Марк Грини - One Minute Out

The road in front of her was empty other than parked cars. Police sirens wailed lower on the hill, but she didn’t think there was any law enforcement presence up here just yet.

There was an LAPD helicopter nearby; she was very familiar with the sound, and farther away she heard what might have been a news chopper. She didn’t see either of the aircraft directly above her, so she straightened out her clothes, put her phone in her purse, and walked out into the winding two-lane road, just as a gray Toyota Camry pulled around a tight hillside turn and stopped twenty feet in front of her.

A woman sat behind the wheel; Riesling hadn’t bothered to look on the app to see the driver or the car, but she stepped to the back door, opened it, and climbed in.

The woman just turned back to her and stared.

Riesling said, “The Four Seasons, Beverly Hills. You got that, right?”

“What’s your name?” the woman asked, her voice accented, like many Uber drivers here in LA.

“Claudia. Let’s go.”

The woman behind the wheel reached for her purse, fumbled in it a moment.

“Don’t you hear the shooting going on down the street? I said, let’s go!” Riesling demanded.

Soon the red-haired woman began driving forward, towards the sound of gunfire, not away from it.

“Turn around! What the hell are you doing?” Riesling asked. “You know, forget it, I’ll walk. Pull over, now!”

But the Camry only picked up speed on the winding road.

Dr. Riesling shouted with all the authority she could muster. “Pull over!”

She reached for the door handle, but the driver slammed hard on the brakes, sending the psychologist forward. Claudia’s face smacked the headrest in front of her, hard.

Dazed, she held her hand to her bloody nose and started cursing her driver, but only until the back door opened next to her.

The driver reached in, grabbed Dr. Claudia Riesling by her sweater, and shoved her down onto her back. Riesling brought her hands up to protect her face, but a large kitchen knife was pressed against her throat.

The younger woman leaned over her through the open door. In an accent Claudia suddenly realized was Central European, perhaps Romanian, she said, “You’re not going anywhere, bitch.”

Talyssa Corbu pulled the woman she recognized from the LinkedIn page of Dr. Claudia Riesling out of the car, and soon both women walked down the hill along Jovenita Canyon Drive.

• • •

I clear the downstairs of the pool house and find a young girl hiding on the ground floor in the back. She’s terrified, crying, and dressed in a wetsuit, which seems like a very strange thing for a young sex trafficking victim to be wearing.

I say nothing to her at first, only help her up to her feet and walk her back down the hall towards the living room and the staircase there, because I know now Cage and the others are on the second floor.

I motion to the front door with my head, my gun still pointed at the staircase.

When she doesn’t move, I say, “Do you speak English?”

She nods, her voice is meek. Staring at the dagger hilt jutting from my blood-drenched left shoulder, she says, “Yes, sir.”

She’s clearly American, probably fifteen or sixteen, and this confuses me. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.” Then she says, “Are you going to kill my dad?”

Cage’s child? She’s so like the girls I saw along the pipeline that I can’t even process it. How could these people, Cage and the others in the Consortium, be so unspeakably evil when they themselves have children?

I don’t ponder this for long. Instead I answer the girl as truthfully as I can. “I’m just here to make things better.”

That’s true, isn’t it?

“Please,” she implores. “Don’t hurt him.”

I smile a little, but I guess it must look sinister to her, seeing who I am and what I’m smack-dab in the middle of. My smile fades as this occurs to me, and then I say, “I need you to run out that front door. There is no one out there who will hurt you, I promise.”

Into my earpiece I say, “I got one, green, coming out the front.”

A green is a noncombatant. Not a friendly, a blue, or an enemy, a red.

I wait for the reply from Rodney. “Understood, one green out the front door of the pool house. Do we detain?”

“Negative. Just make sure she gets clear.”

“Roger that.”

Rodney will probably think this little girl is another sex slave, like the hundreds he’s rescued in his life. This realization only serves to make me want to kill her daddy so much more.

But I can’t. Can I?

“Go ahead,” I say to her. “Out the door.”

Fresh tears fill her eyes, and I know she’ll never be the same. It’s a shame, but her tears aren’t going to stop me from doing what I came here to do to her father.

“Why?” she asks, now watching blood drip from my left fingertips, onto the floor.

She thinks I’m a monster. I see that in her eyes. She doesn’t know that her own father is the monster. Maybe she will soon, or maybe this will all be swept under the rug somehow. But I don’t have time to walk her through Kenneth Cage’s crimes, so I don’t answer.

I swing my gun towards her now, shifting it towards the front door, and soon she leaves, sobbing all the way.

When the door closes behind her, I turn my attention to the staircase.

Cage is up there, I can feel it; he’s with Roxana, and it all ends here.

With my Walther aimed up the stairs, I begin ascending. There is a mirror on the landing that gives me a narrow view to the second floor, and my eyes are on it, but I can’t see anyone above.

I only make it halfway to the landing when I hear a man up there speak. “Gentry?”

I stop, take a few steps backwards till I’m on the ground floor again.

I don’t recognize the voice. “Who’s that?”

“I’m Cage’s bodyguard.”

I sniff out a little laugh. “I hope you’ve updated your résumé.” I resume my climb, slowly and carefully, my weapon high in front of me.

“Look, man,” he says from above, and I stop again. “There’s three of us up here, all armed and well trained.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. I’m liking my odds, though.”

“And we’re all ready for you. You can turn around now, get out of here, and we won’t come looking.”

“If you were ready for me, you wouldn’t be giving me that option, would you?”

I hear the man sigh all the way down here. Then he says, “Look, bro. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to die for this shit. Let’s just call a truce. We stay up here, you leave. I can send the girl down to you. Unharmed.”

Roxana isn’t unharmed, of this I’m certain. Before I respond I hear a man shout out from another room upstairs. “What the fuck are you doing, Sean?”

I don’t recognize this voice, either, but I know exactly who it is. “Hi, Ken. Just met your daughter. She’s going to miss you.”

There is no response.

“I met your man Jaco, too. By the way, you might want to get that pool out there professionally cleaned.”

The bodyguard shouts down again. “If you won’t knock it off, Gentry, we will kill you.”

I back off the stairs, my right hand holding the Walther because of the knife still sticking out of my left shoulder. Through a grimace of pain I say, “I love your optimism, Sean.”

“It’s desperation, dude,” and that’s exactly what I hear in his voice now. Then he screams out, plaintive and terrified. “What are you? A hero? A fucking saint? We aren’t all like that, you know? Some of us out here are just trying to make a living.”

I kneel down, searching for a target in the mirror’s reflection. While doing this, I say, “I had a mentor, and he had a thing he used to tell me. ‘Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.’”