ShoaKi Girl 14: The Cocaine Factory

Part 3: Lois Starts to Work

Back in Dallas, Lois debated quitting her bounty hunting job. She went in to see Mr. Peterson, who hit the roof, figuratively.

“What the hell you mean, you’re quitting?” he screamed. “Because of you I hired two more tracers, and they’re neither one good enough to bring in those people. I hired them for their tracking abilities, not their size.”  Peterson waved his arms, getting red in the face. “And all those contracts I signed with the other bail bondsmen?  I’ll go broke.  I need you, Lois.  I won’t be able to find anyone to replace you.”

“Well, maybe I can work when I can, like part-time,” she finally agreed, feeling sorry for him. “But when I have to take off, I have to take off, no questions asked.”

Her new career didn’t look to be full-time, and probably nothing at all until things got going. Jones said he still had to hire more people and set things up before they could begin.

“I guess that’ll have’ta do, but I’ll have’ta cut down, and maybe let Tom go.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Peterson, but I can’t get out of my new commitment,” Lois told him.  She thought, it’s his own fault for getting himself in this position.

Jones had implied that it might be months before she heard from him. So what?  She already had the money. Why not go shopping?

*****

Igor Milovich had the world by the tail. In a few months he would shock it. His mafia backers, combined with his new invention, would take over the world’s cocaine market.

Igor had discovered a way to turn cabbage into cocaine. It was such a simple process he was astounded nobody had discovered it ages before. Needing financing, Igor had gone from his home in Yugoslavia to Italy, then to a lovely villa in the mountains outside Palermo.

“So, you wanna make’a me a millionaire, uh?  Everbody’ wanna mak’a me one. Then’a daa’ wanna my money ta’ do it.” Don Luigi laughed. “Yu’ talk, an yu bet’ta talk’a good.”

A nervous Igor looked at the hard-eyed men standing around him, and began talking. When he’d finished, the Don sat and looked at him, eyes seeming to drill into Igor’s brain. Drilling in like they were deciding where to place the bullet.  Finally, the evil gangster gave the evil chemist an even eviler smile.

“Ho-kay. I’ll bite. I’ll give’a you my money. But’ta ya’ damn well bet’ta deliver,” the Don warned him. “An you gonna have a anna ta’ make’a damn sure ya’ do.”

As he shook hands with Don Luigi, Igor briefly wondered what an anna was.  When he got back to his rental car, he found out. A beautiful dark-haired woman was sitting in the passenger seat.

“I’m Anna,” she told him. “I was told to go with you. You know why.”

Anna Sinestra was all business.  She rarely talked and he never saw her smile, but she was an excellent expediter.  She returned with him to his apartment in Pristina, Yugoslavia. Within days, they had moved into a large empty factory.

Turning out to be an excellent organizer, Anna contacted the local mob and furnished him with all the money he needed to build and buy equipment. As the large machinery arrived, so did hardened men with guns. The Don was taking no chances on losing his investment.

By the time everything was purchased, set up, and adjusted, the factory grounds had evolved into an armed camp.  Igor was a scientist, not a warrior, and had been careful to obscure the process from both Anna and the Don. If someone would examine the machinery, they still wouldn’t be able to use it without him. He didn’t trust his mafia partner or the taciturn Anna with all his secrets.

Once the distribution problems were solved, they would bring in truckloads of cabbage and send out tons of homemade cocaine, blanketing the world and causing prices to plunge. Cocaine would be as prevalent as coffee, and just as cheap. It would drive the other sources out of business.  After that happened, they could raise their prices to a captive clientèle.

*****

Lois had the “Dallas Times” delivered to her apartment in the mornings. It was her habit to read the newspaper along with downing her morning tea. So far, she hadn’t seen any of the ads targeting her, so she was surprised when one actually did appear.

Heart beating faster in anticipation, she went to a pay phone at exactly five p.m..  Laying a still-blank notebook down on a shelf inside, she dialed the number listed in the ad.  It was answered on the first ring.

“You ready?” came Mr. Jones’s harsh voice.

“Yes,” Lois answered, readying her fountain pen.

“Say a little more, so I can recognize your voice,” she was instructed.

“It’s me, Lo–”

“No names. Take this down and proceed.”

She copied two pages of information.  As recommended, Lois did it in Mandarin Chinese. Besides being safer from a security point of view, it was much easier for her than in English.

“Got that?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good luck. And after this I’ll find another way to get your information to you. No more phone calls unless you have to contact me. I should have a better system set up by then.”

“All right. Did you get anyone else yet?” she was curious.

“Sorry, but you don’t need to know. Good luck.”

The phone went dead. A funny little man, she decided, going back home to study her notes.

Damn, she thought, all the way to Europe. Some kind of illegal drug threat. She’d been given the address and a few names, along with information on what was happening and where.  Her only instructions were to eliminate the threat. How she did it was up to her. She was to do it as quickly and silently as possible without tipping anyone off to her identity.

It was past normal working hours, so Lois waited until morning to make travel arrangements. That must be why he’d furnished an assortment of passports, she decided, usinh one of the fake ones.

It was the first time Lois had flown, and started out scary for her. The flight from Dallas to New York’s Idlewild Airport was the worse. Her overseas flight to England wasn’t as bad, for two reasons. First of all, she’d realized that even if the machine should crash, she could simply snap herself back home to avoid injury. For another, the England trip was in a larger, hopefully safer, airplane — one with more engines but fewer passengers. There were only about thirty of them on the latter trip, and the time and distance made everyone more sociable.

She’d booked many short trips from England to Yugoslavia, feeling it would be better to snap all those locations into her memory.  Since her first assignment was in Europe, it would be quicker to snap there in the future — and to memorize all the countries she could on the way.

Lois hired a cab from the airport in Pristina, again with that now-familiar feeling of being out of place by not knowing the money, language, or customs. The taxi driver, however, had experience with foreigners. Hearing her speaking as she got into his taxi, he recognized the language and handed her a card in English, asking if she wanted to go to a hotel. She only had to nod her head.

The card, however, didn’t give his price. She could only hold out a handful of the local currency she had acquired at a money exchange at the airport.  She had to trust him to take the correct amount.

He must have taken enough, because the man smiled widely and carried her bags to the desk. After a brief exchange between the cabby and the clerk, the man behind the desk went to a back room and brought out an English-speaking lady.

Lois looked around the lobby. Everything looked more massive than in the US, with no plastic in evidence.  The furniture was made of wood and metal, mostly heavy hardwood. It reminded her of a Dracula movie on television.

Tired from the long journey, Lois went directly to a large double-bed and was soon asleep, without bothering to even unpack or take a shower.

In the morning, she found that there was not only no shower in her room, but not even a bathroom. Lois found those facilities down the hall, and only then by watching a man with a towel going into one of the rooms. Since his was marked by a picture of a man, and another by a drawing of a woman in a skirt, she figured out which was to be hers.

“Damn,” she muttered. The room contained a large bathtub, toilet, and sink. No towels or even toilet paper were in evidence.  Lois had to go back to her room for both, finding them in a cabinet there. By the time she got back to the bathroom, the door was locked and three other women waiting.

“Hi there.  Are you tourists too?” Lois asked, getting blank stares from all three. One smiled though, which made her day. It took over an hour before she made it back to her room. Once there, she debated with herself over what to do next.  Lois supposed she should at least go to the address and see where it was, then try to form a plan on what to do.

First, some breakfast, she thought, being hungry. Her last meal had been a cold box-lunch on her last flight of the day before.

The hotel dining room was virtually empty, so Lois sat by herself. Being used to foreigners, the waitress produced a picture-menu in a half-dozen languages. Lois chose what was called a “Continental Breakfast.”  She was brought a small cup of strong coffee, two pieces of dry toast, butter, and jelly. The toast was gone in ten seconds.  Although she waited and waited, drinking her coffee, nothing else came.

“Good morning,” Lois heard, in Chinese. Looking up, she saw another oriental girl sitting down across from her.  As she watched, the woman spoke in some other language, then said “Good Morning,” again, in English that time.

“Good morning to you.  I speak Mandarin,” Lois greeted her. “It’s strange to hear it over here, though. My name’s Trudy Chu,”  The name on Lois’s passport.

“Grace, Grace Hon,” the other girl introduced herself. “You here about that job, too?”

“No. I’m a tourist. What job is that?”

“There’s a new factory starting up here.  For some reason they don’t want locals, or even anyone who knows the local language. I was hired back in France, mostly because I had never been to Yugoslavia before. Anyway, that’s what someone said.”

“That’s strange. No, I’m only visiting. What does the factory do? I mean what does it make?”

“They didn’t say. The woman that hired me said they wanted single women and that skills weren’t needed.  Only women that didn’t mind traveling or living on the factory grounds.  Some kind of secret government thing, I figure, to keep locals from knowing what they’re making?”

“Maybe I’ll go over with you.  I could use a little extra money in my travels. You been there already?”

“Nope. I got here yesterday afternoon. My car broke down and I had to have it fixed. It’s a long drive from France for such an old car.”

“Do you have the address on you?  Just curious is all.”

Grace went through her purse, producing a slip of paper. It was the same address Lois had been given. Incredibly good luck, she thought. They made small talk over breakfast — one in which the more knowledgeable Grace told her that the “Continental Breakfast” was only toast and coffee. They had to wait until Lois had eaten a more substantial meal.

The other woman’s Volkswagen Beetle huffed and puffed along dark dank gloomy streets. They drove across town, seeing mile after mile of bombed-out buildings, many not yet fixed after WWII.

“I have a cracked head on my motor thingie, not much compression,” Grace explained as they searched for the correct location. A lot of street signs were still missing from the war.

They finally, more or less by following trucks of cabbage through mostly empty streets, found their destination.  As they made a left turn, Lois spotted a rare street sign. It was the right one.  After that, the factory itself was easy to find. It was the only one, in a long row that looked identical, that showed activity. Full trucks were going in and empty ones coming out.

“I hope I get hired,” she mentioned to Grace as they waited their turn to drive in.

The Volkswagen had been waved into line by a gate-guard. When their turn came, the guard didn’t speak either Chinese or English. He did understand a few words of French, as did Grace and, after checking Grace’s papers, let them in — pointing to a small parking lot and then the main entrance. It seemed he couldn’t read her paperwork either, only seeming to recognize what the documents, Grace’s written in French, looked like.

“Well, here goes, Trudy. Hope you get the job. If you don’t and want to, I’ll try to get out and take you back to town later. I gotta call my boyfriend anyway and check out of the hotel. I know, I should have done it this morning, but I’ve been caught before. At least if something happens I still have a place to sleep tonight,” Grace told her.

After the two girls parked and got out of the car, they went through a large stone entryway into the factory.

Inside the lobby, there were makeshift signs in a dozen languages. The signs directed the speakers of each language to a different door; spotted behind a large but empty reception desk or around the edges of the large room.

Grace had been hired in France, so she figured she should go through the French one. The two hugged briefly, wished each other luck, and promised to meet later — back in the lobby. Then Grace went through a door and left Lois standing alone.

Having a choice, Lois wondered which door to use. She would like the Chinese one, but wondered if they would check her identification, which was in English. The hell with it, she figured, choosing better understanding over paperwork.  She could always say she made a mistake. She went into the door with Chinese characters over it.

There was nobody in the small narrow room. A short row of wooden chairs and a small desk graced the space.  There was also a large interior glass window in the wall behind the desk. Lois sat down on a chair to wait.

After twenty minutes by her watch and no one entering the room Lois, being curious, went behind the desk to the dirty picture window. She could see massive machinery filling a large space on the other side. It extended into the distance to her left. At her end, the machine had several brass nozzles, all pouring out a thin stream of what looked like a white liquid or powder. It came out of the machinery and dropped about a foot into a wheeled industrial tub.

A line of full tubs led to long tables tended by women. When the container was full, a man pushed an empty one into it and forced it away from the nozzles, sliding the empty into its place.

She couldn’t see any of their faces, as everyone wore heavy masks like gas-masks. As one tall woman walked past, near the window, Lois could see the mask was locked on with a wide leather strap and a brass padlock. That seemed strange, until Lois remembered why she was there.

I must be seeing tub after tub of pure cocaine, she thought. And the masks would be needed because of the dust produced–and locked to keep employees from sampling the wares.  It probably isn’t because of lost profit, but because if the employees are high they couldn’t do their jobs.

Lois wondered briefly that, if I’m right, how many millions of dollars in illegal drugs are in that one room?

“What are you doing?”

A voice brought Lois back to the present. It was in Chinese and came from another tall woman in a white coat and mask.  She must have come in through the other door, the one into the working area, Lois thought.

“I -– I talked to a woman this morning. She said you might have a job for me.”

“You should have checked with the receptionist, not just walk around the place like you own it.”

“There wasn’t anyone at the desk and, since I’m Chinese, I followed the signs.”

“It’s a good thing I saw you through the window. You better sit back down, young lady, while I find out what to do with you.”

The woman left.  A minute or so later, a man with a rifle came in to watch Lois. He professed no understanding of either Chinese or English.

After about a half-hour of sitting on her wooden chair, Lois tried to stand, only to find the gun swing over to point near her head. Since the gunman seemed serious, she sat back down and waited.

Finally, a Chinese man came in through the first door.

“Hi there.  I hear you’re looking for a job?”  He pulled a chair up to the desk and lay a briefcase on top. Opening it, he motioned her over. “Please pull your chair over here. You better do it slowly so as not to alarm the guard.”   He didn’t smile as he said it, seemingly deadly serious.

“Now I don’t know how you got in her, lady, but this is a restricted site. You’re lucky you weren’t shot.”

“I’m sorr–”

“Quiet!  Let me finish.  As I said, you’re incredibly lucky.”  He stressed the word “incredibly,” then continued, “Since you’re already in here, and even saw part of our operation,  I fear you cannot leave, even if you wish.  I’ll find you work and you’ll be paid well.  But you’ll not be able to leave until we tell you.  If found trying to get off the grounds, you will be shot — and with no questions asked.”  He paused to make certain she understood.

“We have a vacation trip planned for every other weekend,” he continued.  “You and other employees will be taken to various rented vacation sites. The cost will be borne by the company.

“Except for that, you are restricted to the boundaries of the factory itself.  If you try to leave the vacation sites without authority, you will also be shot — on the spot.  Sorry, but that’s just the way it will be.”

He asked for her name and address and she gave him false ones. The man never asked for her to prove her identity, not even for pay purposes. She feared that none of them were intended to ever leave. Which, no doubt, included her interrogator.

“Wait here and I’ll send someone for you.” He gathered his papers and left, with a nod to the guard. She could only guess at the significance of the nod.

A few more minutes of waiting brought another man in from the first door. Without speaking, he led her to a large open dormitory at the other end of the fenced-in factory grounds. Lois was shown an empty bed with folded bedding on top of a rolled mattress. She was then left on her own.

Lois made her new bed and lay down to think. She had to find some way to destroy both the factory and the accumulated cocaine. Not only that, but find the owners and kill them to keep them from starting up somewhere else. On top of it all, she wanted to do it in some way short of harming the workers.  Even most of the guards were probably only dupes, paid for a simple security job.

With the emphasize on different languages, it was doubtful that many people there knew the entire picture. Most of them would only know their own jobs. If they did stumble onto the entire operation they would be killed. No doubt the women in this barracks were of mixed dialects to inhibit communication, were segregated from other sections and the workers there. She had a big problem to solve. While she was thinking, Lois drifted off to sleep, waking to the sounds of jabbering in different languages, coming closer.

A crowd of women in dirty work-clothes came through a door at the other end of the room. On entering, they split up and trickled around the beds. Some lay down, some going to the bathroom at the other end of the room, others gathering around long tables along one side of the room.

Three television sets were turned on and a group formed around a row of snack and drink machines in a corner.

Lois idly watched them, still trying to think of some way out of her predicament. Jones hadn’t told her about the innocent workers.  Lois had been figuring on coming in, killing the criminals and snapping back home.  She found it wasn’t so simple.

She perked up and looked around when she thought she noticed, through the babble of voices, Chinese being spoken. Lois saw her new friend, Grace, talking to another Chinese woman, both standing across the room. Lois went over to see what was going on.

“Hey, Trudy, see you made it. Go get your stuff.  We got us an empty bed over here.”

Lois moved her bedding over with Grace and the other girl. It seemed that they were the only Chinese speakers in that dorm.

“What’s the work like?” she asked Grace.

“This is Janet Chen,” Grace introduced them. “Oh, not too bad except for not being able to leave the place. It pays good, though. All I did all day was cut cabbage into quarters. They gave me a knife and, while Janet and some others picked the old leaves off,  I cut it up and put it in a movable bin. My arms are tired but I can get used to that.”

“That’s why they have all the cabbage coming in,” Janet confided.

“Yeah, must be some kind of salad place. Don’t know why they need all the guards for cabbage, though.”

Cabbage in and drugs out? Didn’t make much sense to Lois. Maybe she was wrong, but why else all the money spent on security? And what else could that white powder be? She couldn’t think of any large market for powdered cabbage.

“I know some Italian and I heard one of the girls say she recognized that one woman.  You know, the tall blonde one?” Janet told them. “Said she’d seen the woman’s picture back home. Some kind of mafia thing. Maybe the guards are because of the mob for some reason.”

That brought a smile to Lois’s face. It also gave her an idea.

That night, when everyone was asleep from a hard day’s work, she locked herself in a booth in the restroom and snapped back to the village in China.

“I can’t stay long, Samuel,” Lois told her brother. “I think they’re making cocaine. I want you to find a chemist somewhere.  Downtown, maybe in the village, whatever. What I want you to do is. . . .”   She outlined what she needed, then snapped back to the factory before anyone missed her.

The next morning, one of the new girls was found dead, strangled in the bed Lois had been assigned to.  Lois watched as the body was taken out on a stretcher by two men.

She was put to work with the others. They were awakened by a loudspeaker playing dance music. As women rushed for bathrooms, insulated carts containing food-trays were brought in, the odor helping to wake heavier sleepers.

After breakfast, women gathered in groups and were escorted to their assigned workspaces, leaving Lois alone in the large barracks with a few other new women.

She sat, waiting, while others came in to clean up the breakfast mess, even sweeping the room itself. Lois was lying on her bed, half asleep, when several women came into the barracks.

They consulted a clipboard, then grabbed up new workers as needed, Lois included, motioning them to follow.  At least they didn’t ask for names, Lois thought, since she was probably expected to be dead.

Lois rose, following the silent woman.

“Where we going?” Lois tried in Chinese, then English, getting only a smile in return.

Obviously her guide knew neither language.  She was taken to a loading dock at one end of the building.  There, she saw the back-ends of several trucks, a pile of cabbages lying on the concrete floor behind one.  Two women were picking the heads up in baskets, dumping them into wheeled bins. When full, they pushed the bins to a long table, where other women, including Grace and Janet, processed them by tearing off the outer leaves and cutting the stripped heads to throw the pieces in a hopper.

Her guide demonstrated Lois’s job to her, filling the bins, and left for a small desk in a corner — obviously a supervisor.  Most of the women not being able to understand the others, there wasn’t much talking going on.

The work was easy for Lois. Easy and boring. With a little increase in mass and strength, she could have filled a bin in moments.

Lois thought that someone had screwed up by putting her in that section, since she’d seen the final product. No matter.  She wasn’t going to complain.

It was a long day. Lois not even being able to talk to her co-workers in the task. At times, as bored as she was, she wished she could simply say the hell with it and, using her strength, shove the piles over to the tables and go back and take a nap.

That night, she again snapped back to the village, finding a package on a table there, waiting for her. It was what she’d requested the night before. The next morning, since nobody really knew her except Grace and Janet, she avoided the two. They might have commented on how thick she was around the middle.

During the day, Lois became thinner as she treated the cabbage she put into the carts with a white powder from the sacks inside her shirt.  While she was doing it, Lois heard a babble at one of the tables. One of the workers seemed to be complaining about dirty cabbage, wiping her hands on her shorts. But at least no one called the guards. The powder was supposed to be harmless unless heated to a high temperature.

*****

A couple of days later, Anna was sitting in her office, a tray of white powder in front of her. She’d finished a hard day’s work, organizing and fixing problems. It had taken weeks, but she could now relax and check out the product itself.

Anna was amazed at all the work involved. The drug should be all right though, since her boss had already sent for a sample and had it analyzed.  A good deal of her time had been in bribing officials to retain their secrecy.

The last two days had been spent in trying to keep government food inspectors out. Because of the use of foodstuffs, they had insisted on checking for health hazards. Anna hired lawyers and supervised their efforts.  Before that, the police had complained about no permit for even opening the damned place. That took a little bribing.  What took the most time was finding the right man to bribe.

She’d wasted time and money on a minor official and had to do it all over again when his boss wasn’t satisfied with his own share of the money.

As Anna laid out a couple of lines of cocaine, ready to test it.  Igor Milovich was present in the office .

“You want some? There’s plenty,” she offered, rolling a piece of scrap paper into a tight cylinder.

“No, I’ve never used it.” He shook his head, watching.

Anna, an occasional user, snorted both lines, sitting back to enjoy the rush.

“Ah, good stuff,” she told him through clenched teeth. “We’ll make a fortune.”

All was well for a couple of hours, until she felt a strange stirring in her stomach. Racing for the toilet, she only made it halfway before falling over, clutching her belly and throwing up on the floor, even as her bowels emptied involuntarily.

“Oh! My God!” Anna exclaimed before passing out.

*****

She woke in a bed at the local hospital, still in extreme pain, her stomach spasming and cramping every few minutes.

“Call the doctor in here, and I mean right now,” Anna screamed at a nurse, after throwing a nearby vase at the woman to get her attention.  A doctor, wearing a white coat and stethoscope, came rushing in at the noise.

“What’s the problem, miss?” the doctor asked, a concerned look on her face.

“What the holy hell happened to me?” Anna screamed.

“What happened is you were lucky. When we pumped your stomach, we found you’d drank a lot of milk for breakfast. That milk is what saved your life,”  the doctor answered, trying to placate Anna. “You ingested quite a bit of some violent poison. We had to drain and cleanse your blood. Do you know where you got it?  I have to make certain nobody else gets sick from the stuff. What did you eat this morning?”

“I know damned well where I got it.” Anna forced herself to calm down. “No. don’t worry, nobody else will get hold of any.  I’ll make damned sure of that.  Now get me my clothes and a taxi.”

“You should stay here a few more days.  You almost died.”

“I know someone else. . . .  Never mind, just get me my clothes.”

*****

Igor was at the far end of the machine from Lois, checking the quality of his product with a testing kit, when Anna returned.  She stumbled — more like tumbled — weakly out of a taxi and called the head of the guard detail to her.  Lois knew nothing of what was happening.

The chemist was too engrossed in his task to notice workers being motioned out of the room. The first thing he did notice was when Anna, being supported by two of a half-dozen guards, came up to him.

“You bastard.” She slapped the man in the face. Before he knew what was happening, the head of security and two other guards were holding Igor by his ankles, face down over one of the full bins of cocaine.

“You son of a bitch. All that money down the drain. This stuff is shit. We’d never sell it. If we did it would kill off all our customers. You bastard. See how it tastes to you.”

She motioned at the guards who, smiling, shoved him head first into the bin.

Clouds of white dust rose around the room as he struggled, in vain, to breathe. As the powder filled first his nose, then mouth, forcing itself into his lungs, the drug’s effects hit him.  Igor stopped struggling and stiffened.

They left, leaving him with only his feet sticking out of the container.

*****

All Lois knew was that the ending whistle blew in the middle of the work day. She and the other workers were ordered to form a single file at the main gate. There, they were paid and shoved off the property.

“What’s going on, Trudy?” Grace asked as the two made their way back to her car.

“You got me.” Lois acted surprised. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

Lois kept her room at the hotel for a couple more days. When she took a taxi ride back to the factory, she found the machinery broken up and the place empty.  The girl noticed that there was strange powder dried around some of the drains. She’d been told not to report when done with a mission, so she merely snapped back to Dallas.

On her last couple of trips home to China, her mother had been bothering Lois to bring her to Dallas to shop. Lois brought her to the apartment, then the two snapped to San Francisco because of the large Chinese community there.

Su Lin had cut way down on her drinking, dropping from 24/7 to a weekly binge or two.  Meili had moved in with Peter by then and was again jealous of Lois for being the top breadwinner of their community.

Because of Lois and her generous pay, the village now had their air-conditioning back, courtesy of an underground cable.  The mere mention of Lois brought on a rage in the other woman.

“I’ve had enough of that whore,” Meili would rage. “I spend my days in a rice paddy while she lies around with more money than she can ever spend.”

“Baby, baby.  Don’t let it bother you,” Peter would reply. “All we can do is be the best we can be.” Peter took his life in his hands every time he even spoke to Lois.

Eventually, Meili talked Peter into taking her to Sweden.  Of course, once snapping a location there, the girl could return whenever she wished. He flatly refused to snap her to Dallas, fearing a fight between the two.

Upon returning to Dallas, Lois went to see her boss there, wanting to relax by bringing a few fugitives to justice.

“Am I glad to see you,” Mr. Peterson greeted her, “How was your vacation?”

“It was fun. Now what do you have for me?” she asked. He had plenty of work for her.

That night, she was surprised not to see Sammy. After her stay in Yugoslavia, Lois was in the mood for sex but was frustrated when he never showed up.  Not even the next morning.

After a couple of days with his door still locked, she asked Bertha, the desk clerk.

“Sammy?  He moved out last week,” Bertha told her. “I don’t know where. None of my business and he didn’t say.”

It took Lois almost a week to get caught up with Peterson. After that, things were slow again. With no word from Mr. Jones, she decided to look for Sammy.  It was a way to pass the time, or so she told herself.

*****

“I don’t know, lady. He left me hanging, never showed up one morning,” Mr. Thompson of “Skip and I Get You, Inc.,” told her.  Sammy’s ex-employer was mad at her for asking. “You the broad he was talkin’ about earlier?”

Lois shook her head and backed out. Now where would Sammy be hiding? If he were hiding, that is. She was at a loss. The woman realized that neither of them really knew much about the other. She did know he drank, that he spent a lot of money on clothing, and that he was good in bed. But that was about all she knew about the guy.

In her work, finding people had never been her strong point. She was usually told where to find them and simply brought them in. One day she had a thought.  Why not use her own employer to find him? Mr. Peterson had the experienced people for the job.

“Sure Lois, no problem at all,” Peterson told her, happy to have her indebted to him for a change. “I’ll tell everybody to keep an eye out for your boyfriend while they’re working.”

She still didn’t like the “boyfriend” reference, but figured it was so or she wouldn’t even be looking.

Lois’s home was chaotic.  Her mother moved in for awhile, leaving Lois to sleep on the living-room floor, amid piles of purchases.  Having learned of Lois’ wealth, Su Lin was trying to help spend it.

“Why you need all those furs?” Lois asked. “It never gets that cold in the village?”

“To show the other wives,” was the answer.

“So that’s the reason Lin Mei asked me for $10,000 dollars, to keep up with you. Half the village is using my money to catch up with the other half, also using my money to do it.”

On top of it all, Su Lin was drinking heavily again, drunk at least half the time, bumping into walls and insisting on senseless arguments.

Lois loved her mother, but found it hard to have a life with her around.