Inches Closer

I got the feeling Danny was coming around with me being with Elizabeth. He finished the studio I started and business was booming with local merchants needing advertisements for the summer season. He got a new laptop with a webcam for his models to have thirty minute appointments with customers in a specially made bedroom set that took phone sex to a new level. I set up the laptop with a twenty-inch screen and taught the ten selected models to use the program. Naturally, Elizabeth was a model and I had to listen to her fake orgasms through the plywood walls. Danny had me record those appointments too to use in advertisement videos and previews to upcoming films. Offers of dates came with the territory and they were all rejected. Dates would only come in the VIP rooms at strip clubs they worked at. He also replaced his screen t-shirt printer with a digital t-shirt printer to make better shirts for concerts. His poster printer broke down and quickly replaced it to fulfill back orders for a local boutique. A favorite was a salamander holding a pina colada. One bakery needed new posters to advertise their wedding cakes and selected Elizabeth and her friend Daisy to model as brides. Afterwards, Danny had them model in white lingerie with their bouquets and veils for his website. Daisy was a crew member’s girlfriend who was a dancer at the club and cut drugs for Danny. A local designer named Carlo Luigi who created the popular salamander shirt wanted to put on a fashion show in the local park. Danny quickly found models for it and took all the pictures for the designer to use. My Elizabeth strutted her stuff in various dresses, shorts, and swimsuits. I sat in the audience and applauded. The after-party was fun with Danny approving our relationship as we drank champagne. I came to suspect this change came about because he was making plans for me. I was invited to the Saturday night party in the apartment. A few nights after raves in a different warehouse Elizabeth slept over in my hotel room to eat breakfast with me. We celebrated Danny’s twenty-third birthday at the strip club. Elizabeth gave me a gold loop to give him and he put it in his eyebrow. Elizabeth danced for us and only us in the VIP room. I think I got a spiked drink when I woke up in on Elizabeth’s sofa bed without memory of how I got there. Danny was in his room with two women, one was Daisy and the other was Desiree. Cameron was eating cereal at the kitchen table. I said good morning to him and checked the fridge for food. It contained mostly beer and leftover pizza. I let the others have pizza for breakfast. I took Cameron down the street to get donuts and came back with a dozen. We also got bread, eggs, syrup, butter, and milk to make French toast. Cameron never heard of French toast. He rather enjoyed it. Danny and Elizabeth enjoyed it too. They remember eating French toast sticks at school lunch a few times.

I next attended Cameron’s First Communion and gave him a book of Bible stories. I’m sure Danny thought I was strange staying with one woman, but then his mother had a revolving door of men so couldn’t expect him to know what falling in love with one person was like. I asked about Mickey’s father since Francie didn’t have boyfriends around. Elizabeth said he was in jail and she is still married to him. He killed someone while robbing a bank so serving life in prison. Mickey was seven years old when he was arrested. Francie borrowed money from The Don to start her beauty shop to support her son. Francie writes to her husband and sends pictures of his grandson, but he can’t have visitors or very many phone calls. Francie had sent him pictures of Mickey’s funeral. I quit my job as busboy and began my porn editing career. I walked into Mickey’s Studio in a former retail store. The front was set up for family photographs. A student of the local community college took the family photographs. She was quite chatty and made good coffee in the break room. Danny would take the pictures when she was taking classes. The back room had two women making posters and t-shirts. Both of them were on welfare and worked in retail stores part-time. Their kids were in school and were earning extra money off the books. Orders usually weren’t that big and they left when the work was done because Danny paid by the item made. Then I walked into the large storage room I helped build into hotel room and strip club sets. I was set up in an office with a laptop and given the keys to the outside doors. Danny’s office was next to mine. I sat at a computer all day adding music and editing takes to upload his movies onto the internet. I was paid by the hour. Danny had almost twenty websites for his merchandise including posters and calendars. He had some print shop make his calendars since they were a once a year thing. His sole advertiser on his websites was The Don’s strip clubs where most of the models came from. Elizabeth’s stage name was Destiny. I also helped in the studios. We held cameras for his livestream shows of couples on a stage twice a week. The audience’s favorite was the strip club stage. The youngest performers were twelve and girlfriends of his newly jumped in fourteen-year-old gang members who sold drugs for him. They also came to practice their dancing for his parties and raves. He paid these dancers well enough for them to keep coming back. He had some films printed on DVDs and pictures on paper to sell to porn shops that also sold his calendars and posters. I created some of the DVDs and mailed them to subscribers. I secretly printed one of Elizabeth’s pictures of her as a bride and taped it up on my wall.

I found one model posing for Danny didn’t speak English as she was filling out the release to publish her photos and movies. I remembered her dancing with Danny at the raves. She spoke in Spanish and was happy to meet someone with a Spanish ex-wife. Danny knew a little Spanish, but they mostly spoke in Latin. I explained the release form allowed Danny to put out her photos and films in the mass media. If she didn’t sign it, then they were forbidden from using it outside the studio. She signed her name and asked when she got paid. She worked for The Don’s strip club as the dancer Esperanza and wanted her freedom they promised when she paid her travel expenses. The other girls said Danny paid well and wanted out of debt as quickly as possible, she hated the sex industry. I asked how she got into it. Constanza was born in Columbia in a village along a river near the city Arauca. Her family raised cattle and nearby was a coffee farm where many people worked. She left home to be a maid to get raped by her employer who sent her to live in a brothel. She was beaten, drugged, and starved in that rathole until her keepers sent her to work in America. She and a few other girls were sold to the American strip club manager. There the girls were very nice and didn’t seem to act like prisoners. She gets paychecks, a card to show any local clinic for the club to pay the medical expenses, and gave her an apartment to live in. She shares her three-bedroom apartment with five other girls. The girls told her how to make extra money to pay off her debt faster and encouraged her to take English classes for when she does get free. She started her English classes a month ago to learn the alphabet, numbers, and colors. She couldn’t form a full sentence yet. She joined them at Danny’s raves and parties to earn good money in tips she got to keep ninety percent of. They told her she had to pay off her travel expenses before she could leave her job. They take her apartment rent and travel expenses out of her paychecks. She assured me they gave her enough for food and proudly declared she spent her first paycheck on a Shakira CD. She would like to open her own restaurant making Columbian food she grew up with.

I gave her the card of the lawyer I was told to contact if I got arrested. I explained if she was forced to come here, then she was entitled to a real visa by law. She eagerly left and I told Danny that I saw the way he looked at her so just take the girl out on a date. I explained her predicament and he could be her hero if he wanted her that bad. I left him to his thoughts. Two days later he took her to a pizzeria and learned she loved the Columbian singer Shakira whose first English album came out last year. He promised to get tickets to one of her concerts. Esperanza’s predicament made the local news and she sat through an interview with her lawyer. The warehouse where illegal workers were held was raided and strip club manager asserted to the reporter he didn’t know she was illegal when given papers by the smugglers. To his knowledge, he met a group of dancers at a hotel presented by a talent agent from Columbia and he chose which dancers he wanted. He holds nobody prisoner and the accountant pays everyone after withholding health coverage, housing, and recovery of travel expenses. Constanza announced she moved out of the apartment and paid off her travel expenses with help from her American friends. With her real visa, she has been sponsored in a job as a cook at a restaurant and looking forward to it. We all went to see The Fast and the Furious at the movie theater to celebrate. I looked forward to what Constanza would add to the menu at Mr. Lucci’s café bar. I saw her again visiting Elizabeth in their apartment. She was quite happy sleeping in Danny’s bed and teaching him Columbian food cuisine. I spent Saturday night in the apartment and walked with Francie to the cathedral in the morning. Constanza stayed with Francie during party night and stopped attending the raves. She was happy working at Mr. Lucci’s and coming home to Danny. Cameron liked her a lot and she taught him to speak Spanish as she learned English. She soon wanted to return home to Columbia and see her family. Danny took her to Columbia and brought back cocaine in the wine cases.

As summer came around and the studio business was hectic with lingerie models for autumn advertisements, Elizabeth brought me to a party in the new cutting room in an office next to the studio. I was sure it was more than a heroin cutting room, but said nothing. I drank beer from the bottle slowly. Suddenly out of the blue, The Don dropped by in his Armani suit, gold rings, and reeking of cologne. I had to explain no more cage fighting since my rib fractures mostly have healed. He asked if I knew anyone who needed money and possibly take a fall. I said The Pirate would, he needed money for a new car. They got together and I was next to the cage with Elizabeth as the fight began. In the fourth round, my guy tore a ligament in his shoulder (or so he said) and lost the fight. We both walked away rich men and I flew us to Atlantic City. I mentioned during my bedrest that I flew private planes and we chartered one for the weekend. I asked her about getting a new tattoo. I thought it was time to heal from my ex. Elizabeth knew the right place in the neighborhood. In the casino hotel room, I asked how she met all her friends. She, Danny, and Mickey had mothers who were friends so she knew them since birth. Danny and her lived on the same floor of their apartment building and walked to school with the other children of the building. Mickey lived across the street and she was taken to Francie’s beauty shop by her grandmother. She had been best friends with Danny since preschool, even though he was two years older. She fell in love with Mickey who was five years older than her who took care of her like a sister. She explained once meeting Mickey while Danny and her were looking in garbage cans for food and Mickey came by with his friends. This was after her grandmother died and her mother was too strung out to cook anything that day. The boys laughed at us and went in a door. When they came out, they split up different ways. Mickey told us to follow him and we ended up at the back of a bakery. They toss the unsold bread loaves so we got a few loaves of Italian bread to take home.

He taught us to be the look out when he shoplifted and got a share from the fencer Nico who was eight years older than Mickey. I asked if this was Danny’s enforcer Nico. She said he was. I thought Danny at age eighteen a little young to be a gang ringleader when Mickey was killed. She answered Danny shot a member who disapproved and then appointed Nico as his second in command to quickly gain approval. Nico graduated fencing and got into the drug trafficker under Mickey’s friend Toro. When Toro was hauled off the jail, Nico took over his business and used Mickey’s business as a front. When Mickey was killed, Danny took over and made Nico his partner as second in command/enforcer. Danny is boss of the block because he is the front man. For Nico to be boss, he would have to get his own buildings. I asked what happened to Toro. She said he was found a prison room beaten to death and nobody knows what happened. The coroner said his lungs filled up with blood to suffocate him. I asked about her relationship with my former boss since her and the kids spend holidays with his family. She replied Mr. Lucci was the only one kind enough to give them free meals, since he knew her grandmother and couldn’t bear to see her starve. He is like the grandfather she never had. I kissed her and assured her that I also could not bear to see her suffer. When we got back, she took me to a shop and I asked for a rose tattoo with Consuelo swirled into a stem on my upper arm. She would like that. Then Elizabeth asked if I would put her on a tattoo someday. I said that would depend on what happened between us. We only known each other for six months so the future is hard to see. After being married and divorced, I’m cautious about falling in love so fast. She understood.

After making her friends rich from the fixed fight, I started in on the drug trade in the cutting room. I paid prescription buyers for their pills and sold Danny’s forged prescriptions. Soon it was Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday. I joked how she would be legal to buy her own booze if she ever had a real driver’s license. I bought her a gold and black pearl ring. They had a party at The Blue Moon and another party in the cutting room with her gang. I spent the night in her sofa after the party ended at sunrise. I was with Danny in the cutting room when he sold guns out to fellow criminals who looked a little foreign. I thought we may have reached our terrorist target. The guns ended up being used in a robbery in another neighborhood and homemade bomb materials were found when my section team tracked them down. Business continued gathering information on our targets. They didn’t seem to have much of a connection to terrorists other than being gun suppliers and loaning them money. The foreign immigrants learned quickly to pay back the American loan sharks. I scared a few borrowers just by standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette outside their front stores. I explained to the debtors a small payment would be better than no payment. I punched a few debtors and maybe fractured a few bones, but didn’t kill anyone. Nico would be the one to kill them if necessary. We turned a few foreigners into prescription buyers to help pay off their debt. Unfortunately, one of the buyers went to the same pharmacy twice in one day to get arrested for phony prescriptions in their car. I was worried the buyer would turn on me and I was prepared to have my cover blown to pieces. I laid low for a while in the secret hiding place Elizabeth showed me. Danny was questioned about the office next door and he pleaded ignorance of what happened next to his studio. The lawyer of The Don was good, but not good enough to keep the prescription buyer from being deported back to Egypt. He quickly found another cutting room when I stopped hiding. His rave warehouse was raided too so we went on the hunt for a new rave room.

Soon Danny had a party in his new cutting room inside the back room of a front store. A grocery store owner owed him money so he paid by allowing his men in a back office to cut their drugs. The strippers who came to cut had it down to an art. Danny made them walk around in lace lingerie and face masks to keep them from stealing. Soon the drug dealers arrived to pick up their deliveries to the front stores and special deliveries to customers. I went along with Riley, who fenced my laptop, on special deliveries to learn the customers in the two project buildings. His girlfriend lived there and had a crying baby boy with her. I thought the baby sounded hungry, but his mother was concerned with preparing her smoke. Riley said there was milk in the cupboard. I opened the cupboard door and found a rat. I jumped in surprise and Riley told me to stand aside. He shot the rat and dropped it down the garbage shoot. I fed the baby boy and set him down for a nap. Our last stop was the strip club where Elizabeth worked. We walked in the VIP room where there are no cameras and a few dancers gave us lap dances. We made our deliveries and went on our way. To celebrate the new cutting room, we drank beer from the grocery cooler and Elizabeth cooked in the break room microwave some chow mein for us. Someone made a crack on her being a housewife to the gang and she turned around to shoot him in the shoulder. He also found a new place for his crystal meth lab, an abandoned department store that made a good new rave place. We built a new stage, dancing cages, peep show stalls, balcony, and bar. We went shopping for liquors for the bar. Danny mixed his drinks into the bottles so the bartenders that were underage just had to pour them out of the bottle and add ice or lemon slices.

I woke up on her sofa bed in the morning. I stayed in the apartment watching TV with Cameron. We played some video games and then got ready to go to a rave. Danny convinced Constanza to dance in the balcony with him. I remained on the ground floor selling ecstasy pills while Elizabeth danced in a cage for Grand Opening. When I ran out of pills, I took my turn as collector for the Peep Show and chased people out of the stalls when the shows were over. I heard the DJ announce a treat for the Grand Opening, the topless dancers would remove their hotpants the rest of the night if he collected a hundred dollars in the jars on the stage by midnight. Danny made a fortune that night and the audience got their striptease from the dancers. Thereafter, the challenge was presented at every rave. Danny more cautious about his raves that keep getting raided, we just stay for the first two hours and left. The exception was celebrations where we stayed all night. Working my editing job, I discovered Danny saved everything he and Mickey ever recorded. I found some videos of an underage Elizabeth still available for viewing. I made some copies of my own of the underage videos and photos to mail a box full of external hard drives to my boss’s office. Naturally, I included the websites and access codes to view the subscribers on a piece of hotel stationary. Danny had no argument against me backing up his system. All his of stuff was on the internet so he wasn’t worried about losing anything on his computer until he met me. My undercover friend and I bugged every place we went when nobody was around. But, most of my day was adding music to videos. I learned the business began ten years when their friend Mickey got into trouble with the law. To make money to help out his mother, he took photographs around the city to sell. This led to strippers posing for him to help promote themselves in the want ads. Stripping for profit is legal, just the sex that can come with it is not. I learned their Chinese partners import heroin from Afghanistan and Danny’s men import meth from Mexico.

Danny confided that Elizabeth’s mother Dinah discovered her customer was teaching Elizabeth hand jobs while she was sleeping. She demanded money for Elizabeth’s services and once an offer came for Elizabeth to lose her virginity to a customer, Mickey was furious and poisoned her fix. He set the whole thing up so Elizabeth was with Danny playing video games at his apartment down the hall when it happened. What he didn’t plan on was a customer being present when he arrived with his usual delivery. He stabbed the guy in the living room while Dinah was in the bedroom getting her fix. He came over covered in blood from his first murder at age fifteen and called his friend Toro to help him cause the plan went awry. Danny was the look out while Mickey and Toro disposed of the customer down the garbage shoot. The garbage collectors found the body and called the police. Knowing of the death of Dinah from an overdose at the same time, the police put the pieces together. The police detective told Mickey he shouldn’t have used a bed sheet from the prostitute’s bed to dispose of the body. Mickey relayed his sob story of Elizabeth about to be sold into prostitution and the detective assured him of a deal where he got probation for two years. He got the camera from the Bishop trying to steer him in a legal profession. Francie took Elizabeth into her home and once Danny’s mother Rachel died of an overdose (not on purpose this time) a year later he lived in the apartment too. That would explain a lot. I didn’t tell him that Mr. Lucci said his mother was killed by her boyfriend, it seemed rude at the time. The three became very close, just like their mothers. Danny took over Mickey’s business when he was killed in a bar fight since he was the underboss of Mickey so to speak. Elizabeth shot the man who killed the twenty-one-year old porn director by lying in wait for him to come out of a bar and confronted him on the sidewalk with Mickey’s gun. She was sixteen at her first murder and earned the name The Spider. I told him Elizabeth had said he shot someone who disagreed with his takeover. He smirked and assured me it was not his first murder. He killed someone at age fifteen who had robbed Mr. Lucci and broke his jaw. It was someone from the neighboring gang territory a few blocks away. They put the word out and a bartender informed The Don’s men of someone bragging about robbing and beating up an old man outside a bar. Mickey gave him the gun to shoot the braggart and said he would his underboss if he succeeded. Nico drove the car when Danny shot the named culprit to affirm he actually succeeded.

Naturally I had to ask why Danny was called The Crow. He refused to answer, but Elizabeth told me it was because he murdered the men who gang-raped his girlfriend at a party. She was pregnant with Danny’s child and had a miscarriage after the rape. Danny got wind from a waiter who overheard of the culprits bragging about their crime to their friends. In the darkness, he waited for revenge and took it violently. His friends nicknamed him after the character who avenges his love’s death by killing her killers. He was seventeen and adopted Cameron as his son because of it. I asked what happened to the girl. Elizabeth said she fell asleep at a party a year ago and never woke up. She moved in and Cameron accepted her as his new mother. Then got them in trouble after the party that made them move his cutting room into an abandoned factory. Cameron received the belt for that and got sent over to Francie’s when they have parties. The parties were all the same with underage girls dancing on tables and providing services in the bedrooms when someone paid Danny for it. People were smoking from drug bongs, snorting powder on mirrors, and injecting in the bathroom. I slowly drank a beer from a bottle and spent time with Elizabeth in a closet.

I was told the junkie man who lived here after he was injured at a construction job took Danny’s dope for the pain. Soon he found a woman with a three-month-old baby boy sleeping in the basement and they moved in with him. They used baby formula to cut the dope so there was plenty for the baby to drink. They didn’t know who the father was. Then the man overdosed and Danny didn’t want to give up the apartment so he stole his identity and disability checks. They dumped the man in the river so nobody would find him. Danny said he sunk like a rock. Danny also took over the girlfriend who ended up getting raped during a party of his and then miscarried his baby. When she overdosed last year, she went into the river too and Elizabeth stole her identity. The junkie girlfriend once let Elizabeth take Cameron over for preschool registration so she could sleep. They wore disguises so the nuns wouldn’t recognize them. Putting him in Kindergarten at the public school was easier and nobody recognized them. The plan only went awry when the kid blabbed about their parties to his Sunday School teacher. The Bishop pounded on the door and demanded to know what was going on. Elizabeth imitated how the Bishop asserted how he knew the pair since their baptism so do not lie to him. He ordered the cutting in the apartment to stop and protect the kid from the parties. His concern was more for the welfare of the child than their illegal activities. He would pray for them, but what goes around comes around. The kid walked to Kindergarten with the other apartment children and played with them after school. During the summer, he plays with the neighbors, with Little Mickey, and at the beauty shop.