“So…what about the sex trafficking? Did you ever get close to that?”
Levy grabs my hand and holds it to his chest. “Tell us.”
I nod, then hold up my hand before I’m peppered with a ton of questions. “First, adult trafficking and child trafficking are two different animals, and I was never able to make my way into the child organizations. I’d rather not go over the choices I had to make, but it’s enough to say that the mechanisms of taking people—lying, bait and switch, kidnapping—remain the same. And I may have taken down the sex-trafficking assholes with a bit more heat if I’m honest.”
My sweet Levy wraps his arms around me and squeezes tight. “I can’t believe you did that. No wonder you were so upset about Ant.”
Parker pats my arm solemnly. “I can see why Anders likes you—you’re as crazy as he is.”
I laugh. “No one’s as crazy as Anders.”
Levy puts his head on my shoulder and anchors himself to my side. “What else did you learn from all of that?”
I nose through his hair, accepting his sweet support, thinking about how to word it.
Finally, I answer, “Getting humanity to put people before profits will take some time and some politicians aging out, frankly. You’ve got companies and people willing to use human beings who have been enslaved and trafficked, and in my opinion, they need to be named and shamed.”
Parker nods along. “We’ve got people working on the systemic issues, but the companies are a little trickier because they can hide behind third-party vendors and layers of corporate policy and say they didn’t know. But we go after the crime syndicates who deliver people to these organizations.”
I shake my head. “You’re definitely missing the lowest layer. The kidnappers are people wanting to get into these syndicates and gangs by doing their dirty work for them. I went after those who put their actual hands on people, the ones collecting bounties from these crooked criminal organizations.”
“How did you get away with killing so many people?”
“You already know my nickname. I was very quiet and would hit an entire neighborhood at once, taking out two or three pieces of shit, one right after the other. A quick slash to the neck, and then I’d disappear.”
“You never tried to hide the fact you were murdering these people?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t have time for elaborate coverups, and I preferred to work alone.”
“But you did have help from time to time, right?”
“Sure. Sometimes the people I’d help wanted to get involved. I didn’t really want a sidekick, so I’d train them to do it independently.”
“I’m taking it you didn’t appreciate having a nickname applied to you.”
“It was good and bad for business. Good, because I remained unidentified. It would have been bad had anyone ever connected my nickname to a picture of me. As far as I know, yours is the only organization that has positively identified me.”
“How did you search for Ant then?”
“I carried his picture with me. I also got a lot of information out of the people I hurt. Nobody ever said they recognized him, which didn’t surprise me, but they would often give up the details I needed to damage their organizations a little further upstream. I like to think I made it incredibly expensive to be in the trafficking business in Mexico, Central America, and South America.”
“Did you know there’s a rumor going around that you’re in Southeast Asia now?”
I grin. “A good friend of mine spread it around for me, figured we would split the focus. He liked my style and started copying it.”
“For your work to have that kind of impact, you had to go through thousands of individual operators.”
“Perhaps not thousands. At some point, I realized one gruesome death would discourage the other kidnappers from continuing. Leaving out one man’s entrails influenced hundreds of his low-life colleagues.”
She snorts. “I like the way you think. As I understand it, Charlie is trying to avoid having to kill the actual predators because his focus is on the people. You strike me as somebody who likes it both ways.”
“I love helping people walk out of places like that. Going into some of these horrible situations with no trace of Ant, though…I found the killing helped balance things out. It was awful but necessary.”
Levy smiles sadly. “What you’re saying is the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”
I nod. “True. I, however, have been doing this for a decade and have made many, many mistakes he hasn’t had the chance to make yet. I’m not lying when I say I got lucky. I don’t want his survival based on luck.”
“What was your biggest mistake?” Parker asks. Her curiosity is authentic. I can tell she’s not trying to poke the bear but genuinely looking for a better process.
