“Word through the grapevine is, there’s going to be a major shipment going out tonight.” The scrawny, rat-faced man said, pitching his voice to be just audible to the figure sitting across from him over the babble of other voices and the raucous jazz music that filled the inside of the speakeasy like the haze of cigarette smoke.

“What sort of shipment?” Sally asked, toying with her glass of hooch but never quite taking a sip. The bathtub gin the place served was rotgut, even if no one had slipped her a mickey. The private investigator hated coming here, but it was necessary if she wanted to tap into the local underworld’s grapevine communications.

The informant shrugged, taking a long drag on his noxious, dogeared cigarette. “Don’t know for sure, just that it’s really hot merchandise. They want it out of the city as soon as possible.”

That was promising, Sally thought. As far as she knew, there hadn’t been any jobs pulled recently that had generated as much heat as this one she was investigating. “Police?” She asked.

“Paid off. No patrols and dispatches to the docks between 1 and 3 in the morning.” The seedy man said.

Sally nodded. That was the way things worked in this town. One reason, among others, the parents of the missing girls had come to her instead of the police. “Got a number for the docks?”

Rat-face seemed to have suddenly been struck with a case of deafness. He scratched his head absentmindedly, seeming not to hear her question. With a sigh, Sally produced another C-note and slid it, surreptitiously, across the table to him. His hand darted out and made the bill disappear as quickly as the first one she’d paid him.

“Dock 3.” He whispered and, knocking back the last of his hooch, got up and vanished into the crowd of speakeasy patrons.

Sally waited a minute then left herself. She walked a block or so before flagging down a taxi back to her office. It was, by that time, a quarter after 11, giving her a little more than an hour and a half to get ready and head towards the docks.

First order of business was a disguise. Sally tucked her long, blonde hair up in a dark blue fisherman’s cap. An oversized striped shirt and a heavy, dark blue sailing coat helped hide her slender, feminine figure, as did a set of baggy gray pants and a pair of sturdy boots. She tucked her automatic in one jacket pocket and went to catch another cab to the docks.

It was just after midnight when she arrived. Dock 3 was dark and quiet, large warehouses looming up in the dark. Sally alternated between strolling nonchalantly, whistling an old sea shanty and scurrying between dark corners as she surveyed the area.

Gradually, her attention was drawn to a warehouse close by the pier. Its windows were boarded up, suggesting the place was abandoned, but the place looked too nice and maintained to have been sitting empty for very long. When she got closer, Sally saw the doors had brand new padlocks on them and, behind the boards, the windows had further been painted black. When she scratched at a corner of one pane, a small sliver of light peeped out. Someone was in there and didn’t want anyone to know it.

“This is the place.” She thought with a triumphant grin. “Now, I just got to find a way in…”

That was easier said than done. Sally had circled nearly the entire building before she found a window that had only been half-boarded up, probably because it was in an out of the way spot and too high to reach from the street, but with the boost of a nearby trash can, the private detective was able to reach it. With the aid of her pen knife, she dislodged the lowest board from the window frame, giving her just enough room to squeeze through into the dark interior. Sally dropped silently to the warehouse floor, slipping into the cover of a stack of dusty wooden crates which looked like they hadn’t been moved in months, if not years. Cautiously, she peered around the corner of the boxes.

At the far corner of the largely empty warehouse, near the doors closest to the docks if Sally’s sense of direction was correct, the crooks had set themselves up. A quartet of goons stood guard, visibly armed. Two of them had lanterns, which was the source of the light she’d seen. Their focus was on a row of metal cages, side by side in the corner, each of which held three or four captive girls each.

The girls, about a dozen or so in total, were young, most of them in their late teens or early twenties. They had been stripped down to their unmentionables by their kidnappers, some even further than that. The girls sat in the cages with their hands and feet tied with rope. Bands of cloth covered their eyes and mouths. As she neared, Sally could hear plaintive moans and snuffled from the unhappy prisoners.

With their features obscured by the blindfolds and gags, it took Sally a minute to spot the girls she was looking for. Two of the cages held the missing students from St. Claire’s Young Lady’s Finish School, looking very sorry for themselves.

As for the other captives, Sally didn’t recognize any of them from recent missing persons reports, but she wasn’t surprised. Plenty of pretty girls arrived in the city everyday off trains from quiet country towns, dreaming of the glamorous big city life only to leave after a few weeks or months when they found the life of a typist, secretary or factory girl wasn’t as glamorous as they’d hoped, enough that when some of them didn’t go home, but fell into the clutches of a ruthless white slavery gang like this bunch, no one noticed.

“Well, now I’ve found them, but how do I get them out of here?” Sally thought. Going for help wasn’t an option. She recalled her information mentioning that the local police had been bribed to stay away. Any of her other options were hampered by the knowledge that the girls would be shipped out no later than an hour or two from now. But, crack shot she was, Sally didn’t much fancy trying to take on four goons by herself, especially since she was sure there’d be more outside the warehouse somewhere and they’d come running at the sound of gunshots.

Sally was still puzzling out the tricky problem when a sap impacted the back of her head. The young woman didn’t go completely unconscious, which would have been a mercy, but she was sent sprawling, stars dancing in her vision. The automatic slipped from her grasp as she landed, sliding off somewhere in the dark.

She was certain the next thing would have been a bullet in the back, or maybe a knife if the goon that had crept up behind her didn’t want to make too much noise, but the blow had also dislodged the cap she was wearing. Her long blonde hair caught a glint of the lantern-light as it tumbled free of the cap’s confines, apparently giving her attacker pause.

“Well well…” The goon said, yanking the limp woman to her feet. “Word through the grapevine was we’d be gettin’ a snoop comin’ by tonight, but they didn’t mention it’d be a pretty dame snoop!”

“I’m gonna kill that rat of an informant!” Sally thought as she was dragged over towards the cages, still too weak to resist as the other goons crowded around her. In short order, the private detective was stripped down to her unmentionables and her wrists and ankles lashed tightly with rope.

“You’re lucky, toots!” One of the goons said, reaching down to grab her chin in a tight grip. “Were youse anyone else right now, me and the boys’d be fittin’ you for a set of cement shoes, but we gots another idea for takin’ care of you. You and the rest of these dames is gonna be takin’ a long boat ride in a bit.”

“You bas-mmpphh!” Sally gagged as a dirty rag was stuffed in her mouth. The goons around her guffawed as she grunted angrily. A band of cloth was tied across her lips to keep her from spitting it out, followed by a second one over her eyes. The helpless detective was dragged over to one of the cages and tossed in with the other kidnapped girls.

“Sit tight, else me and the boys’ll get rough with youse!” The goon growled and slammed the cage door shut.

Inside, Sally groaned miserably. “This is going to be a real tough case…” She thought.