10-33 Assist PC

Chapter One

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 - 2:30 p.m.

Detective Constable Mike O'Shea casually drove the unmarked scout car around the corner. He felt good. Maybe it was the bright October sunlight reflecting off the crushed beer cans scattered on the overgrown lawns. Maybe it was the police-issued snubby holstered in the small of his back. Or maybe it was the anticipation of a successful end to a long project. Whatever the reason, it made him smile.

"Mike! Left!" Sal grabbed the dashboard with one hand while instinctively reaching for his gun with the other.

The clang of metal rang in their ears as a streak of green flashed in front of them.

Someone bounced off the hood of the car.

Mike slammed the brakes, one hand on the wheel and the other reaching for the snubby. Despite their ratty sweatshirts, stained jeans, and unshaved faces, neither cop looked quite as rough as the

scrappy man who popped up from the pavement next to Mike's door. They watched, hands on their still-holstered guns, as the scruffy man yanked a battered bike from under the front tire of the car. Without a word, he wobbled away, apparently none the worse for wear.

"Hey!" Mike hollered after the cyclist, who responded with a suggestive finger in the air.

"Bike's stolen and he's drunk. Or stoned. Let him go," Sal said, spitting sunflower seed shells on the floor of the car before settling back into his seat.

"Unbelievable," Mike mumbled, shaking his head.

"No shit," Sal agreed, stuffing another handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth.

"I'm talking about you, asshole. You're not spitting those shells in the car, are you?"

"Yeah."

"Use the fucking window."

Sal spat a shell at Mike's feet.

Mike continued towards the boarded-up shithole that was their target, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as he considered how close they were to a successful end to this project.

He knew this neighbourhood like the back of his hand. Old houses with good bones that had now fallen into disrepair lined the streets. The sidewalks that used to overflow with women with three and four children in tow during the daytime and old men eking out a living on their meagre pensions in the evenings had changed, too. Now the only people outside, day or night, were homeless addicts who had chosen to live rough rather than face the violence inside the shelters that had popped up in the neighbourhood over the past ten years.

During the past few weeks, Mike and Sal had been gathering bits of intel from those same eyes and ears on the street in exchange for a smoke or a couple of bucks. They'd spent days shoving a photo of the girl who had sparked the investigation under the nose of anyone who would look. Some of their leads were good; most, though, were bullshit.

The girl in the photo was Chelsea Hendricks: barely sixteen, missing since fourteen, and an apparent runaway. She'd been spotted in several security videos from a reasonably upscale hotel lobby in Niagara Falls over a five-day span in February of this year, always with different men, sometimes with one or two other girls.

Mike knew a couple of the guys who monitored the equipment and would drop a dime on the down-low whenever a new girl appeared. When Chelsea surfaced, he'd got the tip. It was during an ice storm, and after a precarious drive down to the Falls and several drinks with his boys, he had boxes of security videos and a pounding head. It took his team three sleepless days to positively identify Chelsea and sixteen other girls who had been reported missing from Toronto in the preceding two years. But by the time Mike got the search warrant written and signed by the judge, the girls were long gone.

A couple of months later, Chelsea Hendricks was back in Toronto on the stroll. Someone had called the police about condoms in their laneway. A neighbour had a decent security video and had turned the footage over to the divisional detectives, who, after looking at hours of footage of cars driving by, saw an emaciated girl getting fucked in the back seat of a car. She looked pretty young, so they called Mike.

It didn't take much work for him to identify the girl as Chelsea Hendricks. He and Sal set up on the stroll for two weeks but had no luck finding her.

In the middle of May, after a call from his counterpart in Buffalo regarding an unrelated project, some instinct told Mike to ask for the names, dates of birth, and photographs of any of their known prostitutes who even remotely matched Chelsea Hendricks's description. It turned out that a girl known to them as twenty-year-old Tracey Henderson was really his sixteen-year-old Chelsea Hendricks. She had been investigated several times on a strip known for its younger girls, and each time, she'd had no ID and gave a false name and date of birth that put her over the age of concern for underaged street hookers. On top of that, the bogus name didn't raise any flags regarding her missing status in Canada.

Now it was October, and Mike, Sal, Julia Vendramini, and her partner, Fred 'Hoagie' Hogan, had been working the case for almost a year. Despite their best efforts, they always seemed to be a day late and a dollar short. Until, that is, about three weeks ago when the mailman noticed some activity at a house that had been empty for months and called the police.

Mike and Sal were in the area and got to the address before the uniforms arrived. They recognized a couple of guys having a smoke out front from another project they had worked on and convinced the attending officers to let them handle the call. Dozens of computer checks, around-the-clock surveillance on the house, and some other bits of intel were enough to give them a signed search warrant for the address.

Today, within the hour, they'd be kicking in the door and shutting down a sizable prostitution ring that ran underaged girls between Toronto, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo.

Mike was hoping that Chelsea Hendricks would be here. His jaw tightened whenever he considered that this girl-like all the girls whom they dealt with in his unit-had been barely out of childhood when these fuckers had got hold of her-and destroyed her. Now, at sixteen, she was likely their most senior offering, leaving her precariously close to her expiration date.

He could not lose this girl. Not now, not when he was so close to rescuing her.

Today, more by luck than design, the team's timing was ideal. One of their more reliable sources had assured them that the handlers would be moving the girls on Monday, leaving the hold house relatively quiet this Saturday afternoon. Only the handlers, hustlers, and mid-level pimps looking to buy second-hand girls for their stable would be coming or going. No johns, no outside interests, just the vested players.

Clean. Easy. Round them up and shut them down.

Once he and Sal made sure everything was kosher out front, Mike would radio Julia and Hoagie, who would be parked just down the street. A quick door knock followed by a swift kick and they'd be in. If these assholes ran true to form, they would scatter like cockroaches when a light flicks on.

Mike's team would be ready for them, though. They would grab the pimps, get the girls to a safe house, and that would be the end of it.

Whole thing should only take a couple of minutes, Mike figured. Maybe a scuffle or two, but nothing they hadn't dealt with before. All these scrawny little fuckers were cowards full of some bullshit version of intimidation that might work on scared little girls, but not on Toronto cops. Besides, if things really got ugly, they'd put over a '10-33 Assist PC,' a powerful all-call that would bring every cop in the city racing to help.

After wrapping up, they would call Robby, the suit in the unit who made sure the bosses were happy, and they'd all grab a few beers and some extra-hot wings at the shitty bar they always went to. And then they would start all over again next shift. Because that's how it went in the Juvenile Prostitution Task Force where the never-ending demand for sex with young girls meant hopping from one project to the next, trying to save as many girls as possible before the dirty business ate them alive.

"What the fuck?" Sal suddenly said, spotting a lone woman standing in front of the dilapidated hold house they'd been doing surveillance on for the past week.

"You're kidding me," Mike groaned.

"She's gotta be an independent."

"Or eyes for the place? She looks pretty clean, and those jeans she's wearing aren't cheap."

"Pretty old fuckin' eyes," Sal commented with a laugh as he looked the woman up and down before spitting a mouthful of shells on the floor between his legs. "She's gotta be, what? Thirty?"

"You fucking disgust me with those shells, you know that? Hang on. Roll down your window. Let's have a little chat with her."

Sal gave a piercing whistle, then shouted, "Hey, sister!" Mike sighed, unsure which was more annoying: Sal whistling at women or his spitting sunflower seed shells inside the car.

"Piss off," the woman called back, pivoting on her red stilettos.

"That's not very nice," Sal chuckled. "We just want to talk."

"And I'm telling you to piss off, copper," she yelled back over her shoulder.

"We're not cops," Mike said, leaning over his partner as he pulled up beside her. "We just want to talk to you."

"You're either cops or born-agains because nobody just wants to talk...