I didn’t like the condescension of the “son” but he was not wrong.
“I’ll text you my local cell number. Call me tomorrow after you’ve thought on this. I fly back out the day after tomorrow. We have other business to discuss as well. I hope we’ll continue to have a business relationship. Your father and I made each other a lot of money. I’m sure we can carry on that way with myself and you and Tommy.”
I shut the door, barely acknowledging him. I loosened my tie, paced a minute, running my fingers through my hair. He was right. I had to play things out careful-like. I should’ve been more guarded with him but what a fucking shock. My Pop’s business partners would see me as a threat if I didn’t play things carefully and in that kind of business they would deal with any perceived threat accordingly. Fuck. I needed this added complication like I needed a hole in the head.
** ** **
I’d talked things over with my brother and we agreed I needed to handle this in person.
I’d have to play things cool with these partners, do a meet and then figure out the right exit strategy. In addition to buying me a slave for my birthday Pop had essentially bequeathed us a piece of a human trafficking ring and that was absolutely fucked. It’d make our exit strategy even more complicated than it already was.
The best thing we figured we could do would be to pick this girl up and help her reintegrate into society. We’d probably have to fake her death and help her move on with her life somewhere fresh.
Tommy told me he knew of the place. He remembered Pop telling him about a trip to Thailand a few years ago where he was staying at a resort with sex slaves. Pop hadn’t said much back then but Tommy knew of that place as well as a similar place in Mexico. He said Pop occasionally did business with stakeholders in those businesses but Tommy hadn’t known he was an actual partner.
Before going to sleep I’d opened the envelope and lifted out a small tablet. Immediately after giving it my print, which I fuckin’ hated, I was greeted by a slideshow of photos of a gorgeous girl. Long sleek hair almost to her waist. Her specs read 5,5”, 115 pounds, 34C, 27” waist. It said she had a pink treble clef tattoo on her left hip and a white bass clef on her right hip, pink music note on her inner thigh. Her ears, eyebrow, nose, upper lip, tongue, and belly button were all pierced but it said in brackets she now only wore earrings in her ears and navel. She had never been pregnant and had healed in the last two years from a broken wrist and a fractured ankle, two different occasions. She was O positive blood type, redheaded, blue-eyed. She had an IUD and as of the transaction close date she’d been taken off the rotation and had since been off limits sexually to anyone in preparation for her transition to me. By the looks of things Pop had finished the transaction and she’d been taken off rotation just a few days before he got shot by Jesse Romero’s crew.
The boudoir style photos I flicked through were black and white except for one, her Alaska driver’s license. In that color picture her hair was wavy and wild. It looked auburn with highlights the color of copper or maybe copper with auburn highlights. It was both. She had the piercings in, she had a look of mischief, like she wanted to give the camera the finger, a smile on her face. She barely resembled the straight-haired expressionless girl in the boudoir photos. They called her “Felicia Sapphire”, the quotes telling me it wasn’t her real name. It didn’t list details about her true identity and the license had identifying details blacked out. At the end of the slideshow was a note stating that if I wanted nude photos, they would be made available. There was an additional screen that said “report” but there was no information on that page, just a blank spreadsheet that said ‘error’ in the first cell.
Before I crashed for the night I texted Stan and told him to be at my apartment at 7:am for a conversation and told him there was a missing report from the tablet.
Once that hour was up and I’d seen that the info wasn’t accessible any longer I hoofed the tablet with a pair of boots on and then chucked it down my building’s garbage chute.
** ** **
Three days later I was on a flight to Bangkok. I’d done some juggling and delegating at the office with my staff, a consulting firm I’d hired to help me prep the subsidiaries we wanted to unload in order to put them up for sale, and asked a few of my key guys to be my eyes and ears with everything else.
Business was winding down in a number of areas. I’d sold all the local debts to a factoring company who paid a decent rate to buy the debts, since we’d done them all with contracts under our financial services wing, and those who’d been in debt with us now got to deal with a collection agency instead of bloodthirsty thugs like Tino and his crew if they were late for a payment.
We were in talks to sell a few of the retail and hospitality businesses. Businesses we were part owners in were being sold to the existing other part-owners.
We were keeping the chain of coffee shops but would be hands-off by hiring a few extra people to run the day to day and all the locations would be franchises so it’d just be royalties coming our way. We were talking about gifting Venetia, our Italian restaurant that was run by Eddy, to Luc and Ed.
We’d backed off some of the other shady stuff, too. Not all of it. But it was work-in-progress. There were still people in our pockets but that’d all get slowly phased out as the companies under Ferrano Enterprises were all sold. The construction arm and the nightclubs we owned would take more clean-up before being sold and other than a few associations that all had or would have time limits on the relationships, that’d be the last bit of it. I was trying to take care of our guys, too. Some of our key guys had been offered first refusal on some of the businesses or given our blessing to go onto other ventures. It was all working out. All working out fairly smoothly with just a few kinks now and then until now, when all the Thailand shit had been dumped in my lap.
Stan had gone ahead already with some directions from me on how to handle some of the other business ventures he’d told me about and he wou
ld be picking me up at the airport. From there he was dropping me at another location where I’d be picked up by a guy named Gan Chen, general manager and one of the founding partners of Kruna, the name of the resort. He’d said Kruna meant please in Thai, and had dual royalty meanings in Croatian. The place was designed to please, to make visitors feel like they’d been crowned royals.
Kruna was on a gated waterfront property outside Bangkok, classified to the public as a private time share community. Most of what they did involved entertaining on-site with slaves. Stan said it was only very occasionally that they parted with them and that the slave sold to become mine was considered an exceptional asset.
I didn’t know how Tommy and I would exit this partnership yet but for the moment I needed to get in, assess the place and the management, pick her up, get home, and then figure out what to do next. All without arousing any suspicion. This would be natural for me. I often dealt in shady businesses with dangerous people. I could handle myself. But I’d never dealt with human trafficking at this level and I’d certainly never handled a transaction that was so personal --- a female being prepped to be handed off to become my wife slash personal sex slave. I had a plan, not a very in-depth one, but I had a plan and that entailed getting in, making them think I was a friend, and getting her back home.
From there, I’d tell the girl she was out of the sex trade and I’d help her get on with her life. Before I left I briefed Zack Jacobs, our PI. I’d get him some details and then he’d assess and get us some information to help us determine an exit strategy.
I’d do all this as fast as possible so that I could finish my task of selling off the rest of Ferrano. Who knew how cracked this sex slave would be and whether or not she’d be another risk to us but I’d see how things went and decide from there. Hopefully she wasn’t going to be a problem we’d have to dispose of. Hopefully we were at a point in our lives where we could be past all that.
Chapter 2
“Felicia”
When Cleo, my handler, told me a little under two months ago that I’d been sold I was a numb walking zombie for hours after the fact, maybe even days. I wasn’t sure, at first, if she was playing a game with me. She’d snarled it in my ear and stormed away, furious. A few hours after she imparted this info she took me from where I’d been left sitting in the slave courtyard over to Rafe’s office. He confirmed it.
Rafe was Kruna’s warden, in essence, and he was not my favorite person but I was one of his favorites, which worked in my favor. When I was brought to his office where he sat with his boss, Mr. Chen, I was tweaking, not sure if Cleo was playing a game designed to put me off my game, getting me in trouble, or what.
“Felicia, darling, sit,” Rafe said. Rafe was a short and bald Spanish muscular guy who looked like a steroid user. He always wore princess cut giant diamond stud earrings that looked totally stupid on him. He was about 45 but dressed like he was 20 and on his way clubbing. Mr. Chen was a shorter but older Asian in an expensive suit but he had a long salt and pepper ponytail and goatee. He was also physically ripped, with the body of a 20 year old, a well-known Kung Fu expert.
I squatted to go to the floor.