Bow Down(139)
“What do you think happened?” he asked me.
“How about we go ask and fucking find out instead of yanking our dicks and guessing?”
“No need to be an asshole, Rafa.”
I grinned at him. “Fuck off, Jimmy. You cock blocked me earlier.”
“So what? You stole that girl. She was mine.”
“She wasn’t anyone’s, you dumb fat shit.”
“Say that again.”
“Dumb fat shit. Come on.” I headed into the house, and Jimmy reluctantly followed. He was a spineless scumbag and he knew it. I didn’t enjoy pushing him around, but sometimes that dick bastard got a big head, and someone needed to keep him in check.
The Madame of the place was standing in the living room. The room had been tossed over pretty thoroughly. Every drawer was pulled and every pillow was slashed. The curtains were even torn down and shredded.
The Madame was an older woman, dark skinned and in her late fifties. She was thin and severe, and I guessed she’d been in the business a long time.
“What happened?” I asked her.
She grunted. “Five people came. Ski masks, big guns. Killed Robert.”
“Who’s Robert?” Jimmy asked.
“Guard,” the Madame said.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Eloise.”
“Okay, Eloise. Sorry Robert got killed. What happened next?”
“Like I said, they came in fast. Killed Robert, held up the patrons. Robbed them blind, even slapped them around. Then they took the girls out to some cars they had outside and then they were gone.”
I nodded. It sounded just like two other raids that had happened in the last few months.
“Get a look at any of them?”
“No,” she said. “Except I heard them. I think they were all women.”
“Women?” Jimmy asked. “You fucking kidding me?”
“Shut up,” I told Jimmy.
That was another common theme. The attacks had all been done by women wearing ski masks. As far as I could tell, the Spiders were a bunch of warrior princesses or some shit like that.
I wasn’t much interested in this whorehouse or in the girls, but I’d been ordered down here by Ernesto, and although he wasn’t my direct boss, he was one of the leaders of the organization. I couldn’t exactly say no to him.
“Go check the place out,” I said to Jimmy.
“What? No. You do it.”
“Go,” I said, annoyed. “Check for anything.”
“Like what?”
“Holy shit,” I said, turning to him. “Make me say it again.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll do it.”
“Lazy asshole.”
He flipped me off and then went upstairs.
I turned back to the Madame. “I’m sorry about him.”
“It’s okay. I’m used to that sort of man around here.”
“Look, what else can you tell me? Anything weird happen in the few weeks leading up to this?”
She shook her head, frowning. “Business has been a bit slow, but nothing unusual. Had a girl get pregnant two weeks ago, but we took care of that.”
I sighed, looking around the room. These Spiders were professionals as far as I could tell. From what I knew about the other attacks, we weren’t going to find anything. They didn’t leave shit behind, and they always took every single girl with them. They never killed the patrons, though they usually hurt them pretty bad.
The organization was very unhappy about the Spiders. Apparently they were hitting the Russians as well, and they were costing both of our groups a lot of fucking money. It wasn’t cheap to buy and train a bunch of girls from overseas, or at least so I was told. I wasn’t much into the economics of that sick shit, so I stuck with what I was good at.
“Okay,” I told Eloise. “I’ll take a look around.”
I walked away and began to pick through the wreckage on the off chance that one of the Spiders had decided to drop her fucking driver’s license. This whole thing was an annoying waste of time, but I had to go through the motions.
There was a smaller war going on, a war waging inside the mob itself. It was a war between those who wanted to keep buying and selling girls and those who didn’t.
Some men were against it because it wasn’t profitable anymore. Some men were against it because the whole practice was sick and barbaric. Sure, we were thieves and killers, but sex slavery was pretty fucked up, even by our standards.
Then there were those who saw sex slavery as the new business. They saw it as the future of our organization. Anyone could sell drugs and run guns and do all that shit, but only we had the resources to buy and sell girls.
It was a quiet war. Nobody had died from it, at least not yet. But it was simmering beneath the surface, and I could tell that one day it would bubble over.