Muscle

by Lexi Whitlow

  I really want to get Winter out of LA. I want us where I know we’re safe.

  “There’s one more thing, Sir.” Tyner says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Drew Ransom will be here in about an hour. He’s come up from San Diego to personally oversee security. He said if you were up before he got here, to make you aware.”

  Why does this not surprise me?

  “Alright,” I say. “So… you and Spencer have been on awhile. Do you guys get a break, or relieved, or how does it work?”

  Tyner smiles. “We came on around midnight, sir. We’ve only been on four hours. But yes, a relief team will come on at seven.”

  If feels like they’ve been here for days. Then again, I feel like I haven’t slept at all.

  “I need coffee,” I say. “Lots of coffee.”

  * * *

  Checking my computer with a cup of hot coffee steaming beside me, I finally get to see what set Addison off. The paparazzi photographs of Winter and me, shot through the glass in the main room, are nice. The headline is completely contrived, but it gets the point across.

  I wonder if Addison even bothered to read the article before going right off the edge of sanity. As vapid puff-pieces go, it’s kind of sweet. It’s also mostly true, and even reveals an interesting bout of investigative journalism backing it up. The article’s author managed to put together that Winter and I met years ago, when she photographed me for the SEAL calendar.

  In other news, Dylan’s ex-girlfriend is getting roasted alive on social media. Dylan’s fans are rabidly protective of her, and they’re crucifying the poor girl who outed her. Meanwhile, my stock has gone up a few notches. Most of the hate has flipped to love in response to what I said at the press conference.

  I take it all with a grain of salt. These people are as fickle as a feather in the wind.

  “Howdy, Bro,” a familiar and long anticipated voice speaks from behind me.

  I turn and see Ransom standing cross-armed in the doorway of my study, grinning at me like old times.

  “You shit-bird!” I say, coming forward, wrapping him in a tight bear-hug. “You didn’t have to come all this way, but I’m glad you did.”

  “Oh, I did have to come,” Ransom says, shoving me off him. “You’ve got yourself mixed up with some real pieces of work. Somebody’s gotta bail your sorry ass out of the muck. You’re not smart enough to do it on your own. Just like the SEALs, dude. I’m always having to think you out of the holes you dig yourself into.”

  I laugh. He’s so right about that.

  “Seriously though,” Ransom says. “Over the last few days, a lot of loose ends have come together. We need to talk about how to proceed.”

  “Have you had coffee?” I ask. “Anything to eat? Before we get into the nitty-gritty, you need to eat. You look like you’ve lost weight.”

  Ransom laughs, rolling his eyes at me. “I have lost some weight. Full-time desk job. Not as much time for the gym. I don’t get paid by the definition of my six-pack, like you do.”

  I grin at him, leading him toward the kitchen. “Some of us are just lucky like that.”

  “Fuck that,” Ransom observes. “I wouldn’t call your current situation lucky. I’d call it a shit storm of galactic proportions.”

  I feed Ransom, Tyner, and Spencer, while Winter sleeps in. I want her to sleep. She needs it. I checked on her a little while ago and she was snoring like a kitten, with a black and blue bruise spreading across her face like she’s been in the ring with Mike Tyson.

  I want to take more pictures of that thing while it’s in full bloom, so when it goes to court, the judge and jury get to see what Bill Addison did to his own daughter.

  After breakfast Ransom and I go back to my office, so he can walk me through everything he’s learned.

  There are a lot of moving pieces, but they all seem to revolve around an employment agency in downtown LA that specializes in getting immigrants, both inside the country and out, work visas.

  “They look legit on the face but when you did deeper, things get murkier,” Ransom says. “For instance, last year, along with booking a couple thousand flights for people from European and Asian countries, they also booked about five hundred shipping containers from ports in Thailand, Indonesia, Riga, Latvia, and Odessa, Russia.”

  “Shipping containers?” I ask. “You think they’re shipping people?

  Ransom nods. “Looks like a human trafficking operation to me,” he says. “The employment agency works with a lot of diverse companies, but four or five stand out in terms of turnover; three catering companies and two ‘general services’ companies who seem to be going through a lot of personnel and getting paid a lot of money from two specific organizations. The first is Addison Productions. Addison pays these companies millions annually for what’s booked on taxes as services. The second organization is called DSI. No clue what DSI stands for, but there’s a shitload of people and money moving between the employment agency and them. From there, DSI is associated with what looks like about ten different off-shore shell corporations that are nothing more than bank account numbers with no personnel. Those, in turn, handle cashflow from DSI, through their accounts, back to a single account in the Bahamas called WAP Holding Corporation, which is a real estate investment trust corporation that owns property, and stakes in property, all over the world. To put that in context, WAP Holdings has a five to ten percent stake in the ten biggest resorts in Orlando. It owns property all over lower Manhattan, Hawaii, LA, Tokyo, even London and Berlin. It’s everywhere. It’s a multibillion dollar operation, and it’s not paying any taxes to the United States.”

  This is hard to wrap my head around.

  “In essence, what I think is happening,” Ransom says, “is that they’re shipping people in by the thousands annually and selling them into service jobs and the sex trade, then laundering the proceeds through this maze of storefronts and shell companies.”

  This is so much deeper, so much more insidious that I ever imagined.

  “There’s more,” Ransom says. “Completely separate from all this other shit, I found twenty-two legal settlements, all sealed, between the production company and women who have been in Addison’s films. I managed to locate another nine women who never filed, who just quit mid-film, and left the business. They’ve provided statements of what happened between themselves and Addison. Pretty harrowing accounts of sexual assault, attempts at assault, intimidation. All the usual stuff. None of them are willing to come forward unless all of them come forward. They’ve all moved on, built lives for themselves. They don’t see the benefit in putting themselves through the press scrutiny if nothing is going to be done about it.”

  “What if we can convince Keira to go public too?” I ask.

  Ransom shrugs. “I don’t know. It may help. It can’t hurt to try.”

  “And what about Winter’s mother?” I ask. “Anything on her?”

  Ransom nods. “Plenty,” he says. “She’s remarried with a new family. Two kids. She’s terrified of Addison. She wants nothing to do with any of this.”

  “I have something that may move her,” I say. “Get the police report from last night, and I’ll give you copies of the photographs of what Addison did to Winter. If she can look at that and still manage to stay uninvolved, she’s a colder bitch than even her ex-husband.”

  “You spoke to my mother?”

  I fly around in my chair. Ransom turns toward the door. Winter is standing in the doorframe, wearing my pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, her hair a mess, her face a maudlin bruise of purple and blue.

  Ransom looks at her, then at me, then back at her. I introduce them, then Ransom says, “I spoke to your mother briefly. She wasn’t interested in talking to me. She asked me to leave as soon as she understood what I was there about.”

  Winter’s jaw clenches tight. “She has another family? I have brothers and sisters?”

  Ransom nods. “A younger brother. He’s thirteen. And a sister, who’s te
n.”

  Winter nods. I see her eyes darken, starting to pool, going liquid with tears. I’m on my feet as fast as I dare, pulling her close to me. “Your father has scared her,” I say. “What he did to you last night, he did to her with regularity. We’ve got police reports and pictures. Your mom was running for her life when she left him. She didn’t—”

  “She left me with him,” Winter whispers. “She left me there alone.”

  She pulls back, brushing tears away, steadying herself. “I need coffee,” she says, almost stamping her feet in frustration. “And I need to know everything you guys know. Wait for me to get coffee, then I want you to start over, from the beginning.”

  Ransom waits for Winter to leave. “Do you want to show her all this?” he asks, once she’s beyond earshot.

  I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “Better now than later. She needs to know who he is.”

  Winter gets her coffee, then sits down at my desk. Ransom leads her through everything in all its complex and sordid detail. She stops him occasionally to ask questions, but mostly she just takes it in. At the end of it, she asks the only reasonable question remaining.

  “So, what are you going to do with all this?”

  Ransom bites his lip. “That’s where it gets complicated,” he says. “By law, I’m required to report at least some of what’s in the general report to the FBI as well as the IRS.”

  “And what else?” Winter asks.

  “I think it depends on what you want to accomplish,” he says. “If taking apart this syndicate and bringing Addison and his cohorts down is what you want, then the only thing to do is give a copy of the comprehensive report to the FBI, Interpol, the IRS, the Attorney General, as well as multiple press outlets. I’d probably get the Human Rights Campaign Fund involved on the human trafficking front, just to police all the rest. That’s the only way to make sure no one entity quashes the investigation. Checks and balances, as it were.”

  “Can you do all that?” I ask.

  Ransom smiles that old familiar, mischievous smile. “Brother, it would be my highest pleasure to do all that.”

  * * *

  By six in the evening, Winter and I, along with Ransom and a couple of security detail, are headed out of LA toward San Diego. Ransom’s security firm has access to a house near Oneonta Slough, right at the Mexican border. The house is secure, electronically monitored, and impossible to get into or out of without passing through multiple security checks. It’s United States military property leased to the security firm Ransom works for.

  “We use this for sporadic weekend R&R,” Ransom says. “It’s yours for at least a few weeks.”

  The place is standard mid-1980’s construction. Its amenities are few, but it’s comfortable enough, and I take immense solace from the idea that nothing can touch us here.

  Winter walks through the house, straight out to the balcony overlooking a wide sand beach and the dark Pacific Ocean beyond. I see her look up at the sky with wide wonder. I join her on the deck, circling my arm around her small waist.

  “What do you see?” I ask, watching her gaze up at an inky night sky with a thousand stars twinkling overhead.

  “I’ve never seen so many stars,” she whispers. “Look at them all. It’s amazing.”

  It’s darker here than in LA. There’s not so much ground light to obscure the skies above. Still, it’s a far cry from the night sky above Iraq or Syria, where electric lights are few and far between. There, the Milky Way lights up the heavens like Sunset Boulevard or the Las Vegas strip.

  “When we get to Richmond, we’ll take a road trip down into the rural parts of North Carolina,” I say. “There, you’ll see a night sky with no ambient light for a hundred miles in any direction. I’ll show you a star scape worthy of your wonder.”

  I want to show Winter the whole world. I want her to see the buildings and sculptures of Florence, the architecture of Spain, the ruins of Rome and Athens. I would like to take her through the pyramids of Giza and down the Nile to Thebes where we can explore temples and tombs made by kings, queens, and lovers, five thousand years ago.

  “I’d like to see that,” Winter says, pulling me close, nuzzling under my arm. “But first we need to make sure my father gets his day in court, and we have to get us situated in Richmond. And I need to get a good OBGYN.”

  That’s my girl. She’s got her priorities in order.

  Chapter 25

  Winter

  I wonder what Gates will think.

  “It’s got everything you asked for, and then some,” the real estate agent says. “It’s double the square footage.”

  I’m trying to wrap my head around the space I’m in. It’s a 19th century tobacco manufacturing plant that’s three stories tall, not counting the basement garage, which the realtor warns me floods on occasion. The first floor is wide open, ideal for gallery or studio space. The second floor is living space, broken up into apartments, ready to rent. The third floor is a luxury apartment, complete with four bedrooms, five baths, a spacious main room, a beautiful kitchen, an office, and a sitting room. Every room boasts a nice view of either the city or the James River, flowing languidly by, just a few hundred feet away.

  “Based on current market rates, the second-floor apartments generate almost one-hundred-thousand dollars a year in income,” the realtor says. “That’s a tidy income, leaving the third-floor apartment for the owner’s residence.”

  “What about the street level space?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “If you’re willing to have a restaurant under your home, you can make serious income. Other that, it’s dead space. You might be able to lease it for a thousand a month as office space if you up fit it. That would take a sixty or seventy-thousand-dollar investment. In this part of town, I’m not sure it’s worth it, yet.”

  But it would make a spectacular photography studio and art gallery.

  “What’s the price again?” I ask, because all day long, with every property we’ve toured, I can’t believe the numbers she’s given me.

  “Three-twenty-five, financed. Three-ten cash.”

  This space would cost four or five million in LA.

  “Let me show you the roof,” the realtor says. “The owners have done some amazing things up there.”

  The roof is a combination patio entertainment space, solar panel power station, and garden. The garden includes an enclosed greenhouse, with an adjacent raised-beds for vegetables and herbs, complete with rainwater collection and irrigation.

  “The solar panels offset about three fifths of the buildings energy requirements,” the realtor says. “If you upgrade the panels to current specs, you could probably cover ninety percent of energy usage. Maybe more”

  “And what’s the cost of that upgrade?” I ask.

  “Around fifty thousand,” she says. “In solar panels and batteries. Plus, there are tax credits.”

  “What’s the break-even point?”

  “Three years.”

  We’re going to be here three years, at least. We’ve got the cash to do this, plus more coming in. Gates is earning a hundred and fifty grand an episode, times twelve per season, times three seasons. He’s already in talks to do another film or two during hiatus. It would be crazy to let this get away.

  “I have another showing at three o’clock.” The realtor says. “Across town. I’m sorry. I need to go soon.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Put the paperwork together on this and schedule a time on the weekend to show it to my partner.”

  She brightens. “Okay. I will. Is Saturday good?”

  “Perfect,” I say. “After noon. He works late; he’ll want to sleep in.”

  “What does your partner do?” the realtor asks.

  “He’s a serial killer.”

  “Ummm…” The realtor blanches white.

  I laugh, putting my hand to my swelling belly. “I mean, he plays one on TV. He’s got a leading role in a new show here. And I think this place is perfect.”

 
* * *

  “This is perfect,” Gates says, looking out over the expansive view of the river walk, and at all the historic structures surrounding this one. He leans on the rail, peering over the edge to the sidewalk below. “I love it.” He turns back to me, grinning like a happy kid. “Let’s make the offer. Let’s buy it.”

  The realtor smiles, producing a folder full of papers she’s prepared, handing Gates a pen for his signature. He signs the offer to purchase, then hands it to me.

  I laugh. “You want me to sign it too?” I ask. I don’t have three-hundred-thousand dollars. I wouldn’t even have a checking account if it weren’t for Gates. My father cut me off and closed all my accounts. I’m still working on re-establishing everything in my own name.