The Doll (43 page)

“Possibly.”

“If you don’t, he will kill you or have you killed.”

“It’s you I’m concerned about,” she said. “Do you have a reason to hunt me?”

“Yes.” He stared at the floor, at her feet. “I have a reason,” he said. Looked at her face. “But no motivation.”

“You may one day find the motivation,” she said, and then knelt so she could better see his face. “Even if you’re successful in hunting me, killing me, it won’t make you more of a man, won’t earn you the acceptance you’re looking for—not from him, not from yourself.”

“I never loved him, never worshipped him,” he said.

She stood, strode to the door, turned back, and in a whisper just loud enough to carry across the space, said, “I, too, once danced on marionette strings to earn the affection and approval of a man who would never be capable of giving it. You have a lifetime of options ahead of you. If that’s what you choose.”

Munroe stepped into the hall, put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door handle, and shut Lumani in behind her. He’d be free by the time she returned—if she returned—of this, she had no doubt.

And like the randomness of life’s chaos, the decision to let him live was a coin toss. Just as she currently fought to get out from under the weight of her decision to allow Kate Breeden to live, so she might also one day again find herself in Lumani’s crosshairs. All she could do was walk the narrow line between instinct and conscience and hope for the best.

Bradford exchanged his jacket for a service technician’s shirt: gray, grimy, and still bearing another man’s sweat—at least he assumed the stink belonged to Roger, the name stitched in red letters above his pecs. Another man’s shirt, another man’s pheromones—a simple illusion for a simple plan: He would walk in the front door, take the girl, and walk back out with her.

Bradford handed the Explorer keys to Andre Adams, swapping them for the keys to the panel van Adams had parked behind him. The utility vehicle, acquired on short order, white, dirty, ladder-topped, and by virtue of its everyday commonness nearly invisible, would serve its purpose just fine.

It was six in the early evening and they were still hours away from the handoff Munroe had arranged. The details called for a parking-lot rendezvous at eight in the morning Zagreb time, one in the morning local, but with the area lit up like the Fourth of July, with trucks coming and going around the clock, and new shifts in and out of the port facilities at all hours, time of day meant little, and there was no such thing as true night.

If Bradford had been in Dallas when the arrangements had been made, he would have needed every one of those precious hours to
pull some kind of strategy together. But he hadn’t been in Dallas; he’d been in Houston.

It hadn’t been difficult to figure this one out. The Doll Maker people knew Bradford was still alive, knew he was hungry and hunting, and they would want Alexis off the grid, somewhere beyond his Dallas reach. But since he was dealing with foot soldiers short on resources, he expected they’d fall back on familiar and convenient.

When Munroe had begged him for help, he’d gotten off one call and made another, to Adams, already in Houston, burning through cash, waiting to see what moves Kate Breeden might make. Bradford sent him to the address taken from the eighteen-wheeler’s freight manifests and then, going with his gut, pulled Rick Gonzalez up from Gatesville to temporarily man the Capstone office and left town. Was already halfway to Harris County by the time Adams called back with an assessment and pictures of the property.

While the traffickers were still waiting for instructions, he’d already been inside their crawl space. This time he’d gotten to the battlefield first; this time he knew what he was up against. This time there were no employees to worry about, only the criminals. He’d debated calling in the police, getting a SWAT team to handle the rescue, but couldn’t figure out how to do it without implicating himself in the shit storm he’d already started, or a way to ensure that a raid didn’t occur too soon or, God forbid, too late or not at all.

No. He’d get Alexis, but not by throwing away Jack’s life and possibly Sam’s as well, just so the scum could spend a day behind bars before posting bail and disappearing like their counterpart trash up north had done after the firefight. The playing field was different now; the stakes had changed and the only way to make sure this got done right was to do it himself.

T
HE BUILDING WAS
warehouse style with straight lines, constructed of concrete and corrugated metal, and ran the length of the entire block. Veers had the end suite, and the other companies in the building ranged from light manufacturing to storage. This address, unlike the others, was leased instead of owned, so it made sense now why the location had never shown up in any of the war room’s searches.

The back portion of the property was larger than the warehouse,
a fenced lot mostly filled with containers, a place where trucks loaded and offloaded cargo, all of this within an industrial zone just south of I-10 and slightly north of one of the many facilities that comprised the Port of Houston’s twenty-five-mile stretch along the Houston Ship Channel.

A transport business like Veers fit right in—disappeared entirely.

Bradford backed the van into one of the few parking spots that fronted the building and stepped into the warm spring air, heavy with moisture and fragranced with chemicals and petroleum, courtesy of the area’s refineries. The Explorer passed in front of him: Adams on his way to the end of the block, to the gated open area in back, an area the doll people couldn’t protect because it wasn’t their property. Bradford pulled a duffel bag out and then a tool chest, and with a clipboard tucked under his arm, laminate ID hooked onto his pocket under
ROGER
, picked up the heavy stuff and strode to the front door.

Didn’t bother to find out if it was locked; it was.

A tremor reached out from beyond the glass: Adams blowing charges on the back door. A thirty-second pause, enough time for defenses to go up, for rounds to be fired, and then came the concussion that Bradford could hear even from here: the first in a series of flash-bangs tossed in through the hole.

Beneath this oversize roof the effects wouldn’t be as devastating as if this had been a living room or bedroom, but if Adams had managed to get the grenades anywhere near the men inside, then they would feel as if the Jolly Green Giant had just stormed through the door and smacked both hands upside their ears, and a ten-car pileup was having a party inside their heads.

Disorienting. Nauseating. Painful.

Bradford drove toolbox to the door.

He was tired. He was pissed off. He was coming for blood.

Stepped through the hole in the glass.

Set down the toolbox and pulled a loaded tactical vest and an MP5 submachine gun from the duffel. Snapped into the vest and, adrenaline amping, slapped the 100-round Beta C-Mag drum into place. Felt the concussion of another grenade, incredibly loud even from here. Counted seconds.

Another went off.

With images from the main room playing out in his mind’s eye, he strode forward through a standard industrial-carpeted hallway, past standard offices with standard office equipment and furniture, toward the back, which was not standard by any means: Under the high ceiling three smaller prefabs waited.

Soundproofed and insulated, they were windowless sheds, padlocked and up on cinder blocks, larger versions of the truck’s crawlspace in which they’d found Logan.

Bradford rounded the hallway corner into the warehouse. The two-man contingent, in a form of disoriented retreat from the gaping hole and the light and the noise, fired suppressed semiautomatics toward the rear of the building, squandering ammunition on shots that went wide and scattered while they stumbled toward the sheds; headed toward the human shield as Bradford expected they would.

His throat burned in recognition of a face he’d seen before, had broken before, a face that hadn’t been there when he’d scouted the location; recognition accompanied by his promise to Walker to take out the trash after they’d gotten Logan. Bradford moved forward, finger to the trigger, firing a staccato of controlled bursts.

The warehouse man and his partner dropped. Rolled. Emptied magazines at him, still too far away for accuracy, and then backup magazines. Bradford continued forward until the drum was empty and the room went battle-deaf silent.

The smell of war filled his airways. Fireworks. Fear. Death.

Bodies on the floor, punched full of holes.

An enemy who might have had a fighting chance if they’d had the ability to think ahead, to strategize, to prepare for the possibility he might arrive already knowing their traps and their weapons.

He with the biggest guns wins.

Bradford moved to the nearest man. Kicked him.

Dead.

Stepped to the warehouse guy, drowning in his own blood. The weapon that had been in his hand was a foot away, and Bradford toed it completely beyond reach. The man could have it if he was willing to die for the effort.

Bradford gazed down at him, then with time bolting wild, turned and strode toward the middle storage shed, the one he’d watched from the crawl space. Checked the door for wires, for any sign of
explosive rigging, and, finding none, pulled a length of primer cord from the vest, wrapped, knotted, sliced, and in a maneuver getting old really fast, set it alight.

O
N A MATTRESS
,
bound with tape at the wrists and ankles, in torn and dirty clothes, lay Alexis Jameson—part-time medical transcriptionist, single mother of a two-year-old—crying out from pain, from fear, turning from the light as if to escape it.

She didn’t bear any signs of the brutalization Logan had endured—no broken bones that Bradford could see, though from the bruises and the marks she’d clearly been brutalized in other ways. Battle readiness kicked in again; the push of war survival that stamped down emotion, the relief of numbness so that he didn’t have to feel.

He took a step inside and paused. Had expected to find Alexis in this holding cell, hadn’t expected to find another on the opposite side, staring up at him in terror. Blond, brown-eyed, she was young—sixteen or seventeen—unbound and in much better physical condition. Arms around her knees, she rocked.

Bradford moved toward Alexis, whose cries had become screams, and her turn from the light into a frantic struggle to crawl away from him, as if she couldn’t see him or had no memory of who he was. “Hey,” he whispered, and she said, “No, no, no.”

He knelt. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispered. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you. I came to take you away from this place, to put you somewhere safe.”

Alexis responded to the tone, to the words, if not the face; stopped trying to crawl away. Didn’t move.

“You’ll be okay,” he whispered. Moved closer. “I’m going to touch you,” he said. “I’m going to put my hands on your arms and legs, so I can move you. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

Alexis flinched but didn’t fight, and he drew her close to him. Picked her up and carried her outside into the warehouse. The blond one followed, jabbering, yammering words he couldn’t understand, tugging at his sleeve until finally through sign language and tears and very broken English, she communicated that there were others in the sheds.

Bradford hesitated. Swore. This hadn’t been part of the plan.

The delay in dealing with other girls, in finding a way out for
them, too, could mean the difference between getting caught or not, arrested for murder or not. But he couldn’t leave them like bags of unwanted belongings beside a Goodwill container.

He yelled for Adams.

Through the opening in the back wall, the former Marine materialized. He, too, paused when he saw the blond girl. Bradford moved toward him. “Take her,” he said, and transferred Alexis, like an overgrown child, from one pair of arms to one stronger.

Hands free, Bradford pulled paper from the vest and scribbled Tabitha’s married name, her number. “This is her mother,” he said. “Call her. I don’t care what bullshit story you have to make up, just make sure she knows her daughter’s been traumatized. Find out what she wants to do.” He paused. “And then, whenever you know what that is, call me. No. Don’t wait that long. Call me as soon as you know you’re safe and then call her mother.”

Adams nodded, then was gone.

I
NCLUDING THE BLOND
one, three foreign girls had been contained in the prefabs, pretty and young in a long-legged, fresh-faced sort of way, each a modern version of the goose that laid the golden egg: feed it, house it, pimp it out, and the money would keep on coming.

They would soon show up on Craigslist and other online meet-up sites, touting themselves as
young
and
new in town
, looking for a good time, forced by their owners to pass themselves off as willing prostitutes and call girls, full of smiles and lies and fabricated pasts.

Not knowing what else to do, he motioned the girls toward the office area, motioned them to wait, and assuming they understood, he turned from them to the nearest fallen enemy, grabbed him by the collar, dead and deadweight, and dragged him into the middle shed.