Power and Empire

“I only called half the bed,” Midas said. “You can fight Ding for the other half.”

“I’m good on the floor,” Chavez said, dragging the cushions off his chair.

Midas fell back on the mattress, bouncing once before curling up in the sheet, apparently unfazed that Yuki had slept in it the night before. He’d surely slept in much, much worse. “Don’t try anything,” he said without opening his eyes as Adara got in beside him.

“I’ll do my best to contain myself,” she said.

Chavez was already breathing deeply.

“I like your friends,” Yuki said, looking at Jack, who now sat beside her on the loveseat.

“Me too,” Ryan said. He wanted to ask her about the scratches on her face but decided against it. He was surrounded by people he trusted, and was alive after a particularly bloody day. A little mystery was a good thing.

46

John Clark was nothing if not patient. He’d seen Magdalena’s auction video in the room at Matarife’s ranch. It had sickened him enough to make it his mission to find the one who’d brought her to the States. The person who had used her and then quite literally sold her into slavery. According to Lupe, that person was Dorian Palmetto.

Clark had a nose for bad men like Palmetto, but even so, it took two days of watchful waiting to find him.

Lupe had given him the location of the cheap hotel where Palmetto liked to hang out and a vague physical description, but Clark still didn’t know exactly what he looked like. He considered the idea of calling in a favor with an old friend from the Agency — or even getting Gavin to pull the guy’s photo. In the end, though, he decided he didn’t want any kind of trail, even with trusted friends. As it turned out, in addition to running a side business trafficking in human cargo, Palmetto had a real job managing an auto parts store near the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in West Fort Worth. Navy C-40 Clippers and Air Force Reserve C-130s had replaced the iconic B-52 Stratofortresses of Clark’s day when it had been a Strategic Air Command Base. Air Force F-16s and an occasional Navy F/A-18 Hornet roared overhead, invigorating Clark and helping rather than hindering his thinking process.

Clark was a traditionalist when it came to investigation, preferring well-worn shoe leather and telephoto lenses over computer analysis. But even he didn’t have any trouble learning that there were three people named Dorian Palmetto on Facebook — and one of them had graduated from Arlington Heights High School, also in West Fort Worth. It was a dangerous endeavor to see stereotypes in the world of intelligence gathering, yet looking at the smarmy mug of Palmetto’s profile picture, Clark couldn’t help thinking that he would have shot this guy had he ever approached one of his daughters. Shooting him certainly wasn’t outside the realm of possibility now.

According to his profile, Dorian was married with two children, both boys. His wife was a slender waif of a thing, with freckles and braids that, not incidentally, made her look like she was in junior high school. It made Clark sick to his stomach to contemplate her horrible life. It was all based on a lie and she went to sleep every night with no idea she was married to a monster — or it was a living hell. Either way, that was about to change.

Clark knew there was a way to get GPS locations from photos on Facebook. He’d heard Gavin talk about it. But again, he decided to watch and wait. He had the address of the Auto Sphere where Palmetto worked and of the Sleeptight Inn tucked in off Loop 820, where, according to Lupe, he took new girls to “break them in.”

The chain-smoking woman with peroxide-orange hair behind the front desk hadn’t given Clark a second look when he checked into the Sleeptight Inn the day before. She was evidently used to older single men in dark glasses who paid cash and kept to themselves. For a two-hundred-dollar deposit — a little over four nights’ rent — she didn’t make him show any ID.

Clark had stayed in worse places, though that had been many years ago — and Vietcong soldiers had been trying to kill him at the time. All the rooms in this single-floor motel faced the parking lot, and Clark’s room, the last one on the short leg of the L-shaped building, gave him a decent view of all the doors but the two adjacent to his. The walls were thin enough that he could hear if anyone came or went in the next room — but no one ever did.

Palmetto’s Facebook photos showed that he drove a blue Dodge Durango with damage to the right-front fender. Clark woke up to peek out the window and find the Durango parked across the lot. But by the time he got his pants on and slipped the 1911 into his holster, it was gone. It didn’t matter. He’d always been patient, and years of hunting men had endowed him with even more of that particular virtue.

Now that Lupe’s information was confirmed, Clark had no doubt that Palmetto would return.