by Claire Adams
“Thanks,” I said as I turned to leave.
“You be safe. You know he’s no one to mess around with. I can help you if you ever decide to actually get away from him.”
“Thanks again ,Michaela. Take care of yourself.”
I knew she didn’t hate me. Michaela was just trying to protect herself from what she knew Stephano was capable of. I would be doing the exact same thing if I still lived in Miami and had tried to escape Stephano. The thing Michaela didn’t understand was Stephano knew exactly where she was. He always kept track of his girls after they left him, just in case he ever needed a favor. The girls thought they had gotten away from him, but he never truly let them get away. He always kept them in his sights.
My plan had always been to get far away from Miami, so far away that he wouldn’t bother looking for me. I had thought about moving out to Seattle or Portland. Anyplace that was on the west coast would have been just perfect.
After meeting Jackson, though, I started to think about what life would be like if I really had a normal life. It was motivating to meet him and to have a semi-normal relationship with a man. Even if Jackson and I didn’t last after we rescued Ana, I would always be grateful to him for opening my eyes to what a normal life I could have away from Stephano.
I didn’t take a taxi, and instead opted to walk to Stephano’s house from Michaela’s salon. It was early in the morning still, but I knew Stephano could track down a taxi if I took it to his house. He would find out where I had been and even find out where it had originally picked me up at the hotel before going to Michaela’s. I couldn’t risk that for Jackson and everyone else, so I walked.
As I approached the front security guard, I took off my sunglasses so I could look him in the eyes. I had made an effort to smear my makeup so it looked like I had been crying. I was carrying the hi-heels and had dried blood from my broken lip on my face.
“I’m just going to see a friend,” I said as I looked the man in the eyes.
“Okay,” he said without asking me another thing.
I had to assume that the security guards had more than a few women coming and going from Stephano’s house. They probably didn’t consider a woman in a miniskirt and bare feet as a threat to him. Although, I was a huge threat to Stephano. I was going to get Ana out of his house – and any of the other women he had there. It was a fact that I was going to help take him down.
“I need to see Stephano,” I said as a man came to his gate.
“He’s busy.”
“Tell him Roxy is here.”
The man stepped away from the gate and talked into his walkie-talkie before he returned and opened the gate. I knew Stephano would let me in. I knew there was no way he could turn down the opportunity to tell me I was wrong and he was right.
Or, Stephano was letting me into his house so he could finish the job that he set his goon out to do the other night. I felt my heart beating faster as I walked toward the door. I could have just willingly brought myself to the home of Stephano Copal when he wanted me dead.
I felt sweat start to form on my brow and I wiped it off before Stephano could see me. I couldn’t let him know how scared I was of him. He had to think I was so scared of the man I had been with that I was willing to come back to him. I needed him to see that he was needed by me. That was the only way I would ever be able to convince him to let me stay in his home.
As I walked inside, it looked surprisingly normal. There wasn’t a big party going on and there weren’t dozens of security guards all around as I had expected. There were expensive paintings on the walls and high end furnishings throughout the house. It was a very stylish house that could have been in a magazine even. It surprised me.
“Have a seat, he’ll be right here,” the guard said as he pointed to the plush couch in the middle of the room.
“So, your independence didn’t treat you so well?” Stephano said as he walked in from the kitchen.
He was dressed casually in some linen pants and a button up silk shirt. It looked like he had just woken up and I felt like it was the perfect time for me to come and see him. He seemed to be in a good mood and I felt at ease very quickly. It certainly didn’t appear that he wanted me dead at all.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted something normal. He seemed like a good guy.”
“They all seem like good guys until they don’t get what they want. Then they turn ugly. Do you want me to take care of him?”
“No. But he knows where I live and I didn’t feel safe going back there.”
“The boys say he’s a good fighter. I’m surprised that’s all that he did to you.”
“I don’t think he meant to hit me. He said he was sorry right after it happened. But I couldn’t stay. I thought he was different. I thought he was the one,” I said as I started to cry hysterically.
If Stephano had ever really paid attention to who I was, he would have known right then and there that I didn’t cry. The tears were fake and only drawn up to make him uncomfortable.
Stephano hated when his girls cried. It was a weakness of his that he just couldn’t get over. In the beginning months, he spent a lot of time trying to harden girls up so they weren’t so emotional. Or he drugged them so they didn’t care as much about their emotions.
“Stop, you can stay here. But I’m not letting you dance anymore. I think we need to move on to something else. If you want a man, I’ll find you one. Or if you want to stay here you can help me with the girls. How about that?”
I looked cautiously up at him. Giving me the job to work with the girls was by far the perfect position for me to help Ana out. But it put me in a very difficult position, too. I had seen the way the girls were treated and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t sure I would be able to treat them as poorly as he required, even if it was only for a day.
“Like a good one, a good man?” I asked.
“Good ones, bad ones, men are all the same. I’ll find you a rich one.”
“Okay,” I said and nodded my head. “I’ll help you with the girls until we find me someone. Does that work?”
“Yes, that will be fine.”
I just needed a reason to stay with him. I needed him to trust me and I needed to not be strong in front of him. It was harder than I expected as I tried to push down the independence of my normal personality so I could let Stephano take care of me.
“Go downstairs with the rest of the girls. They will clean you up and then we need to go into one of the clubs so a couple girls can dance this afternoon. You can help them, maybe even show them some moves so they look good on camera.”
“Okay, thank you,” I said as I looked down at the ground and made my way to the back stairs.
The downstairs was just as big as the main floor, but it was designed more like a sorority house. There were at least eight bedrooms and each of them had bunk beds. There was a main living room area and a small kitchen.
I expected to see a bunch of women tied up or malnourished. But instead, I saw girls sitting around watching television and eating oatmeal. Out of all the women, I probably looked the worst. They did seem sort of out of it and dazed, but they didn’t seem all that malnourished.
Instantly, I thought of PJ, Jackson, Nate, and Chase and what they were going to be doing with Stephano today. They certainly weren’t prepared to find the girls actually happy and healthy.
“Roxanne,” I heard a timid voice say.
“Ana. Hi, it’s good to see you,” I said as I tried to sound happy to see her but not too enthusiastic.
“What happened to you?” she asked me.
She looked good, not quite like she had looked when I saw her last, but she looked better than I had expected. There was a glazed over look in her eyes, though, and I felt like she had to be on some sort of drugs.
“Bad night,” I said as I lightly touched my split lip. “How are you? You look good.”
“Thanks, I’m feeling really good. Sort of tired you know because I hardly have slept much. But we hav
e had lots of good food this week so I feel better.”
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” I asked as I looked at her.
Something was off. She seemed different than she had been when she was at my apartment. She was still timid, but there was something weird about the way she was talking to me. She was hyper verbal and rambling, her eyes didn’t seem to focus on me and she looked like she needed another fix of whatever drug it was that she was taking.
“Oh, I’ve been in a lot of pain. But I have good pain medication. It just makes it hard to sleep sometimes. But Stephano gave me some good sleeping medication, I just am afraid to take it with the pain medication. You know, I don’t want to take too many drugs.”
Ana was rambling a bit and I needed to figure out what all she was taking before she took more of it.
“I’m in a lot of pain, what do you have?”
“Oh, yeah, follow me. I’ll show you.”
Ana brought me back to a large bathroom at the end of the hall. She opened a cabinet that was filled with every kind of prescription drug possible. There was pain medication, anxiety meds, depression meds, and pretty much a drug for anything that was wrong. Each of them were labels with handwritten notes that read, “wake up,” “sleep,” “feeling sad,” and “pain.”
“Do you just take whatever you want?” I asked.
“Well, here. Take one of these. I take three, but if it’s your first time, you should only take one,” Ana said as she grabbed a pill from the bottle labeled “pain.”
“What is it?”
“It’s methadone. It works really good. You might feel drugged up at first. But it will take away the pain.”
Methadone was one of the strongest pain medications I knew of. Girls that had had their faces fractured and eye sockets broken would take that stuff. It certainly wasn’t for someone who was walking around without any visible broken bones.
“That’s a little strong for me, I’m alright for now,” I said.
“You should probably take it or one of Stephano’s men will make you take two of them,” Ana said as she looked up at the camera in the corner of the room.
I was starting to see what was going on. The girls needed to be drugged up so they would listen to Stephano, but he didn’t pick light drugs. He picked things that would get the girls addicted. That way, even if they wanted to leave, they wouldn’t leave because they needed their drugs so bad. It was sad and I could only imagine the withdrawals that the girls went through after he sold them off. Those men probably had to deal with some really dangerous medical issues.
PART 4
Chapter 19
JACKSON
“Is Victor around?” I asked the security guard at the front of the Port Authority main building.
“Yeah, who’s askin?” the man responded.
“My name is Nate. I need to talk to him about a problem I’m having.”
Luckily, Nate and I looked pretty similar. Nate, Chase, and PJ were finalizing the equipment we needed for surveillance while I got us an appointment with Stephano. I felt in my comfort zone as I made my way from the front gate to the back area where PJ had described I would need to meet with Victor.
After spending the last few years as an investigator, visiting back rooms to get information was something I was very comfortable with. I didn’t expect that Victor would give me any trouble, at all. Guys like him were usually law abiding, for the most part, with families that they were trying to support. Victor probably got a fee for referring women to Stephano and for keeping the high quality women coming through his door.
As I walked toward the security guard that I suspected was Victor, I was slightly surprised by his age. He was well over 60 years old and I hesitated to think that he would be involved in the human trafficking world of women.
Of course, a person of any age could be involved in illegal activity, but I just thought someone of Victor’s age would have too much sympathy for the women and wouldn’t be interested in being involved in something so illegal.
“Hey, I’m Nate. I’m looking for Victor,” I said to make sure I had the right person.
“You need something?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a girl I need to get rid of.”
“I ain’t no hit man. You’ve come to the wrong place,” Victor said as he turned around.
“Nah, man, I got this girl I had her come over from Russia, but she’s driving me nuts. I need to pass her off. She’s sassy as fuck and I can’t handle her.”
Victor turned around and looked me up and down. My size was always a difficult factor. Because I was tall and had muscles, many people thought I must work for the police. I tried to offset that initial opinion by talking poorly and dressing in ragged clothing, but it was always something people thought of.
“Let me check you for a wire,” Victor said.
Surely, I could have protested. But I wasn’t wearing a wire, so there was no reason he couldn’t check me. I felt bad for the guy. It was obvious he was just doing this to get some money so maybe he’d be able to retire someday. Certainly, he wasn’t a hardened criminal.
At least from the looks of him, Victor looked like a normal guy working a normal job. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy that was going this job to meet women. I could see that as being a motivating factor for being involved with Stephano. Maybe I was wrong, Maybe Stephano and Victor had some sort of side thing going on for Victor to hang out with the women. Nothing would surprise me in a business like this.
“No wire, man. I just gotta get rid of the girl.”
“I can set up a meeting with Stephano, give me a call at this number tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do.”
Tomorrow wasn’t really good for us, but I didn’t want to seem too eager to talk with Stephano. Everything I said was being analyzed by Victor and if I said one wrong thing he was likely to kick me out and we wouldn’t have a contact person at all. Our whole plan would be ruined.
I felt the adrenaline running through my veins as I tried to manipulate Victor into doing what I needed him to do. I was really liking this side of the job. I made a mental note to consider some more exciting work when this job was done. Maybe I didn’t need to stay in the shadows so much.
“How about I sell her to you today? She’s a bitch, man, and she doesn’t speak English. I’m about two minutes from just dropping her into the river, you know what I mean.”
Victor looked at me like I was a horrible person, which certainly I was acting like I was. But I needed to get an appointment with Stephano that day and I wasn’t willing to sit around and wait to see if Victor could hurry it up. If he thought I might kill the girl off, I knew he would work faster for me. He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to see the girls harmed. He seemed like a good guy who was just trying to navigate a very bad business.
“Wait here,” he said as he looked at me with disgust.
I needed this to work. Nothing was as important as getting an appointment with Stephano so we could sell PJ. Once PJ was in his custody, she could ascertain what had to happen so we could get the women out of there. It was the best option we had to safely getting Ana out of the home.
I sat on a small stool and looked around the warehouse as I waited for Victor to return. It was clear to me that I wasn’t a priority to him though as he took well over twenty minutes before he finally made his way back to me.
If I had really been trying to get rid of a girl, I’m sure I wouldn’t have sat around waiting for a guy like Victor. If I was as horrible of a person as I was pretending to be, I would have already dropped the girl off at a shelter or killed her.
The thoughts that ran through my head as I pretended to be that guy were horrible. It disgusted me that people like that actually existed. But I was positive about one thing: we had made the right decision to try and sell PJ to Stephano. I was 100% sure that trying to buy Ana would not have worked out at all. Especially with Victor. He was worried about me and why I had come to him. If I had been asking around about buying wom
en, I was sure he would have thought I was a cop and denied having any information at all.
“You can go to the club called Feather Kitty at noon. He’s going to be having some girls dance there. Your girl will need to be ready to dance. If she’s not pretty, he won’t take her, though.”
“Thanks,” I said as I started to walk away. “She’s pretty. Really beautiful, just a pain in my ass and I can’t deal with that in my life.”
“I need paid, man,” Victor said as he stood in front of me.
“Oh, sorry. Is this enough?” I said as I handed him a hundred-dollar bill.
“No, fuck that shit. It’s one thousand dollars for the introduction.”
Suddenly, little old Victor had some balls and was much tougher than I had expected. I doubted that he normally charged people a thousand dollars to get connected with Stephano and I had probably set up the price increase by making my situation seem desperate. Luckily, I had the cash on me because I certainly didn’t want to have to let an old man kick my ass.
I pulled out the cash and handed it to him. I had been around long enough to know a guy like Victor probably had a gun nearby if he was acting all tough like he was. So there was no need for me to act tough back with him. Instead, I nicely handed him the money and thanked him for his time as I made my way back out of the Port Authority warehouse.
Chase, Nate, and PJ had made their way to the parking lot and seemed ready to get things moving. It was happening – everything was going to start moving very fast now and we needed to get ourselves organized.
“You guys have what you need? I’ve got a location and we need to be there at noon,” I said to Chase from the parking lot.
“Yep, we’ve got a van for you to watch the footage from and got an outfit for PJ. Really wish Roxanne had been there to help. Any word from her?” Chase asked.