Lost(25)

I stood there with a grown man in my arms. After a moment, he said something in Dutch. I let his feet touch the ground gently. He spoke again. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dutch.”

The man nodded and said, “English, good. I wish to thank you. You saved me from falling.”

“Actually, I saved you from hitting the ground. You were falling no matter what.”

“I am in your debt.”

“And now we’re going to calmly walk back to where your friend is under arrest. And you’re not gonna do something stupid like try to get away again.”

The man was in his late twenties, I could see now. He looked me up and down, then said, “If I had realized how big you were, I probably would not have run.”

I turned him in the direction I wanted to walk and draped my arm across his narrow shoulders like we were friends. “Let’s enjoy this stroll back.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Everyone’s got a choice. But your other options in this situation would have you limping for at least a year.”

I returned to Marie with the man still at my side. I was impressed that she already had her suspect handcuffed and in the back of her car.

She turned and smiled as soon as she saw me. “I was starting to get worried.”

“You told me not to let anyone get away.” As I stepped from the shadows into the street, she noticed my eye, which I could feel was swelling shut.

Marie said, “Now we have matching eyes.”





CHAPTER 33





A FEW MINUTES later, Marie and I led our two prisoners back toward the apartment building. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. I stepped past the battered door, still hanging at an angle, and got my first good look at an apartment that held large groups of people. Human smuggling made real.

These dazed and scared people, some of them near starving, stared up at us with no hope in their eyes. One young woman looked too exhausted to cry. Her blond hair was a tangled mess and her ribs were showing under a translucent nightgown.

Inside, it got worse. The stench of urine and unwashed bodies assaulted my senses. Add the sharp smell of gunpowder from the flash-bangs and gunfire, and it was brutal. The odor seemed to have a life of its own. It made my eyes water.

No one should ever have to live like this. I was angry at myself for not acting fast enough. It was frustrating that something as terrible as human smuggling was so widespread. I was also angry at my bosses for not taking it seriously enough. Most of all, I was angry at the smugglers.

Three teenage girls in oversize T-shirts wept on a couch. A young female police officer tried to comfort them. I felt like I was invading their privacy just by glimpsing them in this condition.

Marie was clearly respected among the cops. SWAT team members stepped out of her way immediately. One young uniformed officer who had taken part in the raid escorted both of us upstairs.

Marie looked over her shoulder as we walked. “You can see that this was a relatively big operation. There were twenty-six people housed here and five men running the place. The two we caught are known drug runners from the Rotterdam area. But there were two fatalities in the raid.”

We stopped on the third floor. Several uniformed officers stood around the corpse of a pudgy, middle-aged man. He had four bullet holes in his chest and one in his right cheek. A World War II Walther P38 with the slide locked back sat on a table next to him.

The blood from his chest wounds had pooled to a sticky puddle on the hardwood floor. His brown eyes were still wide open. His Nirvana T-shirt looked to be original; it had faded lettering and a few tears in it.

It was hard for me to muster much sympathy for a modern-day slaver.

Marie said, “He fired six rounds. They fired sixteen.” Then she led me farther into the room. I felt a wave of sorrow looking down at the next body.

It was a young woman sprawled across a velvet couch. Someone had placed a blanket over her body, but her face was exposed. She was young, nineteen or so. Blood still trickled from the corner of her mouth.

Marie said, “For some reason, the man shot her in the chest before he opened fire on the arrest team. They think she might have run for the door to get away just as he started shooting. In any case, it’s a tragedy.”

None of the cops could even look at the dead girl. I knew what they were thinking—that they had failed her.

I felt the same way. I’d seen my share of bodies in Miami, but most of them were criminals involved in the drug trade or in gangs. Somehow, those deaths didn’t affect me nearly as much as seeing this one, a young woman whose only crime was wanting to get out of Europe.

In the United States, the media doesn’t care much about gang violence in places like Chicago and Miami until a bystander is killed. But the subsequent outrage rarely lasts long enough to galvanize the public into helping the police.

I thought of all the things this young woman might have done with her life. She might have had children eventually. A death like this can ripple through eternity.

After a minute, I stepped over to the edge of the room and sat on a folding chair. My legs felt shaky. Marie pulled another chair close to me and sat down too. “Now you see why I am so obsessed with the smuggling rings. With your help, we can really hurt them.”

I looked at her and said, “Hurt them? I want to crush them.”