Say the Word(63)
Well, I planned to do more than look at him, I thought, as I scribbled down the address of the downtown precinct that served as home base for the NYPD Vice Crimes unit. I was going to track him down and shadow him for the day. And if I got so much as an inkling that Officer Santos was somehow involved in the disappearance of underage immigrant girls…
I was going to take him down.
With a deep sigh, I swallowed a large gulp of wine and set the empty glass on my bedside table. My fingers hovered over the keys for a minute and I contemplated what I was about to put into my search engine. A string of simple words I’d never have guessed I’d one day find myself typing.
Immigrant girls disappearing.
In a fraction of a second, Google had retrieved over 10,000,000 results for my perusal.
I read, with a growing sense of horror, about young girls all over the world who were being lured away from their families and forced into pimp-driven prostitution rings or escort services. I was haunted as I saw, over and over, the same words flashing across my screen.
Sex trade.
Human trafficking.
Child slaves.
The thoughts were so revolting, my first instinct was to shy away, to deny that it could be possible. Things like this didn’t happen in this day and age. And certainly not in America.
Right?
I refined my Google search to sex trafficking in the United States and forced myself to look on. My eyes blurred with tears as I read firsthand accounts from girls who’d escaped. Adolescents, barely on the cusp of adulthood, who were promised money or fame or fine clothing, and who instead received nothing but a short life on a dirty mattress in the back room of a modern day brothel. Most of them never saw a dime of the spoils earned from the exploitation of their bodies.
I read stories of preteens who were snatched off the streets. Often, they were drugged, raped, and beaten into submission by a sadistic pimp. Their spirits broken, their childhoods stolen, their lives eventually lost.
And what of the victims who hadn’t escaped? For every one who broke free of this life and somehow gathered the courage to discuss it afterward, there were countless whose stories went unvoiced.
This seemed like some alternate reality — some other, darker version of the nation and the city I’d come to love. This was America. The best country in the world. Yet, for all our prosperity and progress, it seemed that the gross majority of us — myself included — walked around with bags over our heads, so blissfully ignorant and caught up in our own lives that we didn’t even blink when children disappeared from our streets without a trace.
I felt a chill race down my spine as I stumbled onto a website with statistics. Though data was scarce, there were a few persistent trends. For one, the girls were almost always poor immigrants, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. They were usually undocumented, so no one took notice when they vanished. Plus, even if someone were to notice, the girls had no real legal status in our country — no protections against predators. As a port city with a large unregistered population, New York was one of the biggest trafficking hotspots in the country.
Could Vera somehow be caught up in all of this?
I wasn’t sure. But it seemed far too coincidental that several young girls were now missing from the same neighborhood. And now that I’d dragged Miri into the fray, I was even more obligated to find out what was going on.
My fingers traced over the shiny silver cuff on my right wrist. I thought of Vera, her beautiful warm brown eyes dulled and lifeless as heroin thrummed though her system, while a man grunted and sweated and stole her innocence for a flat rate in a cheap motel room, or on a seedy street corner somewhere. Her inner light snubbed out into eternal darkness, on a semen-stained mattress in a room full of strangers.
My eyes pressed tightly closed at the images I’d conjured, unable to bear the thought of my sweet friend meeting such an end.
Jamie’d always said that the people who most deserve our help are the ones who’d never ask for it.
Vera hadn’t asked, but she needed someone to stand for her. To fight for her. And maybe there were more qualified people out there, who’d do more good than I could. Maybe I was the wrong girl for the job. But I’d never be able to meet my own eyes in the mirror again if I didn’t at least try to figure out what was going on.
It was time to pull the bag off my head. Time to stop shielding my eyes from the world around me. Time to see past the illusion, and expose the truth.
No matter how dark that truth may be.
***
“Why are you dressed like Catwoman?”
“We’re on a stakeout. This is total stakeout attire.” Fae gestured down at her all-black ensemble.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure the point is to blend in,” I noted dryly. “You look like a burglar.”
“But a sexy burglar,” Simon added consolingly, leaning over the center console to wink at Fae as she settled into the backseat of his car. “The Jimmy Choo biker boots are a nice touch. I approve.”
“Aren’t they cute?” Fae said, brightening immediately.
I rolled my eyes heavenward, praying for some kind of divine intervention as Simon peeled away from the curb and out into the flow of traffic. I was riding shotgun in the rust-bucket sedan he charmingly referred to as “Lola” and was seriously regretting the fact that I didn’t know anyone else in the city who had a car. Not only had Simon made me explain, in detail, why I needed to borrow it, I also was forced to accept the fact that once I explained, there was no possible way he’d let me do this on my own.