Soft Targets

by John Gilstrap

  “And what of all these children?” Irene snapped. “We can’t just leave—”

  A noise in the distance shut her up. “Did you hear that?”

  She leaned out farther and cocked her head. There it was again. A pounding sound. It was coming from somewhere down the row of storage lockers. Someone was pounding on a door.

  Irene bolted out of the opening and hit the ground at a run. “Ashley? Kelly?”

  The pounding got louder, more aggressive. She heard voices, too. Children’s voices by the timbre and quality, but too muffled to make out the words.

  “I’m coming!” Irene yelled. “Keep pounding, I’m coming!” She turned to call to Jonathan, but he was right with her, just a step behind.

  The storage units were all identical, each constructed of brick and accessible through wide double doors that appeared to be made of steel, each of which was locked shut with a padlock. As the pounding continued, it also got closer, and when Irene was only three doors away from Unit 1404, she could see the door moving from the pressure of whoever was behind it.

  The padlock on the outside was nothing special, a combination job that you could pick up at any hardware store. Still, it was a lock and it was closed.

  When Irene arrived at the door, she pounded on her side. “Ashley? Kelly, are you in there?”

  Jonathan’s hand gripped her shoulder. “Step out of the way,” he said. “I’ll take care of the lock.” As he stepped around her, he lifted his Mossberg shotgun from where it dangled under his armpit and racked the slide to eject a loaded round, and then he slid a breaching slug from the ammo loop on the side of the weapon, pressed it into the receiver, and snapped the slide release shut.

  “Step away from the door!” Irene yelled to the occupants trapped inside.

  Jonathan pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the shank of the padlock and pulled the trigger. The muzzle barked and the lock fragmented. Jonathan opened the door.

  A sickening stench poured out in a rancid wave, and it was followed immediately by a flood of five or six children, again mostly girls, but these were all a little older, maybe twelve. They all appeared desperately frightened and desperately filthy, and none of them were Ashley or Kelly.

  A flashlight snapped on behind her, and over her left shoulder, Jonathan played the beam of a mini Maglite into the darkness of the space. They gasped in unison. The space was packed. An area of fifteen by twenty feet held upwards of another ten or twelve children. There appeared to be remnants of food on the floor, and the place buzzed with flies. Like the children in the van, the faces just stared back at them, into the light. They didn’t know what to do.

  “Hello,” Irene said. “Don’t be frightened. No one will hurt you anymore.”

  “Mom?”

  The tiny voice came from somewhere on her left, and as Irene pivoted, Jonathan shifted the light to keep up.

  And there they were. Her two girls. They looked healthier and cleaner than the others, but they looked equally terrified. They squinted and shielded their eyes from the bright light.

  “Oh, my God,” Irene breathed. “You’re safe.” She dropped to one knee.

  Reacting to the voice they recognized, the girls moved as one, darting away from the wall and into her open arms.

  “Mommy, I’m so sorry,” Kelly said past her tears.

  “No, no, no,” Irene soothed. “Don’t be sorry. You have no need to be sorry.”

  “He said he worked for you,” Ashley said. “I never would have gotten into his car.”

  Irene hugged them both, inhaled them both. “He is a bad, bad man,” she explained. “But you don’t ever have to worry about him again.”

  “Um, excuse me,” Jonathan said.

  Irene looked up.

  “Big Guy and I have to go,” Jonathan said. “These kids need ambulances, and you need to talk to the cops. We can’t be here for any of that.”

  Irene started to stand, but her daughters wouldn’t let her. Of course they had to go, and then she would have a lot of explaining to do. “I understand,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what . . . I don’t know how . . .” The words just wouldn’t form.

  “Our pleasure,” Jonathan said. He kissed his fingers and touched them gently to the tops of the girls’ heads. When he placed the fingers on Irene’s head, they lingered just for a second or two. “Congratulations,” he said.

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter 10

  Asheville Police Detective Bob Anderson had become Irene’s shadow. He gave her space for a few days while she sat with the girls in the hospital, but now that they were getting better and were slated to go home the next day, he started to turn the screws on Irene.

  He finally coaxed her to the hospital’s coffee shop, but only after a floor nurse promised to page her when either daughter awoke.

  Irene drank her coffee black, while Anderson turned his to coffee syrup with a fistful of sugar packets. With eating habits like that, she wondered how he stayed so slim. They sat opposite each other, at a table set for four.

  “We still haven’t been able to find your friend Mayo,” Anderson said. Clearly, it was an icebreaker because it made no sense to open their chat with things he didn’t know. With a failure.

  “He was never a friend of mine,” Irene said. In the explanation she’d shared at the crime scene, and then again in the snippets of interviews over the past couple of days, Irene had pretty much come clean with all the details, starting with her interview with Amanda. She’d omitted the presence of Scorpion and Big Guy, and, of course, any mention of the episode with Jennings.

  “No idea where he might have gone?”

  “If I knew where he was, I’d be making travel plans to oversee his arrest.” Irene kept her answers short and her tone tight. She sensed that Anderson had a bomb to drop, and she was confident that he’d get to it soon.

  “Let me tell you what’s not adding up for me,” Anderson said. “I don’t get how you arrived at the U-Lokit yard without a vehicle.”

  “I had a vehicle at first,” Irene said. “But someone must have stolen it. One of the traffickers, I imagine.”

  The answer seemed to amuse him. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I guess child traffickers can never have enough vehicles.” He took a sip. “You know, you saved a lot of lives out there. Every one of those kids is going to be fine. Physically, anyway. Emotionally, well, there’s some serious shrink bills in a lot of futures.”

  Irene felt a stab, and Anderson seemed to realize it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That came out way more harshly than I wanted. I’m sure your girls will be fine.”

  Irene just nodded. What was there to say? “Have you been able to find the children’s parents?” she asked.

  “Working on it. We’ve found some. The preponderance are foster kids. Hard to believe anyone is so evil as to take kids with hard knocks and then knock them even harder.”

  More nodding. The trick in an interrogation—and that was what this was—was to get people talking about anything. Just get the flow going. Once you do, there’s always time to bring the topic around to the one you’re fishing for. By remaining largely silent, Irene was keeping the valves shut.

  “Funny thing about those kids,” Anderson went on. “Some of them talk about soldiers being with you. A couple even talked about a giant.”

  Irene smiled. “Kids say the darnedest things, don’t they?”

  “They do. Yes, they do. And it’s interesting, too, that according to the medical examiner, one of the traffickers was killed with a weapon that doesn’t match any of the ones you were carrying.”

  Something fluttered in Irene’s gut. This could be trouble.

  She leaned forward. “Let’s cut to the chase, Detective,” she said. “All these questions and suspicions. Is it your intent to arrest me?”

  The inquiry seemed to startle him. “On what charge?”

  “That was my next question.”

  He scowled as he considered his answer. “I’ll be
honest with you, Agent Rivers. There’s a lot about what you’ve told me that just doesn’t make sense. Beyond the bullshit about the car and the weapons, there are way too many missing dots when I try to connect them.”

  He paused, and she waited.

  Anderson sighed and vigorously scratched the sides of his head with both hands. “On the other hand, there are all those lives saved, and of the ones who were killed, I figure the world can use the extra oxygen.”

  Irene felt the bloom of hope, but she continued her silence, not wanting to screw anything up.

  He smiled. “Oh, relax,” he said. “I just decided that I don’t care. Whatever rules you bent and broke, I don’t see any of the harmed parties pressing charges. I’ve got real criminals to chase.”

  Irene wondered if she might float out of her chair. She hadn’t realized the weight of that burden.

  Anderson stood. “Try to keep a low profile for a while, will you?” he said. He offered his hand.

  She stood and accepted it. “Nice meeting you,” she said.

  He laughed. “Yeah, right. We both know that this is a freebie, right? And before you lock up, I don’t expect an answer. I wish you a wonderful future with those beautiful little girls of yours.”

  She remained standing as he took three steps toward the exit, and then turned. “Oh, one more thing,” he said. “I just heard this morning that that Ramus prick is dead.”

  Irene couldn’t suppress her smile.

  “Thanks to your lead, we got a BOLO out on the wire, and they picked him up somewhere in Kentucky. I hear the cops there were a little vocal about the charges against him, and somehow he beat himself to death in his jail cell.” He winked. “Go figure.”

  “Yeah,” Irene said. “Go figure.”

  Anderson resumed his walk toward the door and said over his shoulder, “We won’t give up on Mayo.”

  Irene waited till he was gone, then rose from her chair and started the long walk back to her babies’ rooms, both looking forward to and dreading tomorrow, when they would be home again, just the three of them. They’d just endured a part of the world that she’d always prayed they’d be spared. How could she make it better? What could she say even to get a running start on the subject? Here, in the hospital, as depressing a place as it was, at least there was the pressure of something more imminently important than tackling the difficult conversations. There were the health scares of disease exposures—the kids in that storage locker shared enough germs to choke every petri dish in the building—and the physical exams, and thank heaven and all things holy that Ashley and Kelly were fine in both regards. The malnutrition and dehydration issues were already stabilized, so that was good, too. Nothing but good news all around.

  If only she could tell them that the perpetrator of all this, Tony Mayo, was in custody. Or better still, dead. She wanted to assure her children that they would never have to worry about him again. As it was, there would be yet another bitter lesson on the rarity of happy endings in real life.

  Irene felt her mood darkening as she walked down the final hallway that led to Ashley and Kelly’s room, but it brightened the moment she walked through the doorway. Dom D’Angelo, looking dapper and priestly in his black suit and clerical collar, sat quietly in a chair near the window, reading a novel whose title she couldn’t make out. He beamed when he saw her, and stood to greet her.

  “They’re sleeping soundly,” he whispered. He cast a glance to both of them as he grasped Irene’s hands. “Children are so beautiful when they sleep.” He made eye contact with Irene and motioned to the door with his forehead. “Let’s walk,” he said. He bent to pick up a slim leather briefcase.

  Back in the hallway, they could speak more or less at full volume. “It’s so nice of you to come by,” Irene said. “I was just thinking of the mental anguish that lies ahead for both of them.”

  “Let’s walk and talk outside,” Dom said. “Things always seem more dire in a hospital. It’s a beautiful day.”

  It was a five-minute walk, and despite several attempts to ignite a little small talk, Dom seemed intent on waiting for the sunshine. As they stepped out into the eighty-degree brightness, Irene realized that he’d made a good call. The air smelled like summer, filled with the aroma of moist grass and blooming flowers. The air carried no sounds of crying or of doctors being paged.

  “Your girls will be fine in time,” Dom said as he led the way out onto the sidewalk that led to a patch of grass and some benches. He held Irene’s hand as they walked. “They are not sick and they were not brutalized. Considering some of the other children I deal with, that’s a great first step. Plus, I’ll be there to help you if you want.”

  Irene made an incredulous puffing sound. “Of course I want.”

  The path turned sharply uphill. “You’re the one I worry about,” Dom said.

  “Me?”

  “You. A little bird told me that you did a hell of a job getting Ashley and Kelly back. He said you never lost focus.”

  Irene slipped her hand out of his and used it to wave the comment away as irrelevant. “I was just doing my job. As an FBI agent and a mom.”

  Dom let the comment hang and pointed to one of the benches. “I don’t disagree,” he said, taking a seat on the far end. “But it sounds like you might have crossed a few internal lines. If you ever need to discuss that—or anything else, for that matter—I want you to know that I’m here for you, too.”

  Irene remained standing. “I never doubted that for a moment.”

  Dom cocked his head. “You’re not going to sit?”

  Irene tossed her head toward the hospital. “I’ve been out of their room for too long,” she said. “I don’t want them to wake up and find me not there.”

  “I understand.” He stood. “You’re a good mom, Irene.”

  Something about the way he delivered the words caused tears to press behind her eyes.

  “But listen,” he said. “I have something here for you. Something you need to watch in private as soon as you can.” He reached into his briefcase and withdrew a wrapped rectangle that was the size of a book. “Do you have a VHS player?”

  “At home, I do. What is it?”

  He handed it to her. “You’ll know when you see it. Watch it alone, though.”

  She hesitated. “Please tell me that you haven’t gone into the pornography business,” she joked.

  His eyes darkened. “Call me after you watch it if you need to. Anytime, day or night.”

  Irene fought the sudden urge to hand it back. “Dom?”

  “It speaks for itself,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go see if the girls are awake yet.”

  It was nearly thirty hours later when Irene settled into her chair in the family room and slid the VHS tape into the player. Thankfully, the girls were exhausted after the seven-hour drive and were anxious to go to bed as soon as dinner was finished. So far, they seemed happy, essentially undamaged from their ordeal. Irene had been anticipating hours of soul-searching discussion, but now was rather unnerved by the lack of it. If neither of the girls brought it up, was Irene just supposed to ignore it?

  God, how she hated Tony Mayo and all the misery he brought upon her family.

  Once the tape worked through its initial jumps and wiggles, the image settled down to a somewhat jiggly picture of a one-level strip-style motel, a covered sidewalk in front of a uniform pattern of flat rectangular windows alternating with flat paneled doors. A wide array of cars was nosed up to the sidewalk, one of them a Chrysler LeBaron. Judging from the framing of the picture, that was the focus of this production. There was no sound.

  After a few seconds, the door to the room in front of the LeBaron opened to reveal a man in his late twenties, early thirties, leaving with a thick garment bag slung over his shoulder. Irene’s heart jumped when he saw the face.

  Tony Mayo.

  The camera jiggled a little more as the lens zoomed in. Now it was just Mayo in the frame. Someone had been surveilling him!
This was exactly the moment she’d been praying for. If the camera could just reveal—

  The frame jumped almost imperceptibly, and two seconds later, Tony’s body disintegrated in a spray of blood and bone. One arm, still attached to his shoulder, pinwheeled out of the frame completely. Irene yelled—at least she thought it was a yell—and brought her hands to her mouth to stifle it.

  Then, as she continued to watch the horror show, the zoom lens pulled back. And back. And back some more. As the frame increased, she saw the entire parking lot, and in front of that, the entire lot of a waffle place adjacent to the motel. Then she saw four lanes of Interstate traffic and then the tops of trees on the near side of the highway.

  She realized then that she was watching the image from a spotter’s scope, and that she’d witnessed a sniper shot from a huge weapon—she suspected it to be a .50 caliber. The range had to be three quarters of a mile, maybe more. It was the kind of shot that only a precious few people had a hope in hell of making.

  She considered it an honor to know two of them.

  Thank you for reading Soft Targets. Fans of John Gilstrap’s

  Jonathan Grave thrillers have probably recognized it as a

  prequel to the Grave series. In case you missed the first full-

  length Jonathan Grave novel, here is an excerpt from . . .

  NO MERCY

  Available in print and e-book formats from

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Chapter 1

  The fullness of the moon made it all more complicated. The intense silver glow cast shadows as defined as midday despite the thin veil of cloud cover. Dressed entirely in black, with only his eyes showing beneath his hood, Jonathan Grave moved like a shadow in the stillness. Crickets and tree frogs, nocturnal noisemakers by the thousands, gave him some cover, but not enough. There was never enough cover. He reminded himself that he was in Indiana soybean country facing a clueless adversary, but then he remembered the penalty for failing to respect one’s adversary.