagined a young American girl was just as exotic in Moscow or Minsk as a young Russian girl was here in the States. I shook my head slightly. The thought still made me sick, even after all this time.

  Michaud tapped some keys, muttering to himself. After a few moments, he frowned, and typed some more.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, she doesn’t match up to any missing persons reports, so I’m checking suspicious circumstance reports with a victim that matches her description.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing local, but…” he smiled. “Kootenai County took one that matches perfectly.”

  He turned one of his screens so I could see the entry, and went back to typing.

  Taylor Porter. Her parents tried to report her missing, but there was no evidence of foul play. The officer took a report, anyway, probably to placate the parents. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, what he described in the report would end up with her being a runaway or having forgot to tell a parent whose house she was staying over at.

  Michaud stopped typing. “This her?”

  I looked at the other screen. A beaming Taylor Porter smiled out at me from her driver’s license photo.

  “That’s her.”

  Michaud leaned back. “Wow. We haven’t seen this yet. Them snatching local girls, I mean. Sort of ups the ante, doesn’t it?”

  “Because they’re American?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, at least for the politicians. But from a strictly operational standpoint, it raises the stakes.”

  I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. One thing we’d learned from debriefing the ones we’d rescued is that when girls are kidnapped, they aren’t long for the area. If I was going to get Taylor out of this, it had to be soon. While she was on the front end of this, before she disappeared into a cargo ship in Seattle or something, bound for Russia or God knows where.

  “Get this information to the lieutenant,” I said. “I’ll email him the rest.”

  I fully expected Shepard to tell me there was no way it could be done. I mean, I already knew there was probably no way. I didn’t need him to tell me. Just the amount of money Anton asked for, and I agreed to, would raise some eyebrows, even from the feds. It might eventually get approved somehow, but that would take time.

  Time we didn’t have.

  Time Faina and Taylor didn’t have.

  But we humans are a hopeful lot. So I headed over to my office storefront while it was still bright and early, made some coffee, and waited.

  Okay, it wasn’t early. It was after eleven. But in the business Heather Williams was in, that was early. For Anton, it probably represented pre-dawn hours.

  I was on my third cup when there was a knock at the back door. Then my phone buzzed. A quick look at the screen revealed a short text message from Shepard.

  It’s me.

  And then another knock.

  I threw off the hefty industrial lock-bar, and cracked open the back door. Shepard waited in the alley. I let him in. He wore a battered Seattle Mariners jacket and faded jeans. Despite the warm weather, his jacket was buttoned half way up to conceal the gun, cuffs, and badge he wore on his belt.

  Shepard clicked past me in his cowboy boots, carrying a gym bag. From the way the bag barely swayed when he walked, it had to be heavy.

  “You want coffee?” I asked, but my eyes were glued to the bag.

  “You bet.” He plopped the bag into a nearby folding chair. “I’ll even buy.”

  He unzipped the bag and spread it open. Bundled stacks of dirty green cash stared out at me.

  “They approved it?” I asked, amazed.

  He re-zipped the bag. “How about that cup?”

  “All right.”

  I walked back into the small kitchen area. Shepard followed. I poured him a generous mug of brew and held it out to him. He took it, thanked me with a silent nod, and sipped. After a moment, he nodded his approval.

  “Better than the store brand they use at the station.”

  “When you don’t have to buy for bulk, you can splurge on quality,” I said. “Now what’s the deal with the money? Who’d you bribe, threaten, or steal from?”

  A slightly pained expression came across his face. He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he sipped his coffee again.

  Realization sunk in.

  “Oh, no. Don’t tell me.”

  Shepard said nothing.

  “They didn’t approve it,” I said. “That’s not federal money.”

  “Nope, it’s not.”

  “Then how—”

  “Relax. It’s seized drug money. I borrowed it from the narcotics unit.”

  “You…borrowed it?”

  He took another drink of coffee. “Just until the federal money comes through. Then I’ll replace it.”

  “Do they know it’s gone?”

  “Of course. You think I’m stupid? You needed cash right away. The feds take forever. So I improvised. Now you have your cash.”

  “Well…thanks,” I said. I was still wondering how someone went about borrowing money from the evidence room. Sounded like something out of Rampart Division.

  He leaned against the counter, still sipping his coffee. His dark gray eyes were fixed on me. “We’ve got to escalate our game, Gus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s pressure coming from Washington to wrap this up. Our friends in Vancouver want to move on their end.”

  “All I’ve got is Anton,” I protested. “None of his bosses. I don’t even know their names.”

  “You know they’re Russian.”

  “I think they’re Russian.”

  “Ryan Michaud thinks you’re right.”

  “Great. A crime analyst agrees with me. I’m all flushed with relief, El-Tee.”

  “He’s not just a crime analyst, he’s the crime analyst. He knows his stuff. If he is saying the same thing as you, that tells me you’re both probably right.”

  “Fine. Maybe we’re right,” I said. “But it’s not what you know, it’s what—”

  “It’s what you can prove,” he interrupted. “I realize that. And right now, you can prove a lot on Anton. I think we need to turn this next meet with him into a buy-bust. Snatch him up and put him in the box. See if we can flip him.”

  An aching dread crept into my stomach. I couldn’t quite say why, but that felt like the wrong move. “I don’t think that’s the right way to play it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just feels wrong. It’s too much short game, not long game.”

  “We might need to start thinking short game,” Shepard said.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Plus, it’s an all-in proposition,” I argued. “If he tells us to pound sand, we’re done. Dead end.”

  “Yeah. And if he flips, we’ve got the whole operation.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The local cartel, maybe. If it isn’t heavily compartmentalized. But that doesn’t give us the source outside of the country, where many of these women are coming from.”

  “That’ll be the FBI, and eventually Interpol’s, job. We get the local cartel, shut them down, and pass on our suspects for them to work upstream.”

  “That sucks.”

  “That’s life.” He lifted his coffee cup to his lip, then stopped. “The clock is ticking on this one, Gus. If we can flip
Anton, I can buy us a little more time to work on his bosses. But anything short of that, and our bosses are calling it in.”

  “That’s…that’s unbelievable.” I was stunned. “Do they have any idea how much work this has been? How much time and effort and risk and—”

  “They know. And they’re grateful.” He finished his coffee and set the cup on the counter. “And they don’t care. For them, it is time to cash in on this investment. That’s all there is to it.”

  I stood quietly, staring at him in disbelief. “We’ll barely make a dent this way,” I whispered. “It’ll be a mosquito bite to them.”

  Shepard shrugged. “Only if we fuck it up. We flip Anton, maybe get his bosses dirty on audio and video? The feds and Interpol will run with that all day long. You might see some big arrests back in the old country.”

  I looked away from him. Maybe he was right. But I had a hard time believing it.

  Shepard crossed the short distance between us. He put his warm and calloused hand on my shoulder. “You’ve had a good run, detective. You’ve done great work. Because of that, we’ve helped a lot of people with this operation. Now…let’s finish strong.”

  I raised my eyes to his, and nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  At Shepard’s urging, I made another pot of coffee. We sat and talked shop and gossiped for a cup more, then he left. After that, I logged onto the secure network from my laptop computer. I spent the next several hours woodenly catching up on all my paperwork. I filled in the blanks on prepared affidavits, filed the incident report on my meet with Anton at Joe Albi Stadium, and reviewed the transcript from our meet at Clink’s. A few of the exchanges were marked ‘inaudible’ by the transcriptionist. I checked the initials at the bottom of the page and saw /dm/. Dawn Maser. If she wasn’t the best steno we had, then she was in the top two. If she couldn’t pull the words out, no one could.

  Of course, I was there, so I could. I pulled up the audio file and went through it, filling in the inaudible words where memory served. Listening to the exchange in the park when I lied to Anton about Tanya calling me Gus in the restaurant sent a small chill through me. The edge in Anton’s voice sounded somehow more sinister on the scratchy recording. I was surprised at how calm my own voice sounded when I remembered how scared I’d been.