***Author’s note: At the advice of legal counsel, I preface this story with a “Trigger Warning.” The story alludes to violence against children in a demeaning criminal setting. It also includes graphic details of vigilante justice against international sex traffickers. Out of respect for real victims of violence and sexual abuse, the story’s told as candid as I could muster. Parental discretion is advised.***
I sometimes forgot who I was, who I lost and why I do it. Twenty-one years ago, my six-year-old daughter was taken at Conley Port in South Boston while I was doing a drop and snag for William Tomlin’s operation out of Des Moines. It was summer. Julia started kindergarten early and was out for break, readying her first year in Grammar School.
Julia spent summer nights on the road so I wouldn’t get to missing her, and her me. She cried at night when I was gone. I spent two weeks on the road and nine days home during the fall and winter, when she was in morning classes. Her mom dressed her in long shirts or dresses to cover a birthmark at the base of her back, shaped like Africa.
We were close, and since her mother’s name was Julie, I called her Ju, my little Ju-Ju. She was happy, we went everywhere together. I told myself the kid would see the nation before she hit school. We camped at rest stops in the back cab and she enjoyed the roadside diners. Ju asked waitresses for a penny to collect from every city. They never disappointed her.
Julie and I had settled in Polk City two years before Ju, less than a half-hour north of Des Moines. I drove commercial OTR when Ju was a baby and Julie started school, working toward a marketing degree. My plan was to get Julie through so I could cut down to part-time and be Ju’s primary. We made a decent living, had some savings and spent summer vacations in our backyard on Saylorville Lake in community cabins. Ju and I sat on the dock and practiced her vocabulary, sang the Alphabet Song over and over. Ju had her way of singing it.
A-B, D-C,
E-F-G,
Ella Minnow, Ella Minnow,
E-E-E!
Ju had a great childhood until it was gone, she was gone. Julie stuck around for two years until the grief was too much. Our divorce was quiet and she remarried soon after, moved to Highland Park outside Chicago and gave birth to twins who’re now in college. She never pursued work, a stay-at-home mother. I last spoke to her eleven years ago, when she asked me not to contact her again. It wasn’t her coldness, nor my unwilling nature to give up on Ju. She’d put Ju out of her mind. She chose to live forward, and good for her. It was unnecessary for both of us to suffer.
Polk City remained my home, the same home. Ju needed to come home to her family, me. My rationale was irrational. Pop a grenade in the window, I’m staying. Ju’s room unchanged, undusted. Her clothes—unwashed. Her bed—unmade. The scent on her pillow faded. I can still smell her in my mind’s nose. I can still hear her in my mind’s ear. I see her toothless smile in my mind’s eye… A-B, D-C – Ella Minnow, Ella Minnow.
My road gigs run through Mike Fisher Logistics now. William Tomlin moved his operation to the Northeast, in Portland. We were close in our early years. He’d dated Julie before me, we became friends after I married her. I was among a handful of people that knew William was his middle name. Jobe William Tomlin. His parents called him J.T., his friends called him Will and his employees called him Mr. Tomlin.
He may not have been able to handle me after Ju’s vanishing. I blamed him, I blamed everyone. It was my own fault. A drop and snag anywhere but Conley Port would’ve been safe, and that wasn’t true. Ju and I’d done it a dozen times on the Eastern seaports. She stayed in the truck, doors locked, keys in my pocket. I thought I had it secure, I thought she’d be safe. Ju must’ve had to potty. She always had to go. We pulled over so often I considered a five-gallon bucket for the back cab. I didn’t mind, though. I cared less for Tomlin’s schedule than my daughter’s needs. William didn’t fuss.
I continued to search for her, drove part-time to all the major ports. Just enough money to get by, more than enough time to prowl the prowlers. The lurkers, the stalkers of families with small children. I was certain Ju was still alive, taken by child sex traffickers and not a lone wolf. Someone, somewhere knew something. Someone, somewhere… had to pay.
The darkness never left me. I was deep in it and organized fifteen years ago. Ju and I were not alone. People like me were all over and some moved to Saylorville, where I set up The Fowler Investment Group as a front for my Midwestern operation. Those who moved worked part-time O.T.R. with Fisher and branched out to the gigs we were looking into.
I eventually got some contacts with the FBI and they were sympathetic to our cause, even allocating dark funds to us in exchange for help identifying potential victims of international trafficking ops they had their eyes on. We could get closer to it than them. We had unsullied backgrounds for dark undercover operations. They knew it.
What the Fibbys paid us fell under “cleaning and utility services” in their budget, off the record and no trace of confidential informant funds. My contact, I’ll call him Dave, told me we were allocated $3 million for furnishing Wit-Sec houses with furniture and appliances, etc. We hired and filed tax nexus in various states to stay off the security clearance protocols. All to cover Fibby Dave and other feds who believed in our cause. Our people stopped driving to focus on the real payloads.
This all came later.
It took us two years to gain any real traction, long before Silk Road sank. No matter how bad it was, Silk Road was more dangerous for the criminals. People like me made sure they never slept with two closed eyes. We were always there, always watching, always waiting. Patience and time were all we had, nothing left to live for. My crew, men and women, had no other purpose in life, with the rare occasion of parents finding their lost child. Rare, as in twice. The parents stayed connected and helped at times, but I never pushed nor expected them to risk their second chance.
It was Year Three when our op first made the progress we’d labored for. Although we didn’t talk about it, we knew our children were dead. We told ourselves we did it to save other children. That wasn’t true either. Saving kids was an afterthought, a bonus. We were in it for the payoff, the revenge, the bill. We were owed a debt from an unknown monster and if it wouldn’t pay, every monster we found would. One way or another, we collect. We tear the skin off monsters and bury their fibrous living muscles on a bed of loose soil and lye. I could think of no better way to end them. We waited to fill graves until their life was hair-thin, knowing they’d never be found, maybe, with any luck, have hell to look forward to.
People don’t think of these things until they’ve had the air sucked out of their lungs, no refills. Maybe I was a monster too. I caused them more pain than humans can physically endure before coding. I kept them alive. I attached an I.V. to keep their heart strong, their lungs clear, then removed their skin, slowly, cautiously. Only one man died before I had his suit off. Lucky him. Just another dead monster who checked out before tipping the waitress.
Cookie, I called him, had a medical background and extensive training with cadavers from Emory. He practiced cosmetic surgery in Nashville before he joined us. Anyone can guess why. He trained me to remove the entire suit fully intact. We displayed the suit for the monster before we buried it. Tokie, I called her, started pouring soy sauce on skinless legs, arms and genitals. The remarkable burn caused many to faint. We also had female monsters, more common than most think. They ran their litters and the cameras that ultimately led us to them.
It’d be easy to think we busted the front door down and caught monsters in the act. We were never so lucky. We found video footage that got us who we wanted. Once I or another mole were close enough, we recovered tapes, found footage, of monsters doing monster things to young children. I’ll spare the public details I wish I could spare myself. If I was to hunt monsters, I had to watch the entire performance.
Monsters made the videos on analogs, VHS, to avoid digital tracing. Most tapes were a sales pitch to spend an hour with the kid. It was a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry across the globe. Skinning monsters was an express lane to the top. I wanted the shiny gold brass to pay the bill.
Very few kids made it through the first tape, but I never found one of Ju. Their tiny bodies gave out under the grueling pressure of internal trauma caused by large hairy men in cowboy hats and gimp suits. The tapes would be repurposed for snuff collectors at $20K a pop. Gimp suits only cover portions of the body, parts they thought could identify them. In our Op, we learned to make alternative identifications that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. We learned how to I.D. and find monsters, even the ones behind cameras.
We burnt locations by paying special attention to the little things. Mirrors usually got us the filmmakers. Slap, rip, slash, skin, peel. If we couldn’t I.D. the monster, we’d establish a time or a location. A mute newscast in the background with a time or date in the lower-third ticker. We had technology to reverse a mirror image and recreate the details we needed to know. We learned how to identify regional and international accents. We isolated channels of audio to hear low-volume radio broadcasts and found its location, usually by local advertisers, other times hearing the station’s call letters, required by the FCC to identify at the top of every hour. Some basements used cement blocks, local manufacturers that marked their product. Forget about train whistles. They’re everywhere.
For nearly a decade I’d been after a whale. The filmmaker that spoke English with a Russian accent. I named her Mishka. She initially had us fooled. If I’d brought her to public justice, the change in accent alone would establish Pre-Meditation with Intent for anything she was charged with. Only one time did her painted face appear on a discarded mirror. That’s not what I used to identify her. It was her hand, a small tattoo on the web of her right hand, between the thumb and index finger. A Christian cross with a hook at the bottom, or an upside-down Devil cross from her point of view.
Anyone could have a cross, but that hook at the bottom narrowed the search. Other filmmakers had the hook cross, but her hook had a meth-needle scar in the belly and a misshapen mole below the arch. She was daring us to find her.
I’d known about her for eleven years; it was only the past eight she became my obsession. A recovered tape put me on her permanently, what she did, the direction she gave her gimp on a boy no more than four years old. It was the first VHS I found where she’d directed the sodomization of a child under five. It seemed personal to her. The kid didn’t survive. She walked the camera closer to him and put a cosmetic mirror under his nose while he lay in a bed, marinating in a puddle of his own urine and blood. No fog on the mirror. No life. That’s what $20K monsters wanted to see. That was their lust. That was eight years ago.
I’d zoomed in on the cleanest shot of her hand and used our equipment and software to render the clearest view, then printed fifty images, some for Fibby Dave and his team, the rest for us and our expanding crew. She was the first person at the top of our Ten Most Wanted List.
In the last eight years, Cookie, Tokie and I had torn the skin off twenty-six monsters and buried them in various parts of the country. All graves were twelve-feet deep and we relocated poison ivy over them to discourage wandering hikers. Even though we identified at least three men at the top-brass, it was their filmmakers we sent gift wrapped packages to. We wanted them to know we were out there. We wanted them to fear us. We sent them The Suits. Nothing painted a picture that loud. No person, no monster could look at those suits and not hear the screams, feel the pain.
***
Fourteen hours ago, it all came together. A drug-trafficking warrant Dave and the Fibbys served in Buffalo produced no fruit. Dave was on a secondary team, on scene for support only. He worked a different division with no current activity. The Fibbys were fooled into thinking the loot was there. Even the perps thought they’d sandbagged the Op. But they had no idea MY Dave was on the scene armed with a picture I sent him burnt into memory.
Dave put the cuffs on all three men and a young woman, a woman whose hand was a perfect match for Mishka. I don’t know for sure what happened, but I imagine he asked for her name and she spat on him and told him to arrest her or let her go, in a low “R” drop Boston accent. He knew he had to take her without the task force or DEA agents knowing, so his team planted a small bag of meth-amphetamine under the toilet tank and everyone got hauled in until they could establish ownership. Dave had her eliminated and released. He took the cuffs off and said he had to take her back to her last known residence, then put her in the van where his rogue unit put the cuffs back on, then gagged and blindfolded her with a small potato sack. They took her to a safe-house in Rochester.
That’s when I got the call. We were low on Fibby funds, so chartering a direct flight was out. Cookie, Tokie and I hopped in the transport van and turned a fourteen-hour drive into eleven. The safe-house was an outpost for field agents working the border trafficking cases and had a complete Mobile Op set up in the basement of the country home, with an interrogation room that could be open or closed to spectators. The house had been vacant since the Buffalo mess and all agents were at Quantico trying to justify the Rochester Field Office. It was only my team along with Fibby Dave and three of his unnamed agents. They shook my hand and left the room, wishing me Happy Birthday as they walked out the door. We only knew of each other, never met. Only Dave knew me and now he knows Cookie and Tokie. This was the first and last time Dave and I would speak candid.
“You know what I do. You know how I do it. Only stay if you want to see. Otherwise, let us work alone.”
Dave nosed around to Cookie and Tokie, whose faces said All Business, then looked back at me.
“I’ll be in Buffalo. Sanitize when you’re done.”
I gave him the nod and entered the interrogation room with a box of pictures. Some were kid survivors, some were the monster suits, one was the boy and a picture of Mishka’s hand. I had a picture of Ju, but Mishka couldn’t have been more than two-days old when Ju was taken. I always bring Ju, just in case. Hope’s a dangerous weapon they use against me. I don’t need Bad Gravity in my life.
I locked the door behind me and closed the blinds to the observation window. I heard Cookie try to open and shake the door knob, then he stopped. Made no other noise. It’s an intimidation tactic we’d used before, a way to shake up a monster before one of us got started. It told Mishka the interrogation was blacked out and no one was coming to Mirandize her. It said; torture. The ceiling mounted camera had already been unplugged and pointed down. Dave knew. He’d never witnessed, but he knew.
Mishka was not impressed. She had no facial reaction to any of our tactics. I started taping photos of survivor kids on the wall. I taped one of the boy and one of her hand under it. The interrogations worked faster when I said as little as possible, sometimes nothing at all. They knew what we wanted and it wasn’t necessary.
“It’s a fine day for an exorcism, ain’t it, Fath’a?”
I didn’t look at her, nor was I fooled by the New England accent. She probably thought we only knew her with a Russian accent, never shown her naked face on camera.
Elmer’s glue is where I started, it’s where I always started. Ju had buckets of it before she left me, maybe two dozen bottles for home crafts. I was down to her penultimate bottle by the time I got to Mishka.
I splat it on my hand and smudge it around while mostly viscous. The trick is to let it dry some, not so much it didn’t stick. It helped the slap make destructive contact against human skin. It helped form the first face rips. I could usually get twenty slaps in before the glue had fully congealed and I had to tear its dead skin off and reapply more for another round, assuming there’d be another round.
Maximum force with Mishka. She took nine slaps without reacting before she started audible gasps. The glue lasted another seven before it needed changing. There were no rips yet, only red and purple discoloration. Mishka was lucky and unlucky. I’d spend all night on her if I had to.
I applied the second coat of glue and restarted the slaps without saying a word. Ten more and she was wearing down. Me too. Three more and the rips started. My job hit paydirt. The rips usually started on the back cheek or the temple, depending on the weakest pores. Mishka’s started with both.
Once I hit the payload, I slow down, let her feel it. She took over fifty slaps to the back jaw of her left face before it opened. Blood crept down her neck and from parts unknown under her scalp. I rip the third coat of glue off then point to photos of kids presumed alive, still silent. Mishka, hung over her chair, lifted her face and chirped at me.
“Don’t ya’ sc’eam, gay’l. I’ll kill ya’ folks in tha’ sleep.” She weakened and let her head slump sideways. “Don’t you tell, p’incess.”
She was clearly on the edge of faint. I cracked ammonia salts below her nose, she lifted to attention. I smacked her with a new coat of glue twenty more times and half her left face detached from her jaw muscles. Her actions were delirious. Her head swayed with no direction, rolled around on her shoulders, her neck a rope on this ball and chain.
I pointed forcefully at the kids I thought were alive. She couldn’t focus or respond. I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of her. It was time for Cookie.
He saw me open the blinds and turn the mic on. The suit cutting was cosmetic art, his area. I stepped out, he stepped in with precision cutting tools. The cuts had to be on target and clean for complete removal. In the beginning, it took him an hour to make all the cuts. Now, just forty-five minutes. His suit skills were improving.
Tokie and I watched and listened from the other side of the glass. He laid her out on a portable surgery table, stainless steel with rusted edges. Mishka tried to mask her screams with psychotic laughter, but we weren’t impressed. Just another dead monster to us. It took him forty minutes to make the cuts and he’d need our help to detach skin from muscles. Tokie entered, I got a call from Dave. I told them to keep her quiet until I was done.
Dave was on site at another residence in Buffalo. They squeezed their mules and got a location.
“Dave?”
“Listen, Mac. I don’t know how to put this…”
“Just say it, quickly.”
“We found Julia’s tape.”
My brain lost cabin pressure. I sat before I’d collapse.
“Did she die on tape?”
“She survived.”
I initiated the pause. I had to roll it around, the tainted hope in me raging at F-5.
Mishka started in again, blubbering at first, then making the best threats she could. I heard her on the mic.
“Jobe’ll get ya!” The paydirt took me by surprise. Only a handful of people would respond to Jobe, and only me in The Fowler Group. I had no reason to mention him before. Cookie and Tokie were in the dark. “I’ll be back in Pawtland this time tomo’wah…”
Portland. Jobe Tomlin. For fuck’s sake, William Jobe Tomlin! The shiny top-brass who branded his monsters with a hook cross. It wasn’t a hook cross; it was two overlapping letters: “j” and “t.” That goddamn monster branded them with his name!
I told Dave I’d call him back and hung up. Ju was alive, I knew it in my bones. I pulled her picture out of my box and burst through the door. Cookie and Tokie stood back, unsurprised and ready to follow my lead. I held the picture in front of her face, those eyes could still see if I cleared the blood away, a couple eye drops.
Mishka heaved as her vision cleared.
“This girl,” I showed her Ju. “You give me her location, you live!”
Her brows furrowed, her face lost strength. Mishka was no longer an uncooperating witness, nor reasonable.
“What do you know of he’r, huh? What’s she to ya?”
I lifted her chin with my thumb. All business.
“You give me my daughter, I give you your life.”
Cookie and Tokie were stunned. They knew I was on to something. They suspected the call. Mishka howled, uneasy, losing her mind. She cried a laughing tear and choked, an emotion. She laid her head sideways on the table and sang, gently.
“A-B,
D-C,
E-F,
G,
Ella Minnow,
Ella,
Minnow,
E-E-E…”
She sucked the air out of the room and I steadied myself on the side of her table. I gently rolled her naked, brutally battered body filled with two decades of scars and suit wounds, until I could see a bright red Africa on her lower back.
After 21 years, I hurt my Ju-Ju for the last time.
My sweet little Julia.
Copyright © 2021 by Nick Younker
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
My “Tip Jar” is a $1 Kindle copy of this story. If you want to give a bigger tip, leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
Ella Minnow
This was both brutal and amazingly written
Ed Gein style justice with a far better twist than anything M. Night Shyamalan ever produced... Absolutely breathtaking. Well done, sir.