by Debra Dunbar
She looked at the address and frowned. “You think they’ll have the kids there?”
I nodded. “I’m supposed to meet some of the Disciples there—ones that are involved in the child sex trafficking operation.”
One of her thin eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. “And if your sister’s not there?”
I didn’t want to think about that. “Then someone should be able to tell me where they’re keeping the kids.”
This was my beat-the-crap-out-of-everyone-until-I-found-out-what-I-needed plan, the one Bishop thought was going to be the death of me. These guys I was meeting with tonight were one step closer to the operation than Jimmie. If Desiree was there, then I’d have the one person who would definitely know where Nevarra was.
If I managed to get her to talk, and if she didn’t kill me, that is.
“So you need backup, and possibly a tracker to follow the scent if no one talks?”
I nodded. “If Bishop doesn’t come…I understand. You’re right. I haven’t paid him yet. I will. I just need to get Nevarra back, then I’ll give him every spare dollar I make until we’re square. I promise.”
“Like I haven’t heard that before.” She looked over at the head on the flag pole, then muttered a soft curse.
“So, you want him to meet you here?” She tapped the paper with the address.
“Yeah. I need him to meet me in the parking lot. If the kids are there, I need to have them safe before bullets start flying or before someone can grab them as a hostage. If they’re not there, I need to decide who needs to stay alive—who’s most likely to have the information I need.”
“I’ll try to reach him. How’s your other sister? The one that got shot?”
Had I told her about Sadie? I’d always been a private person, and it felt weird to have all these solicitous strangers dropping off casseroles, replacing our front door, and asking how Sadie was doing.
“Much better. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think she’s out of the woods now as far as infection and fever goes. Once her leg has some time to heal, the doctor will be able to evaluate if she’s had any permanent damage or not.”
HB made a tsk noise and shook her head. “It always hits me hard when the kids get hurt. I’m really sorry about your sisters.”
“Thank you.” I glanced at the clock on the wall, feeling absolutely awkward about this conversation. “I really need to run…but thanks.”
I gave the head another quick glance as I left then got on my bike and drove south out of the Valley, navigating the maze of freeways as I headed for the airport.
It was full on dark by the time I eased down the back road that led to the rental car lots, the airplane cargo areas, and the Customs warehouse. The parking lot out front was lit up. Half a dozen cars were parked in front of the building. The open trailer portion of a tractor-trailer sat empty over to the side.
We might no longer be part of the United States, but LAX was still in use. American travelers would go through Customs in Denver, or Dallas, or Phoenix, but the billions of dollars of product that came via plane and boat still needed to pause here in what was now a part of New Hell. The demons and various civil servants would take their slice of the pie along with a few bribes before sending everything eastward.
The warehouse wouldn’t be empty. There’d be a huge open space for pallets, as well as offices and locked areas for shipments that were more valuable or susceptible to tampering. If the kids were here, I’d be willing to bet they’d be locked in one of the offices, or some sort of back room.
I parked my bike across the street in front of the rental car lot and waited. At five minutes to nine I started to get nervous. What if Bishop didn’t come? Maybe he didn’t get the message. Maybe I’d reached my credit limit with him.
I glanced at my watch once more and started my bike. It was nine o’clock. I couldn’t wait any longer. I was going to have to face these guys on my own—possibly face down a demon on my own. The prospect scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t have a choice. This was my best chance at finding Nevarra, and I wasn’t going to let a bunch of armed guards and a demon deter me.
Parking my bike up front next to a souped-up Subaru, I walked up and knocked on the locked front door.
One of those fish-eye lens cameras swiveled so I waved at it. A few moments later a gray metal door on the far wall swung open and a beefy man with a pistol on each hip and a rifle over his shoulder sauntered across the four feet of foyer to unlock the glass entrance doors.
“You that Andrea chick?” The man looked like a professional heavyweight wrestler, but his voice was surprisingly high pitched and soft. I figured it wouldn’t be in my best interests to comment on that, so I didn’t.
“Yeah. I’m Andrea Delgado.” I hoped that was the correct last name. Keeping aliases straight was proving to be challenging.
It must have been correct because the guy ushered me in, locking the glass door behind me.
The foyer was sparse with worn beige Berber carpet. The only light came from the parking lot through the big glass entrance doors. To my left was a small receptionist area—separated from the foyer with what I was sure was bulletproof glass. The walls were an indiscriminate neutral color, the only ornamentation a framed picture of President Donald Trump seated behind a desk in the oval office, smiling as if he were posing for an Olan Mills photographer. Someone had drawn black devil horns on the glass so they appeared to be sprouting from the president’s head. I wasn’t sure if that was a parting shot from the US Government employees before they left, or something the new occupants had added.
Soprano guy spoke into a radio clipped to the neckline of his shirt. Something buzzed. The steel door behind him clicked. Reaching back, he swung it open and ushered me in.
Two steps in and I stopped, hearing the steel door close behind me. The room was a mantrap—a tiny windowless room with only one way in and only one way out. Another fisheye camera eyed me from a corner. A plastic mail bin sat against one wall.
“Weapons in there,” Soprano squeaked, waving a meaty hand at the mail bin.
Things were not going to go according to plan if I had to walk into this warehouse virtually naked. “You’re fucking kidding me. I’m one woman weighing all of one-forty. You could probably cave my forehead in with a single punch. I’m no threat to you guys.”
“If you’re no threat to us, then you’re not gonna be right for this job.” He looked me over. “I’m pretty sure you could draw that pistol and fire a few rounds before I managed to cave your forehead in with my fist. Some boss might have given you his thumbs-up, but you’re not one of us. We don’t know you. Weapons go in the bin, or you don’t go inside.”
Damn it. “I don’t know you either, and I’m not going to walk into a warehouse owned by a gang known for violence unarmed. I’m a woman, for fuck’s sake. You’ve got two pistols and a rifle, and I’m sure anyone else in there has the same. I’ve got one damned gun. One,” I lied.
“One gun and enough knives to open up a cutlery store.” He chuckled. “Tell you what—you leave the pistol in the bin, and I’ll let you keep the knives.”
I sighed dramatically, unbuckled my shoulder harness and set my gun in the bin. There. Hopefully he wouldn’t search me because I had the little 43 in a pocket of my cargo pants, and the white-muzzled anti-magic gun in my waistband against the small of my back. Plus, he was right, I did have enough knives on me to open a cutlery store.
Something in my stance must have changed Soprano’s mind because he started patting me down. The other two guns, my bracers, my knives, my multi-tool, my lockpicks, my electronic password thingie, my stolen cell phone, even the ring with my bike and my house key on it joined my Glock 17 in the bin. I have to say that Soprano was professional about the search. No groping, no fingers trying to go where fingers shouldn’t go without express consent. It almost made me sad that I was going to end up killing him tonight.
“Damn, woman. That’s a lot of shit to be packing
to an interview.”
I shrugged. “A girl never knows what she’s going to need when she goes out. And this might be a job interview, but if I’m going to go out to a warehouse surrounded by nothing but rental car lots and runways, I’m going to be prepared.”
He nodded, then surveyed the contents of the bin, pulling out one of my knives and handing it to me. It was a stubby Boker with a push-blade that measured less than two inches.
Fuck. My. Life.
I took it, wishing I had a wrist bracer on so at least I could have it at hand. I did the next best thing and shoved it in the tiny little pocket at the top of my cargo pants. The top two inches of the handle stuck out of the pocket, which would hopefully be enough for me to grab the knife and get it out fast. One good thing was that with a quick push of my thumb on the switch I could extend the blade. The bad thing was, as I mentioned, it was two fucking inches.
Size matters, but two inches was better than nothing, at least in this instance.
Soprano spoke into his mic again and the far door unlocked with a buzz. He ushered me through, and I walked into the main warehouse. Much like the one Bob, Bishop, and I had broken into a few days ago, tall rows of heavy-duty steel shelving were stacked with pallets of cellophane-wrapped goods and wooden crates. They were all marked and dated, and I noticed as we passed by that some had been logged in over a year ago.
Huh. Clearly a few people weren’t paying their bribe money.
Two forklifts stood idle alongside the front wall—both of them with forks tall enough to access the top shelves. In front of them was a line of pallet jacks for moving the crates off-shelf. A few desks were clustered by one of the middle rows, complete with computers, an assortment of handheld scanners, and old-fashioned clipboards. A man lounged at one of the desks, his feet on an open drawer. He rocked the chair back and forth, creating a rhythmic squeaky noise that was almost drowned out by the fierce whir of the warehouse air-conditioning system.
Two men so far.
Soprano led me to the left of the warehouse, not so far ahead that he couldn’t keep one eye on what I might be doing behind his back. Smart guy because as little as the blade was on that Boker, I could have jabbed a kidney or sliced an inner thigh with a few quick motions.
I heard the beep-beep of equipment backing up and glanced over to see a forklift whipping down a parallel aisle halfway through the warehouse.
Three men.
A line of offices stood to the left front of the warehouse, both with open doors and huge glass windows. Previous management must have liked to survey their domain, making sure the employees weren’t goofing off like the guy who was currently out there rocking his chair. No one was in the offices, and obviously the kids were not being kept there.
Soprano made a right, hesitating to keep me in his peripheral vision as I turned after him.
“I thought this job was going to be personal security for kids. Something about me being a woman would be less threatening?”
There was another man prying the top of a crate off with a crowbar. Four. And if I couldn’t get my hands on someone’s gun right off the bat, I was definitely grabbing that crowbar.
Soprano grunted. “Piers. Man’s always thinking with his dick. Like the kids aren’t gonna be just as scared with a grease-covered, gun-toting woman who looks like she’s ready to knife them. You aren’t the white-van-and-lollypops looking type, but we do need an extra hand, and clearly Piers thinks he’s gonna get laid if we give you a job, so there you go.”
“So, you keep the kids here?” At his sharp glance, I quickly backtracked. “Look, I live in the Valley. This is a hell of a haul. I’ll do it if the money’s right, but I’d take less if I didn’t have to drive halfway to Mexico every day to work.”
“The kids are here for now, but Desiree likes to move them around, so a new batch might be elsewhere. You wanna bitch to her about the distance, go ahead and be my guest.”
We walked all the way to the back of the warehouse where there was a series of loading dock doors and a line of windowless rooms—each of them probably no more than a hundred square feet. It would be an awfully small place to keep a bunch of kids, especially if you had to squeeze in a portable toilet. I was assuming that’s what they did. I couldn’t see these guys walking children back and forth to the employee restrooms to go potty.
Another man came around the corner, this one hauling a pallet jack with a crate full of boxed shoes wrapped in clear plastic. One of the handheld scanners was clipped to one side of his belt, a pistol in a holster was clipped to the other. Five.
“She here yet?” Soprano asked the man.
The other guy shook his head and eyed the diamond-encrusted Rolex on his wrist. Clearly this job had its perks.
“She’s supposed to be here, but…yanno.”
The other guy looped around and down the next aisle and Soprano turned to me. “Gonna have to wait. Which sucks because that means I need to babysit you, and I got shit to do.”
A new idea sprang to mind—one in which I hopefully wouldn’t have to fight the might-be-a-demon Desiree.
“So, lock me in with the kids until she gets here.” One of these guys had to have a key in case of an emergency with their very valuable human product. “You can go back to work, and get to see firsthand if having a female guard is less traumatic than a male one for them.”
He clearly didn’t want to hang with me because it took him all of half a second to make the decision. “Okay.”
Soprano pulled a set of keys out his pocket that would make a school janitor proud. I followed him over to the middle door and watched as he sorted through the wad of keys on the ring. For once he wasn’t looking at me, so I turned slightly as if I were looking at the contents of a pallet, then slid my knife from the pocket, holding it by the side of my thigh as I turned back to face the door. I was right-handed, but held the knife out with my left hand, sacrificing muscle memory for the extra few seconds of surprise it would buy me to stab Soprano without having to jab across my body.
“Fucking keys,” he snarled. “You think we could spring for some magic shit, or at least a handprint recognition system or something. But no, I gotta lug around forty fucking keys, trying to remember which one goes to what.”
He tried a few keys, then cursed some more. I couldn’t hear a sound from inside the room. Either the soundproofing was out of this world, the kids were gagged, or Soprano was getting ready to trap me into an empty room. The last scenario didn’t really bother me, because I planned on stabbing him before I stepped so much as a pinky toe over the threshold.
He finally found the right key, twisted the knob, and pushed as I slowly extended the blade and held it tight against my thigh. The pungent aroma of sweat and urine hit my nose. Through the open crack of the door I saw sleeping bags, a few toys, and a little blond boy whose frightened eyes met mine.
They were here. The kids were here. Nevarra was here. I’d finally found her and the only thing standing between us and freedom was five guards.
Chapter 23
I took a step forward, and plunged the knife into Soprano’s lower back. Just in case I’d missed his kidney, I threw myself to the right, letting my weight and momentum drag the knife deeply through the muscles of his back and side.
He howled, let go of the door, and spun to face me, one hand trying to stem the blood and the other hand groping for his pistol. The keys fell from his bloodied hand, as the door swung shut. I saw a rush of motion as the children rushed to grab the door, but they were too late. It clicked, and from the rattling of the handle, it must have locked automatically.
Switching the knife to my right hand, I jumped forward and slashed at his wrist. He backed up flinching at the blade and frantically trying to pull his pistol out of the holster with bloodied fingers. I kept slicing, carving thin lines into the man’s chest and arms. He was scrambling backward, nearly tripping in his attempts to get away.
As he pulled his pistol, I dove for him, letting him gra
b my wrist. While he was raising the gun, and trying to keep me from stabbing him, I slapped my other hand on his chest and let loose with my magical stun gun powers.
The man jerked as the voltage shot through him, but still managed to get off a wild shot. The loud AC in the warehouse might have muffled his screaming, but it didn’t cover up the sound of a pistol firing. The noise echoed, and I knew I was about to have a serious fight on my hands.
Letting go of Soprano, I grabbed his gun, then swooped up the bloodied keys and dashed down the nearest aisle.
There was some serious déjà vu going on as I squeezed between the crates, pocketed my knife and keys, and gave the pistol a quick check. Soprano’s pistol was a Smith and Wesson 1911 E series Rail 45ACP. Damn, this was a seriously expensive gun. Not that I’d trade either of my Glocks for it, but it would do nicely as a side piece if I got out of this thing alive.
But this wasn’t the time to be swooning over a weapon.
I held very still, making sure my feet were up on the pallets and that I was hidden by the crates. After counting to thirty, I peeked out and saw the crowbar guy come around the aisle. He shouted into his mic as he saw me and started shooting. Scrambling backward amid a hail of flying splinters from the wooden crate, I jumped out into the next aisle and ran.
These guys were a whole lot savvier than the men who’d been in the other warehouse. I’d hit an intersection, nearly get my head shot off, then switch directions, too busy trying to evade them to get a decent line of sight to shoot myself. After a few turns, I realized they were coordinating this whole thing with their mics, herding me into an ever-smaller space in the warehouse so they could converge and take me out. I thought of going up by climbing the racks, but these guys were moving too fast. I’d be open and exposed.
Hiding in the crates wasn’t an option. I’d be trapped while they closed in, so I kept running and turning, trying to move fast enough to break out of this trap.
I was out of options. This was going to turn into a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scenario, and my only choice would be to try and shoot my way out of it. Four of them and one of me. This would have been a really good time for back-up to appear. Bishop. Bob. Hell, I’d be happy to see anyone on my side right now, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen.
