After Juan left town to avoid seeing me—and I even had to kill several of my men to protect him—I went back to Saint Money, the city where this story began. I still needed to make new friends, and the only people I knew besides my men and the folks from my hometown were my business associates, the most important people in the city.
So I had to go to where they were.
"Park here," I told the SUV driver, and he parked in an empty space next to the sidewalk. That street was very dark.
I opened the door and was immediately hit by the smell of piss and garbage. I didn't pay much attention and walked down the street. My men walked behind me. They never asked me anything about their comrades, the ones I killed, and that was 'cause it was so common for us to die. If I took them on a mission, and they didn't return, we all knew they were dead and that could happen to any of us at any given time.
That's just the life of a criminal.
Anyway, I walked down the dark street. There were several abandoned buildings, gang members who stared at us from alleyways and hid when we turned to look at them, and lots of luxury cars parked on the street.
We then arrived at a building covered in graffiti. There was a tall man with dark glasses at the door, but as soon as he saw us, he stepped aside and let us in.
We entered a dark hallway, and the further we went, the louder the music got.
At the end, there was a very large room with many tables and several dance floors in the center where naked girls were pole dancing. Waitresses went from table to table serving bottles while the old men who paid them tucked bills into their thongs and groped them. I recognized several of those guys; there were politicians, businessmen, actors, the bishop, and they all greeted me 'cause we'd done business together at some point.
"Dark?" someone asked, and I turned around. It was a drag queen sitting on a man's lap. She stood up, came closer, and put her arm around me. "So, are you lost or what, sweetie?" She was Juicyfer. She had a black wig, horns on her head, red paint on her whole body, and a tight latex dress with a skirt so short you could see her huge ass.
"I'm trying to make friends," I told her.
"Well, here you can get a good chat, a good fuck, but a friend? I don't really think so, sweetie."
"Where I can find it, then?"
Juicyfer thought about it for a moment.
"Dunno, but if you find it, you come here and tell me." She patted me on the shoulder and left. She walked between the tables, caressing the arms of the men nearby. They almost always smiled at her and turned to look at her huge ass. Some even grabbed it, but she gave them a light slap and walked away.
Fun fact about her: during the day she's a congressman from the ultraconservative party.
She walked further and further away until she went by the corner table, where there was a man staring at me.
"Where the fuck have you been?" he shouted. He was the former Governor Dipshet, an old man surrounded by whores even younger than his daughters. I approached him and shook his hand. "Your people told me you were who knows where and shit."
"And what you want me for?" I asked him.
"Come on. Let's go to my office." He stood up from his table and took two of his whores with him. We walked to a private room with some couches.
He sat there, and his whores stood one on each side of him. He put his arms around them and grabbed each one's tit tightly.
I sat in another couch.
"Look," he told me, "I want you to send me the best men you have to be my bodyguards. I want them huge, ripped, in black suits, like some FBI shit."
It wasn't weird for people like him to request those services from people like me 'cause crime isn't my only business, and it's not even the one that gives me the most money. I also run brothels, human trafficking nets, betting houses, piracy businesses (both counterfeit goods and ship robberies), money laundering schemes, and I also have some hitmen 'cause it's quite common for politicians, businessmen, and other important idiots to ask me to kill a journalist or an environmentalist who's trying to stop them from illegally chopping down a protected forest. They also ask me to threaten NGOs, to blackmail competitors to close their businesses, or extort people to sell their land, which is full of valuable resources they don't even know about.
And I also have several legal businesses, and what I earn from those I invest in illegal ones, and what I earn from those I invest in more legal businesses. Businessmen and politicians do the same thing; money is money, no matter where it comes from.
The important thing is to diversify.
"And how many men you want?" I asked him.
"Like 20, 30, enough they can fill a bunch of black SUVs"
"Sure. I'll send them to you," I told him.
"And what are you doing here anyway?" He asked me. "You want to fuck Juicyfer?"
"I'm trying to make friends," I told him.
That fucking asshole laughed right in my face.
"And what's the point of that shit?" he asked me, and I just stared at him. He immediately got nervous. "Well, you do you. I don't judge." Ha. Fucking pussy. "Hey, if you want to make friends, I'm heading to my private island right now to throw one of my parties. There's room on my plane if you want to come."
"Yeah, sure," I told him, and we both went straight to the airport.