Flesh Market
Page 1
Flesh Market (Bodies and Souls Book 1)
Kate Lowell
Loose Id LLC (2015)
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Tags: Lgbt, Contemporary, Suspense
Lgbtttt Contemporaryttt Suspensettt
Special Agent Leo Gale is up a creek. A year and a half of deep cover is about to go up in flames. He needs help – something, someone to salvage the operation and save the lives of untold numbers of trafficked teenagers. But he isn’t expecting the partner they send, or his own gut-punch of a response to the man.
Julian worked hard for that FBI Honors Internship. It’s supposed to be a foot in the door. He’d never expected it to catapult him into the middle of a major undercover operation. Yet here he is, sleeping on a filthy mattress and using every trick in the book to avoid torture--and worse. He’s never felt so scared, or so alive, in his entire life, and he’s not sure if it’s the danger, or Leo, that’s making his heart race.
There’s no time to think about it, though. The operation is heating up, and Leo and Julian are running out of time and options. They must find a way to take the traffickers down, before Julian becomes just a set of organs on the flesh market.
Bodies and Souls 1:
FLESH MARKET
Kate Lowell
www.loose-id.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Tracking System
Supply Problems
Pick of the Crop
Hammer Mill
Destination
A Prime Cut
Choice Meat
Inspection
Grade A
Prep Work
Shipping
Tenderization
Lean
Marinade
Service
For Sale
Video
Blue Rare
Delivery
Taste
Display
Technical Difficulties
Lost Opportunity
Sample
The Bill
Point of Sale
The Final Cut
Tear Down
Payment on Account
Clean Up
Break
Mend
Confession
Penance
Home
Holding Pattern
Quantico
Recycled
Change of Direction
Back on the Trail
Loose Id Titles by Kate Lowell
Kate Lowell
Bodies and Souls 1: Flesh Market
Copyright © November 2015 by Kate Lowell
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eISBN 9781682520321
Editor: Raven McKnight
Cover Artist: April Martinez
Published in the United States of America
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning
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Dedication
To anyone who works with abandoned or trafficked kids. I wish we could eliminate it all in one fell swoop, but life is not fiction. Fight the good fight, and make them safe, one child at a time.
Prologue
“Ethan, you should go to bed. Now.” Ethan’s dad stood in his bedroom door, shaking his head in mild disbelief. “I didn’t think you liked chemistry that much.”
“I checked my average today. I need to get it up about two points to keep my scholarship, and chemistry is my rate-determining step.” Ethan grinned, and the two men guffawed at his pun. But his dad—a chemical engineer himself—was probably right. The clock was creeping closer and closer to midnight, and he had an eight o’clock class tomorrow morning. His last one for the year—hooray! “Okay, I’ll shut it down. I think I’ve finally figured it out anyway. Who knew soil samples involved this much chemistry?” To prove his point, he put down his pen and closed his study-time playlist.
Environmental science was his thing. He’d been working on projects to protect wetlands and to clean up polluted land since before his teens. Last year, he’d landed a prime summer job working on estuaries in Florida. The year before, he’d been in Alaska, which was awesome, but scary when he saw all the damage they were doing to the ecosystems up there.
His dad shifted, resting his arm against the door frame. “Good. Don’t want you to fall asleep in the middle of the big celebration.” He had an excited look on his face, almost as if it were him turning twenty and not Ethan.
Oh, man. He was going to be twenty. Big step, leaving behind his teenage years. It shouldn’t feel like such a…thing. After all, he’d graduated high school, gone to college. Lost his virginity—he had to duck his head to hide the smile at that. Yeah, that had been a real milestone. Too bad the guy had turned out to be a dick, in more ways than the obvious one. Still, he’d done it, and it had been awesome, and now Ethan knew he wanted to do it again. A lot.
In two years, he’d have his degree, and then he’d really be able to go to battle against the people who were destroying the world. Ethan had already planned the beginnings of a serious social media campaign to help control carbon dioxide emissions—it was going to be part of his fourth-year thesis. The idea had come to him while he worked in the Everglades last summer. Thinking about that project made him kind of sad. He’d felt like things were just starting to take shape when the summer ended, and he’d had to come home. If the job came up again this year, he’d like to go back, finish what he started. Maybe it would work into something permanent. Assuming he snagged enough grants to support himself.
Ethan stretched and waggled his fingers at his dad. “All right, you can say you’ve done your duty. I’m going to bed.” He got up, and driven by some weird impulse, he walked over and hugged his dad. “Thanks for everything. I love you.”
His dad smiled and hugged him back. “Love you too.” He closed the door behind him with a gentle click, and then Ethan was alone.
He peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it in the general direction of the laundry hamper, missing it completely. Meh, I’ll get it in the morning. He cracked his window open—he couldn’t sleep without a bit of fresh air blowing about, even in the middle of winter. It was technically spring now, exams starting next wee
k, and the air coming in the window had finally given up its frigid edge, though it wasn’t anything anyone would call warm. The street was dead at this time of night. Ragged, dirty piles of snow hid the curbs as the season made a last-ditch effort to hang on. A surprise snowstorm—thanks, global warming—had landed last week, and its slushy remnants were still hanging around.
The only movement was a single car turning down the street. He glanced up the road out of habit and let the curtain fall when the car’s high beams skated across the glass.
“Bedtime, George.” He dropped a sunflower seed into the hamster’s cage and smiled as the little guy raced over to stuff it in his cheeks.
A yawn took him by surprise. Wow, more tired than I realized. He stretched and crawled into bed, checking that his alarm was set before he turned out the light.
The last thing he heard was the soft thump-thump of one of his parents walking across the kitchen downstairs.
Tracking System
Leo stopped at the smoothie bar in the mall’s food court and ordered a green tea with acai and raspberries. He’d just turned thirty-seven, and according to his mother, it was time to start loading up on antioxidants. Head off those destructive free radicals before they got the better of him.
He didn’t care that she thought he was taking her advice—he liked smoothies, even if they didn’t quite fit in with the tough-guy image.
The teenager behind the counter popped a plastic top onto the cup and poked a straw through into the olive-green slurry inside. “Here you go,” she said cheerfully and slid it across the counter.
“Thanks.” He sipped, and stuffed a dollar into her tip cup.
She smiled even more brightly. “Thank you!”
Leo took his cup of mixed yogurt and water-soluble vitamins and wandered down the mall toward the lotto booth. Off to one side, a thin man with lank ashy-blond hair put down the dress shoe he was examining far too closely and drifted along in Leo’s wake. There was another as well that Leo was aware of, his usual tail, but that man was behind him now and out of his peripheral vision.
It used to be that just one would follow him on his trips to the mall or the bookie’s, but today there was a second one.
There was only one logical explanation. Leo hated to believe it, but there was no other choice—he’d screwed up, and now his bosses were suspicious of him. Not his real bosses at the FBI, but his fake bosses in this sex-trafficking ring he had infiltrated.
Leo stepped into line at the lotto booth and waited with feigned patience, sipping on his smoothie as he glanced around to locate his tails.
One of them browsed the shelves of a small store that sold knickknacks and did custom engraving. It took Leo a moment to track down the blond man, but he eventually found him standing at the cash register of the specialty candy store, holding a small brown paper bag. Leo kept an eye on both of them. When there’d only been one, he hadn’t let it bother him. He’d been nearly a year establishing the identity he wore now. The bureau had called in a lot of favors to build his cover. Criminals, federal agents, and police officers had all been involved in some fashion or other. The blinds and double-blinds almost had him convinced that he was Dale Leon. The history of Dale Leon, ex-cop and bully, was rock solid.
They’d learned their lesson after losing the first two agents.
Given how hard it was to infiltrate this crew, he hadn’t been surprised that he was followed every time he left the brothel. If it were him, he’d be following the new guys too until he was sure they were clean, going by what Leo now suspected was the extent of the operation. What had surprised him was that they had someone they trusted enough to use. Though he supposed once you made it past the first hurdle, you were part of the gang. Apparently Leo was about to do a face-plant instead of moving on to the next stage of the operation.
He shrugged his shoulders to check the lay of his gun under his long-tailed leather jacket and pretended to scratch his neck so he could casually loosen it in its holster. Just in case.
He’d been working security at an underground poker game when a man in a business suit approached him, offering some under-the-radar security work at a very attractive rate of pay. Leo had accepted, after a reasonable display of suspicion so he didn’t look too eager or too dumb or too much like a cop. The first tail had shown up right after.
Step one of the operation—complete. Success, but also very real and, to some degree, unexpected danger. The moment he said yes, Leo’s cover went so deep he was almost out of contact with his handlers.
Only one person ahead of him now. Leo could see the clerk clearly, though final identification would have to wait until he was at the counter. He checked his back pocket but didn’t pull out his wallet, keeping his hands free just in case one of his tails started something and he had to run. Or fight. They were a paranoid bunch, that was for sure. Everything was locked down to the point that the surveillance struck him as overkill. The question of the day, of course, was whether it was paranoia, or—if the theory tentatively advanced by the powers that be was right—were they scoping him out for a possible advancement? Or both?
He doubted it mattered now—it wasn’t likely that two spies was a sign of increased confidence in him. Not for the first time, he regretted the loss of Dale Leon’s cell phone on the day he’d started working for the ring.
The one they’d given him in return was bugged. Running in the background of the operating system was a tiny app that recorded everything going in and out of the phone. Calls, texts, video messages—everything. It was all packaged up and sent off to some random phone number the IT guys were still trying to pin down. The thing was well hidden too—so well hidden he’d looked at it twice and never recognized it, until he’d woken one night in his seedy rooming-house bed with the knowledge shining like a warning beacon in his mind. Given his background in cyber-security, that was saying something.
And if he’d nearly missed that one, there might be something else even better hidden, which meant he didn’t dare just create a work-around to slip past the logging app. Even carrying on conversations where the mike on the phone could pick them up was a risk he couldn’t afford to take. Which meant that using the company phone to keep his supervisors updated was out of the question.
His backup means of communication—drops to other undercover agents, calls to his “ex-wife”—became the primary contact. It was slow and uncertain and left Leo on much shakier ground than he really liked.
It was a game of chess played on a board he could only see part of, and the adrenaline rush was incredible. They did come up with one contact that he could use with this phone. His “ex-wife”—in reality, another FBI agent who had taken part in creating his cover—could take calls from him. Their calls were carried on in an ad-hoc code, like verbal charades, that barely got half the information across and made them only marginally useful.
The real use for the ex-wife was as a hot-switch, in case something happened that couldn’t wait for his biweekly drop at the lotto booth or for the dogs to be running. If he hit the jackpot, he’d call her to tell her he had “that thing for the kids that she was really looking for,” and the FBI would be there within an hour. If he needed out, he was to ask about his ex-mother-in-law’s gout, and the Hostage Rescue Team would mobilize.
Leo’d been on the inside in this part of the trafficking ring for almost six months, playing doorman and security in two separate brothels in two different cities, both filled with kids. All of whom looked like they should still have been in high school.
The kids came and went, moved around for “freshness” on some schedule Leo hadn’t quite pinned down yet. But over time, listening to conversations, asking a few casual questions, Leo had become convinced it was actually a front for something else, something more serious. He’d kept track of the comings and goings and listened when the kids talked. There were at least four different brothels that he had an address for—two here in DC, one in New York, another in LA. Several others he could plac
e in a specific city but didn’t have an actual address for. A week into the operation, he’d started recording which ones the kids came from and which ones they went to.
And which other victims they saw in each separate location.
He still wasn’t sure what had made him look more closely into that. A lot of what he was doing on this job was instinct—nothing in his classes at Quantico had prepared him for something of this magnitude. But the careful notes he took in his head and then passed on to the analysts back at the Washington office had borne fruit—there was a pattern of disappearances. Most of the missing hadn’t adapted well to working in a brothel; they fought, or cried all the time. But some of them stood out, both gorgeous and obedient, which didn’t make any sense at all. He wanted to know where they were going. All of them.
The blond got into line behind him. Fuck.
Six months in close contact with men running an interstate trafficking ring, it was a guarantee that he’d screw up at some point, say something that raised suspicions, know something he shouldn’t have known. It could hardly be avoided, not when he spent so much time with them; he’d practically lived at the two brothels they had him working in, seeing his skeevy rooming house only to sleep. Realistically, he hadn’t expected the lie to last, but its lifespan had been even shorter than he’d feared.
The biggest problem lay in some of the fringe benefits of his job. The men working the brothels had free choice of the young men and women working there as long as no customers wanted them. Leo, as an FBI agent, was caught in the gears of the legislation limiting FBI powers. It was right in the regulations that he couldn’t initiate illegal activity or do or say something that would encourage someone to engage in criminal activities. Sure, there were exceptions and loopholes in everything, but damned if he could figure out which ones would apply here.
Some agents would have thrown caution to the wind, figuring it was a small evil to destroy a greater one, and risked the possibility of the case being thrown out in court because of inappropriate conduct. Leo might have picked one of the victims and let them in on the secret, except most were so worked over, so beat down, he couldn’t trust them not to give him away. Weighed against the risk of wasting a year and half of his life, the two agents who had tried to infiltrate the ring and had disappeared, and the thought of leaving these kids trapped in this nightmare for another year, he didn’t dare do anything but toe the line with a laser-beam focus.