Packing Heat(5)

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 professions 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.

“By the way,” Eloise said as I went to leave the room, “I just remembered. Some reporter was sniffing around here maybe a month back.”

“Reporter?”

“Sure. Young girl, maybe mid-twenties. Pretty thing. She was asking questions she shouldn’t be asking.”

“Like what?”

“Like how many girls I had. How many of them were from eastern Europe. That sort of thing.”

I frowned. “You think that’s important?”

She shrugged. “Fuck if I know. It was just out of the ordinary.”

“Thanks,” I said. She nodded and walked off, back into another room.

So a journalist had been snooping. A young, pretty journalist. I didn’t know if that meant something or if it was just a coincidence, but I was going to have to follow it up. I wasn’t the type to get accused of being bad at my job after all.

I heard a loud thud, a crash, and some cursing. I sighed and headed to the foot of the stairs just in time to hear the Madame yelling obscenities at Fat Jimmy. He laughed and stumbled into the hall.

“You dumb fucking pig,” she yelled. “This place is trashed enough. You sick motherfucker.”

He was laughing and buttoning up his pants.

“Jimmy,” I barked. “Get down here.”

He grinned and came down toward me. “What’s up?”

“What did you do?”

“Just had a little go. Did you know they have a room full of porn up there?”

Jesus fucking shit. That pathetic bastard.

“You dumb asshole. Keep it in your pants.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “We done?”

“We’re done. Come on.” I led the way back outside.

Jimmy followed, that fat fuck.

We climbed back into the car, but I was already thinking about that girl again. I couldn’t get her hips out of my mind, the way she fucking kissed me, like she was reluctant, afraid, but fucking dripping wet. That made me hard just thinking about it.