Page 7 of Identify
Daria raises one brow at me. “Now come back and wind your way through all the tables.”
I take a minute, but I do it, and with barely a spillover on the tray.
Daria nods, impressed.
“You didn’t think I could do it,” I taunt.
“True. Now, you do that same walk in one-tenth the time when the bar is filled to capacity with a basket of burgers in your other hand, and then we’ll talk.”
Or, maybe not impressed.
“Daria!” I whine.
“Quinn!” she mocks.
“Fine. Let me do the other thing.”
“There is no other thing.”
“Yes, there is, come on.”
She stays silent.
“It’s either that or I borrow money again.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I say, doing a happy dance in little circles. “Why is it so much easier for you to let me kill a bad guy than it is to serve some drinks and burgers?”
She shrugs. “I can send backup to take care of it when you fail an assassination. But here, at the bar, so many more bad things can happen. Broken glass, spilled beer, bad cocktails, cold food, wrong orders, unhappy customers . . .” She trails a hand in the air showing the list goes on.
“I could somehow make all those things happen while I was out trying to kill someone too you know.” I smirk.
She grabs the empty glass in front of me and refills it with Diet Coke.
“Thanks.” I take a long sip. “I can’t believe that you think I can handle myself better as an assassin than as a bartender or waitress.”
“I didn’t say you would make agoodassassin.” She smiles.
I twirl my glass in the condensation dripping from it onto the bar top. “So, how long do you think you’ll keep up this vigilante stuff, anyway?”
“As long as it takes.”
“You can’t kill every bad guy, Dar.”
“Of course, I can. Or at least I can try. Each trafficker we take out of commission saves countless lives in current and future victims. The man who took my sister, he had seventy-five women working for him. And that was justthatday. Who knows how many he’d already gone through or how many more he’d plan to take? Seventy-five women, Quinn. It’s disgusting.
“Think about it,” she continues. “I’ve been hunting these people for over five years. I’ve had the girls working with me for two years. We still take out at least one a month. And now, with the help of the girls, we are growing our list of informants, I could kill one man a week who victimizes women in this way and not run out for years.
“Meanwhile, these scums just keep getting richer and kinkier. They are like those bugs in trash, always growing back, unless we kill them outright. And the Pacific Northwest is the worst in the nation for the greatest number of trafficking victims. Doesn’t it scare you that there are so many? That I never run out of targets?”
She’s on a rant now, I hadn’t meant to get her worked up about it. Human trafficking and modern-day slavery are hot buttons for Daria. Her sister was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. It was by chance that Daria ran into her on the street one day about a year after she’d disappeared. Her sister, drugged out of her mind, was being dragged down the street by a guy. For some reason, that she’ll swear is fate, instead of saying anything Daria followed them all day, only to find her sister was living about thirty minutes away, held captive in a residential brothel as a sex slave.
Daria came up with a plan on her own to rescue her sister. She went back a few days later to free the women and kill the men. She would have succeeded too, but her sister had OD’d the day before. To this day, Daria regrets not confronting her sister on the street, even though that would have gotten them both killed.
That was the beginning that launched Daria’s side business/hobby: killing bad guys. Specifically, anyone involved in human sex trafficking.
“So, what? You just keep killing bad guys indefinitely?”
