Shadow Hand Page 10

  Cleo sat up and stared at her for a second, then caught on. “Roulette! Of course! Some racket! And here I worried about you being too much of a straight arrow to get along in the grubby, gritty world.”

  Ash sat up too and spread the blanket across both their shoulders. “I’ve been as gritty as anybody. And as grubby. Not at the casinos run by the tribes, but there are some cruise ships and a riverboat out of New Orleans that feature roulette. Couldn’t work any one place for long, of course, so Vegas was the place to go. When I had to get out of there fast, too, I headed for Boston.”

  “So where did the Irish chick come in?”

  Ash told her the whole story, even, after some hesitation, the part about Bridget peeking at her in the shower, seeing the dropped soap rise to her hand, and deciding she must be an angel. “She’d upgraded me in her mind from nun to guardian angel. Way to make me feel like hell!”

  Cleo chuckled. “Makes sense that she thought you were a nun when you turned down her offer to put out. And you did, after all, save her from a cruddy life and give her at least a chance at a better one.”

  Ash was silent for a while. Finally she said, “I got something from all that. Something big. I know now what I’m supposed to do, just not how to do it. At least not alone.”

  “Saving sex-trafficked girls.” Cleo nodded. “Sounds good. And you’re not alone now.”

  A few days later they were on the way to being even less alone.

  Cleo had been close friends with Mags in her early days in Boston and had learned a great deal from the older woman. She was more than happy to find that Ash and Mags had found common ground in their northwestern origins, and surprised that Ash hadn’t already enlisted Mags in her cause.

  “I ran into Mags just now,” Cleo told Ash over the coffee she’d brought back. “She wants us to come over to the bar for lunch, before opening, catch up on the last ten years or so. I said we would.”

  “Sounds okay.” Ash sounded less than enthusiastic.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. But sometimes I think she’s all too perceptive.”

  Cleo did wonder how much Mags had noticed about Ash’s bar bouncer tactics, but didn’t say so. “She has to be, in her job. She knows everybody, and hears everything, but she doesn’t tell everything she knows or hears. At least she didn’t back when I first knew her, and I don’t think she’s changed. You can trust her.”

  Ash was still lounging in bed with her coffee. “I know, I know. But how would she handle this?” Her nearly-full cup sailed slowly through the air to land on the table in front of Cleo.

  “Probably okay. Eventually. But we can take it one step at a time. Just chat her up a little on the subject of sex trafficking. I bet she’ll run with it.” Cleo picked up Ash’s coffee cup, took a good swig, carried it over to the bed, and held it just out of Ash’s reach. “Yeah, I know you can take this away from me without touching it, but if I try to hang on to it can you do that without spilling any?”

  It turned out that Ash could. Almost. Cleo grabbed the napkins from the bag that had held the coffee, mopped up a few dribbles from the floor, and sat down on the edge of the bed so hard the mattress bounced and a little more coffee was spilled.

  “Sorry!” she started to get up for more napkins, but Ash gulped down what was left, sent the empty cup spinning back to the table, and pulled Cleo down beside her with a very firm and altogether human arm.

  “You,” Ash said sternly, “will just have to lie over the wet spots.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cleo said with mock contrition, spread-eagling over that side of the sheets while the buttons of her shirt unfastened themselves and the zipper of her jeans slid down on its own.

  Three hours later, they woke for a second time and barely made it to the Galaxy Bar in time for lunch.

  Mags had sent out for pizza and served it with icy-cold beer from one of the local breweries. Between bites and sips they talked about their Army adventures, the all-female medical mission, the hardships as well as beauties of the desert, and various other topics that Ash had only referred to briefly in the weeks before Cleo arrived. Then Mags and Cleo reminisced about the “old” days in Boston, how things had changed in in the lesbian and gay communities, and what had become of old friends. By the time they were topping off their meal with coffee and chocolate chip cookies it seemed perfectly natural for Mags to ask what they were thinking of doing next.

  “After all your adventures overseas, Ash, you’re going to want something more than a job as a bouncer pretty soon, and Cleo is bound to get up to something or other.”

  Cleo shot Ash a “go for it” look, but Ash’s body language practically telegraphed, “careful now!” so Cleo was startled when Ash did, in fact, go for it.

  “You’re right, Mags. We need to get off our butts and find something worth doing. I’d been wondering for quite a while what that would be, and then on the plane to Boston I ran into a…a sort of situation.” She paused, considering, Cleo knew, how much to say.

  Mags leaned forward, all attention. “A ‘situation’? C’mon, don’t leave me hanging!”

  “Well, it could have happened to anybody, but the end result was that I managed to get a young sex-trafficked girl away from her nasty keeper and sent her off on a plane back to Ireland. It was the old story, promised a good job here, then trapped into sex slavery.”

  Mags’s jaw had dropped, but she recovered quickly. “What you should do is write a book about this, all the details, in the Army and beyond. Hell, it would make a great movie!”

  “No,” Ash said firmly. “What I should do is find ways to help more girls like that.”

  “We,” Cleo put in. “What we should do.”

  Mags was right on it, just as Cleo had predicted. “If your team needs a source of local information, the lay of the land, the political situation, stuff like that, I’m here for you. We hear about that stuff going on over there where you were, thousands of women captured and kept as sex slaves, but we have plenty of that kind of thing going on here, too, just without the fighting. All for money.

  “I see articles and editorials about it fairly often, and once in a great while there’s a police raid, but they’re stretched too thin with other kinds of crimes, and the politicians think they have better fish to fry—fish that vote, I guess. Plus there’s always some corruption where there’s money to be made.”

  Her enthusiasm was a bit daunting. “It’s not that we have any actual plans yet,” Cleo cautioned.

  Ash nodded. “We’re still in the studying stage. I’ve been reading up on the local situation, too, and it’s a tangled mess, knots within knots.”

  “Well, I’m here if you need me. And I know somebody you ought to meet. Jana’s a former Army nurse, with connections to an agency that helps girls who manage to get out of the sex trade on their own. She and her partner Val come into the bar once a month or so. How about I give them a call? You folks would get along fine. Val was in the Army, too.”

  Cleo felt the tension building in Ash. The more people involved, the more chance of her powers being discovered. Cleo figured that was inevitable anyway, but she’d protect Ash’s privacy as long as she could.

  “It’d be nice to meet them, have a drink or two in the bar, without saying anything about our interest in sex trafficking right away. How about it, Ash?”

  “Sure. That’d be okay.”

  Ash’s tone wasn’t exactly genial, which wasn’t lost on Mags, who looked at her watch and said, “Hey, time’s been flying. My first shift staff will be here any minute to get the bar ready to open. I’ll give you a call if I find out when Jana and Val will be around.”

  Ash was silent on the way home, and almost didn’t see an impending squirrel/car collision in time to toss the critter safely to the curb, but Cleo grabbed her arm, pointed, and tragedy was averted.

  “Are you
thinking I shouldn’t have agreed to meet Mags’s friends? You’ve talked about not being sure what to do with girls after you rescued them, and apparently this nurse does know, so it seems like too good a chance to pass up.”

  “Yeah, it does. I’ve known, in theory, that to accomplish much we need the help of people we can trust. I guess I’m just having trouble getting used to that theory closing in on being a reality.”

  An hour later, things got even realer. Mags phoned to say that Jana and Val would be at the bar that night. “All I mentioned was your shared military background,” she told Ash, with Cleo listening. “Anything else is up to you two to bring up, or not.”

  Mags was spot-on in thinking they’d all get along. Jana, with her pale freckled face and neat mid-length brown hair showing gray at the temples, had the warmth and competent manner of the best type of nurse. Dark-skinned Val, with her direct gaze, vice-like handshake, and the muscular forearms of the jazz drummer she was, lit up the dim corner table where they sat with her frequent grin.

  “How are things in the Army these days?” she asked. “We got to do the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Tango and managed to fly under the radar, but it was a challenge, and not the fun kind.”

  “It’s still a challenge,” Ash said. “Depends on who your officers are. Some will get you on one charge or another and claim that being gay or lesbian has nothing to do with it.”

  “We were lucky in our last posting,” Cleo added. “Our colonel knew perfectly well what was going on. But there was always the chance that somebody higher up would get us for illegal fraternization, sergeant and lieutenant, so we still had to be careful.”

  By the time they’d finished a couple of drinks each and exchanged humorous anecdotes of hiding their relationships—and a few not so humorous—Cleo felt like they’d been friends forever, but it was still a shock when Ash came right out with, “Jana, Mags mentioned that you know something about an organization that shelters sex-trafficked girls when they get away.”

  Jana set down her drink and gave Ash a searching look before responding. “It’s not widely known, but yes, there is such an organization, somewhat like the shelters for women escaping domestic violence. It was set up originally for oppressed sex workers in general, which has come to include sex-trafficked women. I do some occasional work with them when there are medical issues.”

  “That’s good to hear. I had…well, I happened to get involved in a case and was able to send a girl back to the country she’d come from, but I wondered at the time what I could have done with her if she’d had nowhere to go.”

  “That’s got to be some story!” Val raised her glass in a salute. “Anything you can share?”

  Ash told the story again, adding a few details she hadn’t already told Mags, who had just sat down with them. Cleo kind of hoped she’d include the really startling parts, but it was probably just as well that she didn’t.

  Jana was clearly impressed. “I can see why you’ve taken an interest in the sex-trafficking problem. If you’d like to get more involved, I can connect you with a coalition working on getting stronger legislation passed.”

  “I was thinking of something more immediate,” Ash said. “More hands-on.”

  Cleo choked on her drink, trying not to laugh at the thought of how much more Ash could offer than just her hands. She put her glass down, realizing that she’d had quite enough. Possibly more than enough. Ash’s second glass was untouched, so she must know what she was doing.

  “Oh, well, the shelter—” Jana began, but Ash shook her head.

  “Maybe sometime. But I’ve been thinking of getting together a small, discrete group to brainstorm other approaches. Mostly information gathering at first.”

  Val, with three empty glasses in front of her, sat up straight, eyes gleaming. “So would that include us? There’s nothing I’d rather do than mess up those sex-slavers!”

  Jana, more subdued, considered for a minute or two and then nodded. “Worth considering, anyway.”

  Cleo, who was facing that way, noticed a slight girl in an MIT sweatshirt hovering outside the nearby restroom, a laptop case hanging from her shoulder, but didn’t think much about it until she advanced to stand right behind Val.

  “If you guys really want to know what’s happening, cutting edge, up-to-the-minute,” the girl said casually, “you need somebody wired, like me. If it’s those trafficker sludge-slugs you want to take down, I’m your geek.”

  All this, Cleo thought in a bit of a daze, from a thin, wispy blonde who could have been a grown-up Alice in Wonderland after a few too many years of “eat me” experiments.

  Mags stood up, frowning. “Nobody’s talking about taking anybody down. Who are you, anyway? I’ve seen you around before. You go to MIT?”

  The girl shrugged. “Off and on. You can call me Twelve. Right, Val?”

  Val strained to turn far enough around to see her. “Uh, right, Twelve. How’s things?”

  “Boring as fuck.” She shrugged again, turned away, said over her shoulder, “Think about it and let me know.” Then she wandered off out the door.

  Jana turned to Val. “You know her? Really? Somebody who calls herself ‘Twelve’?”

  “Yeah, a little. She’s sort of a freelance hacker and a hell of a video producer. A jazz groupie, too. She made those terrific promos for the band when we went on tour last time.”

  “A jazz groupie?” Jana’s expression verged on ominous.

  “Not that kind! I only talked with her a few times. She has some interesting theories about the relationship between math and music and the structure of the human brain.”

  “Okay, but… Twelve?”

  “Yeah, it’s weird. I think she’s obsessed with that Star Trek character with a number for a name, the one that’s part cybernetic. Lets her feel smarter than regular people. Which she may be.”

  Ash looked intently at Val. “Would you trust her?”

  “Trust?” Val considered. “Well, I’d trust her once she showed she was on my side. And I’d trust her to do anything she set out to do, legal or not. There was this one time…”

  “C’mon,” Cleo urged. “You can’t stop now.” There were murmurs of general agreement.

  “Okay. I don’t know all the details, but somebody in the band—I won’t name names—was being blackmailed, and Twelve worked some kind of hacker magic and got enough dirt on the blackmailer to shut them down. If we need, as she said, a ‘geek,’ she’s the one to have.”

  “Something to consider.” Ash looked thoughtful.

  Mags, who’d sat down as soon as Twelve left, got up again. “Let’s think things over. Ash and Cleo can meet me tomorrow in my office, if that’s okay with them. No more shooting our mouths off in the open bar.”

  Cleo caught the silent question in Ash’s eyes, the way they’d had of understanding each other back in tight spots in the desert, and said, “Jana and Val too, if they can make it.” She sent back an unspoken question of her own.

  “And if anybody runs across Twelve,” Ash said, “you can bring her along.”

  When they got home—there’d never been any doubt that they’d share the small room with the big bed—Cleo said, “We’ve got to face the fact that we can’t keep everything secret. In fact, if we really pull something off, the more publicity the better. If news gets to girls that somebody might help them escape, they’ll be looking for chances, and if the Johns know somebody is focusing on thwarting the business, they may think twice before plunking down their money for half an hour with an underage Bridget.”

  “I know.” Ash gave a deep sigh. “If the Army spooks find me, they find me. And if I get caught doing…what I do, and get called a freak or witch or something, that’s just the way it goes. Meanwhile, planning with a team is what we need to do. For starters.”

  Mags’s office just about held the five of them, with a few chairs brou
ght in from the bar. When Twelve came in fifteen minutes late, they began to shuffle the chairs around, but she just plopped herself down on the floor in a corner with scarcely a word and logged on to her ever-present computer.

  Ash shared copies of some of the articles she’d found, and Jana had second- or third-hand information from her friends at the shelter, gleaned from girls passing through. One common thread seemed especially worth following up. There was a pattern of traffickers loading unmarked white vans with women who were then warehoused at anonymous motels or well-fenced houses. They’d be transported, heavily guarded, to events like gangbang parties, where men were charged admission and the girls were forced to act like willing guests. The vans had no windows in the back, or if they did they were covered, so the girls had no way of telling where they were or where they went.

  “If we could find some of these parties and follow the vans back to their sources,” Ash said, “we’d have something to go on, even if it’s just information to feed the police.”

  “We have an old pick-up truck for transportation,” Val said, “and I pass a used car lot every day where there’s a white van for sale. Something like that could be camouflage, letting us blend in.”

  “Good idea,” Ash agreed. “Find out how much they want for it, and we’ll buy it. I can cover the cost.”

  A sharp exclamation from Twelve in the corner grabbed their attention.

  “Got it! I worked on this all night, and now I’ve cracked it. There’s an ad on the local Craigslist site, ‘Hot Action after the Big Game.’ I replied under one of my dude identities, got a link to a middleman, and hacked the poster’s e-mail. The last info just came in. Private party with cover charge near Foxboro after the big football game next weekend. Johns are supposed to meet up with a guy at a certain bar in Mansfield to pay and get directions. I’ll bet he looks you over real good first.”

  “I could pass.” Cleo tried to sound more confident than she felt.

  Ash shook her head. “Pass as what, a fourteen-year-old boy?”