The Contractors Page 2

  The madam dashed for the door.

  Piper was quicker. She holstered her piece on the run, tackled the woman, and handcuffed her in one fluid motion.

  I slapped my bracelets on the battered Chung Hee, left him on the floor by the woman.

  “She a friend of yours?” Piper pointed to the madam and joined me by the desk.

  “We went to different high schools together.” I sat down and looked at a yellow pad sitting by a cell phone.

  “Jon Cantrell, you big time in trouble.” The woman lifted her head from the floor and stared at me. “We pay. No hassle.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Heard that already.” I flipped through the pages. Korean writing and the occasional series of numbers that meant nothing to me.

  Piper knelt by our two prisoners. “Where’s Lisa?”

  The woman spat on the floor.

  “Last door on left.” Chung Hee smiled, eager to please now.

  The madam muttered a few words in Korean, not a happy tone. She looked my way, gave me the stink eye. “You not remember me, Jon Cantrell?”

  I shook my head. Scrolled through the call index on the woman’s cell phone. Empty.

  “You mess with my girls last year,” she said. “Claim you a cop.”

  A vague recollection skittered across my mind and then was gone. The secrets and lies, the people and places, the busts and the busted, all of it ran together.

  “That was in Fort Worth.” The madam laughed. “You cop here too?”

  “How many providers working right now?” I stood. “And how many customers back there?”

  “Only two on tonight,” Chung Hee said. “No customers right now.”

  Piper turned to the door behind the desk, the only other exit from the room.

  “Wait up.” I motioned for her to stop and knelt by the madam. “I remember you now.”

  The woman on the floor didn’t speak.

  “One of your girls was overdosing,” I said. “I took her to the ER.”

  The madam shifted her gaze to me and then to the floor. She didn’t say anything.

  Piper opened the door.

  “That girl you call ambulance for,” the madam said. “You take good earner. She never come back to work.” She paused. “See you around, Jon Cantrell.”

  I stood and followed Piper into a hall lit only by purple neon. The smell was stronger here. Bad jazz played in the background, like the soundtrack to a 1970s X-rated film.

  The last door on the left was half open.

  The room was painted cherry red. A black futon on one wall, a dresser on the other. Candles and incense burned on a small table in the corner.

  A girl who appeared to be in her teens or early twenties lay on the futon, eyes closed. She wore enough makeup to make Tammy Faye Bakker look like a granola-crunching atheist, and a pink bustier and matching panties.

  I compared the photo to her sleeping figure. A pretty close resemblance but hard to be certain under all the makeup. I turned on a penlight, gave her face a closer scrutiny. The nose and dimpled chin were similar enough to be a match. We’d found Lisa Sanders.

  Piper sat beside the girl, touched her wrist.

  Lisa stirred but didn’t wake. Under the glare of the flashlight, she appeared younger than her years but older at the same time.

  “She’s stoned.” Piper held up an amber plastic bottle she’d taken from underneath a pillow. “Opie-dopies.”

  “Let’s get her out of here.” I found a robe crumpled in the corner, tossed it on the futon.

  Opie-dopies was the street name for a new form of opioid-based painkillers, like Oxycontin but stronger.

  “Rise and shine.” Piper slapped the girl a couple of times, gentle blows to the cheek.

  Lisa licked her lips but didn’t open her eyes.

  “I remember being this age.” Piper propped the girl up, slid an arm into the robe.

  I helped with the other side, recollected back to my own teen years. At this girl’s age, I’d spent a great deal of time helping my old man track down my mother. Lots of bars and head shops. At least I’d had a father and a mother.

  “The court put me with this foster family in Conroe.” Piper pulled the girl to her feet. “I’d just started to develop, if you know what I mean.”

  “Piper.” I shook my head. “Leave it alone.”

  “I shared a room with these two girls from a polygamist family.” She cinched the robe around Lisa’s waist. “The foster dad started in on the older one first.”

  I shook my head, made a shh sound, soft as the night, tried to derail what was coming next. To no avail.

  She shoved Lisa into my arms. “I’m gonna shoot Chung Hee in the crotch.”

  “No.” I grabbed her wrist. “Let’s just get the girl out of here.”

  Lisa stirred, murmured something. Eyelids fluttered.

  “Okay, Jon. We’ll get her out of here.” Piper relaxed, nodding slowly. “We’ll take her back to Sinclair, the cop who gets paid off so this place can stay open.” She paused. “You want to explain that to me?”

  I had no answer.

  Together, we carried the fourteen-year-old girl out the back door and into the humid night.

  - CHAPTER FOUR -

  The hunger gnawed at him, but he didn’t eat.

  Instead, Senator Stephen McNally pushed away the cold chicken salad and listened to his legislative aide deliver the bad news.

  Food held no interest for the Senator. His hunger was of a different stripe, an empty spot in the soul, a burning at the base of his belly that couldn’t be slaked by bits of lettuce and grilled meat.

  The obsession to win.

  In moments like these, Senator McNally hated the craving for success even as he realized he owed his life’s achievements to the insatiable desire.

  The aide, a smarmy young man prone to wearing bow ties, ran down the list of McNally’s colleagues and how they had voted on Senate Bill 994, a modest piece of legislation to which McNally had added a small amendment.

  “The Workaholic Senator,” that’s what the press called him. Certainly fit the current circumstances. Sunday night, nearly Monday, and he was still in his mahogany-paneled office on the third floor of the Hart Senate Office Building on Constitution Avenue, a few hundred yards away from the Capitol.

  While the young man droned on, Senator McNally slipped on the cowboy boots he’d removed earlier in the evening.

  The boots had been custom-made for him back home, Leddy’s in Fort Worth, black snakeskin lowers with matching calfskin uppers. For a Texas politician, they were a cliché, but he didn’t care. They were comfortable and stood the test of time, much like his Brioni suits and rose gold Patek Philippe wristwatch. He could afford the best in life, so why not buy it.

  The legislative aide finished his report with this summation: SB 994—a highway appropriations request—had failed because of the Senator’s addition, a tiny attempt at immigration reform that had earned the enmity of the other Texas senator, heretofore considered an ally, as well as representatives from several other border states.

  “The amendment,” the aide said. “It was, uh, politically unpalatable.”

  “Sometimes the right thing isn’t the most popular.”

  The Senator tightened his tie, yanking on the silk, the need to win merging into a low, familiar rage that made his movements jerky.

  All the horse-trading he’d done and promises he’d made, assured he would have the votes, only to have SB 994 die because it was politically unpalatable to certain fringe elements.

  “You know how many underage girls move across international borders every year for the sex business?” McNally took a deep breath, willed himself calm.

  “No.” The aide shook his head.

  The amendment would have automatically given a visa to anyone under the age of eighteen who claimed to be the victim of sex trafficking. The barricade-the-border crowd saw this codicil as a backdoor way to let illegal immigrants stay in the United States.

 
; “The UN estimates around five hundred thousand,” McNally said. “But that’s based on the FBI’s data, which even they admit isn’t very accurate. The real number’s almost certainly a lot higher.”

  The aide shrugged, interested only in the abstract, as the young often are.

  “Half million or a half dozen,” the Senator said. “Doesn’t matter too much if you’re one of ’em.”

  “Sir.” The aide looked at his watch. “The best political move right now would be to direct your legislative efforts toward the War on Drugs initiatives a-a-and…”

  The aide’s words died on his lips as the Senator fixed him with the blue-eyed, granite stare that made powerful men around the world stammer like school kids.

  The border between the United States and Mexico was the hot-button issue this election cycle. Smugglers from either side had made it porous—guns and ammunition going south; drugs and illegal immigrants going north; truckloads of cash headed in both directions. Then there were the never-ending skirmishes between law enforcement and cartel soldiers, gun battles that increasingly were fought on the sovereign soil of the United States.

  But if there was one area where no one questioned Senator McNally’s intentions, it was the War on Drugs, especially when it came to controlling the border.

  Control was everything.

  Control would stop the flow of narcotics and enable commerce to thrive, something that would benefit everybody, from the lower-income people on either side of the Rio Grande to the small business owners and ranchers decimated by a decade of drug violence.

  SB 994 was the first of McNally’s many planned efforts at reasserting control over the border.

  And it had failed. And that made Senator Stephen J. McNally angry.

  “I, uh, I’m sorry, sir.” The aide closed his file. “Will that be all?”

  “Yeah, we’re done for tonight.” The Senator turned off his stare, smiled tightly. “On your way out, tell Patrick to have my private car sent around.”

  “Your security detail won’t like that.” The aide stood.

  McNally tossed his salad in the wastebasket but didn’t reply.

  “Before I go, we should talk about your schedule tomorrow.” The aide reached for his coat, yawning. “You’ve got a committee meeting in the morning and then—”

  “Fuck the schedule.” The Senator stood and slipped the phone in his pocket, aware of the anger smoldering deep inside, a cold burn that made his limbs tingle.

  The young aide paused, coat half on, a look of astonishment on his face. The Senator rarely swore.

  The Senator didn’t care that he’d shocked the young man. He didn’t drink or smoke, gamble, or cheat on his wife of nearly four decades. His one passion in life—some might say his vice—was making deals, bringing two sides together to the mutual benefit of both. This passion had allowed him to amass a sizable fortune before entering politics in his later years.

  The overwhelming desire to win, ingrained into his DNA, also meant that he hated when transactions failed to come together.

  Therefore, he was going to have to make the deal in a different way.

  Stopping the flow of children destined for the sex business was just a single aspect, albeit an important one, of his goals for the border.

  The aide hurriedly gathered his things and left the room.

  Senator McNally watched him go. When he was alone, he pulled an envelope from the top drawer of his desk.

  McNally was from North Texas, but he owned a ranch south of San Antonio, a relatively small spread by the standards of the region, about 9,500 acres, a place he used mainly for deer hunting and to escape the glare and soul-numbing grind of DC.

  Eighteen months ago, he’d learned firsthand how porous the border was, images he still couldn’t shake from his mind.

  He’d been alone, meandering in his pickup down a narrow dirt road, a rarely visited section of the ranch, something he did when he needed time and space to think.

  In an area where the ranch road veered near the two-lane, farm-to-market highway that bordered his property, he’d rounded a bend and encountered a dust-covered van parked beneath a palm tree.

  Two girls stood in the open door of the van. Twins, aged eleven he later learned, from Guanajuato. Their mother was dead. Their father had sold them to satisfy a debt.

  One of them was naked, bleeding from places people in polite society didn’t talk about. The other girl stood next to her sister, a protective arm around her shoulder.

  The Senator stopped, aghast. He reached for his ranch radio and the Smith & Wesson revolver he always brought along during rides around the property.

  A man in his late twenties was in the back of the van, lying against a duffel bag full of tidy, plastic-wrapped packages shaped like bricks. He was in a bad way, maybe thirty minutes away from dying as a result of a rattlesnake bite, a not uncommon hazard in the region.

  The man was a driver for one of the smuggling operations, a disposable piece of the cartel infrastructure. His shipment contained two items: forty kilos of marijuana, and a pair of prepubescent girls destined for a brothel somewhere on the East Coast. Unfortunately for the latter, he’d decided to sample one of the girls before delivery. Too bad he’d been bitten after his abuse of the child.

  Senator Stephen J. McNally was an honest individual, hard as iron when it came to business and money, but still fundamentally a player who obeyed the rules of the game. Of course, when your net worth approached the billion-dollar mark, your rules tended to be a little different than those of other people.

  Which was why he felt absolutely zero remorse as he watched the trafficker die and made no effort to call the authorities or ease his suffering.

  As the man shivered and begged for water—poison from a rattlesnake bite causes a terrible thirst—McNally used the ranch radio to summon his foreman and the foreman’s wife, two kind-hearted people who’d been in his employ for years and whom he trusted completely.

  While the foreman’s wife tended to the immediate needs of the girls, McNally had knelt in front of the smuggler and slowly sipped from a bottle of water. Every few seconds, he held the container in front of the dying man’s face, ignoring his pleas for a taste. He tried to fathom the child’s terror as she begged the smuggler not to violate her.

  When there was about an inch of water left in the bottle, McNally stepped out of the van and made sure the smuggler was watching as he dumped the rest of the liquid in the dirt. The smuggler died a few minutes later.

  The foreman’s wife took the girls back to the ranch house while her husband and McNally buried the body of the trafficker in the dusty South Texas soil. They left the van and the bricks of marijuana sitting under the palm tree.

  Back at his ranch house, McNally had placed a series of phone calls on a secure line. The first had been to the chief of staff at the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a golfing buddy. Then, he’d called the head of the FBI, followed by an attorney in Houston who specialized in private adoptions.

  The Senator’s wealth, political power, and implication that national security was involved meant that by that evening he’d taken legal custody of the two girls, and all the papers were sealed.

  After that came a small team of psychologists and doctors from nearby Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, summoned to the ranch by a late Saturday afternoon email from a two-star general at the Pentagon.

  McNally’s final call had been to the local sheriff, telling him that one of the Senator’s hired hands had found a strange van and could the sheriff please come and investigate. The local authorities arrived at dusk, confiscated the van and its contents, and filed the appropriate paperwork with the federal agencies.

  And that was that. The end for one particular cartel shipment, a tiny loss that had little direct effect on the organization’s bottom line but a huge impact on the way a certain senator from Texas viewed the border.

  Now, a year and a half later, the girls were doing well, all thing
s considered. They lived with a family in Virginia, their adoptive father a vice president at one of McNally’s banks.

  The Senator snapped out of the memory of that day as the door leading into his office opened without a knock, and Patrick Hawkins, his chief of staff, entered.

  “You done jacking around with that pussy you call a legislative aide?” Hawkins scratched his crotch with one hand, an absent-minded gesture.

  Senator McNally detested the man, as did most people.

  Patrick Hawkins was mean and arrogant, loud and foul-mouthed, completely amoral. Physically, he was repulsive, blotchy skin, overweight, red-rimmed eyes that were too close together like a rat’s. He wore out-of-fashion clothes bought from discount stores and bathed infrequently.

  But Hawkins had one of the best political minds in DC, the ability to think three steps ahead of most people, and the ruthlessness to use that skill to crush those that got in his way.

  “You don’t have to go to the meeting.” Hawkins stood in front of the Senator’s desk. “Just give me the envelope.”

  Senator McNally shook his head. “I don’t do business without talking to the principals.”

  “This isn’t a hostile takeover of IBM,” Hawkins said. “It’s just another consulting firm.”

  The envelope contained a contract between McNally’s campaign and the Manzanares Political Consulting Group, a San Diego–based firm specializing in Latino affairs, according to their brochure.

  McNally felt tired suddenly, a rare moment of self-doubt. “Where’s their office?”

  “They’re new to DC,” Hawkins said. “Got temporary space. North of here, I think.”

  The Senator didn’t reply.

  Hawkins sighed. “You’re the one who wanted a face-to-face.”

  “We better get on the road.” McNally buttoned his suit coat and felt the hunger lessen just a bit.

  A deal was at hand.

  - CHAPTER FIVE -

  I watched the rain clouds drift away and reveal a moonless sky, dull stars shrouded by smog and the humid atmosphere.

  Dallas was a jewel of sorts, a concrete diamond or perhaps a glass emerald, fashioned from brick and sheetrock and a million or so acres of St. Augustine grass, lushly green from too much fertilizer.