With a Twist Read online

  With A Twist

  (The Last Call Series)

  By Sawyer Bennett

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright (c) 2015 by Sawyer Bennett Published by Big Dog Books ISBN: 978-1-940883-25-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book can be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without the express written permission of the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Find Sawyer on the web!

  www.sawyerbennett.com

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  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  To my fabulous cousin, GM... FBI agent extraordinaire, best trout fisherman ever and all around amazing human being.

  Prologue

  Wyatt

  I look around at all my friends gathered here to wish me well... to tell me goodbye. Fuck, I'm going to miss them. The whole crazy lot of them. I have no clue when I'll be able to return.

  The back deck of Gavin and Savannah's beach mansion in Duck, North Carolina is monstrous, large enough to hold our ever-growing crew, plus about two hundred others. They're hosting my farewell party because let's face it... who doesn't want to party at a mega mansion on the beach?

  For early April it turned out to be a relatively warm day... as long as the wind doesn't kick up. Every once in a while, a westerly breeze comes off the Atlantic, causing the women to huddle in closer to their men to ward off the spring chill.

  Almost everyone in our group has fallen to that miraculous emotion known as love. First, it was Hunter, my best friend in the world. We've known each other our entire lives and I knew when he finally fell, he'd go crashing hard. It just happened to be with Gabby, his little sister's best friend, and I honestly didn't think that would happen. Gabby had some misplaced rage toward Hunter for the longest time, but he finally wore her down. Now she wears his engagement ring on a necklace around her neck, because she works in construction and doesn't want to damage it. I wonder when they'll get married, but they don't seem to be in a rush. Hunter owns a bar--The Last Call--and Gabby is a general contractor. Both of them are so focused on their careers, I doubt I'll be hearing the wedding bells anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they just trotted off to the local judge on their lunch hour or something to get the deed done.

  Just as Hunter's identical twin brother, Brody, had done when he married Alyssa.

  Brody and Hunter got engaged at the same time while vacationing with their girls together, and I suppose that's a twin thing. I just assumed they'd have a joint wedding ceremony, but Alyssa put a kink in that plan by getting knocked up. It wasn't planned, but the baby was no less wanted at that time. Brody just hauled Alyssa off to the courthouse and got married, proclaiming they could have a ceremony after the birth if she still wanted to.

  Looking at her now, with Brody's arm around her back as she cuddles their son, Trey, I don't think a ceremony will be forthcoming. I'd say they have everything they need right there.

  Another baby cries, and my eyes slide over to Gavin and Savannah. Their daughter Clare was born almost a month ago, exactly ten days before Trey was born. There's apparently already talk of betrothing the two of them or something.

  Gavin takes Clare from Savannah's arms, rocking her back and forth. She immediately quiets, and I hope that when I have a child one day, I'm as good with him or her as my friends are with theirs. Gavin and Savannah have yet to get married. Have yet to get engaged for that matter, but it doesn't seem to bother them. I asked Gavin about it when we had a guys' night out, and he said he wanted to marry her like yesterday, but that they always seemed to get caught up in life and raising a baby. It's coming though... I guarantee it.

  "You nursing mothers are putting a serious crimp in my ability to party with my girls," Casey complains as she reaches a finger out to stroke along Clare's tiny nose.

  My lips quirk upward as I look at the stunningly beautiful Casey Markham. She's Hunter and Brody's little sister, and by little, I mean she's four years younger than we are yet larger than life at the tender age of twenty-five. In addition to me, she remains single.

  But she is unlike me in that she likes it that way. She burns through rich and sophisticated men the way my grandma used to burn through copper at the penny slots in Atlantic City.

  I'm definitely different from Casey.

  I'm ready to settle down.

  I've never seen Hunter and Brody look more peaceful or happy in their lives. I've only come to know Gavin over the past year, but I watched a self-proclaimed prick turn into a mushy teddy bear because of his woman.

  Yeah, I want that shit too.

  But it doesn't look like it's going to come soon. Not with me leaving and all.

  "Going to miss you, dude," Hunter says as he steps over to me and leans against the deck railing.

  I hold my bottle of Sam Adams up, and he clinks his beer against mine. "Going to miss you too, man."

  "So you really have no idea how long it will be?" he asks genially as we look out over the ocean.

  "Nah... they've told me to be prepared for several months probably. I'm going in cold to an established operation, and it's going to take a while to build trust."

  "And you can't tell me a hint of where you're going or what you'll be doing?" he asks with a grin, nudging my shoulder with his. "Come on... I'm your best friend, for Christ sake."

  "Dude... you know that's not how it works. You've seen me do this before, and you know I can't tell you."

  "Fine," Hunter says as he raises his hands up in capitulation, and then swigs down the rest of his beer. "Just don't get your ass shot and you better fucking come back in one piece."

  Reaching out, I give him a playful punch in his stomach, which causes him to issue a slight oomph, and I tip my bottle up to finish my beer as well. I need to head out. I have to get an early start tomorrow, and the last thing I need is a hangover.

  This is my second time going undercover as a cop. I used to work in narcotics back when I first started with the Nags Head PD, and I went undercover to bust up a small trafficking ring here on the island. It was a short operation because the ring was minor, and that's testament to the fact that we're a fairly small community.

  This is different though.

  I'm being loaned out to a joint task force of the Raleigh Police Department and the FBI. What they have planned for me is much bigger. I haven't been given many details, but I do know that it involves a suspected sex-slave ring that covers the entire southeastern region of the United States and it happens to be based in Raleigh. The FBI is involved because it crossed state lines when one of the victims escaped and was found in Denver, but was originally abducted in Raleigh.

  T
omorrow, I start a new life. I'll be debriefed for a few days and immersed in my new identity. Then begins the work of getting my foot in the door.

  It could take months... maybe a year, who knows. It's all about gaining trust and building a case from the inside.

  My life is going to be put on hold, and that warm and fuzzy desire I get when I look at my friends in love is going to have to chill out for a while. I volunteered for this, knowing that a successful bust will pretty much make my career going forward. It was too good of a chance to pass up, but until then... love is just going to have to wait for me.

  Chapter 1

  Wyatt

  "Raze... there's a drunk douche up in VIP Room Number Two who won't take no for an answer. Not sure why Misty is telling him 'no' but go get a handle on it," Lance Portman says as he grips my shoulder to help get my attention over the thumping music. Luckily, the name Raze comes completely natural to me now, and I think if someone actually called me Wyatt, I wouldn't react very quickly.

  That's merely a product of being deep undercover for the past three months, living as Charles "Razor" Hawkins... Raze to my friends, criminal acquaintances, and coworkers. I've completely assumed this new identity and outside of the disgust over working in a sleazy strip joint called The Platinum Club, everything else has been going well on this operation.

  I nod at Lance, who is second in command here, and turn away, heading for the staircase. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Leisha crawling across the stage toward a patron who is waving a fifty-dollar bill at her, her huge double Ds swinging back and forth. Catching Leon's eye, I jerk my head upward so he knows I'm heading upstairs and to keep an eye on the stage. More than once, a fight had broken out when Leisha started jiggling her tits in front of the patrons, and Leon is one of the more reliable bouncers in here. I don't hesitate to remove myself from the main floor as long as he's around. His huge, ham-sized biceps are enough to handle even the rowdiest of customers while I'm gone.

  My job here as the general manager is multi-faceted. On the legal side of things, I oversee the management of all the dancers and supporting staff of bartenders and bouncers, and I handle inventory and cash the registers out each night for deposit. I manage schedules, and I'm on duty every night to make sure things go off without a hitch. General business management stuff.

  On the not-so-legal side of things, I oversee quite a bit too. Once I was brought into the circle of trust, one of my first criminal acts was to start vetting customers that wanted more than just a lap dance.

  Yeah, I essentially became an in-house pimp and made sure that horny men with the right amount of cash could get a blow job or a fuck from one of the dancers if they passed muster.

  Which is why I'm heading up to VIP Two now. Misty has two gentlemen--and I use that term loosely--in there with her. They are repeat customers, big spenders, and Simon would want them well cared for. Despite the oily feeling it gives me, I need to get Misty back on board with what she's promised them or else it's my ass Simon will be all over... because this little prostitution side business is how I first entered the circle of trust with him.

  Simon Keyes is my main target--my objective in this sting.

  He owns The Platinum Club, along with a variety of other semi-legitimate businesses. A pawnshop that actually fronts stolen goods, a Western Union franchise that cashes forged welfare checks for a cut of the proceeds, and a bakery that fronts as a meth operation. None of those businesses interests me, the Raleigh PD, or the FBI though.

  No, the business we have our eye on is one that is very covert and has taken me quite some time to inch my way in on. That's because if Simon is ever busted for what I'm looking at him for, he's going away forever, and so, he's very picky as to who he brings into his circle of trust.

  Simon Keyes is in the sex-slave trade. He came upon the FBI's radar about two years ago when they investigated a woman's claim from out in Denver, who showed up at the police station. Her name is Laney Tellar, and her story was that she had been abducted and sold into sexual slavery. She had no clue where she was being held, stating that it was on a private estate in a nondescript neighborhood. She was never out of chains for the entire time of her captivity, so she never even knew what state she was in. However, her owner--Master as she was told to call him--apparently couldn't be separated from her and insisted she go on a business trip with him to Denver. He kept her in chains there too, drugged and gagged when he was away, right in the posh hotel room he had booked for three days.

  His mistake was in leaving the key to the cuffs on the nightstand while he went to take a shower one evening, and she made a quick break for it. By the time the police had gotten her statement and sent units to the hotel, the man was long gone. He had, of course, checked in under an alias and no trace of him could be found. Laney reported it took them approximately six hours to reach Denver by stretch limo from wherever she was being held, so the geographical radius of her prison could be ascertained but not much else.

  The one thing Laney did know, however, was that she was abducted from Raleigh, North Carolina, where she had been living since dropping out of college at the age of nineteen. By age twenty, she had been dancing at The Platinum Club and was hooked on cocaine. Her last clear memories of North Carolina were going to bed at night in her little dingy apartment on Cowell Street in downtown. She woke up gagged with her hands and feet tied, rolling around the back of a cargo van.

  She met her Master two days after that, enduring nearly two months of almost daily rapes before she was able to escape.

  There was nothing to tie The Platinum Club or Simon Keyes to the abduction. He was known to the police and had done a few stints in prison for his various crimes, but other than his shady past, there wasn't one solid lead to tie Simon to the abduction. The only thing that kept the FBI's eye on him was the fact that over the past two years, numerous dancers who worked there would mysteriously go missing. They just wouldn't show up for work and turnover was abnormally high for this industry, which usually provided these women with more money than they could ever dream of. Down-on-their-luck women just didn't walk away from that type of cash.

  The police and FBI knew the turnover was high because they had a man on the inside. He was just a bouncer and never stood a chance to make it into the circle of trust, because that wasn't his job. He was instructed to just watch and report, and that is what he did for almost eighteen months, alerting the investigators to the abnormally large amount of women that just never showed up for work as scheduled. The police would surreptitiously move in for follow up, trying to track down the women, but they could never be found. Their apartments were as if they had just left for a walk around the neighborhood. All of their clothes and personal effects were still there, including their wallets and identification. They had clearly been kidnapped. Even in the three months I've been here, two more of the dancers have gone missing. The sad part is that there's never anyone to claim them as missing. No family... no friends. The women had clearly been targeted as members of society that no one will ever miss.

  Based on industry averages, of which the FBI has a statistic for about everything you could ever want to know, and the fact that when these women simply vanished, they had become convinced that the strip club, and more importantly, Simon Keyes, was very much involved in something nefarious.

  The hypothesis was the sex-slave trade, and they needed solid proof tying him to it. They needed someone on the inside to bring it down and save these women.

  My journey into the circle of trust was rocky. Getting the job was easy enough. The FBI provided me with a rock-solid alias as Charles "Razor" Hawkins. I was a man that had served time in the pen for drug dealing, getting the name "Razor" for my handiwork with...well... you guessed it, a razor. I came to Simon Keyes highly recommended by an FBI informant who was still active in the criminal underworld and did favors for the government in exchange for certain favors they would bestow upon him. Said informant knew Simon Keyes well and had some minor ties to
the mafia, so his word was pretty solid.

  Simon hired me on the spot after an impromptu interview, while we sat at the edge of the main stage one afternoon and watched tits and ass gyrating all over the place.

  Starting as a bouncer, I soon proved my worth. I constantly accepted small "assignments" from Simon that I'm sure were illegal, but he didn't trust me enough to tell me the details. It may have been "picking up a package" from an associate to "delivering a briefcase full of money" to another associate. I never asked questions, did my job well, and proved to Simon that I was loyal and could keep my mouth shut. Within two months, I was promoted to General Manager.

  My first major breakthrough in gaining Simon's criminal trust had to do with the prostitution that was rampant within the club. I had been told ahead of time during my debriefing that the club had been busted a time or two for it. It was small potatoes and nothing that could bring Simon Keyes down. But it gave me an in with him. It didn't take me very long to figure out it was pervasive and that most of the women were in on it. Watching footage of the cameras that were installed in the VIP rooms confirmed it for me.

  So I made my move.

  "Simon... got a minute?" I had asked as I knocked on his office door one night after closing.

  Despite the fact that this guy was a complete scum, you'd never know it by outward appearances. He was a good-looking guy at age forty-two with stylish, dark hair, thousand-dollar suits, and a cultured air of civility about him.

  "Sure... come on in, Raze," he told me as he closed a ledger book on his desk and then stood up from his chair. I walked in, shut the door, and watched as he opened up a safe behind his desk. After he stowed the ledger in there and shut the door, he turned around and sat back down, directing me with a sweep of his hand to take a chair opposite his desk.

  "What's up?" he asked as he steepled his hands in front of his face.

  "Listen... I've been watching things carefully, and I think you got a problem. The girls are fucking the customers for extra money in the VIP rooms."

  I watched him carefully for his reaction, but I really didn't need it to confirm what I already knew. That Simon Keyes was very much aware that this was going on in his club. The man never missed a thing and because he got a portion of the girl's tips each night, he knew exactly where they were making that type of dough.