“Ah, sure.” I turned back to my laptop and began typing. Her comment about being arrested almost threw me off my game, but a few minutes later, I was searching all entrants into the United States via San Francisco the day of Kia’s arrival. “I’m in, but we only have about ten minutes before they realize we’re in their system. Now it’s up to you.”
I slid my computer over, and Kia stared at the screen as I typed commands to scroll through the entrants.
She was about five minutes in, and I was getting nervous; then she let out a little yelp and pointed at the screen. “Oh my God, Nevada, that’s her. That’s my sister, but that’s not her name.”
I took a picture of the screen with my phone and quickly exited the site, relieved to be done with the hack.
“So, what do we do now?” I could hear her excitement.
“We do a nationwide search on Mi-Cha Lee.” I began entering the information from her sister’s passport. Several hits came up in my search, but all of them were for much older women.
“Nothing,” I said. “dammit.”
“It’s okay. She’s probably dead,” Kia whispered sadly.
“I refuse to believe that,” I replied. Then a thought came to me. I slapped my forehead for not having thought of it sooner. “Hold up. Didn’t you just say you’d been arrested?”
She nodded.
“For prostitution?”
She nodded again, this time with her head down like she was embarrassed.
“Hey, stay with me here. I’m not judging you. I think I’m on to something,” I reassured her.
She looked up.
“Did your sister get arrested too?”
“Yes,” she said, a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “In Colorado and Florida during vice raids.”
“Let me check something else,” I said, going into a different database and doing another search. My mind was moving as fast as my fingers, which flew across the keyboard.
A few minutes later, I turned the computer around and showed her an unflattering mugshot. “Is that you?”
She gave me a look that said, you know it is.
I turned the computer back to myself and began typing.
“Look at this. This woman was arrested the same day as you in Broward County, Florida for prostitution. Her name isn’t Mi-Cha. It’s Myesha. But she’s in the same age range, and she’s Asian. She may have given them a fake name.”
“That’s what they told us to do. Let me see.” Kia slid closer to look at the mugshot of the beautiful Korean girl. She gasped and covered her mouth. “That’s my sister.”
I continued to type and found four more arrest records in Florida, all of them after Kia and her sister had split. I showed them to Kia.
“So, is she still in Florida?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. She was bonded out the next day. She hasn’t been arrested in Florida since.”
“They may have moved her out of state,” Kia said, deflated.
“Where did they take you after Florida?” I asked her.
“Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, then D.C. They never kept us in one place more than a week or so. We worked mainly in Asian massage parlors and motels. Sometimes they’d rent us out to American brothels for a week or two at a time,” Kia explained. “She could be anywhere.”
“But at least we know she’s not dead.”
“This is true.” Kia nodded.
“We’re going to find her, Kia.” I held her hand. “If I have to do a search on every state and county in America, we are going to find her. I’m not giving up.”
She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Thank you. I’m truly grateful that you did this for me, Nevada. I truly am. You’ve lifted a lot of the burden off my shoulders. No one has ever been this nice to me and not wanted anything.”
She slowly leaned toward me, and I felt my body doing the same. I closed my eyes and held my breath.
“Nevada Duncan!”
I jerked my head away from Kia and looked around. My mother was walking toward us, her face a deep shade of red, and everyone in the library was staring.
“Uh, hey, Mom.” My voice cracked slightly, and I released Kia’s hand.
“Well, at least you’re really at the library this time. What are you doing? Who is this?” She looked at Kia.
“Um, this is Kia. She’s my, uh, I’m tutoring her,” I said as I nudged Kia subtly under the table.
“Hi, Miss Duncan.” Kia smiled.
I groaned and shook my head. “Zuniga,” I whispered.
Kia quickly corrected herself. “Uh, I mean Miss Zuniga. So nice to meet you.” She reached out her hand, but my mother looked down at it and wrinkled her nose up like it was diseased or something.
“She goes to your school?” My mother asked me.
“Yeah.”
Her eyes went to Kia, and she looked down her glasses judgmentally. “Then why does she have a GED book in front of her?”
KD
20
One by one, the guests began trickling in, all men. Some looked excited to be there; others, not so much, despite the open bar, seafood buffet, and good old-fashioned Texas BBQ. Even the reluctant ones perked up, though, when thirty or so of the finest women money could buy strolled in wearing silky attire that left little to the imagination. From that point on, it was a fuck festival.
“Well, Daddy, you’ve got a happy crowd, and they all showed up,” Tyler said as we watched from the warehouse catwalk. Most of our guests had disappeared into private rooms we’d built just for this occasion.
“Hell, I knew they’d all show up, son. I had no worries at all about that. They know better than to turn down an invite from KD Shrugs. The real question is are they gonna buy into what we’re selling?” I gestured with my eyes to an apparatus hanging in a corner near the ceiling. “You got all the cameras working?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Including the ones in the tents and rooms?”
“Every single one of them.”
“Good. Some o’ these fellas won’t be hard to convince
