Chapter 2 #3
So far he’d only managed the Porsche.
He’d been hawking raunchy videos of young teens for a while now, but so far, he’d been a bit player. He cleared enough to make the payments on his dream car and dealt with bottom feeders.
But the rich boy networks, those were where the real money was. And he was finally making some of it.
Sara would arrive in fifteen minutes. This would be her third visit.
He took another bite from the pan and checked the camera, which was tucked behind a fake plant and a couple of books on a shelf at the perfect angle from the sofa.
It was live-streaming directly to his client, but the kids never knew that.
“How’s the feed, sir?” he asked once he’d swallowed. “Can you see the sofa clearly? And can you hear me okay?”
“I could hear you better without your mouth full,” the client replied, his tone dripping disdain. “And the sofa could use a little more light.”
The voice coming through T’s earbuds was male, older, and bore a curiously unidentifiable twang.
All nine of the other men had used modulator apps and come through sounding like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Darth Vader.
This one hadn’t disguised his voice at all, or maybe his app had glitched or he’d forgotten to turn it on.
T had recorded every one of them, altered or otherwise, in hopes he could ID them later, but damn, this one he knew right away.
He suspected he might recognize one or two of the others as well, if he ever heard more than a word or two in their real voices, those rare times when the app dropped for a second.
He’d been edging his way into the same circles.
T aimed his remote at the cloth-covered studio light in the corner and notched it brighter. “Too much and it won’t look natural,” he said. “Most of my other customers like it to look natural rather than staged.”
“Your other customers are idiots,” the client said. “You ain’t dealing with idiots. These kinds of things are always staged. My friends and I understand that. Now, just to make sure, these are exclusive performances, you’re not recording, and no one else ever sees these.”
“As every one of your, uh, colleagues has reiterated, sir. I get it,” he said, pretending he didn’t know who the guy was. He must think his voice was disguised like the others had been.
They’d all wanted to rehash the terms first. T put his hand in the pocket of the short black robe he wore in case they wanted him in the scene, to briefly clasp the phone where he was collecting dirt on the men he intended to blackmail right after he got paid.
He’d stolen it from a student—one of his models—then wiped it and repurposed it for his needs, appreciating the poetic irony.
These guys were paying him ten-grand per set for ten sessions. Each girl was directed remotely by a different man, but they didn’t know that, much less that they were being watched and recorded. The clients told T what they wanted through his headset. He repeated it to the girl.
He had provided nine sessions so far. Sara’s tonight would make ten. Then, payday.
Up to now his clients hadn’t been rich enough to bother blackmailing after the transactions were complete.
You couldn’t get blood from a stone. But these ten guys, they were freaking rich, the real kind of rich, the kind where you got to do what you wanted to whomever you wanted, whenever you wanted. And now he knew who one of them was.
He didn’t know the other nine names, but he was smarter than they were, so he had license plate numbers for all ten of them.
Before his session, rich guy number nine had mentioned the boys were all “driving down for a meeting at the Marlborough Club,” as if it were imminent.
Then he’d changed topics, all nervous, like he realized he was saying shit he shouldn’t.
A hundred-dollar bribe to the exclusive country club’s hostess after her shift, got T the time and date of a reservation for ten in the club’s private room. There’d only been one in the coming few days. Then he’d staked out the parking lot during their meeting and just waited.
When they’d exited, they’d exited all together—ten men, laughing and back-slapping.
Some had rich man bellies and graying hair, others were fighting age with all their might, with bad dye jobs, toupees, and gym rat bodies.
They wore khakis or jeans with polo shirts and casual jackets in varying hues.
Each pair of shiny shoes probably cost more than T’s whole wardrobe.
He recognized two of them from various parties he’d managed to crash incognito, posing as one of the elite himself.
The boys walked to the valet stand and flirted with the teenage female attendant, in her schoolgirl getup uniform with the skirt so short you could glimpse panties when she moved, or bent, or reached.
She and another matching hottie took turns taking keys, fetching cars, and accepting large tips that came with pats and squeezes, pinches and slaps. And laughter, lots of laughter, none of it theirs.
The boys were driving some nice wheels. A sporty red Ferrari, a pretentious black Bentley, a fully restored yellow Cougar, a black-and-red Mach 1—60’s era and cherry—
a Porsche, worth triple his own, as was every car that rolled past him.
He’d parked along the roadside across from the club’s paved lot with his dashcam running, recording every car, every license plate, front and rear views as they’d passed.
He’d pretended to look at some papers that were really junk mail.
He’d even waved at some of them but lowered his head when the three he’d run into passed by. He noted their cars, though.
Rich asshole in the Mach 1 had even waved back at him.
“Mr. T, did you hear me?”
He came back to the present and realized that he hadn’t. “Sorry sir, the signal broke up a little.”
“I said, if you make her do what I say in this session, everything I say, we’ll double your payout. This one’s a favorite, probably gonna be recruited, so I need to see how far she can be pushed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“She’s not gonna like it,” he warned. “But we’ll make it worth your while. And that’s double the total. Two-hunnert-k.”
T wondered what he’d be asked to make Sara do, and what “recruitment” meant to these men.
The first few sessions, he’d just been told to make the girls undress and take some fairly tame photos.
The live feed to the client had been running the whole time, and he’d also recorded to the camera’s internal memory.
Then things had started to escalate. The second round of sessions had him posing the girls in increasingly lewd positions, per the explicit instructions coming through his earbuds.
Tonight, apparently, the final member of the rich guy sex club wanted things to go even further.
Still, for two-hundred grand…
“Okay, whatever,” he said, because there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for two hundred thousand dollars. He wasn’t a pedo, but he didn’t think teenagers counted as kids, really.
There was a knock at his door. He smiled at the camera that was live-streaming to the client, made a shush motion with his fork instead of his finger, and turned off the computer monitor that was showing what the camera streamed. Then he went to answer the door.
On the way, he took one last bite from the frying pan, then set it on the plant stand near the entrance.
As he opened the door, he said, “You’re early, Sara. Eager little thing, aren’t you?”
His smile died when he saw that pain-in-the ass substitute teacher who’d stuck her nose into his business earlier in the day. “What the fuck do you want?”