Bad Penny

by John D. Brown

  Frank shook his head: what had they fought for in the Civil War? He bet none of those old plantation owners had made anything on their slaves like the modern ones made on these girls—two million on twelve to fifteen kids.

  Carmen said, “Some get sick, and they’re thrown out. You can get a new girl sometimes for less than a thousand dollars. And some try to run. But most don’t because the padrotes inform her if she does, they will kill her family back in Mexico. After all, they know where they live. Or they tell the girl they will kill her themselves. Or their agents in the American police will kill her when she runs to them.”

  “The cops here are not like the cops in Mexico,” Frank said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Frank shrugged. There were dirty cops in America just like anywhere else. There just weren’t the numbers. “So what did you do to wake the whole web?”

  “You really don’t know? Ed didn’t tell you?”

  “If I knew, would I be talking to you?”

  Carmen took in a breath and let it out. “We free who we can. We steal what we can from the traffickers to fund our operations. One night things went wrong, and we killed a major player. Trafficking is often only part of the business.”

  “But they want you for more than that,” Frank said.

  “He had a lot of money with him. A lot of money.”

  “Taking it back to Mexico?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Frank nodded. He’d been guarding just such a man when things went south for him. “More than a million?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Sam whistled. “Holy crap. Those are killing amounts. You’re going up against the whole organization.”

  “The Gorozas are a smaller operation. The bounty went out. They just happened to be the ones that found the prize.”

  “You said ‘we’. What about the rest?”

  “They are all missing or dead. I’m the last one.”

  No one spoke. The van fell silent except for the wheels crunching along the dirt road.

  Frank now knew why she’d called. She obviously cared about the children. She probably felt for Tony. But this was a woman who wanted payback.

  About a mile ahead at the intersection that led to the Gorozas, a cop stood on the road, his car was behind him, lights flashing, blocking traffic to the Goroza’s house.

  “What do we do?” Sam asked.

  “You act like anybody would when you just saw a house explode. We’ll slow down. Ask him what’s going on.”

  The van fell silent.

  Frank said, “You were one of those that made it out.”

  “No,” Carmen said. “I was never in.”

  “You don’t just start raiding folks like the Gorozas.”

  “No, you don’t. They come to you. Like the woman in a neighboring village who brought another woman to see my mother. My mother made tortillas in the market in a village in southern Mexico. My father only showed up once or twice a year. Sometimes he was drunk. Sometimes he just wanted money. We had very little. And then this woman comes. And she says they need workers in America. She says she told the bosses at her American company that nobody worked harder than Mexicans from small towns. She said she’s already taken some boys and men up to work in their factories. But now she needed some girls to clean their homes.”

  Sam reached the end of the road by the beet field and turned back toward the Gorozas and the marsh.

  “She had a nice car. She had pretty clothes. She smelled like flowers. Not like perfume hiding days of sweat, but like flowers. She asked us all sorts of questions. Then the woman showed us pictures she had in a nice folder. Pictures of girls working in a mansion. Pictures of men and boys at a factory. Pictures of kids who looked just like us at a McDonalds in America. They were all smiling. My older sister was fourteen. She and my mama discussed it. It would be far away. The woman said this is how she had herself become an American. She showed pictures of her house and husband.”

  “The perfect life.”

  “My mother was hesitant. Then the woman opened her wallet and showed her two thousand pesos. That’s only about $140 dollars. But in Mexico, in my village, that was more than a month’s pay for some people with a full-time job. She said that would be my sister’s advance. But she would have to work that and the cost of her transportation off when she got to America. The woman did not push. She said to think about it. It had to be the right choice. She needed five girls. She already had three. There were only two slots left. She was going to go see some other girls who were interested. She thought she’d have the others by the next morning.”

  “And that was that,” Frank said.

  “The woman walked out of our little corrugated tin hut, but before she got into her car, my mother ran after her. My older sister went with the woman that day. I was heartbroken. I was scared. I was excited. We might all go to America! I gave my sister my favorite bracelet. She told me she would write. We hugged. She cried when she hugged my mama, but she was very brave and got into the car, and drove away with the woman. My mother and I stood and watched her go. She turned once in the back seat and waved. We waved back, my mother holding the fat fold of pesos. A few moments later the car turned onto another street. The last I saw of my sister was the back of her head in that car.”

  “What was her name?” Sam asked.

  “Reyna. My sister’s name was Reyna.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sam said. His voice was thick. He looked stricken.

  “The woman had all her teeth,” Carmen said. “They were so white.”

  “Did you find your sister?”

  “We received two letters from my sister the next year with fifty pesos included. But the hand writing was not my sister’s. And then the letters stopped. My mother asked the woman in the neighboring village about Reyna. She asked her about the woman. She said Reyna had shamed us all and ran away in America and not worked off her debt. But I knew Reyna was not like that.”

  Frank waited.

  “So that next year I came north. I was barely a teenager. The letters were stamped with the name of the town where they’d been dropped in the mail—Las Vegas, New Mexico. It can be hard for a little girl in America, but an old Anglo woman and her husband took pity. We found my sister’s bones in Texas. My bracelet was still on her arm.”

  Frank thought about her. He thought about that little girl that Jesus had been raping. He thought about that little boy. Those two should be in school, learning about animals and prepositions. The others should be in a middle school somewhere in seventh grade or eighth grade, worrying about getting on the school bus and if the lunch ladies were going to serve rice with weird gravy.

  He thought about the girls he’d been offered in that tin hut in Colombia. Fourteen girls stolen in raids and abducted off roads. Little sisters and daughters used up and then tossed into the trash like empty bottles when they got sick or contracted AIDS or something else from one of the men and the signs started to show.

  Ed’s sins were piling up. Frank hadn’t wanted to be involved in this. But Ed had pulled him in. Sow the wind, Ed, reap the whirlwind, buddy.

  “Men are animals,” Carmen said.

  “Some are,” Frank said. “And some are a lot worse.”

  21

  Gun

  IN THE ARMY, Frank’s company had been briefed about human trafficking, which was not just the transportation of slaves, but also included the buying, selling, and owning. Special Forces worked in places and with people for whom trafficking was no big deal, and so they had to be prepared for it.

  As he recalled, the U.S. State Department thought there were somewhere around twelve million people in slavery around the world. Everything from forced labor on fishing boats to forced marriages to child soldiers. The analysts estimated more than half a million women and children were bought, sold, and transported across international borders as sex slaves each year.

  More than half a million per year

  The tra
de in Asia and other parts of the world was huge, but it didn’t all occur in far-off places. Thousands of women and children were brought to the U.S. each year. Thousands coming to the land of freedom and opportunity only to find it a land of shackles. A place to be infected with some disease at the hands of people whose chest cavities were missing their hearts.

  Where did they go when they were used up and broken? How many escaped? How many died?

  And these were the people who had Tony.

  He took some deep breaths to calm himself. He needed to see straight. Needed his vision to clear. He could not risk letting his thinking get mucked up with too much anger.

  They approached the police officer, and Sam slowed the vehicle. Frank took another breath, then rolled his window down and put on his concerned citizen face. “Officer,” he called, “what happened?”

  “House fire,” the officer said.

  “We heard a huge boom.”

  The officer looked in at Carmen in the back. “It appears they had a propane leak.”

  “Oh, my,” Frank said. There were two ambulances along with a couple of fire trucks down the road. Ahead on the road was a tractor. “Anyone hurt?”

  “We’re still checking on that.”

  Four dead bodies in the house, two out in the yard. Surely those on the scene had seen the gunshot wounds on the guys outside. The officer was playing it down. He was also giving them all a hard look, probably knowing that perpetrators sometimes come back around and pose as bystanders, but he must not have seen what he was looking for because he waved them on. “We need to keep things moving here.”

  “Right,” Frank said. “We’ll get out of the way.”

  Sam’s pulse was beating in his temple. In his nervousness, he gave the van too much gas, and they almost peeled out.

  The cop looked after them.

  “You trying to get us caught?” Frank asked.

  “My foot slipped.”

  “It’s all right, Sam. We’re going to be okay.”

  Ahead, a tractor was coming their way. Probably another local gawker. They moved over and passed it. The marsh was about a half a mile away. Frank said, “See that black bird sitting on that post?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s where we’re going to stop.”

  “That cop is just right there.”

  “He’s far enough away. And we don’t have time to come back.”

  Frank thought about Carmen’s story. The whole time she’d been talking, he’d been watching and listening for any indication she was feeding him a line. For seven years he’d been surrounded with some of the best liars humanity had produced. As far as he could tell, she was straight up.

  Sam approached the post with black bird on it and slowed the van.

  There stood the cattails Frank had soared over. There stood the half-submerged barbed-wire fence. Out in the marsh stood the rise of land where Frank had scared the cow. “Here,” Frank said.

  Sam eased off the side of the road and stopped.

  The blackbird, which had a patch of bright red feathers on its shoulders, took off and flew over the water. Frank had seen blackbirds like that before. Those patches always made him think of army sergeants back in the days of Napoleon when soldiers wore bright colors. It made him think of sergeants now and wish he had a few more soldiers on this operation. He said, “You two need to stand watch outside. Get out a map and pretend to look at it. Maybe do some stretches like you’re taking a break.”

  Hopefully, this wouldn’t take long. Hopefully, they wouldn’t attract too much of his attention. This was not going to be an easy search. But he didn’t have a choice. He knew Pinto had some guns, but he wasn’t going to ask for those. If something happened, and he lost one, he didn’t want Pinto getting hit with the collateral damage.

  Frank opened the door and stood on the shoulder, which ran straight down into the mucky water and the cattails festooned with spiderwebs and bugs.

  Sam and Carmen got out as well and stood in front of him, looking at Sam’s road atlas. Two lost travelers.

  Frank stripped down to his black Hanes underwear. He placed his boots, folded shirt, and pants on the shoulder. He looked at the wound in his leg. It was a nice bloody puncture that, despite the yummy kiddy medicine, still burned like a mother.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  Sam looked him up and down. “You don’t want to take that leg in there.”

  “It will be all right.”

  “Look at that water.”

  Frank looked back down at the mucky water, guaranteed to be teeming with all manner of bacterial life.

  “I have a little first aid kit,” Sam said. “Band-aides, gauze, some nifty ointment.”

  “You have any duct tape?”

  “I think so.”

  Sam opened the back of the van, fished around a bit, and came up with a white plastic container with a red cross on it and a roll of pink duct tape.

  “Pink?” Frank asked.

  “It’s my wife’s roll.”

  “You buy his and hers?” Frank asked.

  “It’s a girly color,” Sam said, “yet still retains its mannish strength.”

  Frank reached into the diaper bag between the front seats and grabbed a few wet wipes. He cleaned his wound, dried it with a tissue. Then he opened the first aid box and applied a smear of the anti-bacterial ointment. He stuck a piece of gauze on top, then said to Sam, “Hand me that sissy tape.”

  Sam handed it to him, and Frank ripped off a piece of tape about six inches long and pressed it down right over the top of the gauze. He smoothed the sides out around his shin and calf, pressing down the hair. He applied two more strips crosswise to make sure the seal along the edges was good and tight. It did indeed feel like the mannish version, which meant it was going to rip out a fine swath of hairs when he yanked it off.

  Frank stood on the track made by the Polaris when he left the edge. He said, “Come here. I want you directing me.”

  Sam walked over and stood next to him.

  “See those three reeds sticking up about seventy yards out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You need to keep me on a line between this spot and them.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood right behind Sam, put his head next to his, then pointed over his shoulder at about where he figured he’d landed. “I’m thinking of that spot there. You see it?”

  Sam held his own hand out and spanned the distance. “Got it.”

  “Whistle or honk the horn if that cop comes.”

  “Enjoy the leaches and snakes.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said. He swatted at a couple of mosquitoes that were already coming in for lunch and climbed down the slope, the gravel poking into his bare feet. He stepped into the warmish, brackish, thigh-high water at the edge of the cattails and sank a good six inches into the squishy mud at the bottom. He brushed aside a big spiderweb between two cattail stalks and made for the fence.

  The barbed wire was rusted all to hell, great for tetanus, but it was also fairly loose. He pressed the top strand down and climbed over. A few more strides, and he was out of the cattails, wading in the open water, which was getting deeper with each step.

  Gnats and mosquitoes danced on the surface of the water. Some beetle-looking thing struggled along. Frank continued out into the deeper, colder water, his feet sucking into the mud, striking the occasional sharp edge of a rock or stray stick. The cold water rose to the tops of his thighs, then crotch, then belly, and then came to his chest. A couple of mosquitoes gathered about his head and shoulders, and he swatted at them. He glanced back to make sure he was still in line, and Sam waved him over to the right a bit.

  He stubbed his toe on a large jagged stone, climbed over it, and went to where he figured he ought to be. He looked back at Sam who gave him the thumbs up. Frank found a reed that he would use to fix his position and bent the top. Then he started to walk a circular pattern around that reed, sweeping back and forth through the muck
with his foot because the water was too murky for him to simply dive down and look for it. He found rocks, some rope, something sharp. A number of mosquitoes made off with some of his blood.

  Out on the road, Sam and Carmen kept up their tourist act. Frank continued to work. Twenty minutes later he had searched a sizeable radius around the reed and was beginning to wonder if he’d been sloppy. Then he looked at the hummock, and realized he was too far out. He backed up, found another reed, and started his search pattern again. His fourth time around the new position his ankle struck something hard sticking up out of the mud.

  Oh, please, Lord.

  He felt it with his toes, found the barrel, the magazine, the odd grip, the trigger. Bingo. Frank dove under, grabbed the P90 with his hands, and came back up with it.

  He held it up and inspected it. Everything looked good. Just needed a bit of cleaning.

  He folded the stock in and began to swim back. When he was about halfway to shore, Sam whistled hard. He whistled again. Then he pointed discretely, not back toward the intersection, but farther on down the road, across the water. Frank stopped and looked back. Another cop car was coming down the road about where Frank had lanced the windshield of the pickup. If they’d been watching him closely, they might have caught a glimpse of the gun in his hand.

  Frank pretended to swat at a mosquito on his chest, and kept wading toward the cattails at the edge of the water, making sure to keep the P90 below the surface.

  The cop car drove along the water, made the L turn, and started coming toward Sam and the minivan, the tires rumbling over the gravel, the dust kicking up behind.

  Frank kept himself low in the water, even as it got shallower, until he was crabbing along in a squat.

  The cop car slowed, rolled up to Sam and Carmen, then simply passed by. Frank waved. The cop waved back. Obviously, he had bigger fish to fry than stopping and talking to some idiot who thought it might be nice to take a swim in the duck and cow poop pond.