The Red Book Read online

  “No. No!”

  Officers, plainclothes detectives from the Tenth, rushing in. “Take her,” I tell one of the patrols. “Cuff her and put her in a chair.”

  I race downstairs. There’s an upstairs, but I’m thinking downstairs.

  “Chicago police!” I run down padded stairs into a basement. Turn with my weapon up.

  A dim, filthy space reeking of body odor and urine and vomit. A mop and pail of dirty water in the corner. Sleeping cots lining the other half of the basement.

  Dozens of pairs of eyes staring up at me. Twenty, maybe thirty young girls, some in their early teens at best. Dressed in rags. Sitting on a stained, broken concrete floor or lying on battered couches, the foam stuffing sticking through the cheap fabric. A few girls in a circle on the floor with a deck of cards. Some huddled around an old television watching a show about animals. Several clutching beaten old teddy bears or scuzzy blankets.

  One girl, who couldn’t yet be a teenager, sitting in the corner, staring at me through stringy, unwashed hair and sucking her thumb.

  They sleep down here. They live down here. When they’re not cleaned and prettied up to perform sex acts for strangers, they live down here in a dirty, disgusting cave like animals.

  “Chicago police!” I say. “Everyone get down.” I pantomime the motion, assuming many of them can’t understand me. “Down. Down on floor.”

  I don’t want any cops getting the wrong idea, amped up as they are, coming down the stairs.

  The girls get down, lie flat. They don’t understand yet, but they understand doing what a man tells them to do. They’ve been doing that their whole lives.

  I catch a few glimpses. Tattoos of black lilies on each girl’s ankle.

  “Hold your fire; hold your fire,” I say to the officers pouring down the stairs. “They’re not a threat. They’re just…”

  My throat chokes on that sentence.

  They’re just children.

  I open my phone, which is already linked to an online English-to-Romanian translator. I do my best to repeat the words. Some of them are trying to understand me, but I’m probably botching it.

  The translator has an audio component, so I turn up the volume and play it, let the robot voice pronounce the Romanian words better than I ever could.

  Nu ai probleme. Sunteți victime. Oamenii ăștia nu te vor mai răni. Suntem aici să te ajutăm să ajungi acasă.

  You are not in trouble. You are victims. These men will not hurt you anymore. We are here to help you get home.

  I play it once, twice, a third time.

  Several of them understand and start talking to the others, rapid bursts of words I couldn’t possibly understand. Before long, the news seems to spread across the room in a few languages. The girls are hugging each other, crying, some of them even smiling.

  “We…go home?” one of the girls says to me.

  “Yes,” I say, squatting down. “We will help you.”

  A detective starts collecting the girls, any semblance of a threat now gone. They line up, not for the first time in their lives, but probably for the first time willingly and happily.

  “Take them to SOS and call Protective Services,” I say. “These girls are gonna need detox, too.”

  I watch the girls file up the stairs, most of them underage by several years, dressed in ripped, ill-fitting clothes, dirty and sick and abused beyond comprehension.

  Sometimes there are no words.

  But I have a few more. Not for the cops or for the girls. They’re only for one person, one person who isn’t here.

  This is what you were trying to stop.

  We finally did. Thanks to you.

  Chapter 105

  THE MATRONLY woman with the fiery red hair and chubby face is apparently named Augustina, last name currently unknown.

  She’s the only one in the house. The upstairs was clear. Vanities covered with makeup, closets full of fancy dresses and kinky costumes, even a tanning bed in one of the rooms.

  “You’re under arrest,” I tell her, “for running a house of prostitution. Probably kidnapping, rape, and a lot of other things, too. We could be here all night just listing the charges.”

  Her chin up, defiant. “I want lawyer.” The thick accent.

  “I know a good one,” I say. “His name is Vasyl Discovetsky. Ring a bell?”

  That stops her a moment, but she won’t say so.

  “You know Disco, do you?”

  “I do not know that person.”

  “What about Trev? What about Nicolas? You know those boys?”

  “No,” she whips out. Cuffed to a chair, caught dead to rights, but still fighting.

  “Trev and Nicolas are dead,” I say.

  Her expression breaks, but I’m not getting anywhere using those names. Disco runs the show, Viviana told me.

  “Disco’s on the run,” I say. “Though last time I saw him, he was limping more than running.”

  She looks at me. That bought me something with her; that detail gives me some cred. Still, she won’t budge.

  “You don’t seem nervous, Augustina. But you know who is?” I lean up close. “General Boholyubov.”

  I pull back. She doesn’t look quite as hard, quite as collected.

  “Boho must be getting really nervous right now. Nervous enough to make sure nobody talks. That’s what you’re thinking right now, isn’t it? You keep your mouth shut, maybe you do some time, maybe you get deported back to wherever you’re from. But ask yourself, Augustina: Is he really gonna let you live? I’m thinking no way.”

  “We can help with that,” says Clara Foster. She shows her badge. “FBI, Augustina. I’m working on a joint federal and county task force to combat sex trafficking. Tonight was a big break for us”—she nods to me in thanks—“but we want to stop this thing at its source. We want General Boholyubov.

  “You tell us what you know, we put you in WITSEC. Witness protection. You get a new identity and a new life. If”—she wags a finger—“if you can help us take down the general. You help us break up this sex-trafficking ring, you get your life back. You sit there like your mouth doesn’t work, we throw you into the system, and the general takes care of you sooner or later.”

  “Still want that lawyer, Augustina?” I ask. “Or do you wanna tell us where Disco is and have a chance to stay out of prison and live a normal life?”

  “You have one minute to make a decision,” says Agent Foster. “Make a smart one.”

  Augustina looks back and forth between us, doing the math in her head, the pros and cons. “I do not know where he is,” she says. “He is afraid. Afraid of the general. He will…he will run.”

  “Run where?”

  “I do not know where he will run.”

  I give that a moment. It’s her instinct to clam up, but how far her loyalty to Disco goes is something I can’t know.

  “Disco’s in a world of shit right now,” I remind her. “Everything’s crashing around him. Your operation here is down the toilet. And yet he didn’t reach out to you, did he? Didn’t warn you. Didn’t call or text you. Didn’t say ‘Run, Augustina, get the hell out, the cops are coming.’ Nothing like that.”

  I hold up her cell phone, which I’ve already reviewed—no recent communications from Disco or any unidentified caller.

  “Why not?” I ask. “I’ll tell you why not. Because he doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t give one shit about you.”

  She breaks eye contact. Hard words to hear, but she can’t argue with the logic.

  I bend over, hands on my knees, so we are eye to eye.

  “So, Augustina,” I say, “why are you protecting him?”

  Chapter 106

  DISCO DRIVES toward the house on Mayfield Avenue, on the southwest side of town, slowing as he gets within a block, listening for sirens, looking up at the dark sky for any illuminations or flashing colors. Nothing. Nothing but dark sky.

  He passes Mayfield Avenue, where he’d normally turn, and instead turns
into the alley on the next block over. He kills the lights, rolls the car forward, and stops.

  Limps between two houses on the opposite side of Mayfield, peeks out to his left, to the house where he keeps his money. A small A-frame bungalow with a detached garage.

  The front porch light is off.

  The light over the garage is off.

  The house is completely dark.

  Disco limps back to his car, lights still off, backs out of the alley. He once again passes Mayfield, this time to the east, and turns down that alley.

  Again, no sign of police.

  He kills the lights, gets out of the car. Puts on his night-vision goggles again. Checks again that the suppressor is securely attached to his handgun.

  Limps toward the middle of the alley, toward the back of his stash house. Stops when he reaches it. Turns and looks.

  The small backyard of the house. The detached garage. Empty.

  He listens. No sounds, at least nothing out of the ordinary. A plane passes low overhead on its way to Midway airport. He uses the cover of that sound to inch forward along the side of the garage, everything lit up in fluorescent green.

  Sweat dripping inside his goggles. His foot screaming at him again, intense pain, but he can’t let it affect him now.

  He reaches the edge of the garage, seeing the concrete driveway where he’d normally park his car before getting out to open the locked garage door.

  But there’s no car there, obviously, because he came around the back way on foot.

  Nothing but a dark driveway.

  And a man crouched down among the bushes on the other side, gun in his right hand, flashlight in the left. A cop.

  A cop who didn’t consider that Disco might have night vision.

  Disco takes a breath, readies himself, and steps into the clearing. He fires twice, thwip-thwip with the suppressor, aiming for the upper right torso.

  Dennis Porter yelps in pain and falls backward. Little chance he could still hold the gun with two gunshot wounds to the right shoulder, but Disco takes no chances, moving as quickly as his bum foot will allow, shooting Porter in the left foot, then the right foot, thwip-thwip, to occupy him while Disco closes the distance.

  Porter cries out in pain again as Disco reaches him.

  The gun is clear of Porter’s hand.

  “Wait, wait…wait…we can figure this out.”

  Disco falls to his knees, grateful to relieve the stress on his foot, and puts the muzzle of the gun against Porter’s cheek.

  “Tying up loose ends?” he asks. “Was this the idea, Denny? I pull up in my car and you ambush me? This was your plan?”

  “No, no, that wasn’t—”

  Disco leans forward. “That garage light is never off, Denny. If you hadn’t unscrewed it, then you might have surprised me.”

  “Listen to me, lis—”

  Disco sticks the gun in Porter’s mouth to shut him up. “I don’t have time, Denny. I have to leave. I don’t want to kill you. It would make no sense. It does not help me. But I need to know. Does Harney know my name yet?”

  Porter shakes his head.

  “Did you tell him about the ambush, Denny? Did he know we were waiting for him?”

  He shakes his head again.

  “No? He brought someone along. A woman. Did you not assure me that Harney would be coming alone?”

  Porter tries to talk, which isn’t easy to do with the gun’s suppressor in his mouth. So Disco pulls back the weapon.

  “I don’t know. His sister, maybe. His partner left town.”

  Hard to know if he can believe him. Doesn’t really matter at this point.

  “I’m the only one…can help you outta this,” Porter says, two clean holes in his shoulder, just outside the bulletproof vest, his sweaty face balled up in pain and desperation. “I can misdirect everything. Keep them off your scent. Keep them off mine, too. Please, just—please let me do that.”

  Disco puts the gun back in Porter’s mouth.

  “Denny, I’m going to leave now. For good. But someday, my friend, when it’s safe, I’m going to come back here. I’m going to find your family. Your wife, your daughter, your son.”

  Porter shakes his head, tries to scream, gags as Disco shoves the gun further still into his mouth.

  “Your wife, she’ll beg me to spare the children. She will do anything I ask. And I will ask, Denny. I am going to violate her every way a man can violate a woman. And when I am done, when my cock is so sore I cannot possibly penetrate her again, she is going to watch while I set your children on fire.”

  Porter tries to lunge forward, but there’s nothing he can do but make begging sounds.

  “And I will tell your children, while I am raping their mother, that all this is because of their father, Captain Dennis Porter.”

  He leans forward, so close he’s almost nose to nose.

  “Their late father,” he says.

  He pulls the trigger.

  Chapter 107

  DISCO LEAVES Porter dead in the bushes. This house isn’t registered in Disco’s name. Disco has no connection to it.

  He limps over to the garage door, grateful now that Porter went to the trouble to unscrew the light above the garage. Better to do this in darkness, so nobody can see him but, with his night vision, he can see everyone.

  He punches the code on the garage’s keypad, unlocking the door and disabling the alarm. He lifts the door and enters the garage, grabs the ladder off a hook on the wall, and places it in the center of the floor.

  He climbs up to the ceiling, hard as it is with his bad foot, unlocks the bolt, and pulls down the door. Reaches up and feels for the gym bag, pulls it closer.

  Inside the bag, a fake passport, baseball cap and glasses, a travel set of toiletries. And thirty thousand in cash.

  He climbs down, doesn’t bother moving the ladder. The bag in one hand, his handgun in the other.

  His phone buzzes in his pocket. Not his normal one—his burner. A text message.

  He hikes the gym bag over his shoulder. Porter’s dead. Nicolas and Trev, too. There’s only one other person who has the number for this burner.

  He pulls out his phone, the screen lighting up in the darkness, normally a yellow color but through his night-vision goggles, the color is grassy green.

  You haven’t checked in, Augustina writes. Is everything ok?

  Disco takes a moment, staring at the message. What are the odds, he wonders, that the police have already made it as far as the house on Rockwell where they keep the girls, and thus to Augustina? What are the chances that the police, not Augustina, are sending this message?

  No reason not to be cautious, he decides. Be vague and, more important still, give a fake location. His law office, sure, on the other side of the city.

  Leave right now and meet me at law office, he writes. I will be there in about twenty min

  That’s all he types before he hears the squeal of tires, the roar of an engine.

  The phone falls from his hands as an SUV turns and bounces into the driveway, headlights on. Headlights changing to high-beam brights.

  Blinding him with his night-vision goggles. He fires anyway, shooting in the direction of the vehicle, thwip-thwip-thwip and thunk-thunk of hitting metal, the splintering of glass, as the vehicle screeches to a halt on the driveway.

  Chapter 108

  I CREEP between two houses and look across the street. The house is dark. No car in the driveway. But the garage door is open. I can’t see in. Is there someone in there? Maybe a ladder? Too hard to tell. Too dark.

  So I shield Augustina’s phone with my hand to cover the light while I type out the text message. You haven’t checked in. Is everything ok?

  I hit Send. Drop her phone in my pocket. Ready my Glock. Get into a sprinter’s position, ready to pounce.

  A small square of light appears in the garage, illuminating a man. Disco, limping forward in the garage, reading my text message from Augustina’s phone. Goggles covering his
eyes.

  “It’s him,” I say into my phone to Patti, who has crawled her SUV toward the house but still kept a half-block distance. “He’s got night vision, so use the brights.”

  It’s not quite the flashbang I used at the industrial park, but it should help once again to turn his advantage into a disadvantage.

  “Go!” I tell her.

  I run between the houses and across the street, Patti’s vehicle beating me by only a second.

  Her Jeep bounces onto the driveway, lighting up the garage, the high beams blinding Disco, but he fires indiscriminately, bullets hitting the Jeep, metal and glass, forcing me to drop low as the Jeep screeches to a halt.

  “You okay?” I shout as Patti’s door opens.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Disco’s already disappeared around the corner of the garage, into what I assume is the backyard. We had no time to stake this place out—we just got here five minutes ago, after Augustina told us this is where he’d come—so I have no idea what’s awaiting us back there.

  His goggles will adjust any second now, and he’ll have the advantage again in the darkness.

  I run double-fisted, my Maglite at chin level to shine a path forward, my Glock in the other hand.

  I turn the corner, and I can see instantly that he’s hobbled, that he can’t run well. He’s still well within my sight, moving down the concrete pathway toward the alley.

  “Chicago police, Disco!”

  Still with his back turned, he swings his arm back, an expert move, shooting behind him. I feel a bullet whiz past me as I shoot, by instinct, even though I want him alive, aiming low to the extent I’m aiming much at all.

  Patti grunts and falls behind me, a thump in the grass.

  I stop, shine the light on her. “Are you hit?”

  “I’m okay, the vest,” she says. I shine the light on the bullet, square in the chest, stopped by the vest. A nasty bruise will be the worst she gets.

  I shine the light forward again. Disco’s disappeared once more, but a smear of blood paints the side of the garage where he turned into the alley. I must have hit him.