Heartless Lover by Faith Summers

29

Eric

As I walk into the back office of the homeless shelter my gaze lands on the body of the head organizer lying on the ground with fresh blood oozing from his head.

This place is the source of where the girls were coming from. The moment I knew human trafficking on such a large scale was happening I knew I’d have to hit up all the places you could access girls who essentially no one would miss if they slipped under the radar.

St. Jude’s is one of the biggest charities who take care of the adolescent population in L.A. When I looked into their systems the other day things looked off and that’s when I knew to look a little deeper. I was right.

It’s been a week since the incident at the docks. This is the only thing we’ve managed to get. Everyone else has been split up doing different things. While I’ve been stuck on the same shit task of trying to track the device.

Sometimes it’s hard to live up to my name because people expect me to work magic. I mostly can, but every now and again I come up against shit like this and it’s like asking me to move the sun when it’s supposed to be where it is.

Borya and Oleg are standing to the side by the computer. The files on there are my reason for being here. They told me it was password protected and the dead asshole on the ground wouldn’t allow them access. I won’t need a password to retrieve whatever he didn’t want anybody to see. Chances are it’s illegal shit outside of what we need but I’m taking anything that will help me get closer to Robert and Micah.

“Just waiting for the cleanup crew, Boss. They’re stuck in traffic,” Borya explains casting a sideways glance at the body.

“We got this for you, though.” Oleg hands me a foolscap folder. “It contains the profiles of one hundred girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, all virgins and runaways or orphans.”

“Fuck,” I rasp.

This is good though. By screwing with Micah and Robert’s plans as much as possible, it draws them to me. I look in the folder and pull out an invoice for a hundred thousand dollars. That’s how much my dead friend on the floor was going to collect for this harvesting.

He’s actually written the word harvesting at the bottom of the invoice. I gaze at him, and he has that fatherly appearance but it’s a mask. When men like him look like that it’s a guise to fool people.

Motherfucker.

“He was going to transport the girls tonight, two trucks have gone already,” Oleg states. “The men have followed and tracked it to a house on the coast.”

“Go and take charge. I’ll finish up here with Borya,” I instruct, and he leaves.

I glance at Borya and note the drained expression on his face. I’ve had them working diligently on the streets while I’ve been working on the tracker.

“How is she?” Borya asks.

He’s talking about Summer.

“I don’t think she’s okay, but I hope she will be soon.” There’s no point pretending she means nothing to me. I’d just be trying to fool myself.

“Well let’s hope we can get down to the bottom of this. I’m sure getting Robert will help her move on.”

“Yeah.” Getting Robert is supposed to help us all move on and moving on means letting her go.

I know I should concern myself with getting to that part because that’s the hard part, not this that we’re doing. I just wonder what she’ll do by herself. I don’t want her to run back to Monaco or go anywhere where she can get in trouble again.

She has no money, no job, and realistically no one. It’s cruel, but I don’t want her anywhere near her father but that’s not my call. The deal was to let her go when this was over. Nothing more is supposed to happen to us. It’s just that she’s grown on me, especially over the last few days.

I didn’t want to leave her, but I can’t expect my men to do everything and when I’m called, I have to go. They needed to hack into the files here.

“I’m going to take the hard drive and look at his files at home,” I say, and Borya nods. “Did he say anything useful?”

“No, like everybody else he had limited information. I’m getting sick of these motherfuckers. Pity we can’t find something to end this once and for all. I’ve never come up against anybody I couldn’t find.”

“Me neither.”

This is perhaps our last lead. The first meeting we know of is taking place in the States in two and half weeks and even then, we don’t have an actual location of where to get them. It’s looking like it will be here in L.A., though.

I also figured they must have some other email correspondence we don’t know about. Bernardo said they contact Micah and Robert by email, but we haven’t seen anything come through the email address we have for anybody since we’ve been monitoring it.

The cleanup crew arrive minutes later and Borya deals with them. I focus on extracting the hard drive and scan for viruses.

While I’m doing that my mind is still processing ideas. I wish like hell I could resolve this because it’s starting to wear me down and because this is the closest I’ve gotten, it’s harder. I want everything to be over so badly I can’t think straight. At times it feels like when I was in Brazil and I needed to calculate how I was going to survive from one day to the next to keep my family alive.

As I think of Brazil, an idea works its way into my mind, and I stop what I’m doing.

I look ahead at the file cabinets and allow the idea to take fruition because I think I might have come up with something.

Something different I never factored in because I wrote it off.

I might not know how to track this device when its being used in real time, but I do know something that could simply destroy it if I play my cards right.

My grandfather’s weapon can do that.

The same fucking weapon I was taken captive to create.

Fuck.

It could do it, but it’s never actually been made, just designed. There wasn’t anything my grandfather designed though that didn’t work.

If I made it, modified it a little and programmed it to disable Robert’s device that should work.

It should work. There’s no way it wouldn’t. The same way Robert’s tech is designed to be some state-of-the-art invention, mine is too, and I just found my own way to fight fire with fucking fire. Once I disable his device, I should be able to track him down the usual way and he won’t be able to hide from me.

It would take me a few days to get everything I need together and make my grandfather’s weapon plus implement the modifications. Then I’ll be back in business.

Hope sparks inside me for the first time in a while and I can’t wait to get back to the apartment and start planning.

When I finish taking out the hard drive my phone rings in my back pocket.

I pull it out and answer when I see it’s Lyssa, who never calls me. Instantly I know something’s happened with Summer.

“Hi Lyssa, what’s going on?”

“Eric, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m worried about Summer. She’s been drinking. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she knew where your alcohol was. She wanted to get some air on the terrace, and I found her out there. She’s saying all this weird stuff and I can’t get her to come in. I can’t get her away from the balcony.”

A cold knot twists in my stomach at the mention of the balcony and I’m already walking out the door before she can say anything else.

Borya glances at me and I give him a nod he understands to mean take charge.

“Lyssa stay with her. I’m on my way.”

One thing pierces through my mind and I start running to my car. I remember the words Summer wrote in her journal and how she said she feared the day when she might not want to save herself.

Enough has happened to her for today to be that day.