***

Hudson took another look at the young man fiddling with his keys and fumbling his way inside the apartment, and shook his head for a moment. He wasn’t here to fraternize with the neighbors, but he couldn’t act like he didn’t want to know anyone there, or at least that was the justification he was giving himself. That was one odd-looking kid. Not in a bad or repulsive way but, quite the contrary, in a way that made you look a second time even if you met him out in the street by accident. Was he a model? Yeah, right. That rundown building was a nest to people of all kinds, but runway models didn’t fit the bill.

Maybe no one had scouted him yet, but it should happen any day now, Hudson mused as he let himself inside his apartment for now. Otis was skinny enough to be a model, but that wasn’t the striking thing about him. No, the most striking thing about him was the color of his eyes… of the eye, because Otis wore his hair over half his face, and that was all that Hudson had managed to see. That eye reminded him of Zeus, his Siberian Husky, who had to be relocated for the duration of his undercover mission since keeping him here, in this dingy apartment, wasn’t an option.

The boy’s eye was the same shade of blue, and the black ring around it contributed to its striking quality. He wasn’t a boy, Hudson reminded himself. Otis had been quite adamant about telling him his age. Also, he had the manners of an old person, another odd thing about him. It was a wonder he hadn’t smashed that mirror on his way into the building, and Hudson had kept an eye on it the whole time.

He shrugged. He wasn’t here to get an eyeful of the would-be model living a few doors away from him. Or play the Good Samaritan, although, it appeared that he couldn’t exactly help it when there was someone genuinely in need of assistance.

His phone beeped. He picked it up right away while taking off his earbuds. “Yeah?” he asked roughly.

“This is the last time I’m calling you until you’re finished,” his captain, who was also a close friend, began. “Is there anything else you need before getting started?”

“How’s Zeus doing?” His captain had taken Zeus in, without one moment of hesitation.

“The girls love him. He loves them back. I’m afraid you won’t have a dog anymore if you take too long with this mission.”

“Thanks for the motivation, captain,” Hudson said with half a smile. “Why did I agree to do this again?”

“I’d say it’s because you need the paycheck, but that’s not everything. You’re the only guy in the entire department with the stomach for it, West.”

Hudson snorted. “What you’re really saying is that I’m the only guy in your department who won’t have trouble staring at naked men all day long.”

“That, too,” the captain admitted. “So, any prospects so far? You know what we’re looking for. Foreign, not too many friends, no actual job history, no means to call for help. These are their targets, and we need to identify leads, too.”

For some unfathomable reason, Hudson’s mind drifted to the odd-looking young man in 508. He seemed lonely, too. Again, he shook away the recent memory that kept coming back to him. It wasn’t like him to dwell on things that weren’t important to the task at hand. He was a master of focus.

Apparently, not so much when a striking blue eye was staring at him like its owner was trying to find a way inside his soul.

“Have a heart, captain. I’m just setting up shop. I did place the ads. Anyone who needs to turn a quick buck is going to come knocking on my door.”

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it. Get to the bottom of this, and I think there might be a promotion in store for you.”

“Don’t tell me you plan to retire,” Hudson joked. “I don’t want your chair. It already sags and has at least a few screws loose.”

“Yeah, yeah, call me old and fat one more time.” The captain laughed. After a moment, his voice turned serious again. “Don’t let it get to you, okay? Don’t make it personal.”

“Hey, you said I was the only guy in your department with the stomach for this. Have a little faith.”

“I also know there’s a heart in there,” the captain continued, his voice turning kind. “That’s why I need to remind you that some things might be out of your control.”

“A few, maybe,” Hudson said. “But most of them can and will be in my control. I’ll be fighting tooth and nail for it.”

“I don’t doubt it. Good luck hunting,” the captain wished him before cutting off the convo.

Hudson took the phone apart with calm hands. From now on, he’d use a different phone and completely assume his new identity, that of a shady photographer looking for young men willing to pose in racy getups for a market with particular tastes. Ever since they had learned about the seemingly new human trafficking ring operating in the area, and a few bodies had turned up, the captain and a handful of detectives had been hard at work to find a way to infiltrate it and catch the bastards who had such a lack of empathy for human life that they used young people for the sick entertainment of others, just for the sake of money.

He brushed one hand over his eyes. The captain was right when he asked him not to make it personal. Just seeing what had been done to those young men, how much they had endured before their lives were cut short, had filled him with the sort of cold rage that never died out completely. The captain had also been right to choose him for the job, because now he was like a bloodhound with the promise of prey etched in his brain. He wouldn’t stop until he took down that ring of human traffickers and put the ones responsible behind bars for good.

He sat on the couch with his laptop on his knees. For the sake of seeming to be the real thing, he had set up a site, and it looked like he had a few messages already. That meant he was starting.

***

Otis followed the words on the screen with his finger. “Date more than one person at a time,” he murmured and frowned in thought. He had trouble getting one date, and the first rule was that he needed to date more than one man? He’d installed all the dating apps, but after that, he had started removing one after another, as some pictures he had seen there were too intimidating to even look at them for a second time.

He continued his research while lying on his belly on the bed. The credenza had taken up some valuable space, but it was one of the few things he still had from his grandma, which meant that sacrificing a bit of space wasn’t an impossible feat. “Be authentic,” he continued to read. Now that was another difficult thing to do. Being authentic, in his case, made people nervous. Sometimes, it made them laugh, but it wasn’t the nice kind of laugh, and Otis could tell they were laughing at him, not with him. His intelligence was at least average, and he knew how to recognize the signs.

He turned his phone with its face down and then closed his eyes, his head resting on his right arm. “Grandma, I do want someone to love, but it’s hard,” he said out loud, as he’d started to do since he had been left all alone in the world. “Dating is difficult in the twenty-first century. First, a machine has to find a match for you. I did swipe right, but I believe that I’ve ended up talking with all the bots on each app. Bots are like fake people,” he explained, since his grandma had a hard time keeping up with technology.

Today, he didn’t have a lot of things to report to her. After all, not much had happened… but that wasn’t true. He turned on his back and linked his hands over his belly. “I brought home your credenza. It looks really nice in the corner. It lights up the room.” There was no point in telling her that there was barely any space left for him to move around in because of it. The mirror was in the hallway, causing its own kind of trouble. But it had been her who had taught him that white lies were good at times, and he was just telling one of those now.

“Ah, and there was a very nice young man in the elevator who helped me,” he said, excited to tell her about Hudson. Suddenly, his dejected mood improved. “He did not appear to enjoy being called a young man, although he didn’t seem older than thirty to me. His name is Hudson, and he lives in 505, just a few doors away from me.” He hesitated, but in this case, not saying anything meant that he would be lying about something important. “He has tattoos on both arms. They’re really impressive. And he has what you would call a brusque manner at times. However, he helped me by carrying the credenza to my door. Also, his smile is beautiful, and he has a dimple on his right cheek… it’s not symmetric at all, but it didn’t look strange or anything.” His grandma would scold him if he admitted how obsessed he was with symmetry in the human face, so he stopped there.

“I still have trouble getting a date. Besides talking to those fake people online, it seems that when I talk to others they also think that I’m a fake person, and then they want my phone number, and I don’t want to give that to someone who assumes that I’m not real.” He sighed at the end of his tirade. “I need someone to teach me how to date. I’m not capable of figuring it out myself, even with the information readily available on the Internet. It just doesn’t work.”

With that thought, he drifted off to sleep. He’d see about the mirror later. Now, he had several hours left until his shift started, and being well-rested was important for a good and healthy life, just as his grandma had taught him.

His sleep soon turned into a world of dreams, and Otis saw himself moving down a winding slope, only to realize that it was a green serpent that reminded him of the tattoos he’d seen on his neighbor’s forearm. What a silly dream, he told himself as he was dreaming, but silly dreams could also be funny, so he didn’t mind them at all.

***