The Second Girl(19)
“So that’s why you busted into the house, to get his tools back?” Hicks asks, like I’m an idiot.
“You outta your head? Of course not. I’m not crazy. For a drug house like that, I would’ve used one of my sources,” I say with a smile.
“Sheeit,” Hicks grunts.
“Seriously, though, I decide that the next day I’ll sit on them at Sixteenth and Park some more and start taking pictures of the deals, maybe get some good photos of them transporting the property from the trunk of their vehicle into their house. And then when I think I have enough, I was gonna take everything to McGuire and Luna, who I knew would jump on it. They’d maybe send in one of their confidential informants to trade bait property, like power tools, for narcotics. We used to do that kinda shit all the time, and it’s good for a quick hit. I figured once they hit the place, my client could ID his property and get it released back to him. It woulda been nothing more than a few hours of work and then maybe I’d finally get my kitchen remodeled. Would’ve saved hundreds in labor.”
I sip my Coke. I can tell by the look on Davidson’s face that he’s a believer. Damn, I even believe it.
“I go back the next day, early in the morning, but this time to sit on their house. I wait for them to leave, which is at about ten hundred hours, and I decide to sit there for a bit to see if they got anything working at the house, too, because that’d be easier work for a CI. Nothing is happening, so after about a couple hours I exit my car to scope out the area, get the layout of the house, see if I can see anything through a window. When I’m at the side of the house, I notice one of the boys has returned and is walking up to the patio. I’m figuring he’s there to re-up. I scoot myself tight against the side wall, and that’s when I hear his cell phone ring. You know I speak Spanish, right?”
“No, I didn’t, but go on,” Davidson says.
“Well, I speak good enough to understand. He answers the call and greets some dude he calls Angelo. Had to be the one you locked up, right?”
“More than likely, yes,” Davidson says.
“He’s talking to him on the patio, and I hear him ask this Angelo about a girl and if he should ‘let her out to eat.’ Obviously I couldn’t hear what this Angelo was saying, but the way this boy was talking, it sure as hell sounded like they had a girl being held against her will and locked up in a bathroom. I mean things like, ‘I won’t f*ck her,’ ‘She has to eat or she’s going to die on us.’ Man, I knew they had someone in there. My mind started working, and I remembered on the news about some of these young teenage girls that had gone missing in Fairfax County recently, and how the police there had made a stop on these young Latino boys after it was reported they were following a young girl that just got off the school bus, but she ran away and got home.”
“I remember hearing that,” Hicks says.
“This boy finishes the call and enters the house. After about half an hour he leaves. I watch him get in the car and head out. I wait about twenty minutes, try to look through some windows, and don’t see shit. Actually, I do see power tools on the floor in the kitchen, but that didn’t mean anything to me anymore. I walk to the front door, ring the bell a few times. Nothin’. I knock hard and still nothin’. That’s when I decide, based on everything I heard and what little experience and intuition I have left, that I’m going in. So I did.
“I find her in the upstairs bathroom. She was handcuffed to a chain that was secured to the floor with a heavy eyebolt. She was handcuffed in the front, and that made me think they knew she wouldn’t try to escape because she was brainwashed or some shit like that. All she was wearing was her underwear. She was terrified. I didn’t know what she was thinking about me being there, so I told her I was a cop and showed her my badge but covered the part that said ‘retired.’ All I wanted to do was make her feel comfortable. Would you believe, she didn’t want to go with me at first?”
Davidson shakes his head. “Why?”
“She was convinced they’d kill her family if she left, said that they knew where she lived.”
“She told us that, too.”
“So then you have someone sitting on her house?”
“We have it handled. But why did you just drop her off at Leslie Costello’s?”
“I’ve been retired for close to two years now. I don’t know what I was thinking ’cept to get her someplace safe and where I knew she’d get help. I knew Costello would do everything right, so that’s where I took her.”
“But still, man, you should know better than that. You take a victim like her to a hospital, right? You remember that much, don’t you?” Davidson says.
“I’m not a cop anymore, and I wasn’t thinking straight. Now, I sure as hell know the boys you locked up ain’t gonna put any charges on me and neither are you, so why are you beating me down like this?”
“I’m not trying to beat you down, Frank. I just have to ask. You should know that. Hell, you’re a hero. The chief might even give you an award.”
I seriously doubt the chief would consider that, but I say, “Don’t even think about writing me up for an award. I’m serious, Scott.”
“You’re something else, Frank.”
Ain’t that the truth, but I don’t say it.