“Simon Mortay was the one who gave the order to shoot it down.”
“He was a Soviet officer?”
“Yep. A rising star until that fiasco. Afterward he was shuffled to different assignments, then disappeared for a few years.”
“And now he’s here, working for the Russian Mafia.”
“Bingo.”
“Hey,” I said, “I thought you were researching property titles. How’d you wind up with this stuff?”
“Oh, on a hunch I called a friend.”
“What kind of friend knows stuff like that?”
“You know.”
I nodded, “Uh-huh. A friend from your third world days.”
“I was working as a candle maker then.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Gave a bunch of those folks in that area a whole new meaning to ‘light me up’.”
Hondo spread his hands. “Mortay’s not the big honcho, but he’s important. It’s assumed Mortay’s using old military contacts to do some smuggling into the United States.”
“Smuggling what?”
“They’ll get back to me on that. Could be anything.”
“I hear Boris Yeltsin Life-size Love Dolls are big this year.”
Hondo drank the last of his second beer and said, “Yep, right along with the children’s working model Chernobyl Reactor, complete with real radioactive core. I hear it’s good for ages ten and up.”
“That’s a Gotta-Have if I ever heard one. What’s the box look like?”
“It’s color, shows two kids with no teeth and hair falling out playing with the glowing reactor. Thing’s a real eye-catcher.”
“Too bad we don’t have kids, huh?”
“Too bad.”
Hunter walked in at that moment and saw us both with cans in our hands. She went to the small refrigerator and got herself one while Hondo cut another lime. She doctored the opening with salt and lime juice and took a long swallow as she sat on the edge of Hondo’s desk. She said, “Oh, that is fine.” She looked at us, “That all you two did today, sit around and drink beer while I worked my buns off?”
I angled my head to look at her rear, “You didn’t work them all off. There’s a goodly portion left.”
“Goodly,” Hondo said.
Hunter looked under her arm at her rear, “Yeah, I’m getting flabby.”
I almost choked on my beer. Hunter’s rear is about as flabby as the butt on an Olympic gymnast. You could bounce quarters off it.
“You come up with anything?” Hondo asked.
Hunter said, “Some. I read through the ICE reports before the woman called, then quizzed her about some of the points. Seems there’s a regular pipeline smuggling young, pretty women from Mexico into California, especially the LA area. The woman said a man recruited her daughter and several relatives, and he went from village to village to get the best looking ones and bring them up. The trick is, they don’t have to pay much to be smuggled, but the smugglers gather all their wages at the jobs until they’ve worked off the trip.”
I said, “Isn’t that what we used to call indentured servitude?”
Hunter said, “Uh-huh. But knowing what I know about smugglers, if they control all the money these women earn, then the women will never finish paying off their trips.”