“Or the shed its spray-painted on?” Erica added.
I stepped on a rock to peer over the fence. There were two more sheds toward the other end of the neighbors’ yard that looked like small houses, except the windows were all barred up and the doors were chained shut with thick padlocks. The shed directly in front of me, with the graffiti on it, had a small window facing me that had been barred up with some kind of industrial metal grate. As I looked closer, I could see a dim light on inside behind the ratty curtain covering the window.
I dropped down quickly, a cold sensation suddenly running through my body. I’d been too afraid to scooch up higher to get a better look inside that window. Too afraid of what I might see. Or of getting seen by whoever was involved with whatever was going on back there.
I described it all to Erica and we were so freaked out that we hightailed it out of there. Then, with her following me, we drove around the block to get a look at the house on the other side of the fence. Unlike the quaint red-brown stucco houses on the block, with their nicely manicured or overgrown desert yards, this one was a newer manufactured model placed on a concrete covered front “yard” surrounded by an unusually tall chain-link fence with a big Beware of Dog sign mounted on it.
Oddly, given the sign, the gate to the driveway was wide open, and children’s toys were strewn carelessly in front of the garage at the end of it. The storage sheds I’d just seen were completely obstructed from view by the house and garage.
Something about it seemed off, just like the house behind it. Enough that we decided to report it to the police upon parting ways. They’d called us each back to report that everything seemed fine. They’d gone over and spoken with the next-door neighbors, who’d said an elderly couple lived in the house and they’d never noticed anything unusual.
“Fine my ass,” I’d said to Erica over a Manhattan at Tonic a few days later.
“Yeah, I guess we knew they weren’t going to be able to go in there without a warrant or anything.” She tucked her hair behind her ear.
“I know, but I’m still glad we called it in. Maybe if something else happens it’ll give them enough to check it out. Honestly, maybe it’s just me, but I got a really bad feeling from that place.”
“Me too,” Erica said, “and actually, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to freak you out even more that day, but there was this house my company listed a few months ago, a foreclosure on Camino Monica...”
“...a total fixer in Barrio la Canada, like three months ago? I remember that one.”
“Yeah, that was it — when my coworkers first went to see it, they found all this weird, creepy shit in the basement. They showed me pictures they took.”
“Another basement?”
“Right? And there was stuff spray-painted on the bedroom walls, like, Satan Lives Here, and a picture of a scary face saying, God can’t hear you crying. And it gets worse...” She paused for a second. “In that basement, there were a bunch of old metal cots with handcuffs on them. Like they’d been keeping people locked up down there. It was horrible.”
I felt my stomach drop the same way it had when I’d heard a news report about a sex-trafficking bust in Albuquerque. Apparently they’d found a bunch of mostly Native American preteen girls locked up in dog cages in various Motel 6 rooms. They’d been sold who knows how many times a day for sex before the bust.
It’s something most people I know don’t think about, or like to think about, but it happens everywhere. Sex trafficking is one of the largest growing “industries” in the world, and Native women make up about 40 percent of the victims despite being just a fraction of the population. I know all this because my own mother’s twin sister, my Aunt Lupita, was kidnapped when they were ten and never seen again.
Their parents, my grandparents, had immigrated recently from Chile and were working heavy hours, so the girls had gone to the park one afternoon together, unsupervised. Lupita never returned after heading off to the public restroom.
The authorities suspected sex trafficking, and told my grandparents as much, so I’d grown up hearing about it. Hearing my mother’s fearful warnings to my little sister about “bad men,” and never going places by herself. I, in turn, was assigned her chaperone and told to protect her.
Despite all that, my awareness of this dark side of existence had, for the most part, faded conveniently into the background once I’d gotten out into the world on my own. Until now.
“Holy fucking shit,” I said, “it sounds like the house was being used for sex trafficking. That shit is real.”
I told her about the recent bust in Albuquerque, and my Aunt Lupita, as we gulped down the rest of our Manhattans. We talked about how fucked up it is that this shit goes on everywhere, right under people’s noses, because people want to believe it’s not happening. But even gleaming, tech-wealthy San Francisco is known to be one of the biggest sex-trafficking hubs in the world.
“Well, if the cops won’t do anything, I guess I’m just gonna have to scope it out myself,” I said to Erica before calling it a night.
Which is why I’m sneaking down this driveway right now after a couple of weeks of driving by at different hours, on the lookout for anything I can use to get the cops to go over there again.
I make it past the toys and around to the back of the house, out of view from the street. I take a second to catch my breath. I wait another to see if anyone has noticed my trespassing.
The house feels deserted. There’s no sounds at all other than the singing of the birds in the trees. So I turn to the sheds in the backyard. The first in my line of sight are the two that look like little houses.
I head over to the first, stand by the front door as silently as humanly possible, and lean my ear in to listen for sounds of human life. Nothing. So I walk around to the side and try to peer in the window, but I can’t see a thing behind the thick dark cloth on the other side.
I repeat my motions with the second shed, with the same results. This leaves only the concrete shed in the back corner. The one that had the light on inside.
I don’t scare easily but I’m aware of my heart racing and pounding in my chest as I approach it. I stop for a second and reconsider. I’ve come this far unspotted, unhurt, and, most importantly, un-traumatized. Maybe I should cut my losses and leave now.
But I keep seeing SOS Sex in my mind. The place those words were scrawled on is right in front of me, and it might’ve just been teenagers being stupid, but it might not. I have to find out, because if it’s as bad as I suspect it might be, I need to do something.
I walk over toward the concrete shed. It’s about six feet by eight feet and there are no visible windows from this side except a small one in the rusty metal door. I walk over to the door and stop. I steady myself and wait for several minutes, listening intently. I remember that I might want a picture of what I see, and take my cell phone out of my pocket to be ready. Then I take a very deep breath, turn to face the window, and I look in.
The light’s still on but it’s dim and the window is dirty so it’s a hard to make out anything at first. As my eyes begin adjusting, I see a small wooden chair next to a plastic folding table covered with alcohol bottles and other crap, and across from them: a metal cot.
My heart skips a beat. I quickly look away and glance around me to make sure no one’s there. I look over the fence at the house for sale on the other side. No one. I pull up camera mode on my phone and look back in.