The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (10 page)

“No. Yes. I mean, no, but Julie’s coming later; her plane lands in a couple of hours.”

Julie.

“What about the girls?”

“Television. They’ve been watching for hours.”

“Martha, I have a few things to do, but I will come to see you later this afternoon, as soon as I can, okay?”

“Thank you.” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t know who else to call.” She hung up, and my headache finally landed a vengeful punch of pain on the right temple.

Yvonne was waiting at her post in all her full-bodied, hoop-earringed, brunette glory, and I fell into the salon chair with a groan.

“That bad, eh?”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not me. It’s my friend. He’s messing up, big time. Know any good therapists?”

“Funny you should ask.” Yvonne winked at me in the mirror, then swung my chair toward an attractive-enough, thirtysomething woman sitting to my right, dressed in a black velour tracksuit. Her hair bristled with enough foil to signal a fleet of UFOs.
Matronly,
I thought, dismissing her.

“Ten, meet Stephanie. Stephanie, meet Ten. He needs a therapist. For his,” Yvonne air-quoted the word, “you know, ‘friend.’”

Stephanie, to her credit, didn’t miss a beat. “Tell your friend you know a brilliant and fascinating therapist with almost-awesome highlights.” Her eyes, like Tank’s, were an exceptional shade of green. Also like Tank, she used them to both look at me and
see
me.

Okay. Not so matronly.

A young Asian boy, maybe three years old, ran up to my chair. He was clutching a wooden truck. “VROOM! VROOM!” he yelled while driving it up and down my right arm. I looked around the salon for his mother, but came up empty.

“Hey, you. Where’d you come from?”

“He’s mine,” Stephanie offered, amused.

“Mine! Mine!” the boy echoed, giggling. He rolled his car across my chest and down the other arm.

“Sorry, usually he’ll have nothing to do with strangers. Connor, come here, sweetie. Don’t bother the nice man.”

Connor’s lower lip pushed out, but he lifted his car from its human track and moved to his mother. A shadow brushed across Stephanie’s face. “My son’s Cambodian,” she said. “I think you remind him of home.”

A friend once called me vaguely Asian. I guess Cambodian also qualifies.

Yvonne wheeled me around to face the mirror again.

“Enough chitchat. Same as usual?”

“Same as usual.”

In the past, you could tell by the length of my hair which parent had me in their custody. At my father’s monastery, I sported a barren cue ball, like all the other novice monks. Back in Paris with my American ex-patriot mother, I would endure a month or so of embarrassing fuzz until my hair had grown out to a tolerable inch or so. But Valerie was a recovering hippie and refused to let me cut it at all. Any additional hair beyond that inch meant black bristles going off in all directions, like a clothes brush assembled by committee. Unless, that is, I resorted to gelling it into submission—then I was a perfect candidate for The Human Magic Marker.

These days, I maintained the ideal inch-long buzz cut. The monthly commitment to hair preservation was a pain, but on the positive side, the process usually took only 15 minutes, and Yvonne spent the other 15 kneading the knots from my overworked skull.

“Let’s go.”

I followed Yvonne’s confident sway to the sinks, where she shampooed my head into a foamy cap, rinsed, conditioned, and then started in with an extended scalp-rub. I almost groaned out loud, her strong fingers felt so good.

“Be nice to Stephanie,” she said, when she had me nice and drugged. “She’s had a hard life. Was even working the streets for a while, if you can believe that. Single mom. Lives for that boy she adopted. And from everything I hear, a helluva shrink. Someday she’s going to make someone a very happy man.”

“Thanks for the nudge, Yvonne, but I’m not looking.”
Especially for another wounded bird.

“Fine. I’m just sayin’.” She toweled my head dry with maybe a bit more intensity than was called for and marched me back to the empty chair. She draped a fresh towel around my neck, plugged in her clippers, and got to work.

Stephanie’s eyes met mine in the mirror. The clear green of her gaze was intense, but relaxed.
Okay. Not so wounded.

“So, you’re a therapist?”

“I am. A clinical psychologist, to be precise. I specialize in abuse victims. PTSD stuff.”

“Hmm.”

“Adolescents, mostly.”

The skin on my forearms puckered, as if pricked, into little bumps of recognition. The Sufi tradition holds that whenever your soul has need of a new teacher, the teacher will come, as if drawn to the flame of that need. Just another way of saying there’s no such thing as coincidence.

“So you work with young girls?”

She checked on Connor’s whereabouts. He was vroom-vrooming his wooden car up and down the far wall.

“Mostly. Victims of early sexual trauma. Also violence. Early childhood abuse, for the most part.” Her eyes darkened. “Although lately I’ve been hired by the city to counsel more and more youngsters who are casualties of human trafficking.”

The pricking sensation turned into full-on chills.

“Where, here?”

Her smile was grim. “I’m afraid so.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Join the crowd. People like to think human trafficking only exists overseas—in places like Russia or, or …”

“Bosnia?”

“Bosnia. Exactly. But it’s a multibillion-dollar industry, and its reach is worldwide. California’s one of the top destination states in North America, and Los Angeles is now considered a major hub. These days, even the local gangs are getting involved, with some of them intersecting trans-nationally. I could go on and on.”

“Okay, Ten. You’re good to go,” Yvonne said.

The teacher had arrived. But I had run out of time.

Yvonne whisked the towel from my shoulders and dusted off my neck with a chubby pink brush. I rubbed the top of my head. The consistency was that of cropped sod. Perfect.

I fished two twenties and a business card out of my wallet. I handed the money to Yvonne and the card to Stephanie.

“Stephanie, may I call you later?” I glimpsed Yvonne’s satisfied smirk, and quickly added, “I’m dealing with a situation that involves human trafficking. I’d love to talk shop with you.”

“Of course.” Stephanie handed me a card of her own. “And I promise that next time I won’t look like a science experiment gone very, very wrong.”

I laughed. I liked her. She reminded me a little of Julie. I glanced at her card.

“Your office is in Santa Monica? I’m not too far from there. Topanga Canyon.”

“I hear Topanga’s beautiful. I’ve never actually been up there,” she said. “Maybe someday.”

I decided to ignore the hint, if that’s what it was. The new me. A year ago, I would have upped the flirtation, just in case I needed an ego-lift later in the day. As I headed out the back door, little Connor ran to block my exit.

“Mine!” he shouted, grabbing my knees. “Mine! Papa! Mine!”

I peeled him off of my legs and fled.

I had just enough time to order a yuppie-certified meal of chai latte and a grilled flatbread sandwich before G-Force strolled inside. He caught me reaching for my wallet.

“I got this,” G-Force said, and counted off 20 singles from a folded wad of tip money.

We sat at “our” table. I passed G-Force his check. He studied it closely. Finally, a high beam of delight illuminated his handsome face.

“Shee-it, Ten. No wonder you so pricey.” He tucked the check away with care. “Sure there ain’t nothing I can do?”

“Actually, I did think of something,” I said. “G-Force, I heard some information today that surprised me a little. Do you know anything about gangs getting into human trafficking, local gangs, I mean?”

G-Force went very still. He lowered his voice, leaning close.

“I been hearin’ some about that shit, yeah. More and more lately. It’s the comin’ thing, you feel me? Brothers call it
running meat.
I ain’t thought too much about it though; idea makes me sick.”

He stopped talking as a slim waiter in skinny black jeans, a pumpkin-colored T-shirt, and plaid Converse high-tops delivered my meal. It was a beautiful thing to behold: creamy, melted buffalo mozzarella, tinted green with pesto and layered between fresh tomato slices, dripped from both sides of thick grilled slices of sourdough. There was even a dish of extra pesto, as well as some sort of roasted tomato spread, and in case the slab of sandwich didn’t satisfy, a side salad of baby greens.

I looked across at G-Force. He was eyeing my oozing sandwich with something akin to horror. I ignored him.

“What exactly have you heard?” I took a huge bite. Using my thumb and forefinger, I severed the string of mozzarella stretching like a thin hammock between the bread and my mouth.

“It’s big business, man. You got your Asian gangs doin’ it, you got the Mexicans and the Salvadorans doin’ it, and now a bunch of new playas comin’ in from those places used to be Communist. Everybody want a piece.”

Interesting. Just what Stephanie was saying. I slathered on extra pesto and kept eating as my mind filed away the confirmation from a second source.

“Gangstas, they all about di-versa-fication these days,” G-Force mused.

The waiter came by with a pitcher of water and refilled our glasses. He checked my plate, but I still had more than half a sandwich to go, which I guarded with both hands. G-Force waited until he had moved out of earshot again.

“Cartels tryin’ to branch out, see. They scared shitless the politicians gonna make dope legal. Just a matter of time, ask me, before a man can stroll down to the corner store, buy his weed and blow. That happen, how the poor brother in the hood goin’ make a buck? Dope trade drying right up soon, everybody knows it. Everybody looking for other options.”

“And you’re suggesting
people
might be the new commodity.”
Running meat.
A chill snaked up my spine.

“Ain’t saying it right, but it’s happening.”

“What about your old crews? Are any of them in on this?”

G-Force grimaced.

“Okay. Well. Wish I could say ain’t got nothing to do with Bloods or Crips, but like I said, I been hearing things. Not so much about making dudes work in fields and motels and shit—but running hos on the side, yeah, they doing more and more o’ that. From what I hear, some of the local Bloods even called a truce with each other. They working together, sharing territory and shit.”

He took a sip of ice water. His eyes narrowed with thought.

“Like I said, whole idea give me the creeps, but now that I think on it, it’s the ab-so-lute perfect business for brothers to be in!”

“How do you figure that?”

“Think about it, Ten. If you dealing dope, you gotta always be growing more. Harvesting, hauling it around, paying your crews. Other brothers picking leaves and trimming weed.”

“So?”

“So if you’re dealing hos, you don’t need to do all that shit! Supply’s endless! You work it right, you can even sell the same one over and over a bunch of times.”

“Treating human beings like inventory.”

“Yeah.”

“There used to be another word for that, G.”

“Yeah?”

“Slavery.”

G-Force blinked at me.

“Shee-it. That the truth, brother,” he said. “That the goddamn gospel truth.”

C
HAPTER
11

Traffic in L.A. is a giant force field, like gravity or the tides—never exactly the same, always something to be reckoned with, and the subject of millions of conversations a day. Depending on my mood, and how freely the vehicles are moving, my driving experience in Los Angeles can range from a joyous sheet-metal ballet to a steady repetition of patient breathing.

Expose me to no flow at all, no forward motion of any kind, as had been the case on the 101 for the past ten minutes, and I devolve to a place of equally immovable rage. I sit and steep with resentment at the perceived unjustness, the direct evidence that some angry god is meting out punishment for a random unskilled action from a past life. I ask you, what about that is fair?

I leaned on my horn, as three decades of Buddhist commitment to impersonal nonattachment flew right out the window. Everything about this logjam was personal, and aimed at me.

I sat back and relaxed my jaw muscles, which were by now fully clamped. I could be stuck here for hours. I called Martha.

“Bohannon residence.”

My heart cartwheeled.

“Julie! Hi. It’s, it’s me. Ten,” I said.

Silence.

My entire body contracted. “So, umm, I told Martha I would come over, but the traffic is suddenly horrendous. It might be a couple of hours, if it’s a SIG alert, you know, if they’ve shut down a lane. Sig Sigmon’s the guy who invented a device in the fifties for letting radio stations know … shit, never mind, I’m babbling. I’m going to be late. Is that still okay?”

“I’ll put her on,” Julie said. Nothing else.

What were you expecting, a parade?

“Ten?”

Her voice still sounded weak, but I definitely detected more Martha in there. Julie must be working her magic.

“How are you doing, Martha? Do you still want me to come over?”

“No, sorry, I’m going to bed. Tomorrow, okay? If it’s not too much trouble?”

“Of course.” I was shocked at her timidity.

“Don’t worry, Julie won’t be here. She’s taking the girls to Griffith Park for the day.”

No, but, but …
I wanted to say, but didn’t. “I understand. I’ll stop by in the morning. And Martha?”

“Yes?”

Up ahead, the solid block of cars shifted from a frozen to a flowing state, for absolutely no discernible reason.

“Whatever you’re feeling right now? It will change, that I can promise.”

I hung up, my attention pulled like a dowsing rod to the fresh, bittersweet pressure newly lodged in my chest. Bill was gone, and Martha was hurting, but neither was the cause.

Julie was back, and my heart had suddenly remembered how to hope.

My car and I flew home. Tank was waiting at the kitchen door. He stalked, stiff-legged, to his empty bowl.