Josh Stallings - Out There Bad

“You did right.”

“No.”

“I’m alive, you’re alive, Anya’s alive. You did fine. I want you to stay here while I get us a clean car and try and figure out what the hell we’ve stumbled into.”

“We’re going to find Nika.”

“Yeah, we’ll find her.”

From the path outside, I looked in through the kitchen window. Angel was curled up on the floor, gnawing on a bone at the feet of a small plump woman. Anya was chopping carrots into a bowl. She was wearing a large denim shirt that came down to her knees, it had never looked that good on me. Maybe it was the domestic setting, or the lack of makeup and spike heels, but all the sense of stripper was gone. She was a beautiful young woman, the kind you took home to mother, if your mother wasn’t a gin-swilling Jesus freak. I knew, looking at her, I could wake up every morning, roll over, see her and count myself a lucky man.

Gregor came into the kitchen, snatching a bite out of the salad Anya was making. She slapped his hand playfully and they both started laughing. I walked quickly away before I could convince myself I should stay.

I called Helen, my friend from the dog park. She had someone for me to meet. The pink light of sunset was sparkling off the Silver Lake reservoir as I rolled into the hills.

“Bottom line? You could stumble around Ensenada for months and never find their safe house.” Peter Brixon, an LA Times reporter, was sitting across from me in the breakfast nook in Helen’s home.

“And taking you with me will do what?” I asked.

“A, I speak Spanish, helpful when in Mexico. B, I’ve spent the last year investigating Russian sex trafficking, so we won’t be starting from zero.” He spoke in a rapid clipped way that reminded me of a meth freak two grams into a bad bender.

“Rolling with a punk civilian, looking for his shot at a Pulitzer, is an easy way to get dead.”

“Moses, don’t be such a prick,” Helen interjected, “Peter came here to help you.”

“No, he’s right,” Peter said. “You want my credentials? Fine. Somalia riots, Haiti coup, in Afghanistan I was embedded with Air Cav. Now do I strip down, compare bullet scars to prove I’m no fucking cherry?”

I looked from him to Helen. “I like him. If he walks like he talks, he may survive.”

I had only one stipulation and it was a deal breaker: he could come along, he could write his story, I didn’t even care if he turned it into a million dollar movie deal, but he wasn’t to use my name. Not in the paper, not with cops if it went wrong, not even to his favorite girl. Never. I didn’t need the heat that came flooding in with a little notoriety.

While Peter went to pack, I dropped the Crown Vic with Jason B, he was a part-time actor and full-time gear head. He had started a business buying used cop cars and selling them on eBay. But he discovered the real green was in building sleepers for people who needed to run fast and attract as little attention as possible. I had steered illicit business his way, and had hooked him up with a connection for cheap parts of questionable origin. I figured he owed me a solid.

“This lil’ sweetie had a blueprinted 454 that delivers an honest 400 horses to the rear tires. But she ain’t cheap.” He was showing me a mid-sixties International Harvester Scout, the light blue paint was sun bleached almost to white, where it wasn’t gray from bondo and primer. The chrome was pitted and the upholstery was more duct tape than fabric. It was perfect.

“How are the papers?” I asked him.

“They’ll survive a Smokey stop and snoop, but if they dig into the VINs, you’re fucked.” He was handsome in a tan, chiseled leading man way, as well as he could sling bullshit, I wondered why he hadn’t made it in Hollywood.

“What’ll a week cost me?”

“Does this look like Avis? Do I look like I try harder? This beauty is forty grand, cash. And that is my tit buddy price.”

“What do you charge your enemies?”

“Look under there.” He kneeled down, pointing a flashlight at the undercarriage. “That’s a custom suspension, she’ll take a hairpin at seventy without a hint of body roll. And those Brembos? Stop on a frickin’ dime and give you nine cents change.”

“I don’t doubt the quality, it’s the price got me choking,” I told him.

“Did I mention it has two separate cargo hides, Kevlar door panels? This bitch is a smuggler’s wet dream, she makes the Dukes of Hazzard’s General Lee look like a pussy wagon.”

“I’m sold. Now who am I going to have to fuck to get you to let me have it for a week?”

“If I let you take it for a week, I’m the one getting fucked and I don’t swing that way.”

“How’s a grand sound, and you keep the Crown Vic for collateral?” I offered.

He walked away, kicking up a small cloud of dirt. “Fuck it Moses, I know I owe you, but shit, you’re taking bread out of my baby’s mouth.”

“You don’t have any kids.”

“Yeah, but I could,” he said. “Alright, two grand, and if you dump it you owe me forty, plus I keep the Crown Vic for my trouble.”

I reached out my hand. “I could shout rape, but with our history, people might think it was my fault for stepping into your room.”

“Bitch and moan all you want, you know it’s a sweet deal.”

Hitting the gas, I knew he was right, the Scout leapt forward with enough force to pin me to the seat. Jason had done what he could to quiet the 454 down to a subtle roar, at idle it almost sounded like any other SUV, but when the hammer was dropped, there was no mistaking the deep throated rumble of the monster rat. I stowed my weapons in the cleverly disguised lockbox built into the rear quarter panel, all except my snub nose: it, I slipped into the pocket of my leather.

Peter Brixon was waiting in front of his condo, it was one of those classy new buildings in downtown. It had a sign that said if you lived here you’d be home now, plastered so that the slobs stuck in the 101’s constant traffic jam could see it and wish they could afford to live there. He had a canvas shoulder tote and a leather briefcase that had seen its better days somewhere in the 1990s.

“Nice car.” Peter looked over the Scout, unimpressed. “You want me to drive? I have a BMW 540.”

“Of course you do,” I said, holding the door for him to get in.

“I just meant, are you sure this thing will make it to Mexico?”

“Yup,” I said, climbing behind the wheel. It would have been easy enough to tell him about the Scout, but for some perverse reason, I liked the nervous look his face.

I had decided not to tell Gregor or Anya I was leaving. Chances were, they would have convinced me to take one or both of them. Anya didn’t have the docs needed to cross freely into Mexico, and Gregor was mistaken for an Arab enough to draw heat from the border patrol. That was what I told myself, but maybe it was looking in that window and seeing how normal and happy she looked that made me want to protect her from the jug fuck I was headed for.

It was late enough that the freeways out of town were moving with what we Angelinos had come to call fast: 65 mph with only slight congestion. As I watched the glittering high rises of downtown fade in my rearview, I got Peter to fill me in on the modern slave trade. Since the fall of Communism, Russia’s number one export had become women. He rattled off figures and stats like a machine gunner trying to stop the last wave. But the gist I got was that it was international big business, with no end in sight.

“And here, this is the saddest part, we are the end user of all this pain and we don’t even know it,” he rapped on. “If Johnny mid-level executive knew he was supporting rape, torture and destruction, do you think he would still pay for sex?”