Sonya paused and closed her eyes as if recounting the story was too much for her.
“You know the rest. They start having sex, then he convinces her to sleep with his friends. Weeks later, he wants her to prove how much she loves him by going out on the track to make money for him, supposedly to pay him back for everything he’s done for her. Each time she’s picked up for prostitution, we put her in a group home, but she runs right back to Big Daddy. At least he’s one of the less-savage pimps. It’s rare for him to beat his girls. By the way, Big Daddy is thirty-two.”
Loretha grabbed both of Sonya’s hands and squeezed. Without trading words, they both leaned in, their foreheads pressed together. They just stood there in silence, grieving for this child who had no idea she was even a victim.
“Hey!” Carmen yelled over to them. “Are y’all lesbos or what? Y’all need to get a room.”
Sonya pulled away and threw her arm around Loretha’s shoulders as they trudged back over to Carmen. “You’re going to have your hands full tonight,” Sonya said with a gentle smile.
Loretha laughed softly. “Unfortunately, it won’t be different from any other night.”
Chapter 20
Day Two: 3:50 a.m.
Following Deke’s directions, Dre drove east on Florence. Minutes later they arrived at a boarded-up house with thigh-high grass, peeling paint and broken windows a block west of Hoover. In the backseat, Apache sat next to their captive, his Glock aimed squarely at Deke’s stomach.
“Okay, I brought you here,” Deke cried after Dre turned off the engine. “Now, y’all gotta let me go.”
Apache raised the gun from Deke’s stomach to his head. “Don’t say another word. Just do what I tell you to do.”
The three men exited the car. Dre popped his trunk and pulled out a flashlight.
“Let’s go around to the back door.” Apache had lowered his voice and lightened his steps.
With Deke leading the way, they traipsed along the side of the house. Dre was about to switch on the flashlight, but the spotlights dotting the roofline of a neighboring house provided them with more than sufficient lighting. They opened a gate and stepped into the backyard, where the grass was taller than it was in the front of the house.
Pointing his flashlight toward the back of the house, Dre spotted a large window and a wooden door that had multiple holes in it. The door was opened just a crack.
Dre peered through the window, which was clouded grime. There was enough light from the house next door to see three figures sitting on the floor, their backs against the wall. They were either high or asleep or both. He could smell the strong scent of piss through the windowpane.
“There’re three of ’em in there,” Dre said.
Apache snatched Deke by the collar and pressed his face to the glass. “Is one of them dudes Leon?”
“Yeah, man. Please, can I go now?”
Apache didn’t let go. “Which one?”
“The one in the middle. Now please let me go. If The Shepherd finds out I brought you here, he’ll kill me!”
Apache jerked him away from the window. “Lay down on the ground and don’t move. If I hear even a peep out of you, I’m going to shoot you in the head.”
Dre aimed his flashlight at the door and Apache sprang into the house, gun drawn. “Hands in the air!”
The three men were suddenly wide-eyed, but apparently too high to follow directions.
“I said hands up!”
Three pairs of arms shot up, seemingly in slow motion.
“I heard you chumps been snatching little girls off the street.”
The men were all tongue-tied.
Apache brandished the gun, slowly pointing it at each one of them.
“I wanna know where you been takin’ ’em?”
“I ain’t done nothin’,” one of the men protested. “He’s the one you want.” He pointed at the man Deke identified as Leon.
“Shut up, fool!” Leon yelled. “You tryin’ to get me killed?”
Apache pulled Leon to his feet, while the other men slithered to opposite corners of the room. He pressed the gun to Leon’s temple.
“Did you snatch a girl named Brianna in Compton yesterday? And if you lie to me, I swear I’ll blow your brains all over this room.”
Leon’s bottom lip quivered. “I just did what they told me to do.”
“Who?”
“Just some dude. I don’t know his last name.”
Dre stepped forward. “That was my niece you took. Where is she?”
“She’s at a place off Normandie. I don’t know exactly where it is. I swear.”
Apache lowered the gun from Leon’s head and pointed it down at his bare feet. “You need to tell me who you’re working with and where the house is, or I’m shooting off your toes one by one.”
“I swear I don’t know!”
Apache glanced at Dre. After several tense beats, Dre responded with an almost imperceptible nod.
Apache fired a single shot, blasting Leon’s right foot. Blood spurted upward like a mini geyser. Leon screamed and dropped to the floor, grabbing his foot. The two other men cried out and hugged the walls.
“Start talking or I’m shooting you again. I got enough bullets to leave everybody in here with two stumps.”
Apache pointed the gun at Leon’s left foot.
“Okay, okay, don’t shoot!” Leon begged and sobbed. “He’s my cousin. I been working with my cousin Clint. He run City Stars strip joint.”
Dre was so furious that he wanted to grab the gun and shoot Leon himself. He’d known when he’d looked into Clint’s eyes that the punk had been involved in Brianna’s disappearance and now his instincts had been confirmed. He wanted Apache to shoot the dude again.
“Where’d you take her?” Dre yelled.
“Sixty-second Street, off Normandie.”
“That ain’t good enough,” Dre pushed. “We need the address.”
“Man, I don’t know no address. Clint drove, not me.”
Apache fired the gun again. The bullet pierced the wall a few inches short of Leon’s head.
“I don’t know. I swear!” he cried, ducking, but still holding on to his bleeding foot. “It’s bright yellow with lots of bushes and high gates all the way around. About halfway up the block on Sixty-second. I swear! It’s the only house on the block with gates like that. Somebody’s gotta get me to the hospital before I bleed to death!”
The pool of blood around Leon’s foot was rapidly expanding.
“You working for The Shepherd?” Dre shouted.
“I don’t know nothing about no Shepherd,” Leon wailed, rocking and crying. “Clint hired me. I get fifty dollars every time I help him get a girl. I only did it two times. I swear!”
Dre stuck his smartphone in Leon’s face. “Is this the girl you took?” he asked, showing him a picture of Brianna.
“Yes, yes,” Leon cried, barely glancing at the photo. “Now get me an ambulance!”
“Is she still at the house?”
“I don’t know! I swear. I just get my money and leave. I ain’t never even been inside.”
Dre gave Apache a nod that signaled that he was ready to leave.
Just for fun, Apache pointed his gun at the other two men and laughed. They screamed and rolled up as tight as water bugs.
“If anybody in here talks to the police about that sissy’s foot,” Apache announced, “I will hunt each one of you down and kill you. Count on it.”
The other two men were trembling so hard the floor creaked.
When Dre and Apache stepped into the backyard, as expected Deke was long gone.
“Let’s roll, cuz,” Apache said, slapping him on the back. “We gotta go get little shorty.”
For the first time since he’d walked into this nightmare, Dre finally felt real hope. He was close, real close, to bringing Brianna home.
Chapter 21
Day Two: 4:05 a.m.
Trying to sleep was a wasted effort,
so Angela made some coffee and decided to get some work done. She’d hoped that her visions of a wild-eyed Dre roaming the streets, screaming threats and breaking down doors in search of Brianna would go away if she focused on one of her cases. That didn’t happen.
Angela perused a few files, but was too wound up to concentrate. She would have to get it together soon because she had to be in court at nine. She spent the next few minutes alternately checking the clock and her smartphone hoping for a call or text from Dre. She was trying to wait until a proper hour to call her FBI friend, but finally decided this was too important to wait.
When her former colleague answered, he sounded as if he’d been awake for hours. As an FBI agent, Marty Shaw was used to early morning calls.
“Hey, Marty, this is Angela. Sorry to call so early, but this is important.”
Marty had been a witness in one of the first cases Angela prosecuted as a young Assistant U.S. Attorney. After spending so many hours together preparing the case for trial, they’d developed a close friendship. Marty was now the federal liaison to the LAPD’s Human Trafficking Task Force.
“Hey, Angela. What’s going on?” His voice conveyed concern, but he also seemed glad to hear from her.
Angela had been nervous about how Marty might receive her call. She hadn’t had much contact with any of her legal or law enforcement colleagues in recent months. Following the barrage of media reports about the shooting of her ex-fiancé and her relationship with a drug dealer, Angela chose to resign from the U.S. Attorney’s office, where she’d been highly regarded.
She decided not to waste time with pleasantries or beating around the bush.
“I need a big favor. The child of a friend of mine’s been kidnapped and possibly trafficked. I need help. Behind-the-scenes help.”
An uneasiness suddenly seeped into his voice. “What kind of help?”
She quickly told him everything Dre had revealed to her. “The Shepherd’s real name is Rodney Merriweather. Anything you can tell me about him or his operation would be helpful. I also need you to ping her iPhone. If we find her phone, we’ll likely find her. She’s only thirteen.”
“Hasn’t she been reported missing?”
“Yes.”
“Then why aren’t you working with the local police?”
“The family’s done that. But they’re not taking it seriously. They think she’s a runaway. But she’s not. She’s a good kid. The officer who showed up barely wanted to take a missing persons report.”
Marty heaved a sigh. They’d been close over the years. But disclosing information about an ongoing investigation could jeopardize his career.
Angela decided to play on his white guilt. “She’s from Compton, Marty. A straight-A student. We both know that if this were a missing white kid from Pasadena or the Palisades, her disappearance would be leading the six o’clock news until the day they found her. I’m desperate. I really need your help.”
Angela also knew that agents did stuff off the radar for family and friends all the time when traditional channels were taking too long.
“I can’t tell you anything about our investigations,” he said quietly. “You know that. Anyway, it’s not like you can go track somebody down.”
That wasn’t true. If she turned over information about The Shepherd to Dre, that’s exactly what he would do.
“Well, have you heard of The Shepherd?”
Marty remained silent long enough for Angela to know that he had.
“We’ve got our eyes on a few of these scumbag pimps. But I can’t tell you any more than that. If you have evidence that somebody specific was involved in her disappearance, get me a name and I’ll get somebody on it. But I’m not giving you any information so you can start running the streets like a vigilante. That will just come back on me.”
“I’d never tell anyone you gave me the information.”
Marty responded with an uneasy chuckle. “I can’t risk it, Angela. If you get me some solid evidence, I’ll follow up on it myself. Off the clock.”
Angela rubbed her forehead. She was determined to do everything she could to help Dre find Brianna. Marty wasn’t the only agent she knew. She’d just hang up the phone and keep dialing until she found someone willing to help.
“Okay, Marty. Sorry to put you on the spot. I shouldn’t have asked you to—”
“I can’t give you any information on our trafficking investigation,” he said, cutting her off. “But I can probably locate her phone for you. What’s the number?”
Chapter 22
Day Two: 4:20 a.m.
The location Leon had given them was less than fifteen minutes away, but for Dre getting there seemed to take forever. He drove cautiously, careful not to exceed the speed limit or even roll through a stop sign. He really wanted to floor the gas pedal, but with Apache carrying a Glock, they couldn’t afford to get pulled over.
Dre was still a little antsy about having given Apache the go-ahead to shoot Leon. Despite the man’s admitted role in kidnapping Brianna, Dre hoped he got to a hospital before he bled to death. If he’d been thinking straight, he would’ve realized that they needed the dude with them to locate the house. His Jetta headed west on Gage and made a left on Normandie. When he got to 62nd Street, he wasn’t sure whether to go east or west.
Apache made the decision for him. “Hit a left,” he said, pointing. “I just got a feeling it’s this way.”
Dre steered the car to the left and slowed to a crawl as he examined each house. His eyes bounced from one side of the street to the other, searching for a yellow, gated house.
“It’s supposed to be in the middle of the block,” Dre said when they reached the end of street. “It must be in the other direction.”
“Maybe not,” Apache said. “We got our directions from a crack head. Go up one more block.”
Dre didn’t need to be reminded that he had placed all of his hopes on an addict who’d been interrupted in the middle of getting high.
The car crept along the next block. There was one yellow house with lots of flowers in front, but no gates.
“There’s no way we could’ve missed the kind of gates he described,” Dre said. “I’m going the other way.
At the end of the block, he made a U-turn and drove in the other direction.
Dre’s fingers tapped the steering wheel as he waited for the traffic to clear enough to allow him to cross the busy intersection at Normandie to make it to the other side of 62nd Street.
They eased along the first block. No yellow house. The next block either. Dre drove several more blocks, then zigzagged up and down the streets parallel to 62nd Street. With each turn, a bit of his hope faded.
“I think the dude punked us,” Dre said.
“If he did, I’m going back and shootin’ off the rest of his toes,” Apache said. “Let’s keep lookin’.”
They drove up and down the neighboring streets for another ten minutes or so before Dre pulled back onto Normandie and parked in front of a liquor store.
“What you doin’, man? Why we stoppin’. Let’s keep lookin’. I gotta feelin’ we’re in the vicinity.”
“I need to think,” Dre said. Something that would be hard to do with Apache running his mouth.
“Man, when we find little shorty we gon’ fuck them punks up!”
That wasn’t the way it was going to go down. Once he got Brianna back, he was going to be slow and methodical about his revenge. He didn’t need or want Apache’s help for that aspect of the job.
He started up the car.
“Where we goin’?”
“I’m taking you back home,” Dre said.
“You givin’ up?”
“Hell naw. I gotta make a run to Compton. A buddy of mine used to deal in this area. He might know the house we’re looking for. If he does, I’ll call you.”
Chapter 23
Day Two: 5:30 a.m.
The impressive mini-castles along Ocean Boulevard in Newport Beach were among Southern
California’s most prized waterfront property. One peach-colored monstrosity seemed glaringly out of place when compared to the neighboring homes. A low, gold-plated fence with goddess statues every few feet boasted an unwelcomed gaudiness. A black Bentley sat parked in the driveway next to a burgundy Jaguar. An intentional show of wealth that begged to be noticed.
Inside, The Shepherd plodded barefoot up and down the length of his great room, creating deep imprints in the plush gold-speckled beige carpet. The room was the size of two large garages, with high ceilings, fat leather chairs and a wall of glass that looked out over the aqua-blue waters. It had the feel of a model home that had yet to be lived in.
The Shepherd bore a baby face and the earnestness of a young TV anchorman. In sweats and a polo shirt, he resembled a college freshman. He’d created the look first, then altered his personality to fit it.
His two lieutenants remained silent as he paced. They were familiar with the unusual way in which their boss expressed his discontent. It was best not to speak while he simmered.
Pausing mid-step, Shep rigidly sat down in one of the leather chairs, his back facing the two men.
“This guy has no idea who he’s messing with,” he said, mostly to himself.
Shep was always careful to enunciate each syllable of every word. He never cursed and rarely raised his voice. He believed that a true leader always kept his emotions in check. He clenched and unclenched his fists as if he was practicing finger exercises.
“Nobody disrespects me.”
After receiving Clint’s call about Andre “Dre” Thomas’ visit to City Stars, other calls followed. Jonesy, the manager of one of his liquor stores, reported that Dre had walked into the place and announced that The Shepherd had snatched his niece, so Dre was out for The Shepherd’s blood in return. Several more calls reporting similar threats followed. Dre had gone all over town calling him out. And then Shep got word of the shooting of Clint’s crack head cousin, Leon.
Anybody's Daughter (Angela Evans Series No. 2) Page 8
