As for those thirteen teen girls who had just been promised two thousand dollars cash and their freedom after a night of forced prostitution? Jake wasn’t going to lose any sleep. They were no different than a set of high priced sports utility rubber.
62
“911 operator.”
“My name is Lucas Dey. I’m a former LA County Deputy Sheriff working as a private contractor,” began Lucky, knowing the operator would be best served if he was calm, clear, and correct. “I’m currently in pursuit of a medium-sized box truck carrying juvenile sex cargo.”
“Spell your name please for Sheriff’s.”
“D as in David. E as in Edward. Y as in Young. The vehicle is a tire truck.”
“Did you say ‘tire truck?’”
“Yes. I don’t have a company name. Just a witness description. I believe the vehicle is southbound on the 405. Destination San Pedro. Please alert CHP and all South Bay authorities.”
“You say you are in pursuit?”
“Driving a blue Nissan Altima. It’s a rental so I don’t know the tags. I also don’t know how far behind I am. I just need you to run this on all data bands.”
“Are you able to stay on the line?”
“Yeah,” said Lucky, switching the cell phone from his right hand to his left. He was on hold. A 911 emergency hold. So why did it feel no different than if he were holding for tech support from Microsoft?
Traffic was bad. Holiday traffic no less. And it was getting worse.
So callers would know they hadn’t been disconnected, the line played piped-in holiday music. No doubt, the choices were all the secular songs, filtered by some bureaucrat-shrink to slow the panicked caller’s sky-high blood pressure.
Lucky had initially gunned the rented blue Nissan down the 405, weaving through traffic in hopes of catching up with the tire truck. He applied less tension to his grip on the steering wheel to keep the car nimble while steering with just the one hand.
That dim and desperate warehouse chock-full of empty cargo containers was further and further behind him. It had taken little effort for him to glean what he needed out of the bleeding warehouse caretaker. Lucky had quickly learned that Jake was driving a tire truck full of kidnaped girls to some unknown locale in San Pedro. There were thirteen teenagers on board and Ziggy—aka Zagreb—Jake’s older cousin, was in charge of the operation. Cash payments were dispensed to a variety of young Valley-raised compatriots—all of Armenian extraction—in exchange for assisting him run his sex trafficking operation.
Lucky had found a few rolls of bargain paper towels and quickly packed the caretaker’s wound before duct-taping the young man’s hands to a city gas meter.
That was forty-five minutes ago.
Lucky was holding his tongue from cursing out loud at the tightening holiday traffic. Brake lights were beginning to flare across all lanes. Cars and trucks reduced their speeds in a stop and start symphony until a mile south of LAX, forward momentum had wound all the way down to a negligible three miles per hour. More vehicles packed in from behind, leaving Lucky and that blue Nissan a nearly immovable spec in the ugly and sudden gridlock.
“Fucking cunt hell!” Lucky pounded the steering wheel. The outburst stemmed from a stew of frustration and chronic pain.
“There’s no cause to curse me out, mister!” spat the 911 operator, her rise to anger betraying her cultural roots.
Compton, Watts, or Inglewood, guessed Lucky. And he’d stepped right in the middle of it.
“Jesus,” said Lucky. “Thought I was on—”
“And you just called me the C-word?”
“Really, it was something else—”
“Hey, Mr. Ex-Deputy Sheriff. You can go fuck yourself! ASSHOLE!!!”
There was a soft click as the 911 operator disconnected from the call. Lucky unlocked his shoulder from his ear and let the cell phone drop to the seat.
“Can I just—please God—catch a break?” he muttered to himself.
His mind shot back to his days as a Sheriff’s trainee—fresh on the job after a year working the county jail, something required of all rookie deputies. Bledsoe, his training officer that first day in the radio unit had uttered his favorite phrase:
Work the damn problem, rookie.
63
San Pedro. 10:22 P.M.
Thirteen scared and half-frozen teenaged girls tried like hell to balance on the rear deck of the slow-rolling trawler. It was an oversight that they were wearing next to nothing and had zero protection against the elements. The best the crew could muster was a large, blue plastic tarp with grommets on the corners. The girls huddled, each barefoot, holding her heels in one hand and hanging onto her piece of the tarp with the other.
Karrie had been cold before. Wisconsin cold. Jumping out of the hot tub and rolling naked in the snow cold. Yet nothing in her short life had raised such gooseflesh on her skin. She was beginning to shudder from her marrow and wondered how long it would take them all to manifest symptoms of hypothermia. Yet instead of complaining about the temperature, girls were beginning to chatter about the effects of the capsules they had swallowed.
“I’m getting so stoned,” volunteered one girl.
“Seasick bullshit,” claimed another. “That shit’s gotta be like close to heroin or somethin’.”
Karrie was feeling nothing in the form of pharmacologic dysfunction due to the fact that she hadn’t swallowed the capsule. As fast as the pill had landed on her tongue, she’d expertly swept it into a hole in her gums left by an early wisdom tooth extraction. It had never quite fully closed. She had gotten used to nervously playing with it, letting the tip of her talented tongue to slip inside, nervously sweeping food in and out. The moment she spied the pills she knew they weren’t for motion sickness. And when the man they called Ziggy inspected her mouth with a flashlight, he didn’t catch the tip of the pill poking out from the divot in her gums.
She had spat the drug out the second her feet touched the pavement after climbing down from the truck.
Unlike the marathon-like trip in the tire truck, the boat ride turned out to be relatively brief. In no time at all, the tarp was removed to reveal the tall white hull of a luxury yacht. At first glance, the super black-and-white looked massive. Its curving brow dwarfed the fishing boat as it came around and idled at the stern, where a low and inviting diving deck jutted out. Crewmen tossed ropes and attached a gangway with cable rails. One by one the girls were ushered across as Karrie hung back. With her mental and physical wits about her, she was in constant search for a way out. Were they counting the girls? What if she kicked up the lid to one of those fishy holding tanks and disappeared inside? Would they miss her? How hard would they look? Perhaps they would assume she had fallen overboard. For certain, they wouldn’t look for her. Nobody would expect a spindly teenager in heels to survive the black water.
Yet they were only thoughts. Fantasies, even. In no time, Karrie discovered she was the last to be beckoned to cross the gangway to the warm, glowing, superyacht. Inviting as it was, she knew what would be waiting for her once on board. A party. Men. And all their illicit expectations.
“What if I say no?” Karrie found herself asking as Ziggy offered her a hand of help.
“Girls who say no have to swim,” answered Ziggy. “Look at the lights over there. The shore. Ask yourself, ‘Could I make it?’”
Karrie gazed across the harbor as directed. Those massive container cranes covered in colored lights looked miles away. The black water that roiled between sparkled with all the distant reflections. She knew the answer immediately. If she was tossed overboard, she might make it halfway before the harbor swallowed her.
So tempting.
Dying, she thought, would be such a middle finger to the world. To all she had left behind in Chenaqua. It stirred the rebel inside of her. But it couldn’t crush the hope for the life ahead of her. If she could only survive the night, she reasoned. She might yet get her chance at the future.
64
There may not have been a work day that went by that Lydia Gonzalez didn’t want to pinch herself. Comfortably strapped in at the controls of her Bell JetRanger helo, state of the industry noise-cancelling headphones cupping her ears, she might as well have been a gull riding waves of air above all the blood and acrimony that defined a cop’s life on the streets. And to think of all the times she had thought about quitting the LAPD. It hadn’t been an easy career, bouncing around between divisions like a foster child. All the while, she had the even more difficult job of being a single mom. Then there was the accident that had shattered her jaw and left it wired shut for six months. She had fought, for but had been denied, a retirement disability—the PD claiming her injuries were sustained while off-duty.
The decision not going her way was the best thing that could have happened. Her vigor to train and transfer into the Air Support Division had paid off with a raise and a flight suit with her name permanently embroidered over her heart. She was a pilot and a woman. A rarity in the local law enforcement ranks.
She found outright joy flying the mechanical dragon. One of the secondary thrills was the autonomy of the gig. The primary function of air support was just that—providing support from the air when ground patrols requested assistance. The rest of the time allowed her or her observer to monitor all calls. And that included a patch into the 911 exchange. It was during one such respite—after spending twenty minutes in close support of two ground units hunting down a fleeing armed robbery suspect as he hopped one backyard fence after another—that Gonzo switched her radio over to what she called the mash-up channel. When tuned, her headphones would be flooded with nearly every call on the cop band. While listening, she would elevate the chopper to five thousand feet and wait for a plea for help that struck her fancy. Once the call and location were identified, her observer and navigator would call out a coordinate. Gonzo would then spin the helo in the precise direction, tilt the nose downward and using both gravity and the twin turbojet engines, sled her way to the desired destination.
“Anybody out there know an ex-LASD named Lucas Dey?” asked a dispatcher. “Got a 911 report on juvenile human cargo in a tire truck, southbound 405 headed for San Pedro.”
And that was it. All and everything Gonzo had heard on the subject. Yet it was enough to tickle her ears, just hearing his name. The rest she had put together in the summation of the call. Juvenile human cargo? Tire truck? The way Gonzo heard it, Lucky had found his missing teenager and was in pursuit.
Already at her ceiling of five thousand feet, Gonzo rotated the helicopter clockwise until the coastline was ahead of her. The familiar band of red and white lights indicated the 405 freeway was few miles inland. By her account, the artery was at a practical standstill in both directions. She imagined Lucky stuck down there. Gridlocked. Unable to proceed. Sure as hell, he would be cursing up a blue streak.
“Let’s find that tire truck for him,” smiled Gonzo.
As she pitched the helicopter toward the highway, her observer flipped down his gyro-stabilized binoculars. In a matter of moments, they were flying a line parallel to the southbound cars and clocking the business logos on every truck and panel van. When that turned up nothing, Gonzo pitched in a slow arc along the trucking corridor that led to the freight docks of San Pedro and the north end of the Port of Los Angeles.
“We’re out of bounds,” said the observer.
“So what?” said Gonzo. “I wanna find that truck.”
Keeping her altitude, they scanned the docks in one direction. And when she made the slow one-eighty to turn about, the observer spotted the box truck backed up to a commercial slip. Closer inspection revealed the truck door was wide open. Flipping to infrared, they were unable to locate any humans but for the driver of the vehicle as he circled back to the cab.
“What about that boat?” asked Gonzo, looking down over her left shoulder. She saw harbor lights reflecting off the outline of a small wake.
“Looks like a trawler heading out to fish,” said the observer. But when he caught the odd heat signature of what appeared to be a huddle of humans standing on the stern, his tone changed. “Lotta fisherman on that boat.”
Gonzo put the chopper into a slow ascent. She kept the trawler in view while gathering the bigger picture. She unplugged her headset from the radio and re-jacked it into the cell phone. She was grateful she still had Lucky on her list of speed dials.
“Lucky, dear?” Gonzo said the second he answered with his standard, sotto voce, Yup? “You better still love me because I just found your tire truck.”
The superyacht was named Lost Enigma. Built in Perama, Greece, it was two hundred and eleven feet of pure, oceanic luxe. It sported a spa, massage room, gym, movie theater, and most importantly, fifteen private staterooms. In full seafaring motor, it demanded a crew of thirty-one. But for a simple party cruise around the Los Angeles harbor, a skeleton crew of fewer than half was required.
After boarding, the teen girls were allowed to briefly warm themselves in a rear salon. The man called Ziggy reappeared with a cardboard carton containing headbands with fuzzy attached reindeer horns. Each girl was ordered to wear a pair. Karrie chose a red set, but didn’t put hers on. Ziggy gave his final instructions, which when boiled down were twofold: the answer to every man’s request would be Yes and there would be absolutely no negotiation or solicitation for tips. Once again, he promised that at night’s end they would each receive a cash payment of two grand as well as permanent release from servitude.
Karrie looked at the faces of her indentured cohorts, wondering if any of them believed the ploy because she sure as shit didn’t. Instead, she read each girl as glassy and hopped up on whatever was in those red and gray capsules. Some were already grooving, getting pumped to the music thumping in from above.
“Any girl I catch refusing a request,” insisted Ziggy, his voice raised over the walloping bass, “will be severely punished.” His last instruction to “have fun” was swallowed by a man’s voice shouting down from above to bring on the girls!
Placing herself roughly in the middle of the line, Karrie followed a wobbly teen in fishnets and a faux leather skirt up a tight circular stairwell that emptied out into a large creamy living room with plush sofas, pillows, marble pillars, and a mirrored ceiling. The music was practically deafening and dampened the appreciative applause from the male guests. Each man, by her measure, was no younger than forty. Suited. Some had doffed their neckties for the evening. Others were polished and pressed as if they had dressed just for their evening aboard the party boat. Karrie counted maybe twenty men. Though she was too young to instinctively scan for wedding rings, had she cared to she would have noticed quite a few and wondered just how many of those smiling jacks had daughters the same age as she.
There was a huge, black lacquer grand piano upon which was a small, elegantly lit Christmas tree. Over the toxic mix of cigar smoke and men’s cologne, Karrie could still catch the occasional whiff of fresh-cut evergreen. As a tear stuck in her eye when she pined for home and her mother, a black man in a red vest carrying a tray of filled-to-the-brim champagne flutes steered into her.
“Merry Christmas,” he said thickly, his accent reminding Karrie of Caribbean vacations.
She didn’t so much see a tray of champagne glasses as much as she saw crystal stemware poured full of liquid courage. Karrie thanked him for the offer, downed one glass in three successive swallows then picked up a second glass. Still holding her reindeer horns in her opposite hand, she decided to deposit them onto the crook of the waiter’s arm.
A man from behind touched her elbow.
“What’s your name?” the man asked. He was thickly mustached with a full head of silver hair. Not too tall but powerful in the shoulders. A life in the sun had left his skin leathery and cracked, yet his eyes betrayed a rather youthful sparkle.
“Karrie,” she answered simply, not realizing she’d all but jettisoned her stage name of Valeriana.
“Pretty na
me,” said the man with the big mustache, though Karrie was certain he would have made the same remark had she said her name was something like Turnip or Ass Crack. “I’d ask where you’re from, but that’s against the rules.”
“Rules?” Karrie asked.
“The less any of us know, the better,” he said. “I’m sure you understand. Is that your natural hair?”
“I guess.”
“It’s got just enough red to make me wonder what you keep under the hood.”
“I’m a little seasick,” lied Karrie. “Would you mind if I get some air?”
“Take my arm,” he offered. “And I’ll be honored to show you topside.”
“Is this your boat?” she asked, her voice quivering as she cautiously looped her arm in his and followed his steps.
“No, no. Just a guest like you.”
“Bet you’re not at all like me,” she nervously teased.
“Inside we are. Flesh and blood and beating hearts.”
Karrie saw three upward steps ahead and a door leading to an outer deck. Beyond she could see the moon attempting to break through the clouds. And then nothing else but the blackness of an ocean. She briefly fantasized about running headlong until she flipped herself over the railing. Would they stop the boat to rescue her? Or just let her sink and be kindly forgotten?
“You know I’m just fifteen?” Karrie found herself saying.
To that, the man with the silver hair and mustache stopped on a dime. He squeezed her hand and grinned so wide she could see his white teeth were capped.
“I know you’re fifteen,” he said. “Which makes you one very special Christmas gift.”
65
Los Angeles Harbor. 11:02 P.M.
As a general rule, LA cops could depend on the domino effect. The various jurisdictions of authority—from the Sheriff’s Department to the LAPD as well as the variety of independent authorities and bureaus from Santa Monica, Culver City, all the way down to Long Beach—were practiced at passing the baton to one another. A crime beginning in Redondo Beach that wound up as far east as Glendora was hardly uncommon. Dispatch operators passed calls to each other like blackjack dealers throwing down cards.
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 59
