The Shoal of Time Read online

  She nodded as if that was what she thought as well.

  “And they might come back.”

  “We’ll be quick. Just a brief look around.” She rejoined the others, but I didn’t feel invited to join the confab so I wandered off, walking the perimeter. I could call it alligator patrol. It was a large facility, wide at the front and deep, going to the tree line at the far edge of the property. The building itself was nondescript, a fairly new metal warehouse, painted a dull battleship gray. The color would help keep it hidden behind the trees, no glimmer of white showing through. A neatly squared patch of lawn had been trimmed around the building. At one side was a garage door, either to park something inside or to use as a loading dock. I scanned for tire tracks just in case someone was parked in there, but saw nothing. It was wet enough that there would be a mud trace for anything recent. In the middle of the front was a regular door, a small glass window opaque behind closed blinds. The few windows were high, near the top, good for light, but not for spying on what was inside.

  There was a large air-conditioning unit near the back. It was also new-looking and massive enough to cool the whole building. I had to admit that I wasn’t up on the latest in drug trafficking, but I didn’t think cocaine had to be climate-controlled. As for humans, I doubted the kind of pimps who raped and forced woman into prostitution worried about keeping them cool in the summer.

  All signs seemed to point to this being more than a neglected and abandoned storage site.

  I was just going around the back when I heard a gunshot. Just one, and no shouting or return fire. I ran to the front of the building to find that John had shot the lock on the door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, although it was clear they were getting into the building any way they could.

  Ashley replied, “We needed to get in. Not likely, but if they’re holding people in there, we can’t wait.”

  She was right. But as isolated as this was, there were still neighbors close enough to hear a gunshot. This place might be owned by strangers, but it seemed more likely that it was someone from around here, someone who knew about this property, and that would mean someone whose word would prevail against outsiders—even outsiders with badges.

  “Better be quick. Local cops will be here soon,” I said. Or the people who owned this place. They were probably smart enough to bribe the neighbors to be on the lookout. Not an out-and-out bribe, that would be too obvious, but favors like “going away, can you use these ribeyes,” that kind of thing.

  Each one of them had guns. I had managed to grab my flashlight from my car.

  Jack led the way in, Sandy at his side even now. John was next. Cara stayed by the SUV; she clearly wasn’t going inside. Ashley shrugged at me as if to say I could stay here or go with them, and went inside.

  I had to admit I was curious. So I followed her.

  The door led to a small office, a cheap desk and chairs. A table at one corner with a beer bottle still on it. Cheap beer at that. A couple of cigarettes had been put out in it. I touched the bottle. Cool. The cigarettes were old, not just put out as we drove up. At the far end a door led out of the office. I followed them through it.

  The rest of the building was an open space, or would have been if not for the maze of pallets and boxes piled everywhere.

  They had enough stuff they could have rivaled a big box store. Piles of unopened boxes promising new TVs, stereos, computers, all manner of electronics. All kinds of booze from cheap gin to expensive whiskey. Guns and ammo. Stolen. Trucks hijacked, loads diverted. Sometimes the drivers were in on it, sometimes not. Some of the stacks went almost all the way to the roof. I quickly skimmed past the piles of material goods. They had a bit of everything. I even noticed a box labeled “truffle oil.” I was looking for signs that anyone human had been here. To bend victims to their will, traffickers will hold them captive, away from any hope of rescue, often repeatedly raping those they wanted to force into prostitution. Maybe these were the nice guys—a very relative term—and they simply kept them locked up out here, but there still needed to be someplace where several people could be securely held.

  So far all I saw was booty of the material kind.

  “Found their stash,” John called from somewhere in the maze.

  Bile rose in my throat. He probably meant he found where the human cargo was kept.

  But I was wrong.

  “Coke, smack, weed,” he continued. “They got something for everyone here.”

  “Shit,” Jack said. “Big pile of crap.”

  “We gotta hurry.” John again.

  I couldn’t see them through the piles of boxes. Hurry was good news to my ears. If they wanted to raid this place proper, they needed a SWAT team. This much stuff, especially drugs, would be heavily guarded. The only reason it wasn’t swarming with goons was the crooks must have gotten complacent and thought the hidden location was enough protection.

  John said, “Grab as much as you can.”

  That didn’t make sense. They shouldn’t touch anything.

  Suddenly someone touched my sleeve.

  Ashley.

  “Time to leave?” I asked.

  “A minute. Can you take a look at something?”

  She led me to the back of the warehouse. “What do you make of this?” She showed me a ledger she seemed to have pulled from file cabinets that were back against the wall.

  The page she indicated was in code. One column seemed to be dates, written the European way with day first, then month, but with the numbers not separated. Once I worked that out, it seemed to be about goods received and sent out. But they were all numeric codes, no way to tell if the shipments referred to truffle oil or human flesh. I told her so.

  “That’s what I thought. Too bad we don’t have enough time to look over everything.”

  “But isn’t this evidence?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Yes, but we didn’t think we’d find anything. Now that we know this is an active site, we have to decide whether to let them continue and see if they can lead us to bigger fish or bust them now. We’re not going to do that today.”

  “Don’t you think they’ll notice the shot-out door?”

  “Probably. But they’ll likely think that’s everyday thieves, especially if we strategically remove a few things.”

  “Like the drugs.”

  “Yeah, at least we can dispose of them and keep them off the streets,” she said.

  “Sounds good. Someone has probably called them about the gunshot. My guess is that whoever is doing this is from around here and probably has friends who report to him.”

  “Let me check with the others. Give these another quick look over and I’ll be right back.”

  She disappeared into the maze. I glanced at my watch. Right back or not, I’d give her two minutes and then I was getting out of here. They weren’t paying me enough to tangle with the kind of thugs who ran this operation.

  I tried to take another look at the ledger as I listened for any sound that would tell me to get out now. I quickly flipped through the pages. A lot of pages. A lot of stuff. All of it a mishmash of numbers. I glanced back at the file cabinets. The top drawer of one was ajar. Guessing that was where Ashley took it from, I put the ledger back in an empty space. There were other notebooks as well. I fanned the pages in several more of them, but they all had the same listings, most in one handwriting, a few in a different one.

  Then I noticed one in back, sectioned off by a metal divider. The others were all gray, this one was red.

  The drawer only opened halfway, so I had to angle my arm to reach it.

  Still meaningless numbers. I could decipher the date—some were recent. Then I noticed other numbers.

  5-7-36-27-38. These weren’t sophisticated crooks, they hadn’t done a good job of hiding the dates. Five feet, seven inches? Bust thirty-six, waist twenty-seven, and hips thirty-eight.

  I stared at the figures in front of me. I flipped through the ledger. Several pages were fille
d, all in the same handwriting, a neat script. There were about twenty entries per page. Over fifty…women?

  The numbers could mean something else. I could be convoluting them to show me what I wanted—and was afraid—to find.

  The most recent date was two days ago.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Don’t look; just run. But I couldn’t help glancing at the person behind the voice.

  He was big enough to put fear into most linebackers and his tattoos were tattooed. His head was shaved, his nose pierced, and he had a mustache that almost reached his shoulders.

  His most riveting accessory was the gun pointing in my direction.

  Then I did what my animal brain was screaming at me to do. I threw the ledger at him and ran in the opposite direction as quickly as I could, skittering around a pile of boxes to be out of his sight—gun-aiming sight, that is.

  I hear a bellowed “What the fuck?” from his direction and the lumbering thump of footsteps.

  As I passed the box of truffle oil, I grabbed a bottle and heaved it over my shoulder, hoping to make a very expensive banana peel for my pursuer. The smash of glass told me at least the bottle had broken.

  The less pleasant sound was the report of a gun.

  I angled around another pile of boxes, trying to keep walls of the goods between me and any bullets. And also doing my best to head in the direction of the door. It was likely that Mr. Tattooed Tattoos wasn’t alone and there might well be a non-welcoming party at the door.

  But I had heard nothing—or been too engrossed in the human trafficking ledger to be paying enough attention—so it might be that he was the lone guard. Ashley and her crew must have heard or seen him. He couldn’t have slipped by all of us. Maybe they had laid low to see what he was up to.

  Assuming they hadn’t thought he could be firing a gun at me. Certainly cause to arrest him, but I didn’t like the idea that they just left me alone to deal with him. Me and my flashlight.

  “Shit!” I heard behind me. Then a loud thud. Truffle Oil one, Tattoos zero.

  I kept running, trying to keep my bearings in the maze of boxes.

  As I heard his footsteps start up—another sharp crack of a gun—I shoved off against a big pile of TV boxes with enough force to tip them over, blocking the aisle I was running down.

  Daylight.

  The door.

  Another gunshot.

  This time I heard the bullet whiz by my head.

  It was long past time for me to be out of here. The adrenaline rush from the bullet gave me extra speed as I sprinted to the door.

  Just inside it, I pulled down another pile of boxes, cheap bourbon this time, to block the way to the door and slow down Mr. Tattooed Tattoos.

  I heard the bottles crash behind me as I ran for daylight.

  Either I was very fast or he was a poor shot or both. That and a man as big as he is just isn’t going to be fleet of foot were my only advantages.

  At least until I could meet up with my federal cavalry.

  I slammed through the door, not even bothering to close it.

  No one else was in sight.

  Even more worrisome, no sight of anyone being around. The big SUV was gone. Had they left? Stranding me here with a big thug? Or were they hiding somewhere?

  Now would be a great time to signal.

  But I couldn’t wait. I took off running, heading parallel with the front of the building. When I got to the corner, I turned as if heading to the back. After a few paces, I again turned, this time tearing across the lawn to the woods. This way I was hidden from his immediate view when he came out the door. The building itself would keep me concealed until I was most of the way to the woods, and even then he’d have to look back and not down the road to see me.

  Once I was in the woods, I could outrun him. Not his bullets, of course, but weaving through the trees and the shadows of the leaves would make me a much harder target than running down the open driveway.

  My idealistic plan was to lose him in the woods, then work my way back to my car and speed the hell out of here. My more realistic plan was to hide in the woods, maybe a few hours and thousands of mosquito bites, until a plethora of police showed up and I could safely get out.

  I guessed that Ashley, Cara, John, Jack, and Sandy had done the prudent, by-the-book thing and removed themselves from the premises until they could secure backup. I would give them the benefit of the doubt.

  If I survived, that is.

  I was at the edge of the lawn, searching for a way into the dense thicket. There had to be an animal path here somewhere. I didn’t want to just thrash through the undergrowth. I needed to find an opening, otherwise it would be too slow and the shaking of the branches would give me away.

  Two feet away was a break in the brush. I angled myself though it, stepping carefully over fallen branches. This looked a bit like an alligator trail, but fugitives from gun-toting thugs couldn’t be picky. It was the off season for alligators and they were more likely to be hibernating in a mud hole than sunning themselves in my path.

  Balancing speed and stealth, I moved as quickly as I could into the underbrush.

  I heard another shot, but this time it was distant and no swoosh of a bullet near me.

  Another “What the fuck?” sounded like it came from the front of the building.

  I moved a few more feet in, then slid behind a fallen tree, glad I had decided on gray and black clothes and not the sparkly pink.

  Between the log and the leaves, I should be well enough hidden that he wouldn’t find me with a quick scan. My plan—hope—was that he wouldn’t know which way I went and would probably guess down the driveway to my car.

  That would give me a chance to move deeper into the woods and find a secure hiding place. I would stay there until it was safe to come out. If I was really lucky, that would be sometime today.

  Gym, I thought, as I listened to my heavy breathing. Time to go to the gym more often. It’s hard to conceal yourself after a headlong sprint if you’re breathing so heavily it can be heard in the next parish.

  I saw a flash of blue through the leaves. His jeans. He was walking the perimeter. If I could see him, he could see me, so I couldn’t stick my head up and gauge where he was going. If he was just walking around the building, I was probably okay. If he was looking closely for tracks he’d eventually find me. I hadn’t stepped in any mud—that I knew of—but my running footsteps might have crushed the grass, the break in the bushes might have a bent twig. Enough clues for anyone looking.

  Time for me to push my luck and keep moving.

  If it worked for the alligators, it might work for me. Instead of standing, I crawled down the indentation in the brush. The main stand of trees was still about twenty feet away; I was in tall grasses and scrub bushes, ferns and palmettos. This close to the water, the ground was soft and wet, soaking my knees and elbows.

  Inch by inch. I didn’t dare to look behind me. This wasn’t a speedy way to move, but it kept me down, not where he would probably be looking for me, and it made less motion in the brush.

  When I was close to the trees I risked standing up. Crawling is hard work and I was huffing and puffing again.

  “Hey,” I heard Mr. Tattooed Tattoos call. “This might be a footprint.”

  It didn’t sound like he was talking to me.

  Which meant he had to be talking to someone else, and that meant two people were looking for me now.

  His voice still seemed to be near the building. Maybe he had found my track, or maybe he had found something entirely different.

  I didn’t run; that might make too much noise. I kept moving, careful step after step, occasionally looking over my shoulder to see if they were coming after me.

  “Make it quick, we need to get out of here,” a voice answered him. A woman? A high-pitched male voice? I couldn’t see the person.

  I faded back into the trees, taking care to slide around them and keep a trunk between me and where
I’d come from.

  A few more feet, pause, listen, then move again. They didn’t seem to be following me.

  I finally came to a ragged barbed-wire fence, rusted with age. The property line.

  Weaving back into the trees, I followed it as best I could. It should lead me to the road. Not that I was planning to leave the safety of the trees, but I wanted to be close enough to the road to be able to hear if people came and left. The ground here was soft and muddy, not good for running and very good for leaving clear footprints. I wanted to get to more stable footing.

  I didn’t have to wait long. I heard the roar of a truck, the chug of a big diesel engine from the direction of the building.

  Faintly, in the distance, I also heard the sound of a siren.

  Those two combined noises probably lowered my blood pressure by about one thousand points. The man trying to shoot me was leaving and the cops were on their way.

  Which enabled me to move from the problems of life and death to the more mundane ones of hiding in the woods at what was clearly a den of thieves without much of a good excuse for being here without Ashley to back me up.

  The roaring truck revved its engine; I could hear the motor as it left the loading area—where it obviously had been parked, the door clanked down—then it snaked down the driveway to the road.

  Once at the road the engine revved again and sped off.

  The sirens were louder now.

  Explaining my thin story over and over again to the local cops did not sound like a good time. It was more than possible these crooks were in cahoots with the locals and they were assuming their cop buddy would give them my name. No longer needing to be quiet, I thrashed through the woods heading to where I hoped my car was.

  I was in a hurry now.

  Trees and plants are never gone this far south; even in January there is still something green and growing here. But this time of year, before spring bellowed into exuberant growth, was probably the best time of year to be bushwhacking through the woods.

  I swung around trees, taking running steps when I could.

  I finally burst from the trees to the tall grass lining the road.