Liz, who had seen him twice when he brought one of the girls into urgent care with a broken face, said, “That one’s not a man. He’s a machine. He reacts before he thinks.”
So we needed a different approach. And Liz came up with a plan that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up at first, then I realized it was the only one that made sense. She said, “Tony goes to one of Cat’s massage parlors every Thursday night. Not as a customer. As a supervisor.”
“Checks on the girls, collects cash, sometimes helps himself. He goes alone, no security, because in that place he thinks he owns the air.” Liz knew one of the women there, Natalie, who was willing to help.
Natalie hated Tony so much she shook when she heard his name. But it wasn’t fear. It was rage. A month earlier he’d broken two of her fingers because she brought him tea too slowly.
The plan was simple. Natalie lets Tony in as usual. Leads him to the back room.
Keeps him occupied. Three minutes later we come in through the rear entrance. Thursday.
9:00 p.m. The massage parlor was on the first floor of a residential building in the warehouse district. Former storefront converted into a business with tinted windows and a neon sign.
Inside: four rooms, a hallway, small kitchen, and a back exit into the alley. Liz knew the layout by heart because she’d picked up girls from there twice in an ambulance. Tony arrived by cab at 9:10.
Went inside. Natalie greeted him and led him to the back room. I stood in the dark alley behind the building counting seconds.
Bulldog was beside me. Quiet, focused. His massive body rocking almost imperceptibly from heel to toe, like before a jump.
Liz was across the street in a car with the engine running. Shade covered the approach from the roof of the building next door. Three minutes.
My phone vibrated once. Natalie’s signal that Tony was in the room and had relaxed. I nodded to Bulldog and we went in through the back.
Quiet. Hallway. Smell of cheap perfume and cigarette smoke.
Door to the back room closed. I could hear Tony’s voice. Saying something rough, entitled, the way men talk to people they think are property. I opened the door in one motion. Tony was sitting on a couch with a beer bottle in his hand.
Natalie stood by the wall, pale, pupils blown wide. She saw me and moved fast to the side. Tony reacted instantly.
Liz had been right. He reacted before he thought. The bottle came at my head.
I ducked, but beer splashed in my eyes and for a split second I couldn’t see. That split second was enough for him to launch himself at me. Two hundred twenty pounds of live weight hit me like a truck.
We went through the doorway into the hall. My back slammed into the wall. Something in my spine popped.
But pain gets put on hold automatically when adrenaline takes over. Tony got both hands on my throat and started squeezing. Strong.
Very strong. But a wrestler isn’t the same as a fighter. He squeezed when he should have struck.
I hit him with both palms over the ears at the same time. Old special operations trick. Rupture the eardrums and the world turns into noise and imbalance. Tony howled and let go.
I drove my knee into his solar plexus and he folded. That’s when Bulldog came in from behind. Sam grabbed Tony by the neck and drove him face-first to the floor.
Pinned him with a knee. Tony still bucked and growled and tried to get loose, but against 270 pounds of Bulldog he had no chance. Zip ties on the wrists, tape over the mouth, thirty seconds—done.
Tony lay on the floor snorting through his nose, eyes wild. Natalie stepped out of the room, looked down at him, and did something I didn’t expect. She crouched, looked him in the face, and said quietly, “That’s for my fingers, you piece of trash.”
Then she stood up and walked out the back without looking back. The questioning took twenty minutes. Tony was less talkative than Victor, but when I showed him Victor’s video confession and told him his partner had already given up everybody and everything, so silence no longer bought him anything, he started talking.
And he told us things that made even my stomach tighten, and I’d seen war and prison. The brothels. The girls.
One of them had disappeared four months earlier, and Tony knew where she was. More accurately, where what was left of her had been put. He gave an address, and I wrote it down, trying not to show what I was feeling, because if I had let myself feel it, Tony would not have lived to see trial….
