Skin Game

by J. D. Allen

  He found O’s Escalade and cut the lights as he rolled past. The ranch gate was a mile down the gravel road. He pulled off the path, drove his car to the left, and killed the engine.

  He pulled his night-vision goggles from under the seat. Erica was inside that fence somewhere. He opened the trunk and gathered the necessities. Vest, two M84 flashbangs, handcuffs, some zip ties, and wire cutters. He shoved his slapjack into his back pocket. The thing was basically a small leather billy club stuffed with lead. Very intimidating and very effective with lots of stopping power.

  A slow scan revealed a small horse ranch, just as Ely had said. House, barn, outbuildings, a couple trucks, and an old tractor, all in need of a paint job.

  Everything looked asleep. Nothing moving. Maybe nothing alive. The thought panicked him. He considered starting the car back up and driving right up to the door.

  But O was good. He’d see evidence of a struggle if O had been taken down. So Jim scanned again. Looking for the spots where he’d take up to check the place out if he’d been the one to go up to take a peek. He found two good spots. One by the tractor, one by the barn. But if there were animals in the barn, the buttheads might give him away.

  He scanned again. It was like the night before Christmas out there. He didn’t see O. He didn’t see Erica. He didn’t see a dog or a freaking cat. Nothing was moving. Not even a mouse.

  So Jim eased his way through the dark to the tractor to get a better look.

  And there she was.

  29

  With his goggles on he found Erica easily as he took up a spot behind the tractor. She had made it to the odd-shaped blue building between the barn and the house.

  She moved along all bent down and tippy-toed like she was in the movies. Her can of pepper spray was out, ready to spray. She held it with two hands like a loaded gun. He wanted to chuckle at her timid bravery, but he smelled the stench of bad luck in the air as strong as the horse manure.

  She peeked around the corner at the main house. He glanced that way too. One more check for trouble before he made his way to her location. There was a good deal of open real estate between them.

  Nothing moving. Nothing making any sound outside the regular night song of insects. The aging porch was flooded with light. There seemed to be a light on in the kitchen as well, but he saw no one moving around. She jumped when a horse nickered in the distance. It sounded muffled, so Jim couldn’t tell if he was in the barn behind her or the pasture beyond.

  Dammit. She turned back and headed around the oblong building. Why can’t she just get scared and stay put? Through his goggles he could see that instead of windows, the rectangles on the rounded front of the building were wooden panels. The third panel was a door. He knew that because she pulled the door slightly ajar and stuck her fool head in. All the way! She was going to get herself and probably him and O killed. Where the fuck is O?

  She closed the door and turned to see a tall man in a cowboy hat looking down at her from the yard. Fuck. Jim had been so focused on what Erica was doing that he hadn’t even noticed the man. She yelped and turned. Too late. She was a trapped rat with nowhere to go. The man easily caught her as she tried to get past him.

  “Well, you just saved me a lot of trouble.” His voice carried across the empty night air. He wasn’t concerned over being heard now that he’d grabbed her arm. Instead of fighting this guy like she had Banks, Erica stilled. Her eyes widened as if she had seen a ghost.

  It happened. Sudden surprise and fright could momentarily stop all clear thinking. Jim counted on it more times than he could remember. Erica seemed to stare at the guy for about ten seconds before she remembered she was packing pepper spray. She started to raise it, but the guy beat her to the punch and pointed a shiny gun barrel in her face. “Go ahead. Spray. I don’t need to see you to hit you from this close.”

  What the hell was she doing out here? Jim should have kept her with him.

  The man dragged her toward the porch. She stumbled but was in no position to put up much of a fight with a gun barrel jammed into her ribs. She missed the bottom step and tripped. He yanked on her. She yelped again. Loud. Jim guessed she was hoping that O would come bursting on the scene with guns a blazing. Jim kind of had the same hope.

  “Hush up.” He wrenched her to the door. Jim took the opportunity to get closer.

  Cowboy pushed open the front door with his foot and shoved Erica through it. She tumbled into a dimly lit living room with an old woven carpet on the floor. Jim evaluated what he could see. Large room. One guy on a couch to the right. Kitchen behind. Maybe a stairway, not sure if it went up or down. The roofline was low and the terrain rolled slightly downhill behind the house. Jim guessed down. Cowboy inside the doorway. Rest unknown.

  While everyone was concentrating on Erica as she tried to get her balance on her hands and knees, Jim used the cover to move up closer, ducking behind a watering trough. He knelt, looked over the edge near the pump. It was clean, smelled of fresh oil. The guy had left the door open. Nice of him.

  “What the hell?” A very tall, very thin man in a black suit stepped from the unknown area to the left of the front door. Not a cowboy. The asshole was the Thin Man from the hotel. “Where’d you find her?”

  “By the storage building.”

  “Here?”

  “What the fuck other storage building would I mean? I needed to take a leak, not go to town.”

  “How’d she get here?”

  “I reckon she drove.”

  “Dumbass. Must be with the bounty hunter.”

  They’d found O, then. Jim hoped he was alive.

  Time to act. They were confused—he needed to make that confusion into chaos, panic. He was outgunned. Not a new situation to him, but with Erica in there, he was more than eager to even up the odds. No time to consider and evaluate.

  He pulled a flashbang from the vest, popped the pin, counted to ten, and then tossed. It sailed through the door and fell slightly to the side of the room, toward the unknown behind the door and as far from Erica as possible. But since she was on the ground, she saw it first. Watched it with huge eyes as it rolled past her. She must have thought it a live grenade. It tumbled at first, then rolled slowly, coming to a rocking stop past her toward the kitchen, between the Thin Man and Couch Guy.

  They didn’t have time to decide its origin or contemplate its risks.

  Erica fell all the way to the ground, tucked into ball, and covered her head.

  Jim was on the way in as it exploded a second later.

  On the porch he turned away, felt the enormous clap of the explosion. He closed his eyes to the two ultrabright flashes that blasted through the small room and covered his ears. Jim turned immediately, his slapjack in his left hand, his knife in his right. He only had seconds to keep the upper hand.

  Acrid smoke filled the room before anyone had a chance to look up to see him coming. Someone shouted, “Get up—” Jim’s knife penetrated his throat before he could speak another word. Cowboy down.

  Stumbling footsteps and cursing behind him. He turned, the slapjack crashing onto the man’s face as he tried to get up off the floor holding his eyes. Couch Guy down.

  Now the unknown. How many were there in the house and where had the Thin Man gone? Recon before was the usual operating procedure, but he was not leaving Erica with these cretins for even a few minutes.

  A groan came from his feet. Footsteps echoed from behind. He knocked Couch Guy on the floor a second time with the slapjack as he turned and faced the stairway.

  Erica was coughing behind him. With some effort she did a sort of crab crawl for the door. He could see she’d closed her eyes to protect from the burn of the smoke and scrambled as fast and as low as she could toward the night. He had no clue what was out there. He needed her to stay close.

  He grabbed her leg, pulled her back. His lungs were burning from
holding his breath. She kicked with her free foot and caught his chest. “Erica.”

  She kept struggling, unable to hear him from the temporary deafening effect of the flashbang. He tried to tighten his grip, but not enough to hurt her. A shot fired downstairs.

  The room fell silent. She stilled.

  Two more pops. There was a yell and a gurgle and the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the ground very close to him. More footsteps. More shouting. Jim hoped it was O shooting.

  Erica started to wiggle and kick in a panic. This time she connected with a solid boot-heel to Jim’s head. His grip on her foot fell away and she scrambled up to make her break for the door. “Erica.”

  It did no good. She was going. He raced, caught her by the back of her shirt, lifted her all the way to her feet. Another gunshot rang out. She screamed, hearing that, and reached for her boot.

  He held to her shirt even when he was jerked from behind. Another bad guy. “Erica!” His louder voice did no good. Her ears would still be ringing. She was pulling away from him.

  He punched the guy in the throat with a quick jab, the end of the slapjack crushing his windpipe. He wobbled back, but the man had no intention of giving up. He lumbered forward, arms out like a half-drunken Frankenstein’s monster. Another blow landed. Same locale. No air for him. Maybe some blood in the trachea. Frankie went down. It was not the Thin Man.

  Jim saw Oscar at the top of the stairs, two guns drawn. Standing still. All threats eliminated. Erica struggled one last time. Jim yanked her to his chest. Her eyes were closed tight, tears streaming, but she managed well enough to aim that damned sprayer dead to rights. Pressed the nozzle. Jim let go. She ran.

  A stinging, swarming cloud of hell sucked his face off his skull. His eyes sealed shut by involuntary muscle spasms compliments of the capsicum. Angry ducts streamed acrid tears down his cheeks.

  “Erica,” O shouted, “it’s Oscar!”

  Jim tripped off the porch to find the water trough through bleary slits of stinging lids and memory. The cold stale water did little to rinse the oily concoction from his face. But it was better than nothing. He assumed O would clear the area of hostiles.

  O patted him on the back. “Nice job.”

  Jim nodded, not opening his eyes. “We clear?”

  “Lost one when the craziness started, but the rest are down.”

  “Get her.”

  Jim heard him walking away. Calling her name. He knew O would still be armed and ready to defend. He dunked his whole head in the water. Tried to open his eyes.

  “You okay? Hurt?” O was talking to her, not Jim. His voice was calm, low, soothing. Asshole. They were moving closer.

  “I should have stayed. Listened to you and stayed at the truck. I could have gotten you killed.” She sounded panicked.

  “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  “I’m shaking. Shit. Thank you.” She sounded weak.

  “You better thank Jim, not me.”

  “What?”

  Jim raised his head and tried to look over. He saw blurs of human shapes. Waved.

  “Asshole saved both our asses. I’ll never live that down.” Oscar chuckled. “But that pansy squeal when you nailed him right there at the end, I guess I can make fun of that for a while. Sounded like a little girl.”

  “He saved our asses? How could that be?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  Jim could tell she was leaning forward, resting her hands on her thighs. Fighting for air.

  “Know what?”

  “I walked into an ambush out by the barn. They had me downstairs. I broke loose when the flashbang went off.” He tossed his head to the right. “Jim came after us. Without him, we would both be in trouble.”

  Jim had to bend back over the water and continue the effort to scrub the pepper oil from his melting corneas. He cursed. Loudly. Hopefully she’d feel like shit.

  “All right, kids.” Oscar spoke to them both as they huddled by the three prisoners. “We have a procedure for rescued girls. Not only from this situation, but any we get off the streets or out of the clubs. Not that we’ve had many success stories lately. But we get them occasionally.”

  “They’re holding girls here?” Jim asked.

  “Two. In the basement. Pretty much passed out right now. We need to take them to Sister Nora at St. Agnes Catholic Church. She’ll help.”

  “Won’t they need a hospital?” Erica was still shaking a little.

  “She’ll take care of what they need. We don’t want them in the system for several reasons. Mainly, these girls have seen faces. Faces of men who will find them. Kill them. The hospitals are not safe. Sister Nora will get them out of the city and out of the cycle for good.”

  Erica rushed past Jim as Oscar spoke. She wanted to go to the girls. He understood that, but …

  “Wait!” Jim wiped his still-unfocused and half-dissolved eyes on the tail of his shirt. “We need to make sure there’s no more surprises lurking around this house. We’re missing a player.” The stubborn woman was already on her way into the basement. Ignoring him completely.

  But Oscar caught her. “They’re alive. Drugged, battered, but alive. God help them from here on out, but they’re out of the skin game.”

  Jim needed Oscar to know what he’d found out with Ely. “Karen Barnes is dead.” That stopped both of them. He had their attention finally.

  Couch Guy was on the ground. He grunted. “My eyes. Jesus. I need some water.”

  Jim kicked the man hard in the ribs. “Now you need Percocet. Shut the fuck up.”

  The man cursed, rolling around making even more noise.

  “Nice, Bean. Make him even worse. How’s he gonna talk with no air in his diaphragm?” Oscar pointed the gun at man on the floor. “I can make it so you need the coroner.”

  That shut him up. Jim pulled some tie wraps from his pack and tied the guy up. He jerked his arms behind his back. O had plugged the man who’d come up the stairs in the shoulder, close to his neck. He wasn’t moving around or complaining. He was alive and seemed to have the desire to stay that way. He got tied from the front. “Keep still or I’ll twist that arm around back and make this shit hurt.”

  He nodded.

  The cowboy who’d taken the knife to the throat was dead. No need for the zip tie. Erica was staring at him. Nothing Jim could do about it.

  “We’ll need to call Miller to come clean this up. But he’s busy at the moment with Karen, I’m sure.”

  Erica was still staring at the slit throat. More likely she was looking at all the blood pooled on the floor under his head. Jim tried to ignore the pain on her face. He wanted to say that this would be the worst she’d see, but was afraid they’d just gotten started, and the ugliness on the floor before them was likely just the beginning. He concentrated on delivering the evidence to Oscar as he trussed up the men.

  “I identified one of your big players. He was a subject I was investigating for adultery. Ely cracked the man’s hard drive. All kinds of nasty shit hidden behind some heavy-duty encryption. We found him on video with a bunch of girls. There’s some other files Ely is still trying to decipher. Bank records maybe.

  “Then I called Karen Barnes. She’d found a pattern. Chris must have too. Matched the dates on the videos we have. Four girls at a time. Five times a year.”

  They heard an engine start up. They all rushed to the porch since the men on the floor were no longer a danger. An older-model truck pulled out from behind another one of the outbuildings, probably a garage, and headed for the main gate, passing behind the house. Out of range for Oscar’s handgun.

  “The guy from the hotel. The Thin Man.” Erica looked at Jim. “I saw him. I’m sure of it. That has to be him because he’s not here.” She gestured toward the men on the floor.

  Oscar twisted his cap backward on his head. “Dammit. I’
ll get him. You guys take the girls to Sister Nora.”

  Jim grabbed his keys and tossed them to his friend. “The Taurus is right outside the gate.”

  Oscar ran pretty fast for a big guy. The truck broke through the front gate and hit the road well ahead of the bounty hunter. No matter. Jim knew O would eventually catch the guy. That was what he did. Hunted. Once he had you in his sights, you were property of Double O.

  Jim walked to the kitchen and turned the water on full blast and doused his face once more, opening his eyes, shaking his head. It was better. Still stung like a mother. His nose was running and his chest felt tight. Dang, she’d gotten a straight shot at him.

  “Sorry.” Her face was scrunched up as if she was experiencing the burn with him. “I had no idea you were here.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t see you but …” She looked at the floor. “Even if I had, I may have shot you with it anyway for dumping me on Oscar like that.”

  “Don’t blame you.” From her perspective, he deserved it, since she didn’t know anything about Zant and Alexis. It was time to tell her. But those girls down in that basement needed to come first. “I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

  She looked skeptical. “Okay.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “We should … we should check them?”

  He blew his nose on his sleeve. “How about you go get the Escalade? I’ll do a first check.”

  For an instant he thought she might agree. That she’d want to run and hide from this disgusting truth about humanity. But he knew she was the kind of person who would want to help those girls. He understood the swing of feelings. “If it helps, I don’t think either of them is Chris. If these are the girls from the list … from the videos … Ely checked them. Chris wasn’t on them.” He took her shoulders, made her look him in the eye. “Any of them.”

  Her shoulders dropped as if she was relieved, but her face still looked like she’d lost everything. Drawn and tired. She was searching the walls for something. Anything. That wasn’t going to help her. The room was a mess. Two men were tied up and groaning. Another was dead in a pool of cooling blood. The scene was a lot for a banker from Boston to take in.