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13
Annie
Nothing was what I expected.
Well, the warehouse was. It seemed a logical place to move large objects – human sized packages, for example -- without inviting curiosity. It also seemed like a logical thing to do, to warehouse the girls you meant to sell. Because face it – we were nothing more than product.
I was uncuffed.
"Boss doesn't like to be kept waiting," Chad said and the light in his eyes said he was definitely looking forward to turning me over to the boss and watching me get punished.
I didn't get a chance to see Theo's eyes. I wondered what he was thinking. If he was a weak link, I wanted to know it.
I could use all the friends I could get right now.
But once again nothing was what I expected. Truth is, trafficking rings are kind of mythical. We know they're out there. We know human trafficking exists. There are law enforcement agencies that fight against it.
But stop to think about it and all kinds of non-politically correct images come to mind: Women smuggled out of the country, heiresses and the like, stuffed into wooden shipping containers by something called "white slavers." Okay, totally not politically correct, but at least as an undercover narc, I had no idea how they really operated. Luxury jets and handcuffs? Under the guise of being a federal marshal and captured fugitive? Husband and wife, the husband constantly with his arm around his wife because he just can't keep his hands off her (or his knife out of her ribs)? There were ways to control someone even out in public. Drugs and the story the person was ill. Threats to loved ones. Threats to the girl herself.
There were stories that made their way through law enforcement circles as well as becoming urban legend. Stories about truckloads of girls found. Someone stopping an eighteen-wheeler and finding the trailer packed with girls. Most of the time even in the cop shops there's no follow up story as to how that all came about and most of us are too busy to even remember to follow up on it. The things we see in our own jobs are enough to lend verisimilitude to the stories. Sometimes I'd wonder about how anyone ended up with an entire trailer full of girls. Maybe it made sense if they were immigrants, all of them coming to the country together and snatched at the same time, possibly by the person who brought them, promising them a new life and leading them into hell.
That was a good guess. Other than that, no clue.
Or maybe I was the only one clueless. Looked like I was about to find out.
And nothing was straight out of central casting or my darkest imaginings.
"You've all certainly taken your time getting here."
They'd dragged me into the warehouse, because by then kicking and struggling wasn't really an act. I was breathless by the time we got inside, and sun blind. When we plunged inside the warehouse, it was dark. Slowly my vision adapted, seeing first that the windows at the far end of the big, empty warehouse space were weirdly done up in priscilla curtains, all frothy waves of see-through ruffles. There was a tall chair standing in front of it, almost like a throne if that wasn't too crazy to think of.
The person standing in front of it, silhouetted for now, the person who'd spoken, was a woman.
You hear about women feeling betrayed by that. Shouting, "How can you turn on your own kind?" But I had a pack of sisters and not one of them was at all like me, and all of them had always been more than happy to turn on me. It wasn't like I was going to like anybody who was doing this, no matter which sex they were.
She was tall and rangy, her arms muscled. As I blinked away sun tears, I started to see better. Theo dragged me around to the far side of the throne arrangement, so the sun wasn't in my eyes, and I started being able to see her better. Probably he'd moved me out of the sun so she could see me clearly, without any kind of glare from the sunlight, but there was something weird about the redhead's behavior. I'd hit him in the nuts with a car door and dropped him to the ground and run. I didn't think I'd mistaken the Now you're going to get yours look in his partner's eye but his own behavior now could only partly be explained as letting her get a look at me.
He was letting me get a look at her. Why? And what did he think I'd do with it?
Commit to memory. But he didn't know that.
… it was vitally important that he didn't know that.
"Bring her closer," the bitch queen said and Chad was the one to comply, dragging me up to where the woman stood. At first I'd thought she was wearing something preposterous like a leather catsuit or something. When I was standing right in front of her I could see she was actually wearing long running tights and a very form fitting t-shirt. If I had her figure, that's what I'd wear to run, and probably a hell of a lot of the rest of the time, too. I didn't doubt she was a runner. She had the lean, muscled look of a runner, with natural muscle in her legs.
So here my endurance was worth zip.
You're not supposed to be escaping.
…you sure about that?
"What's your name?" She stepped up into my space and took my face in her hand, turning my head this way and that.
"Erin Trace. There's been a mistake. You see, my friend has this Corvette and he said I could borrow it, he told me where it would be in the parking garage and so I just thought – " I ventured a little laugh and it sounded convincing enough, the way it quivered, because all of me wanted to quiver. "I thought he'd parked it there and I – "
"Didn't notice there were no keys?"
That was a stupid question. Hot writing a car that had a locking mechanism for the steering wheel was a waste of time. Which she knew.
