Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(5)
She set down the backpack, unzipped it, and removed a heavy-duty plastic contractor bag. She stepped out of the flip-flops, then stripped off the yoga pants and shirt like a surgeon peeling back a pair of post-op latex gloves—outside over the inside, to minimize any contamination. The sports bra came off last. She tossed it onto the rest of the clothes, then paused for a moment, suddenly aware of a slight breeze, the cool air delicious all over her body.
Not now. Later.
She knelt and loaded everything into the contractor bag, the wig and glasses included, pressing out the excess air and tying it off when she was done. From the backpack she pulled underwear; riding leathers, gloves, boots, and a full-face helmet; and a belly bag concealing her duty weapon, a Glock 26. She donned all of it, then zipped the contractor bag into the backpack, slipped her arms through the straps, and continued out of the park along a residential street. In the distance, a dog barked once, then was silent. Other than that, still nothing.
At the intersection of a four-lane road, she hung back in the shadows until two night-owl cars had passed her position and it was quiet again. Then she lowered the helmet visor and crossed the road into the parking lot of the motel where she’d parked the bike. It wasn’t her registered ride—she loved that Ducati Streetfighter more than anything she’d ever owned, but it was too unusual, and therefore too memorable, a machine for what she had done tonight. No, for nights like this one, she used something she had built herself from parts, most of it a Kawasaki Ninja 650. The Ninja was one of the most popular bikes around, so not something anyone would much notice. And because she kept it separate from her residence, it couldn’t be connected to her regardless.
There it was, parked in back where she’d left it. She undid the disc lock, the steering lock, and the cable lock she’d run through the rear wheel and around a signpost. She stuffed the cable lock in the backpack and pulled out a florescent vest, which she slipped over the leather jacket. Nothing stealthy about her appearance now—just a good, honest citizen and responsible rider. The kind that made cops feel comfortable. The kind they tended to ignore.
She drifted out the other side of the motel parking lot, keeping it in first, the engine growling softly. In three minutes, she was heading south on Interstate 5, the wind whipping past her, the throttle open, the bike thrumming between her thighs. She resisted the urge to tuck in and gun it, not wanting to take any unnecessary chances. Even if highway patrol might be willing to offer a little professional courtesy to a fellow cop, a traffic stop would place her in the vicinity at around the time Billy had shuffled off his mortal coil. And while she knew she could outrun and outride anyone who tried to pull her over, a high-speed chase would entail its own set of risks.
Considerations like these were always involved when she hunted down a repeat-offending, misdemeanor-pleading rapist scumbag. This time, though, there was even more at stake. Yes, this time, the rapist scumbag’s death was going to be the occasion for a big funeral, a send-off white supremacist–style, attended by the entire Hammerhead gang. And what Livia learned from that funeral would give her what she needed to go after the real prize: a senior Hammerhead named Timothy “Weed” Tyler, who was about to finish a sixteen-year prison stretch at Victorville.
The last time Livia had seen Tyler, he had been one of her captors. And he was the only person alive who might be able to tell her what had happened to her sister, Nason. Nason, her little bird, who had been missing since they had both been trafficked from Thailand as children.
3—THEN
It was the end of the rice harvest when the men came to the village and took Livia and her sister Nason. Livia was thirteen. Nason was eleven. Their parents had sold them.
It had been morning, the time the children ordinarily would have been feeding the chickens, except that this year there were no more chickens in the village, or pigs for that matter, or even dogs. The last three harvests had been poor, and everyone was hungry. Livia caught worms, frogs, spiders, even scorpions, but it was hardly enough, and the emptiness in her belly gnawed at her constantly, sometimes merely an itch, more often an angry, throbbing ache.
Their father had told them to play outside, which he sometimes did when he was irritable, so they went out to the dirt in front of the small thatched hut and pretended to be different animals—fish swimming in the river, birds flying across the sky, tigers creeping stealthily through the jungle. It was one of their favorite games, and in fact Nason’s birdsong imitations were so uncanny that Livia’s pet name for her was “little bird.” They laughed delightedly whenever Nason got real birds to answer, and the game distracted them both from thoughts of the food they didn’t have.
They were Lahu, one of the hill tribes living in Thailand’s mountainous forests along the Burmese and Laotian border. But borders, like the outside world generally, were largely an abstraction for Livia. There was a single radio in her village, used mostly for music. The only television was a tiny vintage model that, when the weather was right, displayed snowy images picked up from a Burmese station somewhere to the north. She had heard of something called the Internet, but had little idea of what it could be.
Livia spoke some Thai from the provincial school she sometimes attended, and wanted to learn more. But her parents didn’t see why anyone would need a language other than Lahu. Besides, in better years, there were too many chores to allow for frivolities like school: rice to be planted and then harvested; well water to be fetched; game to be hunted. By the time she was six, Livia was already expert with the a-taw—the Lahu machete used for everything from clearing a trail to felling trees to butchering a chicken; the law-gaw, the sickle used for threshing rice; and the heh hga geu dtu ve, a wicker cage in which a small chick was placed in the forest to attract jungle fowl, which could then be shot with a ka—a crossbow of ancient but effective design.