Chapter 21

Well, it was almost two weeks later when we started our raids. By that time it had become a three-ring circus, just missing the clowns and dancing bears. I had just finished the final brief and went to talk to Sarge.

“Got a question, Clint?”

“Yeah, actually I do. Who’s idea was it to bring all of this in like this? I thought it was supposed to be just a small local operation.”

“Well, when Dianne put in the memo after Dr. Tran signed off, it traveled up to Control Headquarters. Up in Washington they got the idea to use this as a test. Push this as a real sweep, and see if we can replicate it in other towns. They especially like that the goal is to sweep up all the teens and put them somewhere safe, and largely catch and release the little fish. But keeping all the big ones, which in the end should stop the little ones even after they are released. But as we get them we can still run charges, and let them know if they return to the same business within seven years we will hit them with those and new charges. The statute of limitations is great like that.”

“OK, I can see that. So this is more like an old textbook search and destroy mission in other words.”

“Oh, no destroy other than the big guys. You three got it right, cut the heads off in these sweeps, and the little ones will be headless and without direction. The street guy sells hundred dollar packets of heroin. But where is he gonna get the smack if the big guy that imports it is out of the picture? He ain’t got the money to bring in million dollar shipments, so hordes his remaining supply and prices go up. That starves out the junkies as they can no longer afford it.”

I nodded, as that did make sense. “DEA will be sweeping in the day after and collecting evidence for RICO charges on them, and we should be able to stomp it out really quickly. But by letting the little guys go, it sends a clear message. But yes, this is largely taken from the counter insurgency playbook how we are doing this now. With enough support and backup to keep you all covered we hope.”

Well, the sweep did not go quite as expected. Manchester went like clockwork, but two days later I was a block north of Bohica and Darkie in Dockside and heard the crash. I jumped out of a second floor window just in time to see Bohica flying through the windshield of a big SUV. I ran over as fast as I could, and he simply climbed back out, looked inside, and nodded. I looked inside and almost wished I hadn’t. The dude’s face looked like hamburger helper, and he was obviously a corpse. And when I followed Bo to the other side of the street, the paramedics were pulling a plastic sheet over a body lying next to a car. I saw him clench his fists and just walk away. I walked up and asked them who it was, and they told me it was Blackie.

I turned to find Bo, and he was already walking away from two bodies with MP5 machine guns. I jogged up, their faces looked like the one in the car. I then largely just followed Bo as we were near the meeting point for this raid, a large parking lot next to a strip club. And now I could see what I had sensed in him as long as I had known him.

Release Bohica, and he was an outright killer. He would smash any that tried to fight him, but just knock them to the ground if they surrendered. But at least a dozen bodies were left in his wake if they tried to resist him with a weapon. I shared his rage, but knew to keep it bottled inside me still.

He held nothing back. He seemed almost drunk when he finished breaking the neck of the last wise guy that had shot him two times in the chest with a 9mm pistol. He almost staggered to the strip club, and there were just over a dozen girls standing around outside. There were two vans there, and Bohica was pointing girls to each of them to be taken to the holding areas. And finally there was only one girl left, a cute little thing in shorts and a tank top. He walked right up to her once the others girls were gone, and she almost threw herself into his arms and held him tight.

I walked up behind him, and wondering who this was when I saw him softly kiss the top of her head. He then whispered “It’s all over, Flinx. You can come inside now, no more living in the shadows.”

Holy shit, this was Source Flinx? I looked at her closely, she was Asian, and rather small. But the two of them actually went into the club, and seeing Di next to me we both nodded and followed them.

Bo introduced me to Kim, who was also apparently Source Flinx. She actually went behind the bar and grabbed a bottle, pouring us all a drink. Di also filled me in on the total count, as I had lost my earpiece somewhere during the sweep.

Total count, we had saved 102 girls so far, and that was just in Manchester and Dockside. Holy hell, what was the rest of the town going to be like?

Then the bad news, we had six dead and twenty-two injured. The only Paladin death being Blackie, who had been hit by the car Bo had stomped his way into. And at least fifty-five bad guys dead, but I knew that would go up as Bo had killed a lot of them in the last push after Blackie bought the farm.

And even I was stunned when Kim told us that Roberto Ricci was dead. “He was the driver of the car that hit that girl. The one that you jumped through the window of? That was his car, nobody but him drove it. I could see from here that was him, and you made him pay.”

Bo just grabbed the bottle and a tall glass for soda and almost chugged it down. As he was doing that, DI confirmed that the driver was KIA, and the wallet said it was Ricci. “We are gonna have the coroner confirm it, but it does look like he’s gone.”

“So now we gotta look for Paolo. He will likely try to bring the survivors back together.”

But Source Flinx just shook her head. “No, he can’t do that. He’s only half-Italian. That means he can work for them, but never be one of them. He can lead a crew, but the organization will never follow him. They are kinda funny that way, they have to trace all of their blood to the old country or they will never be big shots. I don’t know who will be in charge now, but it ain’t him.”

A bit later we all ended up at Sister Clarissa’s, and it was a madhouse. There were nuns and volunteers everywhere, and it seemed like every few minutes there was another van pulling up and discharging more girls. And more than a few boys as well.

Even I did not expect that, they had been using boys as well. And a large piece of plywood had been propped against the front, with spray paint that said “Paladin Blackie Memorial Dormitory”. She would have been proud.

Well, that was the last sweep I did, as I soon found myself acting as the construction manager for what became the new dorm. Turns out that decades ago there had been a convent there, that was sold off under questionable conditions to the city. But they never occupied it, so it had reverted to unowned.

Which after a call to the mayor and governor they both signed off on giving it back to the Sisters. And remembering some military buildings I had worked out of, we threw up a good old 1940’s H-style military barracks. I called Doug, and he came by an hour later and handed me the plans that he had pulled from the commander at a Marine base. And the word had gone out we needed building materials and people who knew how to do construction.

So for the rest of the sweeps, I was happily wearing a Contractor’s hat and helping arrange for the building to go up fast. And thanks to some Paladins that we could not use on the raids like the pyros, we had the thing up in a week. They were occupying the bottom floors even as we were finishing the top floors.

If things were always so easy to ram through planning commissions and red tape, I might have decided to try being a contractor right then and there. But I had five of the real deal who were really running the thing, I was mostly supervising the Paladins and other mutants that were assisting. And even they were amazed that any exemptions needed were simply signed off without question.

And Alicia was a real doll. Whenever Sister Francis thought I had been working too hard, Alicia and at least two other girls would show up and drag me to a tent that had been set up for sleeping in. And they would push me onto a large mattress that had been put on the floor for me with instructions to keep me there for at least four hours. Or if I had gone too long without eating they would drag me to the mess tent and refuse to leave my side until after I had eaten.

And on the third day Lucy showed up and even she was amazed at the progress so far. “Clint, you guys have been all over the news almost nonstop since this started. At first for the high body count of that first sweeps, but now it is all about this building going up.”

“Well, I have been out of touch with that a bit since this all started. How’s it going? Were the rest as bad?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Nope, actually pretty easy. That first and second nights shocked the criminals it seems, now when the sweep starts a lot actually walk out of their buildings and kneel in the street waiting to get picked up. And with the death tolls of over 125 from those first sweeps, that in itself sent a message.”