“You can relax around me, Marley. I want you to.” Wyatt’s eyes glaze over as he runs his finger from my temple to my chin. “It’s important you’re very relaxed for the things I’m about to do to you tomorrow night.”
A tiny squeak emits from my throat as the elevator door opens. The cool air washes the heat from my body, albeit temporarily. Wyatt leads me to his car, a different model than I’ve seen before. Of course, it is. He probably has an entire collection of these in his twenty-car garage. The Golden Oaks ranch is huge and sprawling with all kinds of nonsensical buildings dotting it as far as the eye can see. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if somewhere out yonder there was a building used exclusively for his special brand of perversion. And I’m loving the perverse nature of this very erotic beast.
“Where to?” I ask as we zoom out of the lot. The metropolitan buildings soon give way to the Jepson business district, but Wyatt hops onto I 97, the road that circles the back end of Hollow Brook, straight to the valley—straight to Walleye.
I sink in my seat a little as the familiar terrain takes over. Expansive dirt lots slip by, elongating with their nonstop tower of tires, trashcans spill in the street like some never-ending junkyard.
“It’s sort of a surprise. It’s not too far out. Just past the northern part of Hollow Brook. Sort of a dicey neighborhood, but I promise to protect you.” He gives a devious wink my way.
Dicey neighborhood is putting it mildly. We didn’t have a week where we weren’t locking all the windows and doors due to a robbery suspect running loose in the neighborhood—and on occasion the robbery suspect in question was my father. It was police sirens and search helicopters all the time. Jemma managed to move to a slightly improved track of homes, but Mom still lives in the old house across from the liquor store. Our neighborhood was a lot more hood and a lot less neighbor, but it was our little, dicey corner of the world, the one I’ve come to affectionately call Thug Central.
“You’re quiet. What’s on your mind?” Wyatt asks as we edge dangerously close to the Chicken Fried Filet where my mother was just promoted to shift supervisor. An uneasy feeling pulses through me until I realize we’re headed in the entirely opposite direction.
“Just taking in the scenery.” A quick breath escapes me. “You were right, it’s a little rough around the edges here.” I’m speaking from experience.
He pulls in front of a small warehouse with an oversized garage door rolled open, and I spot dozens of sewing stations set up inside with about a hundred women busily serging their hearts out. “Wow,” I marvel. “It’s like they’re in training for the Olympic hem-offs. Is this the place?” I spike up in my seat suddenly excited to be here.
“This is it. Take a look at the work these ladies do, and, if you like what you see, we’ll set up a contract—short-term at first.”
We head inside and meet up with a tall redheaded woman named Dasha who runs the facility. Her first order of business is to inform us she’s from Russia. She pounds her chest with pride before asking us to excuse the potential language barrier.
“I beat anybody’s prices.” She rolls just about everything in that last word until it comes out sounding like prizes and it instantly endears me to her. She’s actually taller than tall, squatty features with a turned up nose. Her hair is cut to her ears and dyed a shocking bright crimson. “Ve have output of tousand grams a veek, depend on level of difficulty.” I take it grams is code for garments, either that or we’ve landed ourselves in an accidental drug deal. “I have tree shits of girls.”
Shits equals shifts—or at least I’m hoping.
“Dis is round da clock operation. Ve no joke here.”
Okay, so they don’t have a sense of humor, but are they hiding a bunch of ten-year-olds in the back? More realistic than the drug deal, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve unwittingly hit up the local sweatshop. Who are we kidding? Judging from the long, tired faces—those matching vacant looks in their eyes, I think we might just have stumbled upon the inspiration for The Walking Dead. I’m guessing they’re not big on breaks around here either. Good God, why do I get the sudden feeling these women run all three shifts?
“Ve take payment upfront.” She slaps one hand over the other as if we owed her a stack of cold, hard cash, right here and now. “Ve burn vun too many times da odder vay.”
And there’s that.
I guess it’s fine since most likely my first hunch was right, and this place doubles as a front for drug trafficking. I bet if we stormed the back we’d find a redline to the Russian drug cartel.