It did not take long for the quartet of office buildings that Sachmilli called home for many years to be transformed into quaint urban squalor after he abandoned them.

A ruckus arose from drunks inside the first building Tasìa approached. She peered through a dusty glass window. Several broken holes in the surface of it made it easy for her to listen in to the ongoing conversation.

A small crowd of eight gathered by a rusted oil barrel with a fire blazing in it.

She arrived just in time to see a hairy nude plump woman pulling a skinny customer into a back room.

The other men and women laughed at the commotion. One woman was not as amused as the others yelled out, "Blesses, Agu, not like your first. Are you up to it?"

Agu was likely a nickname for a man named Agustin, Tasìa thought.

"You know I am. Just worried about my spine."

The nude woman protested, raising her chest up in a proud heave that caused her ample dugs to spread out against her belly.

"Don't you worry, little man. I'll be careful."

The big naked girl dragged the young man by his arm. He flailed in futile resistance.

The other woman put her drink down on the floor. A cheap forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor imported from the northern continent.

"You're definitely going to need my help," she complained. She suspired and muttered under her breath. "The things I do for my stupid little brother."

A man beside the woman said to her, sympathetically,

"Annebél, you can't mollycoddle him his entire life. He has got to learn these things for himself sometime."

As she crossed the room Annebél threw up her hands in exasperation.

"Whenever I get that notion and let him out on his own he comes home needing stitches."

Annebél was a tall boozy redhead. She walked like a solid mountain made of thigh and thick bone.

Tasìa shook her head as she leaned against the outer wall. The goddamnedest things you stumble on when you are trying to sneak past people.

Five other drunks were left standing around in the big, former foyer entrance room that Tasìa needed to cross.

She noticed a label on the liquor-styled bottle from whence the last remaining woman sipped. Wild Irish Rose, it read in English.

Where would you even go to get that shit?

Tasìa studied the woman and her two companions as they huddled together on one side of the barrel.

They were North Americans, either Canadians or from the States. Tasìa was terrible at identifying accents in the English language.

She couldn't tell if they were from California or Nova Scotia.

They were a rare sight except for well-paid contract workers with their guarantees of a return to the outer world.

Amongst the indigent, they were never seen.

The three she studied did not appear to be poverty tourists but appeared genuinely fucked in their current social status. If a guise, it was a very good one.

They kept to themselves and leered at one another in their own private little language. The woman's eyes were full of mischief as she spoke of fishing and catching the prize, a full spectrum rainbow trout.

Whatever in the Seven Hells that meant?

Canadians then?

Tasìa could spend hours just observing these people, but she needed to move on. They were just another set of obstacles to where she needed to be.

She crouched and walked several yards to the side corner of the building.

Tasìa peeked over. Only one window pane was exposed on this side of the building. The rest were boarded up.

Tasìa hoped one of the backrooms in the interior was accessible enough to get her to the enclosed parking lot on the rear side. What she could see of its condition so far was excessively dilapidated.

It could now be cut off and enclosed by debris, Tasìa worried.

Annebél's voice boomed through a broken glass pane just three up from the corner of the building. The trio were in the room on the other side.

"Stop shivering and wiggling. It makes it harder to prop you up. Just let her do her job. She's a professional."

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Tasìa approached the window as she dug through her fanny-pack. Either Annebél was the sister-of-the-year in what she was willing to tolerate, or she contributed greatly to her brother's dysfunction. She knew them not long enough to judge the matter either way.

Agustin mumbled something Tasìa could not hear clearly.

"For the last time," Annebél said, in answer. "I'm not helping you with that. It's perfectly okay as it is."

"You sure?"

"Trust me, I've worked with even less."

The plump prostitute laughed and pleaded for Agustin to hurry up. He was costing her in time with her paying customers down the street.

She was just doing his sister a favor by getting his sad ass laid.

Standing under the window, Tasìa rolled a cherry bomb in her fingers. It was only a grade more sinister as a stink bomb than the stock fireworks version commonly available at the stands.

This was a reformulated, repacked version. Highly effective against guard dogs in situations where a bullet to the skull wasn't appropriate.

Tasìa lit the fuse and tossed it into a hole in the window near where the threesome gathered.

Soon smoke puffed up, and three high pitched screams yelled like the Furies in unison.

Agustin's voice was the highest pitched and he sounded the most fearful.

Tasìa scrambled up the wall. It was only a two-story building structure. She was up on the rooftop in seconds.

Poor Annebél had a fit of it. She cursed God, then Satan, then the whole shit-hole world.

Soon she became convinced of who deserved her ire.

"You better start running, you fucking Canucks. I know it was you."

Though amused, Tasìa regretted terrorizing the woman. If the building was more accommodating she would have skipped the people altogether.

Tasìa was familiar with the design as it was originally laid out. The backlot contained dozens of large earthmover vehicles and several large assemblies of industrial equipment in stacked rows.

The fence around the lot was double barbed wire.

Also, the walkway to the lot was caged and barbed to keep out cat burglars drawn to the items that were worth tens of millions, USD.

That very equipment would provide her with cover as she approached the brownstones of the Hijos Lux lair.

The commotion of argument wailed out as the front door of the building opened up. One of the Canadian men yelled for Annebél to stop pushing him.

"Come on, you little bitch, afraid to get your candy ass kicked by a woman?"

"I don't know what you think I did, lady. What is that fucking smell?"

"Don't play like you are fucking dumb," Annebél growled at him.

Tasìa heard a loud slap. Soon to be followed by punches and screams for several more seconds in a scuffle between several participants.

Finally, the three Canadians ran across the parking lot and down the street.

The plump prostitute put her dress back on as she walked away towards a gas station whose towering tanks could be seen lit up with carousel lighting from the parking lot.

The streetwalker bitched in a staccato of near musical fuss that she would have to get cleaned up all over again.

As the woman stuffed her hips into the dress, Tasìa chuckled to herself. The woman's tush was quite cute and not too lumpy in its shape for a plus-sized girl.

Her revelry ended when Annebél let out a blood-curdling scream.

"Goddamn! He said he would pay me three hundred and fifty for the entire night if I partied up in the rental with him and his people."

"Calm, down. It's alright, Anne."

An older man's voice. Smooth and familiar.

"No, it's not. I knew he was a joker by the look of him, René."

The older man she identified as René took several seconds to respond.

"I would rather he turned out to be a prankster than what I suspect he really is."

"You worry too much," Annebél answered with a disgusted bite in her tone.

Tasìa moved in closer. Her intuition to René's tone of voice told her that this was important in her own scheme of things, as well.

"North Americans. Offering a streetwalker three hundred and fifty dollars. It was a lure. They are organ harvesters. Look at you. You are in great physical health for your profession. They could have double-checked your vitals with a scanner when they passed by you in that car. You are a prime target, Annebél. You know it, so stop denying it."

This possibility had not occurred to Tasìa before René made his case, but he was dead right. She had heard of these smuggling rings of organ harvesters.

The organs were a source for sporeplay, as they grotesquely called it in North America. The internal organs of Quadra residents were rich in a chemistry unique to nanospore manipulation.

It occurred to an extent in other animal species, but only the consumption of human organs could provide the uniquely satisfying satiation of appetite accompanied by an unrivaled high that those who indulged the practice craved.

Prostitutes, given their intimate exposure to potentially hundreds of clientele, provided the most richly cultivated organs of all.

She saw the three Canadians again in her mind's eye. The way they kept to themselves. The smirks, the knowing glances. The words they used that were obviously coded with double meanings.

Organ harvesters. That is exactly what they were.

She could not allow them to commit their nefarious operations within her own hideaway town. If it was true, if they turned out to be organ harvesters, they would have to be eliminated.

Did she have time to do it tonight? Only in the early evening, still.

If they weren't too far away, she could accommodate her schedule. What she could not risk was their exposure here and the investigative heat they would bring to little Villa Morrón.

Tasìa decided she now had to make her presence known. She shimmied down the side of the wall.

Agustin caught sight of her doing this, and he yelped out a shriek.

"Who the fuck is that?"

Tasìa grinned as she approached the four who stood in the car lot near the entrance door.

She turned and nodded her head to Annebél.

"I heard you talking about organ harvesters. Where did they plan to take you to party it up?"

"Answer my brother's question," Annebél demanded.

Tasìa reached in her fanny-pack and tossed her a cherry bomb.

Within seconds the rather tall redhead put it all together; she squinted with a hardened look as she snarled.

"You fucking bitch, I'm going to rip . . ."

Before Annebél could finish her sentence, Tasìa had the laser sight of her .32 pinpointed on her forehead.

"You ain't going to do shit but thank me for saving your ass. Now, where did they say they were going to take you?"