The Trafficked Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be a bit kind to yourself. You have to let it go now. Time will heal, son.’
    Mann looked at his mother and searched her eyes.
    ‘I will never let it go, Mum. In my own way I got justice for Helen, and I will get it for father. I will find out who killed him and I will make them pay.’
    ‘Your father made enemies. It killed him. We can’t keep raking up the past.’
    ‘And I cannot forget it…the sight of my father being executed will never leave me. I can see it so clearly. It is branded on my mind’s eye, on my subconscious, in vivid detail. There is no forgetting for me until I get it explained. I want to find out why his death was ordered and I want to get the man who ordered it.’
    Molly was staring at him, horrified. Mann felt instant remorse. He had not meant to worry her. He reassured her with a smile and stroked Ginger, who purred in her arms.
    ‘I never knew that about Dad—that he hated animals.’
    She looked at him and met his eyes with her piercing grey stare.
    ‘There was a lot you never knew about your father.’

9
     
    ‘What is that fucking awful smell?’
    The Teacher sat back in his chair and waited for an answer. Reese sniggered.
    The Colonel paused, beer bottle to his mouth. ‘What smell?’ He lifted his chin and sniffed the air from right to left.
    ‘The all-prevailing smell of shit in this place.’
    Reese giggled nervously. ‘You get used to it, bro.’
    ‘Don’t you smell it, Colonel, or is your nose buggered from all that speed you shove up it?’
    Reese and Brandon looked anxious. It wasn’t often they saw their boss at the butt of someone else’s jibes. He wasn’t the best at taking a joke. But then, he didn’t usually have to suck up to anyone. His word was the law in Angeles. He owned five of the big clubs there: Hot Lips, Lolita’s, Lipstick, The Honey Pot and Bibidolls. They were the best clubs in Angeles with the youngest, prettiest girls—handpicked by him. He also owned several bars and hotels. The Bordello was one of them, the Tequila Station another. The Colonel set his beer carefully down and looked at the Teacher. He smiled.
    ‘I thought the same when I first got here. I thought “what a shit-hole”. Now I think “what a gold mine”. The smell of shit and the smell of money have become one and the same for me.’
    ‘Just as well, because this place is an open sewer.’ The Teacher looked about him in disgust. ‘Literally…’ He was referring to the foul running water that ran the length of the street and followed a course beside the cracked and uneven pavement.
    The Teacher gave up the conversation and sat back and drank from his beer bottle. There was too much noise to talk. Opposite the Bordello the mosquito drivers with their noisy motorbikes with sidecars, were trying to impress the girls who stood outside Bibidolls in their bikinis. They were competing to see who could rev their machine the loudest—the night was young and they were bored. They belched fumes and beeped at one another whilst the girls giggled at them—although both sides knew it would not end in a coupling. The boys didn’t make enough money and the girls didn’t give it away for free. The girls’ sole aim in life was to marry a foreigner and get off the Fields. They were Guest Relations Officers, GROs. Their job was to entertain the tourists on Fields Avenue. Besides their yellow plastic bikinis they wore permits that hung long around their tanned necks and settled just below their pert cleavages—permits that had their photos and stated they were legally permitted to work in the clubs and that they were eighteen and over. Most of them weren’t; their documents were forged. The girls swished back their hairand pushed their chests forward as they bantered with the whorists as they passed by.
    Upstairs in the Bordello there were no GROs. This point on Fields Avenue was the boundary. Here marked the beginning of the descent into unlicensed bars and twenty-four-hour hostess