Chapter Eight #2
I kept my gaze planted on her as Pete went on. “She came to Dubai with a group of women to be cleaners. There’s no record of any of them working at any of the hotels or record of them being paid.”
“How’d Shep find Kiara?” Fallon asked.
“Dumb luck. He was tracking . . . name redacted,” Pete said, and rolled his eyes.
“He got a hit on his guy here, and Kiara was with him, so he ran her. Her family filed what’s equivalent to a missing person’s report in Odisha, where she’s from.
Of course, Shep hacked the records and contacted the father to get more information.
The father told him about the other girls and the service that hired Kiara.
Shep dug around some more. No hits on the others, but he’s still looking and hoping Kiara will give him a lead. ”
“Do we have a clear image of her?” Calista queried.
“Passport photo and a still from the footage Shep used to run the facial rec. It’s a clear shot. She’s thinner, hair’s longer, but it’s her. She has a mole on the corner of her right eye.”
“So what’s the plan for tonight?” Fallon asked.
“Simple and stupid,” Pete shot back.
“You have the number for the massage service,” I guessed.
“Yeah. I’ll call and find out where the pickup spot is, and we’ll move in.”
Simple and stupid.
There was no reason to overcomplicate things when we had a phone number to call that would lead us right to the girl.
“What about muscle?” Calista asked.
“From what Shep could find, Deepak Bashu, aka Sparkle, runs a crew of ten, with twenty girls working for him. But that’s not confirmed.”
“Sparkle?” Fallon repeated. “Where the fuck did he come up with that, and who told him Sparkle was a good street name? At least go with something like Killer or Blade or Pimp Daddy. Christ, what a tool.”
“Pimp Daddy?” Calista scoffed.
“What? I heard it used on TikTok.”
Calista’s gaze slowly slid in my direction. When she had my attention, she made one of those big-eye faces women make when they find something . . . Hell, I don’t know why they make the bug eyes, but I’ve seen the servers at the Dirty Plank do it plenty.
“I think your buddy has found himself on the wrong side of TikTok if Pimp Daddy’s coming up on his algorithm,” she stage-whispered.
“What? I use it to watch my bagpipe vixen.”
“If you say so.” She pinched her lips and gave me big eyes again. “But if you tell me you only subscribe to the Naughty by Nature website for the articles, I’m not going to believe you.”
Pete chuckled. I was too busy staring at her to make a sound.
“Never heard of it, but now I’m interested in how you know about a website that leads with naughty.”
“Research,” she shot back with a wink.
I was not going to think about Calista poking around the internet on naughty websites. I was not going to think about why I wanted to kick my friend in the dick for being on the receiving end of Calista’s wink. And I absolutely wasn’t going to think about why I found that playful wink so sexy.
Christ, I must be coming down with a brain infection.
“Let’s get this shit done.” Pete nabbed his phone off the cushion next to him and started stabbing at the screen. “I want to order up a woman from a sleazy fucking pimp like I want a hole in my head.”
No more than the rest of us wanted to hear the call, but it was a necessary evil.
Pete put the call on speaker.
Five rings later, a heavily accented male answered, “Hello?”
“I found your card,” Pete said through clenched teeth. “I’m looking for a massage.”
“Yes, brother, come tonight.”
Calista’s head twitched. Twice now. A new tell. I didn’t have to guess what that small tic gave away. Bloodshed would be imminent.
Nice.
Once again, I liked the way the woman thought.
Pete’s jaw clenched. “How much?”
“One shot, eighty. Full service, two hundred.”
There was commotion on the other end of the line, people talking, the sound of traffic, music.
The asshole was walking down the street conducting business like he wasn’t selling the services of girls he’d forced into sexual slavery.
Visions of stabbing him in the throat danced through my head.
“Where?”
“You know Meena Bazaar?”
“Yes.”
“Beside Atheryat on Al Fahidi. Will you come?”
Christ, I wanted to bury this asshat.
And by the disgusted lip curl Calista had going on, she seemed to be in agreement.
“What kind of girls?”
“Pakistani, Indian, Russian, Thai. You take your pick. You get good service.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good, brother.”
With that, Sparkle the pimp hung up.
“That easy?” Calista asked with a frown.
“That easy,” Pete confirmed.
Nauseatingly easy. Hundreds of men would call that number every day.
Some would show to pick a girl, some would call another number, find a better price, and head to whatever location that pimp controlled.
That easy. Every day. Hundreds of times a day.
Three sixty-five. And when one pimp was taken out, another would be put in his place, but the girls would never leave the streets.
“The Atheryat building houses retail shops and a restaurant,” Fallon announced, looking down at his tablet.
“Corner of Seventy-Fourth and Al Fahidi. There’s an alley on the east side of the building.
Multiple entrances to the building next door.
Bottom floor is a perfume shop and shoe store. Top floors are apartments.”
“Other entrances to access the apartments?” I asked, pissed at myself I’d left my tablet in my room.
“One on the east side on Seventy-Fourth Street. None on the backside. But there are businesses back there. It’s not an alley or a street. A car or motorcycle could pull in, but it’s a dead end, approximately two hundred meters, and connects back to Sparkle’s alley.”
Pete was staring with narrowed eyes—his normal thinking face—at the dark screen of his phone.
Calista sat silently beside him with her gaze fixed on her red sneakers.
A desperate need to know what she was thinking churned in my gut.
A curiosity that would only lead to trouble, yet I couldn’t stop the question from spilling out of my mouth.
“What’s on your mind?”
“The girls.”
That was the generic answer; we were all thinking about the girls.
That’s why we did the work we did. Long after we left this world, the war would continue, yet we willingly marked our souls for the ones we could save.
What seemed like small victories were in reality monumental to each woman, man, and child we pulled from the bowels of hell.
“What else?” I pushed.
Calista abandoned the study of her shoes and lifted her gaze.
“I’m wondering if it will ever stop coming as a surprise.
My sister was taken . . . not like these women, by someone she knew.
He took her, gave her away, and she was sold, then passed around.
I’ve lived this for so long, yet I’m still shocked.
Right out in the open. Business cards passed out with phone numbers to call.
It’s easier to order a woman than it is real bacon and a martini. ”
She wasn’t wrong.
“It never stops coming as a shock, sweetness, because it’s fucking shocking and disturbing.”
She nodded but didn’t look convinced.