Chapter 7

“Hey Mallory, come on in.” Johan’s smile was pro forma.

So was mine, and it’d ended up being a late night by the time I got back to my bed. That, and an early morning, coz I’d had to get up at six to meet Chaz at eight, and it’d been a waste of time. None of the girls had seen a thing, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had.

Miss Tokyo was still gonna be fucked six ways to Sunday day and night for the next few weeks.

It was hard not to yawn, even after three coffees, and I knew it was gonna be a long long day. So yeah, my smile was pro forma too. Not like Johan was a buddy, was it?

Business associate, I guess was about the best you could say, and this was all about business.

Maybe he liked me. I kinda thought he did, the way he eyed me now and then, or maybe he was sorta thinking about how I’d look servicing his clientele. Not that it mattered, either way. He wasn’t a bad looking dude, bit of a hunk if all you went by was looks, but I wasn’t ever going there, not with him. I knew too much about his business. Besides, I preferred girls. I’d found that out after I’d started university.

I figured Johan knew that, too.

Wasn’t like I made any secret about it.

“How ya doing, Johan?” I followed him into the apartment, looked around, checked my six on the way in. Never been to this apartment before. New address, but he did move his operation around. “Nice place.”

He always had a few different apartments for his girls, and they always were. Nice, that is. Johan’s clients paid big bucks for the services Johan provided. Nondescript up-market suite apartment buildings were ideal for his business. Lotta people were always coming and going. Turnover. Nobody ever knew their neighbors, Johan’s clients really didn’t want to be recognized, and if you wanted one of his new girls, you came to him.

Anonymity. That was good for Johan’s business.

From the look, this was a furnished luxury rental. Real up market, but that kinda went with Johan’s clientele. I’d checked right after I’d pinged him and he’d texted me the address. Fancy. Four hundred apartments in this tower and there was a concierge tucked away in an office outta sight, only there if you needed help. For the rest, it was card access and a buzzer to admit guests, so he got his anonymity alright.

Gotta cost a packet to rent, but the business Johan was in, he could afford it. One of his girls earned him enough from two or three days’ work to cover the month’s lease. Clean, uncluttered, expensive. High end luxury hotel suite décor. Even came with enough built in sound proofing to muffle the sobs and cries and more than occasional screams coming through those closed bedroom doors.

The sort of décor all his clients were used to, and I knew that now. Hadn’t known that when I started out as a cop. I’d been sorta idealistic. Family that voted liberal, mom and dad big on social issues and whatever that latest buzzword was. They really hadn’t liked it when I’d joined the cops. They were the sorta liberals who looked down on cops. Only thing worse than the cops in their minds was the military.

“A necessary evil,” my mom had said once, not quite sneering. They’d been all for defunding the cops, and they just didn’t see the correlation between that, and increased crime. Once when I’d dropped by home, my dad had been bitching about the cost of putting in security grills over the windows, an alarm system and paying for 24/7 armed response. Still didn’t have a gun himself.

I’d looked at my dad and I’d laughed. Shouldn’t have laughed at him, but I just couldn’t help it.

“You voted for this shit, dad,” I’d said, and it kind of went downhill from there, because for whatever reason, he just couldn’t make that correlation.

Defund the cops?

My parents just didn’t understand how that made it easier for guys like Johan to do their business. My mom, she’d asked me once what I did in the Force. She didn’t put it like that, she’d used a few more words, but that’s what she wanted to know. It’d been a little dinner party with a few of their liberal friends, all making noises about the latest feel good bullshit, whatever it was, the bad evil despicable police, undocumented immigrants and how they could best be helped, the poor poor homeless, and how, really, the pigs picked on people like sex workers, which was a valid job, just like any other job.

I’d told them what I did. I’d given them the truth about the sex trade.

The exploitation. The coercion. The drugs. The pimps. The violence. The missing girls. The trafficking in girls. Young girls. Especially the trafficking, and how a lot of those girls came up over the southern border as “undocumented immigrants” and promptly disappeared into the night and fog. Those children who were sent up alone, with an address for them to be sent to. I knew what happened to a lot of them, and I shared that too. The 8 year old girl that was found at the U.S. border with 67 different traces of DNA inside her. She’d been raped by 67 different men while trying to cross into the U.S. A fucking eight year old. Been in the media, sort of. Just a little clip, nowhere near front page. Wasn’t fuckin’ important, coz it spoiled that fuckin’ narrative didn’t it?

The fabled land. The land of promise. Except for that little girl, it sure as fuck wasn’t.

She wasn’t the only one, and a lot of those little girls, the ones on their own, they were being brought in for the sex trade, nothing else. Undocumented, nobody had any idea where they even fucking were. They let them in, sent them off wherever, the person on the other end at that address they had took delivery, and then ... those little girls, those young teenage girls, they disappeared completely.

No fucking trace.

They were used and discarded like rag dolls. By the time I was done, those liberals all looked like they wanted to puke, and I’d probably shattered a few illusions. Or maybe not. Maybe they just tuned it out. Maybe they just didn’t want to know. Most of them didn’t. Confirmation bias. They’d pretend to themselves that it was all lies and stuff like that couldn’t happen. I’d found out by then that most liberals were like my parents.

They just tuned the bad shit out until it hit them in the face and broke a nose or something, and then they came up with excuses.

Like if they closed their eyes and pretended it didn’t happen, it’d all fucking vanish. Like those little girls fucking vanished. I knew a lotta people just didn’t want to believe shit like that went on, but it sure fucking did and it was getting worse. Last time I’d been invited home, come to think about it, and that’d been a couple of years ago. I did drop by, uninvited, now and then, but you know when you’re not really welcome. Still, they were my mom and dad. Been a while now. Maybe I should call, let them know I was still alive.

Check if they were. Yeah, well, whatever.

Maybe I would, sometime soon.

Maybe later.

Anyhow, Johan. He’d set up here in business quite a while ago. Few years before my all-too-brief time doing what I’d always wanted to do on the Force, but we knew each other from back when I’d been a cop. He knew I’d been terminated. He’d called me up a couple of days afterwards. He had his ear to the grapevine. No idea how he knew, but he always knew.

“Hear you’re unemployed, Ms. Kwon,” he’d said. “How about meeting me for a coffee?”

“Why would I?” I’d said. “Not like I’m gonna work for you.”

I’d known exactly what Johan did, and I really didn’t like it. Didn’t like him, either, and he was one of those guys Greg had always wanted to take down, but there was never enough evidence. Never found any of his girls either, back then. Johan was a smart guy, he kept outta sight, really low profile, which given his business, was probably a good fucking idea. I’d wondered what the fuck was going on that morning when he’d called me outta the blue, coupla days after I was out on my ass and feeling real down about it. Hadn’t had any ideas at all about what I was gonna do, and it wasn’t like they gave me a package or anything.

It was fuckin’ depressing, but if you’ve ever been fired, you know that one.

Had about two weeks’ pay in my bank account, enough for the next month’s mortgage payment, and after that, I was gonna default, and that was sure gonna fuck with my credit rating. Fucked if I was moving back to my parents. I’d crash on a friend’s couch or something if I had too. Couple of the guys had told me they had a spare room, and back then I was thinking I’d have to take one of them up on the offer if it got down to it and the bank foreclosed.

Johan, he’d laughed. “Nope, you’re as straight as they come, Mallory, we all know that, and that was righteous, what you did to those two dumbasses, but maybe we have a couple of other things we can chat about.”

It was the “righteous” that did it. We’d met for that coffee in a coffee shop. Refused to meet in a Starbucks. Fucking baby killers, and Johan, he’d laughed.

“You’re a real whacko, Mallory,” he’d said, still laughing. “There’s a mom and pop coffee shop at five four one ten Chandler, right opposite Ricardo Cortez High School at Chandler and Hammett. Ten tomorrow morning work for you?”

He was there when I walked in early, checking my six. No backup now that I was out and on my own. He grinned. Fucker knew why I was early too, I was sure of it. Half a dozen schoolgirls walked out, middle school from the look of them, ‘n he was eyeing them as I sat down with my coffee opposite him.

“Recruiting?” I said, kinda with a hint of hostility. Yeah, I knew exactly what Johan’s business was.

He’d grinned. “Not today, but you never know where you’re going to spot new talent.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, taking a sip. Fuck, that first coffee of the day was great. “Talk to me, Johan. What the fuck’s this about?”

“So impatient, Mallory,” he’d said. “How’s things?”

“You know how’s things,” I’d said. “Fuckin’ jerks.”

He’d laughed. “Have to agree with you on that one,” he’d said. “Now, what the fuck is this about, you ask? You know my business, right?”

“I’m not working for you, Johan.”

“Not asking you to, Mallory. Going to explain a few things to you.”

He had, and we’d chatted about a few things, and I’d asked a few rather pointed questions, and got some straight answers. Didn’t like those answers, but he wasn’t feeding me bullshit. He’d explained things about his business niche I hadn’t known at all, and back then, I’d already known a lot about his business model. Well, not his specifically, but the business in general. After all, I’d studied the way those guys worked, I’d interviewed a lot of the girls we’d rescued. The few that we had rescued. I had the background.

My background was from the girls, and they saw it rather fuckin’ differently to Johan, believe me.

After talking around it for a couple of hours, Johan got down to what he really wanted to talk to me about. Yeah, Johan had a business proposition, and he was a good businessman, and he was a good marketing guy, even if his business niche sucked. Big time sucked.

The way Johan ran it by me back then though, two years ago, it all made a lotta sense. Still did, when I had second thoughts, and stopped to think it through all over again, which I did every now and then, even now, two years and a few hundred recovered girls later.

Okay, I knew all about Johan’s business. Girls. Not just any old girls. Johan ran a specialized business. He had clientele with specific tastes. Real specific. Teenage Asian girls, coz Johan’s clientele didn’t like just any teenage girls. They had real money, they were willing to pay big bucks, and they liked beautiful teenage Asian girls in that range from you don’t really wanna know up to sixteen or seventeen or so, and that really was the upper limit. Seventeen was old for most of those fucking perverts. Most of his girls were in that bracket around fourteen, give or take a year or two, ‘ne he was straight up about that.

“It’s not like you don’t know the business, Mallory,” he’d said.

Johan, he didn’t do real pedoes, not by his definition anyhow. He went young, but not young enough that you’d want to shoot the fuckers on sight. I mean, there’s limits, and Johan was straight with me about what his limits were. Johan’s girls had to have tits, even if they weren’t that big. Legal age of consent didn’t mean a thing to Johan. In his business, consent, legal or otherwise, didn’t mean a thing either, and he was straight up with me about that too, the fucking asshole. In Johan’s case, I’d already known that he specialized in those Asian girls, but there was something else I didn’t really understand, not back then.

Johan, and the other guys like Johan who were more or less in that same specialist business niche, even though there weren’t that many of them, they had an ongoing supply problem. It’s not exactly a business where your average Asian teenage girl wakes up in the morning and decides she’s gonna go work in it, especially given the services those guys supplied to their clientele. Nope, there weren’t that many job applicants at all, but the demand was there, along with the money to pay to have that demand met.

So yeah, demand exceeded supply, way exceeded, and the type of business Johan ran, the merchandise he needed to meet that demand didn’t exactly grow on trees. The girls he needed had to be lookers, they had to be hot, they had to be Asian, and they had to be fresh and trim with sex appeal. Up-market looking. They had to be all of that to appeal to his clientele, and fourteen year old girls like Fumiko Suematsu were that optimal age.

Already mentioned how girls made it into this business, and it mostly wasn’t voluntary. Wasn’t like most of them were paid, either, and once they were in the hands of some human hyena like Johan, they were trapped, and there wasn’t any escape. Those girls, they were used, and in Johan’s niche, where there was a hard age where they hit their use-by date, they were moved on. Sold. Trafficked, if you want to use the terminology.

Trafficking?

Johan and the others like him sold those girls into the mainstream market, because they had their niche, but it was a niche, and after their use-by date in his niche, those girls just didn’t appeal to Johan’s clientele anymore, but they sure appealed to the wider market. There was demand, but what they sold for wasn’t anything like what they would’ve fetched on the market when the guys like Johan first acquired them. A girl like Fumiko Suematsu was expensive if you bought her fresh, tight, young, baby-faced, and all ready to be broken in.

Not to mention the risk involved picking the girls up, because job applicants who looked like Fumiko Suematsu were pretty much non-existent, and you already know what that means. That meant guys like Johan bought them off those auction sites, they bought them from teams that picked them up, or they picked them up themselves. It was cheaper to pick them up themselves, but a lot riskier. Kidnapping, to start with. Easier and safer to pick up or buy girls that their families didn’t want. Girls from families that owed the coyotes. Girls that were runaways, sometimes.

Once the cops had been called on a girl who ran or was a problem child even a couple of times, they kinda just wrote them off. Debt collections? A few girls came that way, but not that many. That combination of debt and a good looking daughter who was the right age just didn’t come up nearly often enough to meet the ongoing demand.

Those runaway girls, they met the bill for some of the other guys in that niche, but not Johan’s. Not that often, because Johan’s clientele were upmarket. Business men. Politicians. Older guys with real money and they’d pay whatever they needed to pay. They wanted class as well as looks. They didn’t want some young skank who’d been through a few rodeos already, so the guys like Johan, they went outside the normal procurement channels, and they picked up a lot of the merchandise they needed themselves or through suppliers.