Lost(4)

It happened so fast I didn’t react until he was standing behind the table with the gun raised at the two detectives. Then he pulled the trigger. I still remember seeing the flashes on the fuzzy TV. Bang, bang, and both detectives were on the floor.

Holy shit.

I sprang out of my seat, burst through the door into the hallway, and yanked open the door to the interrogation room. That’s when I got one of the biggest surprises of my life: the two detectives were sitting on the table laughing, and the crack dealer was laughing right next to them.

The crack dealer was one of their regular informants and they’d put blanks in the gun. The idea was to have a laugh at the expense of a rookie and teach him two important lessons, both of which I have never forgotten: don’t wear a shoulder holster, because it’s tactically unsound, and don’t take a gun into an interrogation with a prisoner in the first place.

I also learned that a person could literally have the piss scared out of him from a prank like that.

Today, I’d learned never to underestimate the speed of a skinny guy. And Lorena had learned that it never paid to argue with an idiot.





CHAPTER 5





ABOUT AN HOUR after the airport worker had used her martial arts skills to disable our Dutch suspect, I found myself sitting at a long table in a Department of Homeland Security conference room with all six of the children Nobler had brought over. We looked like the weirdest corporate board meeting in history.

I said, “My name is Tom Moon. You can call me Tom.”

The kids and I started chatting. At eighteen, Joseph from Poland was the oldest. His accent was thick, but he spoke decent English. We talked sports. He said, “Real football players are the best athletes, both in skill and endurance.”

“I still prefer American football.”

Joseph gave me a sly grin and said, “I would too if I were as big as you.”

The two youngest kids didn’t speak much English, but I doubt they would have said a lot even if they’d understood what was going on. They were shy and quiet. Considering what had just happened to them, I got it.

Michele, a little blond girl, was only nine years old. She was not ready to talk about how she’d ended up in this situation. She spoke only French. Our office was trying to find her parents or guardians, who were somewhere outside of Paris.

The other little girl, Olivia, was eleven years old. She was from Madrid and thought she was on some kind of field trip. I still wasn’t clear on the details of how the traffickers had tricked her into coming, and I didn’t know if she had family back in Spain, but we had no problem finding a translator for her. More than 70 percent of the population of Miami–Dade County was fluent in Spanish. Even my Spanish was good enough to just chat.

I asked her, in Spanish, “What do you like to do when you’re not in school?”

“I have Rollerblades and roller skates. I’m faster than anyone in my apartment building.” Her eyes positively shone as she boasted of her skill.

“I bet you are.” I couldn’t hide my smile.

Monnie, the teenage girl from Kenya, turned to fifteen-year-old Jacques from Belgium and whispered in his ear. They both giggled. I smiled to let them know it was okay to speak, but they were happy in their private joke.

I looked over at the Finnish girl, fourteen-year-old Annika, and said, “Hei, kuinka voit.”

Her blue eyes opened wide and she hit me with a slew of Finnish.

I held up my hands. “Whoa, sorry. ‘Hello, how are you,’ is all I know in Finnish.”

She smiled and switched to English. “Where did you learn to say that?”

I said, “‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’” The quote covered the fact that I didn’t remember where I’d learned the Finnish phrase.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a famous quote.”

“Who said it?”

“Nelson Mandela.”

“Who’s he?”

“A smart man who changed the world.”

Joseph said, “Aren’t you a policeman? How do you know things like that?”

“A policeman can read and go to college,” I told him. I turned back to Annika and said, “What kind of music do you listen to?”

She fixed her blue eyes on me and said, “Mostly I like Top Forty pop. But sometimes I listen to classical music like Brahms or Mozart.” She looked at Joseph and said, “Joseph played me a Mozart sonata on the piano before we left Amsterdam. He’s really good.”

I said, “My mom plays piano.”

Annika asked, “Did she teach you to play?”

I let out a laugh. “She tried, but in South Florida, there are an awful lot of things for a boy to do that are more interesting than playing piano.”

“Is she a piano teacher?”

“She …” I decided to let that one go.

A short while later, a dark-skinned man wearing a jacket that said DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INVESTIGATIONS stepped into the room and announced, “Time to get your stuff together, kids. It’s a little bit of a drive to the place where you’ll be housed.”

I looked at the man and said, “Where is that?”