Dead End by Mariah Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

pause.
    “Shields?”
    “Not recently.”
    “What the fuck does that mean?”
    “He asked about it when I saw him the first time, maybe a month, two months after that night. The night he saw you. I told him it had been taken care of. That everyone had been arrested and the authorities were ID’ing all the kids to send them home. He was concerned about that.”
    “He never followed up?”
    “Why would he?”
    “Oh, maybe if he saw me walking through the office, it might shake his memory.”
    “I told you. You’re not going to run into him. He’s gone for probably a month.”
    “You don’t seem to understand my situation here, Shields. I am at a real disadvantage. I don’t know what this guy looks like. I could be standing next to him in an elevator, or passing him in the hall, and he could be remembering me, and I won’t even know it. You have any idea of how vulnerable that makes me?”
    “He’s never seen you at HQ, he’d have said something to me, but—”
    “I’m tired of looking over my shoulder, you understand me? I’ve spent the last two years looking over my shoulder, and I’m goddamn tired of it. Every new assignment here in the States, I’m holding my breath, wondering who I’m going to be working with, who I’m going to run into. Well, I’ve been reassigned back here for a while. I do not want to have to be concerned about this again.” Luther took a deep breath, tried to calm himself. He knew that when he got really upset, his voice had a tendency to grow shrill. He hated when that happened. “When he gets back here, I want him taken out. No
if
s,
and
s, or
but
s, you hear me? No excuses. Take care of him. I’m done with this shit, Shields.”
    “Okay, I hear you.”
    Luther checked the date on his watch. August 9.
    “I want him gone within a week of his stepping foot off the plane, hear?”
    “I heard you.”
    “Hear this.” In spite of his best effort to maintain control, Luther could feel the anger, the need for control, rising in him rapidly. “By the fifteenth of September, one way or another, there
will
be one less Shields on the federal payroll, and frankly, at this point, I don’t care which of you it is.”
    He hung up before the agent could respond.
    Dumb son of a bitch. It’s that old, blood-is-thicker-than-water crap. Connor Shields was lucky he was out of reach right now. For two cents, Luther would take care of him himself. If he knew where he was, and what he looked like.
    Luther had connections everywhere. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where Connor was. He’d just have to be patient and wait for Connor to come to him.
    Patience was not one of Luther’s virtues.
    He sipped at his coffee, then put the cup down slowly and forced himself to concentrate on the breathing exercises they taught him in anger-management class. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn’t.
    Today it did. When the waitress returned to ask him if he’d like another cup, he smiled and declined like a gentleman.
    A gentleman who, at midnight tonight, would receive a fresh shipment from a very small, very poor Central American country where the chief export was its children, and its import was the money sent back by the workers who had fled illegally to the United States to work as laborers.
    Luther took out the wish list he’d compiled from his roster of usual clients and studied it carefully.
    Four of the older girls, between the ages of ten and twelve, were to go directly to a lovely Tudor-style house in a northern New Jersey suburb. At this most unlikely-looking brothel, they would replace four girls who were being sent to a house outside of Philadelphia, where they would be traded for four girls who would move on to D.C.
    “Keep ’em moving, keep ’em confused,” he told the owners of the houses. “And keep the product fresh. Make sure there’s always something new. That’s the way to build up that repeat business.”
    And when the girls reached their midteens, worn out in mind,