Moonstruck (Necessary Evils Book 3) by Onley James

Author:Onley James [James, Onley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Jericho couldn’t stop thinking about Bryan’s words. Was he just full of shit? He couldn’t be. Dying people didn’t lie, especially not to a guy with a drill in his hand. But that didn’t mean that Bryan hadn’t fallen victim to whatever story these people circulated to keep them off the cops’ radar. Keeping people too afraid to talk was just good business.

Jericho knew, deep down, that the most obvious explanation was that Carlos had trafficked Mercy, that he’d turned her into a junkie so she was more susceptible to his seduction, easier to manipulate, easier to lure away from her family. It wasn’t a unique story in their neighborhood. It wasn’t a unique story anywhere.

People had this idea that human trafficking was something that took place in third world countries. They thought of women and children packed into shipping containers, like something out of a crime show. They imagined the bad guys being far removed from their perfectly curated lives.

But the truth was, most often, the girls being trafficked didn’t even know it. They thought their pimps were their boyfriends, they thought they loved them because that was what they were told. If you loved me, you’d sleep with this guy. It’s just one time. We need the money. Don’t be selfish.

Jericho had seen it hundreds of times. Parents coming to him, distraught, because their daughters had been groomed by some much older gangbanger to believe they were Bonnie and Clyde. His stomach churned at the thought of his baby sister falling prey to some slick talking predator. But it was the most likely scenario.

Pimps could sell one girl or child thirty times a day for years without ever having to worry about restocking inventory. What enterprising criminal would turn that down? Even the simplest of gangbangers understood supply and demand. And that was all any girl ever was to them. Product.

He slammed his hand down on the steering wheel, hoping the impact would drag his thoughts away from falling down a rabbit hole of what could have happened to lead to his sister winding up in the river, missing a kidney.

His phone vibrated on the seat beside him, snagging his attention. Atticus.

He glanced in the rearview mirror to the truck tailing him. Atticus was only a vague outline on the darkened two-lane highway. “Yeah?”

There was a slight pause before Atticus hesitantly asked, “You good?”

Jericho sighed. No, of course, he wasn’t. But that wasn’t Atticus’s fault. “I just keep running over what Bryan said. None of this shit makes any sense.”

“It sounds like a story to me. Some kind of urban legend. It’s a good idea. Make up some big, bad boogeyman to keep people from looking too deep into shit, to keep them from talking to the cops. Mafia, maybe?”

The mob certainly had the pull to intimidate the neighborhood. The Italians didn’t run out of his neighborhood, but that didn’t mean they didn’t poach girls from there. Jericho had no idea where Mercy had ended up before being dumped.

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