The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(60)

There was an all-night taco truck in a parking lot at Sunset and Western. Ballard ate there often and knew Digoberto Rojas, the man who operated it. She liked to practice her Spanish on him, more often than not confusing him with her mix of Spanish and English.

This night he was working alone and Ballard asked him in halting Spanish where his son was. The young man had worked with his father most nights until recently. The last two or three times Ballard had gone to the truck, Digoberto was working alone. This concerned her because it made him a more vulnerable target. They spoke through the truck’s counter window as Digoberto made her a pair of shrimp tacos.

“He lazy,” Digoberto said. “He want to hang out all day with his vatos. Then he say he too tired to come to work.”

“You want me to come talk to him,” Ballard said, dropping the Spanish. “I will.”

“No, is okay.”

“Digoberto, I don’t like you working out here at night by yourself. It’s dangerous working alone.”

“What about you? You alone.”

“It’s different.”

She lifted the flap on her jacket to show the gun holstered on her hip. Then she held up the rover.

“I call, my friends come running,” she said.

“The police, they protect me,” Digoberto said. “Like you.”

“We can’t be here all the time. I don’t want to get a call and find out you got robbed or hurt. If your son won’t help you, then find somebody who will. You really need to.”

“Okay, okay. Here you are.”

He handed her a paper plate through the counter window. Ballard’s tacos were on it, wrapped in foil. She handed a ten through the window and Digoberto held his hands up like he was under arrest.

“No, no, for you,” he said. “I like you. You bring other police here.”

“No, but you need to make a living. That’s not fair.”

She put the bill down on the counter and refused to take it back. She carried her plate over to a folding table where there were a variety of hot sauces and napkins. She grabbed napkins and a bottle of the mild sauce and went to the communal picnic table that was empty at the moment.

Ballard ate facing Sunset Boulevard and with her back to the taco truck. The tacos were delicious and she didn’t bother with the sauce on the second one. Before she was finished, Digoberto came out of the truck through the back door of the kitchen and brought her another taco.

“Mariscos,” he said. “You try.”

“You’re going to make me el gordo,” she said. “Pero gracias.”

She took a bite of the fish taco and found it to be just as good as the shrimp. But it was milder and she put on hot sauce. Her next bite was better but she never got a third. Her rover squawked and Washington sent her to a traffic stop on Cahuenga beneath the 101 freeway overpass. It was no more than five minutes away. Ballard asked Washington why a detective was needed and he simply said, “You’ll see.”

Since she had heard no call earlier from patrol or dispatch concerning that location, Ballard knew that whatever it was, they were keeping it off the radio. Plenty of media gypsies in the city listened to police frequencies and responded to anything that might produce a sellable video.

Ballard waved her thanks to Digoberto, who was back in his truck, tossed her plates into a trash can, and got in her car. She took Sunset to Cahuenga and headed north toward the 101. She saw a single patrol car with its roof lights flashing behind an old van that advertised twenty-four-hour rug cleaning on its side panels. Ballard didn’t have time to wonder about who would need rug cleaning in the middle of the night. One of the patrol officers who had stopped the van came toward her car, flashlight in hand. It was Rich Meyer, whom she had seen earlier at roll call.

Ballard killed the engine and exited the car.

“Rich, whaddaya got?”

“This guy in the van, he must’ve gotten off the freeway and pulled under here so that the women he had in the back could take care of business. Me and Shoo come passing through and there’s four women squatting on the sidewalk.”

“Squatting?”

“Urinating! It looks like human trafficking, but nobody’s got ID and nobody’s speaking English.”

Ballard started toward the van where Meyer’s partner, Shuman, was standing with a man and four women, all of them with hands bound behind their back with zip ties. The women wore short dresses and appeared disheveled. They all had dark hair and were clearly Latina. None looked older than twenty.

Ballard pulled her mini-light off her belt and first pointed the beam through the open rear doors of the van. There was a mattress and some ragged blankets strewn across it. A couple of plastic bags were filled with clothes. The van smelled of body odor and desperation.

She moved the light forward and saw a phone in a dashboard cradle. It had a GPS map glowing on it. Moving around the van to the driver’s door, she opened it, leaned in, and pulled the phone out of its holder. By tapping the screen she was able to determine the van’s intended destination: an address on Etiwanda Street in the Valley. She put the phone in her pocket and went over to where Meyer and Shuman were standing with the detainees.

“Who do we have working tonight that has Spanish?” Ballard asked.

“Uh, Perez is on—she’s in the U-boat,” Meyer said. “And Basinger is fluent.”