the first pocket. Looked like receipts, some folded, some dog-eared. Second pocket, a handful of black-and-white photos. Third pocket, more of the same, only those photos were in color. Fourth and fifth pockets held one eight-by-eleven tablet with a BIC pen stuck in the spiral. Sixth pocket, two, make that three, USB flash drives.
With a deft sleight of hand, Walker palmed those last three items. What Brim didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
“Well? Any gold or silver coins? Pieces of eight? Doubloons, for Christ’s sake?”
“Afraid not, just a bunch of papers. Looks like receipts. Might make good reading over lunch.” Walker held the cardboard wallet over his head to validate what he’d said. “Man, I’m hungry. Feel like grilling that trophy shark yet?”
Brimley’s eyes lit. “Hell, yeah,” he said as he slapped both palms to his knees and lifted to his feet. “Come on, Dog. You’re in for a real treat now.”
“I’ll secure the plank. Be right there,” Walker said as he closed the wallet, then secured the swim deck, fastening the loose plank with the same rusted nails. They’d have to do until he located a couple water-proof bolts.
Once inside the relative solitude of the cockpit, he rifled through the wallet’s pocket of what looked like receipts. Jesus H. Christ. They weren’t receipts for fuel or food. He was looking at handwritten orders—for blondes, redheads, brunettes. Detailed, numbered, inventoried purchase requests. For females! Short-haired. Long-haired. Caucasian. Asian. French. British. Egyptian. Shit! Twenty-one handwritten orders that included girls as young as six months, toddlers, and teenagers. Children!
Walker pursed his lips, his heart pounding. He’d run across a thieving pack of sex-traders once before, oddly, just before he’d been illegally incarcerated. That visit to Guatemala had been on his own dime, because he’d volunteered to follow up on a kidnapping. His best buddy’s wife was from Guatemala, and she’d gone home with the kids to visit her folks. While there, Quinn’s darling three-year-old Emily Dooley had gone missing during what had become a disastrous family picnic.
When every avenue failed Quinn and his wife; when he was up for the naval commission of a lifetime, Walker had innocently strolled into his office one day. Just to shoot the bull. To catch up on each other’s lies. But he’d known something was wrong the moment he’d looked Quinn in the eye. The man had barely been holding himself together.
Haltingly, word by word, Quinn had told Walker what no one else had yet known, that his youngest child was missing. He hadn’t wanted America’s out-of-control press corps involved, so he and his wife had been working every back channel they knew to get Emily back. But they’d gotten nowhere, and Quinn was beyond desperate.
Finally, he’d broken down and revealed the sordid details of the alleged gunfight between two rival gangs on a Guatemalan beach. The staged battle had overtaken a simple family picnic on a bright, sunny day. During the gunfire and ensuing chaos, his wife, their three daughters, and her parents had run for their lives. His wife had taken the two oldest girls with her. She’d thought her parents had the baby, Emily.
But Emily wasn’t with her grandparents, and as the nightmare wore on, it turned out the gang war was a front. A lie. Once the local police had shown, they’d explained how those particular gangs actually worked for some bastard running a sex-trade operation out of Cuba. He’d paid them to stage fights, brawls, and outright warfare, in order to herd prospective victims away from their families.
Terror worked that day. Poor little Emily had run for cover, only to be snatched by the thugs working for some pedophile in Cuba. No one had heard her screaming because whoever’d grabbed her had chloroformed her, then stuffed her limp little body into the back seat of his jacked-up, POS, American-made truck.
Luckily, the man had thought himself above the law; he hadn’t moved his merchandise quickly enough. When Walker arrived a couple weeks later, he’d first tracked down the police officers who’d been at the scene the day Emily went missing. When the bored sergeant he’d spoken with merely shrugged as if a wealthy American losing his child were no big deal, Walker waited until shift change. Then he followed the man home. It took a few rounds of musical chairs, knuckles, and a righteous game of talk-or-I-will-kill-you, but at the end of that long, sweaty night, Officer Bruno had squealed like the pig and coward he was.
Walker left him bleeding and without a