Billionaire's Seduction: BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE (Alpha Billionaire Romance Collection) (BBW Pregnancy Marriage of Convenience) (10 page)

When I got back to the Valley Ho I jumped on the computer and did a search for the green ruin. As expected, there wasn’t much information to be had.

Most ‘cults’ or secret societies worth their salt don’t typically advertise their whereabouts. When I was first starting out as a PI (And don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a lesson in the history of cults in America. We’d be here for hours and hours if I went through that bit of evolution, because I would have to go all the way back to Christianity.), I did a couple of jobs where I kidnapped and deprogrammed two cult members. I’ll tell you this much, It’s a tough nut to crack.

Most kids and adults who join cults are usually fairly fragile as human beings. Typically they’re shiftless people who were raised in either an overly traditional religious environment like Catholicism or the Pentecostals and they become disillusioned by the religion they were raised with. They still want to believe in God and the goodness of the universe, but they think the philosophy which they were raised in was too harsh or too strict in their belief systems. The other type of person is someone who was raised in too permissive of an environment. Perhaps a home where no specific religion was practiced, or where no particular set of spiritual or moral values were set in place (I imagine Ila Stills grew up in this kind of environment), and as the child becomes more self aware, they begin searching for direction. At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are addicts, or drunks, or they’re just exceptionally lonely, and they’re drawn to cults because their personalities are either nonexistent, or all they are is the drug they’re using or the booze they’re drinking,

With the two kids I deprogrammed, they both came from different Christian based cults. The first a young guy named Paul who got suckered in by a group of folks out of Omaha, Nebraska called the Free. The concept behind the group was a simple one, they basically believed that God had created the Earth for humanity, and that everything God created was meant to be free, but because of the devil’s influence over humanity, we started creating systems where man became enslaved to man. Systems like the monetary system, governments, jobs, whatever. At the time, the philosophy of The Free actually made a lot of sense to me. I mean, what’s money really? Especially money in the 20th and 21st century, it’s really just kind of Monopoly money. You know, because if you really think about it, what is the US economy based on? What’s the world economy based on? it’s based on buying and selling and how much each country buys and sells. Governments and countries become powerful and influential entirely on how many televisions they sell, how many Range Rovers, how much oil and Uranium. The point is, it’s not based on anything real, anything tangible. Hell, even when we were under the gold and silver system, that didn’t make much sense either. Because what’s gold and silver? They’re rocks, that’s it. Nothing but rocks.

The whole problem with The Free, however, was that in order to join their order, you had to give up all your worldly possessions, and you had to give it all up to the leader of The Free. As you can probably guess, the leader of The Free was living pretty high on the hog because of all these possessions his followers were giving up to him. Grabbing Paul was zero issue for me, it was a quick snatch and grab while the kid was wandering around downtown Omaha. But what was the real kicker was how long the deprogramming took. We went five days and nights. Five long days and nights of deep discussions about the nature of man and the evils the devil wrought on society. On day three, Paul practically had me convinced to give up all my belongings and throw in with The Free. (As you can probably guess, I still kind of hold onto some of the beliefs Paul leveled on me.) But I muscled through, and on the fifth day I finally broke Paul by showing him his leaders bank statements. Both the onshore and offshore accounts, and he burst into tears and started beating himself up about how stupid he was to trust this guy.

The second one was far easier, but left a huge mental scar that I still haven’t recovered from. She was an eighteen-year-old girl named Audrey. She grew up in the Illinois foster care system and she was all kinds of screwed up. In-and-out of group homes her entire life. In-and-out of abusive, hell on earth foster homes who used and abused her. All except for one woman named Sarah who took Audrey in when she was thirteen and kept her with her until she aged out of the system. Sarah told her she could stay as long as she wanted to. She told Audrey she would even help her with college. But at the very least, she could stay and keep a roof over her head.

But Audrey still had trust issues despite the fact that she had been living with Sarah for five years, and the minute she turned eighteen, she packed up and left without a word to Sarah. She kept hoping she would come back. Finally she grew impatient and came to me for help in finding her.

It didn’t take me very long to track Audrey down. She was still living in Chicago, but she was living in a communal house called the Order Of Adam, more crazy ass Christians who believed that since woman created original sin, they had to atone for this transgression against God, and what the Order Of Adam meant by atonement was that they had to whore themselves out to any male member of the order. In fact, they had to whore themselves out to in order to support the house. I picked Audrey up off a street corner on the Southside near the Order’s “compound” posing as a John, and took her back to a motel room and told her who I really was and who I was sent by. She broke down and cried in my arms, telling me that she had been ashamed of the things that she had done and the things that had been done to her. She was afraid that if she tried to go back to Sarah’s house that she would be ashamed of her and put her out on the street. I spent the next nine hours listening to Audrey talk about her childhood; about the group homes and creepy step-dads. About living in basements with twelve other kids who were supposedly being “taken care of”, but all the foster parents were doing was spending the checks the state sent on booze. The whole tore my guts out. When the sun finally came up, I drove Audrey home to Sarah, and when she tried to pay me, I turned it down flat. I was just happy I could bring them back together. But after that, I didn’t take on another deprogramming job ever again. I just couldn’t take it.

See, maybe you all have got the wrong idea about me after all. Maybe I’m not so bad of a guy. But then again, that was fifteen years ago, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to try and pull Ila Stills out of her current situation. I was going to track down the green ruin, and establish a business relationship for Junior with these clowns and then go home and hopefully never have to come back to Arizona ever again.

One of the true things of beauty about living in the 21st century is no matter how careful you are, no matter how secretive or quiet, you are going to end up on the internet. And unless you have a lot of cash to throw around, there’s absolutely no way you are going to get that information about yourself removed. You’re just stuck with whatever is written about you. Which was lucky for me, because the green ruin was doing a pretty damn great job of keeping itself under wraps.

But you can’t hide from Reddit. That pack of woman hating, government hating, pop culture hating trolls are amazing when it comes to digging up dirt on even the most obscure subject. It took me a few hours of combing through the boards, but I finally found a green ruin thread. It was a couple of years old, but there were more than a few newer posts that talked about the drug, about the orgies (lots and lots of detail about the orgies. But my guess was that not a single one of these guys commenting had ever been involved in one, considering that the average Reddit user weighs 400 pounds and lives in their mom’s basement), and most importantly, where the compound was located, and how to become a member of the GR. (That’s a Reddit term, folks, but I’ll be using it from now on.)

The GR compound was indeed located near the Superstition Mountains, and the rules for joining up with GR was simple enough. You had to come to the compound with absolutely nothing. No money, no possession, no car. Absolutely zilch but the clothes on your back, and everything you could possibly need would be provided for you; all the food, shelter, drugs, and sex you could handle. But you had to submit entirely to the GR in order to get your hands on these wonders. You had to forget everything you left behind including your family, your friends, your home, your job. You needed to become the green ruin, and the green ruin had to become you. Basically, it sounded like the usual cult set up, and chances were the GR had set up this thread to recruit new members, so I decided to put it to the test after a good nights sleep.

Arizona is full of postcard places, not just the Grand Canyon and Carefree. The Superstition Mountains where the GR was located was another one of those picture postcard places. But if Carefree is where the top 1% of Arizona lived, the town surrounding the Superstition Mountains, Apache Junction, is where the bottom 99% called home.

Apache Junction was about an hour drive east from Scottsdale and took me through the vast financial spectrum of the Phoenix area. I passed through Tempe, which was mostly strip malls, chain restaurants, and college ghettos of dilapidated thirty year old party houses that I’m sure the landlords were charging the kids living there an arm and a leg. Mesa was the largest city in Arizona and could probably best be described as an air conditioned nightmare. Block-after-block of impersonal track housing. This was the land Ronald Reagan envisioned for America during the 80’s, faceless and thankless worker bees jammed into identical homes, mesmerized by their televisions and accepting of whatever was jammed down their throats. Chandler was mostly a Mexican burg with lots of cowboy bars and mom and pop taquerias. Gilbert was nothing but farmland; acres of alfalfa and corn being grown for fuel that was only interrupted by a Mormon church every mile or so. And then I came to Apache Junction.

Apache Junction was a ramshackle burg composed of trailer parks and rotting strip malls. Back in meth’s heyday, I’m sure there was an amateur chemistry lab in every other trailer, the air stinking of gasoline and burnt match heads. If the old man and mom had ever made it out of Chicago, I’m sure Apache Junction was where they would’ve ended up living. The old man was a bit of a skin flint; okay, he was more than just a skin flint, he was flat out cheap and so was my mom, and despite the fact the old man was on the take for the last part of his career, I know he would want to make his dough stretch for as long as it could. So instead of just ponying up for nice, tidy little condo in a 50+ community, I’m positive he would’ve just bought a doublewide and parked it in one of the dozens of trailer parks in Apache Junction and he would’ve sucked up the inevitable vandalism and B&E’s that came along with living in such a depressed area.

I know it sounds like I’m being overly harsh, and maybe it was just my general mood that was souring my view of the tiny desert city, but I’d had a rough night and wanted nothing more than to hide out in my room with the curtains drawn and huddled under my blankets while nursing a bottle of Maker’s Mark. After I had gone down the Reddit rabbit hole of researching the GR, it had stirred up a ton of memories that I didn’t feel like revisiting, and instead of getting a restful night’s sleep, I tossed and turned until the sun peaked through bottoms of the rooms curtains.

When I got out of bed and stared at myself in the mirror and saw the dark, sleepless circles under my eyes, my unruly mop of black hair going in a hundred different directions, and the three days worth of salt and pepper stubble, what I saw staring back at me was the perfect reflection of loneliness and desperation. Of a man who had reached the end of his rope and needed answers. I was the perfect image of someone who would search out the Green Ruin for answers, and at that moment, I knew I couldn’t barricade myself in my room, I had to finish things.

From the info I had gathered from my internet searches, the GR compound was supposedly located at the end of a paved street called Idaho which turned into a rutted dirt track. Along the way, I stopped at a Goodwill and turned in my suit and leather loafers for an oversized flannel, a faded pair of jeans, and tan work boots to match the grisliness of my face.

Within a couple miles of the so-called compound, I parked my rental in a Walgreens parking lot and traveled the rest of distance on foot, remembering that the GR wanted you to come to them with only the clothes on your back. Within a mile I was huffing and puffing and sweeting through my clothes. You know, I wouldn’t call myself out of shape, I’ve naturally always cut a very lean, but muscular figure. But I can’t say I’ve ever done anything to maintain the look. I mean, I drink like a fish, spend a good hunk of my free time in bars, and my diet largely consists of cheese burgers and fries and the occasional steak to break things up a bit. I don’t go to the gym, and have always depended on the physical aspects of my job to keep in shape. Of course, I’ve always stayed away from drugs and cigarettes.

But walking up that long stretch of road, I finally realized that time was catching up with me. I wasn’t the invulnerable 20-year-old man anymore who could dodge bullets and fight three guys at a time. I was getting old. Not old-old, not enfeebled in a wheelchair and unable to tell you what day of the week it was. But I could see those two versions of myself coming. I could see the 50-year-old me getting up four or five times a night to pee. The 60-year-old me being rushed to a hospital because of clogged arteries and a massive heart attack. The 70-year-old me falling and displacing a hip. The 80-year-old me sitting in a wheelchair, rocking back and forth, mumbling to myself in a white room full of other oldsters doing the exact same thing.

For a brief minute of clarity I saw all of this and thought that maybe it was time for a change? Maybe it was time to think about dropping the tough guy routine and give up the PI biz and find something maybe a little less risky, something at a desk where I went in Monday-thru-Friday and had lunch with my co-workers in the break room, chatting about our plans for the weekend. Maybe I should settle down with just one woman, buy a house in the ‘burbs. At my age, kids were out of the question, but maybe we could adopt a few dogs to make our house feel full and alive. Maybe I should just sit down with Junior when I get back home and tell him I’m done with working for him. That I was done with beating up lowlife gamblers and pimps who owed him money and just work out a payment plan for the rest of my debt?

Or maybe I just needed to lay off the booze and gambling and eat a salad once in awhile and think about joining a gym? That option seemed a hell of a lot easier and fun then the other options. Let this be a lesson to you, kids, make sure to always get a solid 8 hours of sleep a night, or otherwise you’ll regularly go down these paths of self-examination and really screw up your life.