Chapter 15

  [Masculine, Exotic, Cool, Trials, Work]

  I went down to the bookstore at about ten of eight. Anais would be shocked. But I was curious to see how far Lucy had gotten with her cleanup. She and Lis were both still cleaning. Lis was polishing windows, while Lucy was vacuuming.

  “Hey, what are you two still doing here? Don’t you have lives, things to do?”

  “We’re trying to get the room ready for Saturday night.”

  “What’s Saturday night?”

  “That’s our first TTRPG book club meeting.”

  “You guys must have been pretty sure I was going to say yes.”

  “No, we have a text chain; we decided after you said it was okay.”

  “How many members do you have?”

  “Four officials, the entire Fantasy book club plus Willow makes five, and we want you to play as well. It’s a game about group storytelling, and you love storytelling. Give it a try.”

  “Do you have room for Amy? She’s the gamer girl, well, now the old gamer lady.”

  “Hey, I’m not old, Laura; I’m vintage.”

  “Hey, Amy, is Anais here?”

  “Yes, and her foot is tapping a mile a minute; you better get moving, Laura.”

  “Lis, we’re having a barbecue tomorrow and then watching the fireworks. If you are free, you should come.”

  “Thanks, Laura, I’ll be here. I want to meet Willow. She is so cool.”

  “Great, don’t work too late, and be sure to lock up when you leave.”

  “Laura, can I meet with you and Bianca around nine thirty tomorrow morning?”

  “Sure, I was going to sleep in, but I’ll be sleeping for eternity soon enough, so I might as well hear your master plan, Lucy.”

  Amy and I headed for the front door, and Amy was right; Anais was tapping her foot to save the band.

  “Well?”

  “Sorry, Anais, I was just checking on the kids. They are cleaning up one of the disused rooms as a game room for the TTRPG Club they formed, and we got to chatting. I was actually here ten minutes early. If you had been early, we’d almost be there by now.”

  “Let’s just go and save some hookers.”

  “They are not hookers; they are escorts.”

  “Just don’t invite any to your barbecue, hippy.”

  “That’s a genius idea, Chronos.”

  “No, it’s a horrible idea. When is it ever a good idea to invite a criminal into your home? Amy, do you want me to make some potato salad for the barbecue?”

  “No, it’s already made. Thanks, we’re having potato salad and coleslaw, hot dogs, hamburgers, sausage burgers, portobello burgers, and a cake.”

  “Jeez, Amy, how did you have time to do all of that?”

  “While I was waiting for the cake to bake and the potatoes to cook, I made the coleslaw, then the potato salad, and by then the cake was cool, so I could put on the frosting.”

  “All this from the woman who used to make a four-dish rotation menu of spaghetti.”

  “Laura, it was no fun just cooking for me. But now that I get to cook for everyone, I really love it.”

  “I’m glad Amy and I’m one to talk anyway. When I lived in the city and I didn’t eat out or get takeout, I’d cook breakfast for dinner.”

  “You get that from your Aunt Nan; she used to always cook you breakfast for dinner because it was your favorite.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, she did.”

  We arrived at the ancient bowling alley. I think it was built in the fifties, maybe earlier. It was old-looking in the seventies, when we’d come here for ten-cent beers on a Friday night.

  About three-quarters of the lanes were in use when we arrived. The plan was to bowl two games, then hit the bar and scope it out to see if there were any escorts. I fully expected there to be, as the note in the marginalia had been very clear. This bar has to be the third largest in town. But if you counted all the people in the alleys and the snack bar and the tiny game room with video games and pinball machines. More people come through here almost every night than any of the other bars.

  Amy and Anais were both very competitive, and bowling is the one game that Amy doesn’t just dominate. So when they were tied with one game apiece after two games, neither of them would just walk away, and they each demanded a tiebreaker.

  So we went into the third game, and as luck would have it, I scored three strikes in a row. Anais informed me it was called a turkey and something I had never done before, not that I had ever done much bowling before. I managed to beat Amy by two pins and Anais by one.

  I was ready to go into the bar and check for escorts, but Amy and Anais wouldn’t hear of it. This required one more game to beat a three-way tie. I reluctantly agreed. I was always more interested in the ten-cent beers than the bowling, and I haven’t been back since the price of beer yielded to the ever-spiraling inflation. Why, I wondered, do prices always rise? It’s been shown that people's real wages have fallen, except for CEOs and their ilk, whose compensation has skyrocketed. It should cost less to produce the ingredients and then to produce the beer. As each year passes, technology used improves. If CEOs made ten percent more than the average worker and dividends were limited to ten percent of profits. Surely that would make prices fall, or better yet, tie the dividends to the prime interest rate; dividends can never exceed double the prime rate. Then finally to fix the problem completely after the stock owner has received double the value that he has paid for the stock. The stock is dissolved. No more dividends; the stockholder still doubles their money if the company does well. The better the company does, the faster the stockholder doubles their money. Enabling them to then reinvest in another company, doubling their money again.

  I was bored with bowling, so my mind tended to wander when bored. But being bored is when ideas occur. So it must be why, after fixing the economy in my head, I decided to work on the national debt. First disband the military; keep only a maintenance staff to maintain the already purchased equipment. Cut federal law enforcement by seventy percent. Legalize drugs and charge a one hundred percent surcharge on all drugs, from tobacco to opium. Legalize gambling with a two hundred percent surcharge. For white-collar crime, all assets exceeding five hundred thousand are seized. Even if we did all of that, it’s likely that Lucy will still be paying off the debt we have accumulated for the next thirty to forty years. God, I hate economics; it’s even more boring than bowling. But we finally entered the tenth frame of the fourth game. The only way for Anais to win was to roll three strikes and for Amy not to make her spare.

  Amy got two strikes and won the fourth game and the overall title of best of us old ladies. Then we headed into the bar. Our undercover persona as bowlers must be well established after four games. We found a table, and it wasn’t long until I found the table of escorts. They actually stood out like a sore thumb. Four girls, four untouched drinks, dressed well above the bowling alley average. I also thought that I recognized one of the girls from when I handed out my business cards to the escorts in the Waterhole. She wasn’t dressed as nice, and someone had done something to her hair. That wasn’t very flattering. It was almost as if she was trying to disguise herself.

  She was also looking directly at me. I stood up and walked casually to the ladies' room. Hoping that she would follow. Once inside I walked into an empty stall and was prepared to stand there waiting for the next ten minutes. This was even more boring than the bowling; it also smelled slightly worse than the alleys had, just slightly. Before my brain could begin to swirl around orders, the outer door opened and someone walked in.

  “Ms. Eriksson, how did you find me?”

  I exited the stall.

  “Just call me Laura. I received a note in ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’—two notes, actually. Did you write them?”

  “Yes, it was me. I want to get out, Laura. But they won’t let us.”

  “Us? How many of you want out, and can we take you all tonight? We have a car.”

  “If you come back tomorrow night, there are seven or eight out of the fifteen girls that no longer want to be involved. I could tell them all to be ready for some type of signal.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Yes, we’ll bring two cars and go from bar to bar. We’ll start at the Waterhole at ten o’clock, and we’ll drive to every bar in the town, and both cars will give loud blasts of their horns at the same time. Will you be here tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t know; ever since that night you handed out cards, the men who transport us have been wary. A couple of the girls handed over your card to our driver. Said you were poking around.”

  “Are you all staying in the same place? Maybe we could meet you there tonight instead of waiting an extra day?”

  “We are staying together, in some kind of camp with dorms and such. But I have no idea how to tell you how to get there. Tomorrow night, with the horns after ten. That’s the safest, I think. I have to get back to the table before any of the girls come looking for me.”

  “Alright, tomorrow night. Wait, what's your name?”

  “Florence Russo.”

  Then she was out the door. I hope that the other girls didn’t notice how long she was gone. I texted Amy and Anais that I had to hide out in here for another ten minutes and would meet them in the car. When I came out of the bar, I carefully avoided the escorts' table and instead turned and walked out the front door. I’d have to walk all the way around the building, but it didn’t matter if it kept suspicion from Florence.

  A black SUV with two men in dark colors pulled through the parking lot. I don’t think they noticed me. My old lady superpower: nobody notices us unless we bring attention to ourselves. I positively was not bringing attention to myself. I hopped into Anais’s back seat and quickly filled in Anais and Amy on what had happened in the bathroom and what plan to extract Florence and her seven coworkers we had come up with.

  Once we were on the road, I called Annette. Informed her that we are going to need somewhere safe for eight girls to stay, starting tomorrow night. She wanted to know if I knew the identity of the people that were running the operation. Not yet; hopefully tomorrow night.

  “Alright, Laura. I’ll rent out four rooms at a motel. The girls will have to double up, but it’ll be easier to protect them. Maybe one of the other girls can give us a name, or I can get a sketch artist, and we can get some kind of picture of the men. I’ll be at your house no later than nine tomorrow. I’ll be armed, and I can call both of the chiefs for backup after we get all the girls out that want out. Then the chiefs can go in and round up the rest if we can’t get a name from the girls we rescue. We can always go the plea deal route with the ones we arrest. Well done; to be honest, I didn’t think that you’d be any help at all. I’m glad you are proving me wrong.”

  “Thanks, I guess. You certainly do a backhanded compliment well.”

  “Thank you, you’re very astute. I’ll see you at nine, sharp.”

  Oh yeah, I was going to miss getting orders barked at me by a woman who hated me. When in reality she should be thanking me. She wanted to be a cop, so I helped to make that happen. Yes, her husband managed to humiliate himself twice, but really that was on him, not on me. If I didn’t feel sorry for the poor girls that were trapped in a life that they couldn’t have imagined when they had started to walk down this path. I would tell her to suck an egg.

  When we got home I went up to my room and started adding my notes for the day into Obsidian. Unfortunately, I didn’t come up with any great insights. I closed the laptop and brushed my teeth and got into bed. The whole time I was thinking about my notes. I once came to a realization when a cop didn’t write something down. Then officially it didn’t happen. A key piece of evidence could be lost due to laziness or just inattention or something darker like corruption.

  But you couldn’t note everything either, otherwise you’d just keep writing over and over. I took a breath, and I let it out. I took a breath. Ad infinitum. Ah, Buzz Lightyear. Then I dreamt of astronauts doing spacewalks and somersaults inside the space station. It was actually very restful dreaming in zero g; I wondered if I’d be able to do that again. Falling asleep on a trampoline with zero entropy.

  Lucy wanted a chat, we were having a barbecue, Willow was arriving, and we were rescuing some young escorts from themselves and the people who were exploiting them. Quite the busy Fourth of July I had planned for myself. So I dragged my ass out of bed and got ready for the day. I finished that off with a trip to the kitchen to say good morning to Amy and grab a cup of tea.

  “Morning, Laura.”

  “Good morning, Amy.”

  “I just realized that we are going to miss the fireworks tonight.”

  “No, Amy, we aren’t going to miss them; we’re going to be them this year.”

  “Ha, I like that, Laura. The three amigos go boom over Saranac Lake, red, white, and blue.”

  “It’s better to burn out than to fade away. But I hope to get a lot of reading in during my fading away phase. So instead of a boom, maybe we could just sputter like a sparkler.”

  “Yeah, when I was young, burning out sounded romantic; now it just sounds really tiring.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help with the barbecue?”

  “Nope, we are all set; I have a couple of grills set up. Later I’ll fire them up. We are all set. Go, talk to Lucy. She has her presentation all set up for you.”

  I don’t know how Amy always seems to know what is going on in the building, when I can almost always find her in the kitchen. Perhaps she installed little spy cameras and microphones all over the building when she moved in. Or maybe it’s the constant flow of gossiping housemates who always flow through the kitchen and the fact that Amy is so easy to talk with. Or maybe it’s both; it’s fun to think of Amy as a suave superspy like Derek Flint. Tea in hand, I started to descend the stairs but quickly remembered that Lucy had asked that I invite Bianca to attend the presentation, so I backtracked and made my way to the dining room, where I found Bianca just finishing her breakfast, and with a fresh cup of tea poured, we both made our way to the store.

  Lucy was behind the counter with her laptop clutched in her arms.

  “Would you two like to get comfortable in the reading nook? I have prepared slides for you to view while I give you a brief presentation. Then I will be happy to answer any and all questions.”

  “Yes, we would, thank you, Lucy.”

  So we went over and got comfortable in the reading nook.

  “What is the greatest innovation in reading in the past quarter century?” She paused for dramatic effect. “The e-book and the e-book reader. Who controls the market for e-books? Amazon does. When you plunk down your money for an e-book from Amazon, do you know what you are really purchasing?” She paused again for dramatic effect. “You are not purchasing a book, no; instead what you are buying is a license, which gives you the right to read a book as long as Amazon grants you that right. Why am I boring you with something you already know? Amazon is evil; all they want is money. They don’t care about literature. I’m coming to that; they also have close to a stranglehold on the market. Also, if you pay Amazon ten bucks a month, you have a large selection of fiction to read for free, but it’s not really free because you are paying one hundred and twenty dollars a year for the privilege to read ho-hum literature.

  I’m sure you are wondering, why is Lucy banging on about Amazon? We are a tiny bookstore in the Adirondacks. We can’t compete with Amazon. But what if I were to tell you that we could not only compete with Amazon, we could beat them? Laura, would you give away books for free if it wouldn’t cause you to go broke? Of course you would. Well, I say let’s do it, and let's do something else as well. Let’s save parents eight to ten dollars on every classic novel assigned in middle school and up. I was assigned "Pride and Prejudice." I managed to find a used copy over in Saranac Lake for three dollars. The cover price was nine ninety-nine. I say that we give them away. But Lucy, you say, how can we give away a book that even used is going for three dollars? Well, I’m very glad that you asked. Because I propose that Genre’s become the very first bookstore in the world that sells e-books. At least I think it’d be the first; I have never heard of another physical bookstore that sells ebooks. We would be the very first. That’s not all; we are going to do something that even the public library can’t do for their patrons. That ten-dollar "Pride and Prejudice" paperback is new, three dollars used, and two dollars as an Amazon ebook. Genre’s ebook price is zero dollars. Plus, if you get the book from us, you are getting an ebook, not a license. So not only are we underselling Amazon, but you are actually killing them on price and quality. Now, I can see the wheels turning in your heads. If we are selling ebooks for zero dollars that we paid zero dollars for. How do we make any money?”

  She paused, and I could see she wanted my input.

  “The people who come in here to pick up the free book might buy something while they are here. At the very least you get goodwill for giving them a product that Amazon is selling. Even though the average consumer has no clue that the book they are paying for on Amazon isn’t really their book, only their license. But I hate to add anything negative about this plan, but the advantage of the e-reader is you can purchase the book anywhere, thereby saving you a trip to the bookstore.”

  “Yes, that is very true, and if you know the name of the book you are looking for, say Lord of the Rings. You just type it in, and bang, you have the book, easy peasy. But how many people enter a bookstore looking for a book, not a specific book, just a book? Maybe they have decided on a genre, so you head to the mystery section, and you browse until the cover and the blurb sell you on the book. There is not one ebook store on the internet that can replicate that experience. I think people who love books love shopping for books almost as much as reading them. That’s the other way we beat Amazon—that other empty room we don’t use because it is out of sight and our stock would likely disappear. We use that space for our ebook browsing area. We drag the old bookcases that are stored in the basement and place them in that unsupervised room. We print and laminate a cover image and a back cover blurb. We do that for a few hundred classics. I estimated that ink and lamination might cost us around fifty dollars total for a few hundred books. When Amazon has virtual reality software that allows a person to enter a store, pick up a book, turn it over, and read the blurb, then they will be able to beat a physical bookstore in everything except for the human service. If a TV station heard of a small local shop going head-to-head with a corporate giant and beating them hands down. They might come over to see it for themselves.

  Bianca I see you sitting there thinking, "Why did I get out of bed for this amateur presentation about public domain literature, and why did Laura drag me down here? It’s the Fourth of July, dammit." But I don’t propose that we give away all of our e-books. That’s why I asked that you attend, first and foremost as a writer, but also as a financial wizard. I propose that we offer to sell indie authors out-of-print back catalogs. They can already do this for themselves on Amazon if they know how to turn a Word file into an ebook and then upload it and all the other steps. With us they just hand us the file, the cover image they want to use, and either the old or an updated cover blurb. So half of that space in there is free classics, and half is out-of-print back catalog of writers that live in this very house, and I propose pitching this same thing to Willow for the writers in her collective. Then maybe Laura reaches out to her favorite authors from her editing days whose books are no longer in print and offers them the same service. But this is critical, at least I think it’s critical. Everyone has to agree that it is DRM-free. That means none of us have to pay a licensing fee for DRM software. If authors are worried about piracy, I can show them how trivial it is to break the DRM and pirate any book on the Amazon site. Pirates do it every day. But it also shows that we and the authors that we sell care more about their readers than money. The final nail in the coffin as to where the superior place to buy your books is. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle, the website. I did a down-and-dirty mockup we sell online, but with a personal touch. You don’t put your orders into a cart; you call or text or video chat with us just like the customers in Woodstock do.”

  “Lucy, from a writer's point of view, I love it. To have an out-of-print book still generating revenue, that’s like free money. So what were you thinking of charging?”

  “I thought that should be up to the author, but I would point out that most non-bestselling books on the Amazon website go for less than three dollars. But a specialized nonfiction book might go for much more. The store would get a straight one-third, so if you priced a book at two ninety-nine, you’d get two dollars, and we’d get one.”

  “That sounds very fair. We are having our first writers workshop next weekend. Maybe you’d like to pitch it to real live writers and see what they have to say.”

  “Sure, thanks, Bianca. What do you think, Laura?”