One Way or Another, page 13
Parker marveled his way through the rest of Agent Clopton’s breakdown of just how bad a human being Güero Martinez really was. With an inner circle of only four men, his right-hand man was an ex-boxer nicknamed El Puno, who did most of his enforcing. An older man named Tito handled the drug distribution side of Güero’s enterprise, but that was mostly there as a screen for the sex trafficker’s version of a food buffet, which was overseen by Güero personally with the help of two runners, one nicknamed Flaco and the other El Loro.
“I never took Spanish,” Parker interrupted.
Murillo smiled. “El Puno means The Fist, Flaco means Skinny Guy and El Loro means The Parrot.”
“And Tito just means Tito, I hope?”
Murillo nodded as Clopton sighed and continued.
“Güero has set up twelve locations so far, from San Diego to Sacramento, mostly in low-profile buildings or warehouses. The ‘price-based’ locations are tucked away in commercial sections of major metropolitan areas, where the businessmen with deep wallets can conveniently get to them. By default? They got the ‘fresh women’, new to the trade. Often, the buildings are either divided internally, or by floor, with women of different races. Currently, that means ‘Latinas’ from Mexico, Central and South America, ‘Asians’ from Japan, Korea and Thailand,; and— demanding top price these days—‘Persians’ pulled mostly from ravaged villages throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.”
Parker squirmed in his chair at this last bit. He’d avoided the underground brothels in-country during the war, not because he was honorable, but because he found the risk of catching a bullet in the head while off base too high.
Clopton took a break speaking and Agent Sharma stepped in. “The ‘price-based’ locations net more profit per client, but then there are the ‘volume-based’ locations, which are solid earners, too. With a ten-dollar cover price at the door, they are in the poorest neighborhoods and staffed with the women who have ‘aged-out’”—she paused and used her fingers to add quotation marks to these last two words—“from the various other locations. Services run from as low as twenty dollars to a max of one hundred dollars.”
“As compared to?” Captain Holland asked after clearing his throat.
“A fifty dollar cover at the pricier locales, $100–1,500 for additional services.”
“Do we even dare ask what the services are?” Klink mumbled.
“Damnit, Klink.” Murillo shook his head. “Did you have to go there?”
Clopton didn’t miss a beat. “Let’s just say it’s all the stuff you could imagine and more. That’s the adult women. We haven’t gleaned enough yet to learn what they’re doing to the minors, but we suspect it’s even worse.”
“Unbelievable,” Holland grunted.
“The women are forced to live on-site or in rented homes nearby, which have barred doors and covered windows. They’re kept under guard at all times,” Agent Sharma said, “and there are senior women in the groups that are allowed to refuse certain services if they help keep the rest in line.”
Murillo’s face pulled back in shock. “What? They rat each other out?”
“Sadly, the survival instinct brings out the worst in people, Detective Murillo. Regardless,” Agent Sharma said with a sigh, “the ‘ratting out’, as you call it, rarely has to happen. These women have little or no chance of escape, and even if they did escape, they’d most likely do so with little or no money, in a foreign land where they don’t speak the language or have the slightest idea where to go to for help.”
“So, they stay put?” Klink asked.
Parker had had enough. “More instinct, Klink. Herd mentality, this time. You combine the herd mentality with a strong survival instinct? You have a brutally dangerous combination.”
“Like what?” Klink asked.
“Like buffalo following each other over the edge of a cliff, that’s what.”
Clopton looked over at Parker, and as she did he noticed she was suddenly looking at him differently. “That’s right, Detective Parker, and that’s why it’s up to us to save them.”
Again, Parker had to fight off the urge to tell them all that Güero had called him just before he’d gotten there. Why? It made all the sense in the world to say something, but it was almost as if an outside force was pressuring him not to.
The conference room was illuminated in dull florescent light. Parker noticed that the conference table was newly polished and shiny, their various reports and note pages like paper islands on a glossy wooden sea. But what really caught his eye was Clopton’s cell phone; the screen went from pale green to bright red. Maybe her battery was running out.
“We’re going to save them?” Parker shot the captain a confused look. “I was assuming we would step back and let the Feds do their thing.”
Captain Holland looked at Clopton. “And I was assuming the same thing.”
“No. We need you guys in on this. It’s just too big, with too many local players. And, besides, you’ve stepped in the shit now, so by default? You get to help us clean it up.”
“I mean, I don’t get it,” Parker pushed. “Why didn’t the mayor know about this investigation, or the DA’s office? Hell. How about just telling the Gang Unit guys so that we wouldn’t have stepped in the shit in the first place?”
The two agents looked at each other grimly before Clopton finally spoke up. “Two reasons, really. One, this involves La Marea, the largest gang in the United States right now. We have agents in the field working this from coast to coast, as well as agents with the DEA, ATF and Customs.”
Parker didn’t like the way she was saying things slowly, as if she were stalling, so he pressed. “And two?”
“And two, we’re afraid they’ve got some people on the inside.”
Captain Holland looked confused. “Inside where? The Bureau?”
“Well, anything’s possible,” Agent Clopton replied, “but I was specifically thinking about the LAPD.” Again, she paused, then she spat it out. “Within your station.”
Parker’s heart sank. Shit. I should’ve told them Güero called me before this little revelation. Now if I do, it’s going to look suspicious.
During the war they would call any moment of inconvenient reality a “truth moment.” That could mean the moment when you saw that your position in combat was compromised, or a moment when one of the tribal leaders gave you five minutes to leave town because a greenhorn private had run his Humvee over five of his sheep. Whichever, a truth moment meant that the conversation or situation could go either way.
As Captain Holland stood up and put his hands on his hips, Parker grimaced. This was going to get ugly.
“What the hell do you mean by ‘this station’?” he growled.
To her credit, despite her hesitation at saying the words a moment ago, Clopton now seemed determined and nonplussed. “I mean exactly what it sounds like, Captain. You’ve got someone dirty in your ranks. We haven’t identified him yet, but we’re getting close.”
Murillo asked the obvious question before anyone else could. “And how do you know he’s not one of us?”
Amazingly, Clopton pointed at her phone. “Because Quantico says it’s not.”
A stunned, confused looked passed its way from Murillo to Klink and to the captain.
But Parker simply shook his head. He’d seen this type of technology used countless times in the military. “Voice recognition analysis,” he said flatly. Then he glared at Clopton. “In a damned civilian setting?”
“Changing times,” Clopton replied coldly, but her face said she felt his offense and maybe even sympathized with it.
“You mean,” Klink said, leaning forward with a scowl. “You recorded our voices and—”
“We have the mole on tape. From a meeting some time back that we were able to bug. But he was in a room with a lot of other people. The background noise was too much, so most of it is garbled so we had to—”
“Match us against partials,” Parker said, cutting her off. Then he looked at Klink. “They took the words that were clear in the tape, ran it through software that could get a verbal fingerprint for consonants and vowels, then pieced together a mapping profile to match against us.” But even as he explained it all, he was wondering how he’d passed the test. If they were recording Güero’s calls, and maybe even analyzing them in real time, wasn’t it possible that they had Parker’s voice on tape from the conversation he and Güero just had?
Klink shrugged angrily. “Man. That’s some X-Files type shit right there, Cap.”
“The tape is all we had to go off. No mobile phones. These guys, La Marea as a whole, and including Güero, their procedures are very sophisticated. The rule is simple: throwaway phones only, some foreign-bought, tossed at least once a day, if not two or three times. Human intel is all we have to work with.”
Parker sighed. There was his answer: No. But still, he had nothing to hide, regardless. He could actually ask the Feds to tap his cell in case Güero dared to call him again. But…no. Something in Parker’s gut was practically screaming for him not to say a word. Why? He didn’t know.
Murillo rolled his eyes. “They sound like a damned terrorist group.”
Clopton shrugged. “It was our efforts at going after such groups that caused the drug cartels to begin adopting many of their same practices, unfortunately.”
Holland seemed to agree. “Regardless, you could’ve just asked, or gone through IA—”
“No time for that. You guys are the ones that stepped into this, remember? So, we can all pitch a fit about protocol or—”
“Or what?” the captain said loudly.
“Or we can get back to trying to help the women we were just talking about. Remember them? The ones who right this moment, in this city, your city, are being forced to have sex against their will?”
The room went quiet before Agent Clopton leaned onto the conference table with her hands spread and added, “Because with that in mind, Captain Holland? I couldn’t give a shit about you boys and your hurt feelings.”
The Gray Man blinked away again, leaving Hector standing alone in the foyer, staring at the floor and then the doorknob that awaited his hand. The muscles in his neck went tight as he struggled with the moment before him.
When he opened the door to step out of the house, Hector squinted hard against the flashing lights that were barely piercing the darkness of the surrounding neighborhood.
His vision seemed warped, like someone had slipped filters over his eyes and he could see the world differently somehow. The moment didn’t last long, just enough time for him to make out five police cars and eight cops with their guns, all in exaggerated silhouettes.
Beyond them, about a dozen creatures with glowing red eyes were either pacing along the edges of the lights or had climbed up a few telephone poles— and all were glaring at him. Some were grossly malformed wolves with massive humps on their backs and long, glistening fangs; others looked like monkeys with incredibly long arms and claws that scratched so deeply into the telephone poles that you could hear the wood giving way.
Hector felt his jaw go slack. The law had come for him tonight, that much was obvious, but evil had, too.
The moment, and the vision, was ruined when two of the cop cars lit their spotlights right into his face, blinding him completely.
The voice boomed over the microphone again. “Hands behind your head with your fingers interlaced! Now!”
Hector complied.
“Drop to your knees and remain still.”
The overwhelming urge to run, the instinct that these men with their badges always brought out in him, came back with a vengeance. But he knew that would be suicide. Too many guns were trained on him.
He heard the back door of the house crash open, and heavy, booted feet scampering in behind him now. Guns all around. It would be easy to take a pass on this whole “millionth” thing. To catch a few bullets in the head, wait for The Gray Man to reappear so that Hector could say, “Sorry, man. Peace. Out.”
Except there was no peace where he would be going next at that point, and Hector knew it. Somehow, someway, this was his only feeble path to ever finding any kind of place in heaven.
“Don’t move, not one inch, you little bastard,” a woman said from behind him.
Then the usual pomp and circumstance ensued. His wrists were grabbed, he was forced to the ground and cuffed, then picked up and surrounded by cops, one of whom put on plastic gloves and searched his pockets. Hector had a second to see the name badge of the woman who was behind him, “Davenport,” as she stood there staring at Hector with two other members of the SWAT team, her AR-15 angled across her body and pointed toward the ground.
“He’s clear, Sarge,” one of the cops said to the woman. She nodded, but she did not break her stare with Hector. Not for a second.
“Tell me. How does it feel?” she said to Hector.
He cleared his throat. “How does what feel?”
“How does shooting a defenseless woman in the neck from nearly point-blank range feel?” Her eyes were not red, like those creatures he’d seen a moment ago, but they still burned when Hector looked into them. He looked away and ignored her.
Her voice was seething. “No answer? How about shooting someone unarmed in the head, like the boy in the supply room? How about that?”
Again, Hector simply shook his head.
Davenport sighed heavily. “Get this low-life piece-of-shit coward out of here.”
Two cops, one on each side, dragged him to one of the police cars, where they opened the door, read him his Miranda rights and placed him in the back seat.
Again. He’d been here before. Different car, same plastic smell, with no handles on the door and a black cage that separated the front and back seats.
The radio squawked as two lights on it flashed from yellow to red and back again. With his ankles crossed, Hector closed his eyes and leaned his head back, feeling his shoulders groan against his arms, jammed as they were against the seat behind him.
Outside there was more commotion as cops went here or there, chased off a few nosey neighbors, put away their equipment and cleared the rest of the house.
So, they had him now. And they had to have the gun from The Mayan. Probably had statements from everyone there, too. No doubt by the time he got to the station, they’d be rounding up witnesses to eyeball him in a lineup and that would be that. Not a public defender on earth, not even Atticus Finch, would be able to save him then.
But that wouldn’t be necessary anyway.
“Yeah. I know,” Hector said softly into the emptiness of the car, because he could feel The Gray Man, sitting right there next to him. “I’m supposed to go in and flat-out plead guilty.”
No reply in words. No feelings. Just a silent affirmation that moved through the car like a mental push.
The drive to the police station was like a parade of goodbyes, and Hector allowed himself the moments. Leaning against the window, he said farewell to each spot they passed by: the corner where he’d first crashed his bike, the yard where he’d gotten into a fight with Bobby, Evergreen Park where he’d run the gauntlet to earn his way into the gang, and Arroyo Liquor where he’d bought his first Old English 800, before the eighth-grade dance, and gotten wasted.
As they drove on, there was the house where Lorena, his first true crush, once lived. The first girl that had ever let him put his hand up her shirt. Then they passed Chico’s house, the windows dark, and a few blocks up they passed the street where, if you made a left and went a half mile, you’d find Bennie’s apartment.
Hector smiled sadly. Each place had a name and a memory attached to it, but now each one was becoming a monument to the past. He doubted he would ever see these streets again, and though it was stupid and selfish, sorrow overwhelmed him and tears filled his eyes.
Once at the station he was fingerprinted, photographed and booked into custody. He felt all sorts of eyes on him, but he was in no mood to trade glares or engage in anything but required conversation. Name. Address. Etc.
They removed his shoes and belt, then put him in a cell by himself, which was new. He’d never gotten the Ritz-Carlton treatment before, and as he sat on the cot he realized that he wasn’t just tired, he was stone-cold exhausted. There was a heaviness on him, a depression, that was moving to shut him down. To switch off his eyes, unplug his brain and take him away from this place.
He realized that this would be the only way he would ever be free again: in sleep, in dreams.
A few cells down, some guy, sounding high and delusional, was moaning, “I need help,” over and over again. The cops down the hallway were ignoring him, instead chattering among themselves about two guys in the general holding cell that were drunk and might go at it. Bets were being placed and a short debate broke out over how long to let the fight last.
It was sad. Everything was sad.
Living a life where only sleep was a way out of your misery was saddest of all.
He was just nodding off when a thought came to him that made the tiniest of smiles crease his lips—books. There was always the prison library.
He would still have books.
If nothing else, he could still live there, in the pages of someone else’s life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After Michiko gave him a foul-tasting herb and made him chew it down, Father Soltera began to feel better almost instantly. They rested briefly, before she helped him to his feet and they began walking swiftly again. The Hanging Forest was behind them now, but the bodies were not. Two of them had fallen free from their nooses and were now stumbling around up ahead, pale and so decomposed that their eyes were gone. They were essentially blind, so they were easy to sidestep and evade as Father Soltera and Michiko moved past them and continued on.
After a time, Father Soltera and Michiko took a short rest before making their way down the path, Father Soltera taking notice of the changes in the landscape, which had now become a mix of more familiar looking plants, and trees and bushes that reminded him once again of the woods in Michigan from his seminary days.
