Chapter 11

Oh, my God! This guy turned out to be one of the nuts that we were looking for! He had a contract to supply a girl to a customer having nothing to do with a regular brothel. The customer had just "accidentally lost" his slave during the course of some rather gross sex play, and was in the market for a replacement. Mary was to be that replacement!

Okay, this guy was too much of a prize to take a chance on screwing up with by continuing the interrogation in such a potentially public place. Billy fetched the SUV and we moved to that work room back at our house. I won't bore you with a detailed description of our questioning of our captive, but we did get a lot of very valuable information. Included was the combination to his home safe where he kept a log book of all of his customers, including those dating back some 17 years.

As expected, he did not survive the questioning which lasted nearly seven hours. We dumped his body in his bedroom before setting fire to his house. We recovered the log book and made sure that there were no captives on the premises before Billy made use of his artistic talents. There was nothing but a pile of ashes left by the time the FD managed to put the fire out. There was considerable shock when a body was found in the bed, and the fire was attributed to an accident with a cigarette.

We now had an invaluable source of names, addresses, and telephone numbers for over a hundred customers in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Dammit, some of these customers were repeats! Included in the log book were the names, etc. of a few other procurers. They went to the top of our list of people to be investigated. It did turn out that not all of the names on either list were still around, but we did intend to make sure that they all made the deceased list before we quit hunting them.

Now that we had this list of names, it was no longer necessary for Mary to parade around trying to attract the people we wanted. One of these days, she might need to return to the streets, but not right now. Mary admitted that walking around in public in her outfit did get old fast, so she was happy for the break.

Meanwhile, we still had Aguilar to deal with. Susan reported that he was married, but his wife was currently living on the French Riviera, and their two kids were in Switzerland attending some fancy "elite" university. That was perfect for us because it let us use the brute force technique that RPGs were made for.

There was no finesse in our attack on Aguilar's estate. We loaded up in the SUV with four launchers and 16 RPGs. What we had in mind was obvious: we were going to park outside his fence and bombard the house with RPGs. The warheads were all of the incendiary type, and we hoped to burn the place to the ground with Aguilar inside. We were going to hit the place at 5:00 AM in order to catch him in bed. We also had switched our assault rifles to the AR-18 with the 6.5 mm cartridge. We had these along, as well as our .45 caliber Glock pistols, so we were well able to fight with anyone.

I guess that I should mention that I never went on a fire mission without a pocket full of the new hand grenades. In other words, we were prepared to face anything short of artillery. Our added strength made it easy for us to carry such a weapon load.

We parked about half a mile from the Aguilar estate and walked from there to a place just to the right of the security fence. Dammit, this was just a bit too far for the RPGs—we were going to have to go inside the fence. Billy used a souped-up primer cord to cut the lock, and we pushed the gate open. This probably signaled an alarm in the house, but we were counting on the time of night to slow down a response.

Mary pushed the gate closed to make our entry method less obvious, and we rushed to get set up. Once we were inside a reasonable range for the RPGs, we opened fire. The RPG is not the most accurate weapon in the world, but we all managed to hit someplace on the mansion. By the time we had each fired three more RPGs, the house was a mass of flames, and there was no way that anyone inside could have missed being cooked.

However, by this time, we had been spotted by the security personnel and they were running toward us. We hated to do it, but their dogs were also headed our way, and they were moving a lot faster than the humans. I managed to knock out the charge from the dogs with a couple of hand grenades, but Liz still had to shoot two of them. Meanwhile, Billy and Mary were firing their rifles at the humans.

The accuracy of their shooting broke the human charge, and we were able to escape before the Fire Department arrived to make a fruitless survey of the burned out hulk of the mansion. The news people were not far behind, and the whole mess showed up on TV and in the newspapers the next day.

Aguilar was known to be a gang leader, and the whole thing was attributed to an attack by a rival gang, probably from Mexico. As far as Susan's people were able to find out, that was the official explanation that was believed throughout law enforcement. So we got away with another one! We planned to pick up the rest of Aguilar's gang as the opportunity arose, but we were going to concentrate on the local sex-slavers for now.

As I have said, the procurers were at the top of our target list, and we decided to hit them at random so that we would not be telegraphing our intentions to the next one on the list. Mary was given the honor of picking the first target, and she closed her eyes and touched a name on the list. That was about as random as we could get.

The person she picked was Sharon Varsey, about two-thirds of the way down the list. We had been surprised to find that a number of the people on the lists, both procurers and users, were female. Liz and Mary were very happy to see that Mary had chosen one of the females as our first target.

Varsey lived out in the country to the north of Phoenix, and that made it easier on us. The isolated location made it less likely that we would attract unwanted attention during our raid. If we worked this right, with a little luck, it would be some time before the hit on Varsey would even be noticed.

This time, we were a bit more careful in planning our raid. For one thing, there might be slaves in residence with Varsey, and we didn't want to harm them. We figured that they had enough hurt without us adding to it.

We piled into the SUV and headed out to look over Varsey's property. She had a moderately large single-story home situated on a plot of land ostensibly devoted to being the residence of a successful business executive. There were a couple of smaller buildings on the property near to the house, but there was nothing obvious to call attention to the property. The nearest neighbor was nearly a mile away, so we were sure that we could operate with impunity.

Our inspection had been made in the afternoon, and we were ready to make our raid that night. Not needing sleep sure did make our life easy to schedule! As we were loading into the SUV, it occurred to me that we needed a second vehicle so that we could swap back and forth to cut down our chance of being spotted. I would delegate that job to Billy tomorrow.

We arrived at the Varsey residence a bit after 2:00 AM, and parked in front of her garage as if we belonged there. Our first job was to examine the two smaller buildings to see what was going on in there. Either one, or both, could be used to house slaves while they were waiting to be picked up by the buyer. We needed to know that before we attacked the main house.

Billy and Mary took one of the buildings, and Liz and I took the other. Our building had some conveniently located windows, and we could see that this was simply a storage shed when we looked in the windows.