After Pip had learned the day-to-day running of the henhouse and had time to notice inefficiencies, small changes were soon underway. Ferrying plates of food back and forth to the henhouse was a huge waste of time that took a number of servants to accomplish. She asked Ezzy for a food wagon. When she asked why, Pip explained the inefficiencies that went with the way it was being handled now. Soon, she had a wagon and less staff. Later, Daro himself upgraded the wagon to a motorized scooter she could drive, pulling a two-level wagon with built-in drawers for cutlery and dishes. He liked watching her when he had the chance. He felt like a parent.

Ezzy, with years of hands-on experience and with the boss's new directive to work with, had time to explain the food situation to Pip in a way she had never dared to suggest to Daro before: "Well-fed slaves are happier and better looking. Sulky, skinny girls don’t impress anyone much. Not all of the girls are high-dollar girls, but it doesn’t pay to play favourites with food or drink. That only causes unnecessary trouble." Once implemented, mealtimes were anticipated by those who weren’t too drug-addled to respond to Ezzy’s cuisine. Most meals were vegetables and whatever local fruit was in season. Meat was a once-a-week thing with no more than three ounces per girl. The food, whatever it was, was well-seasoned and delicious. Most of the girls thrived on food better than they’d ever eaten in their lives. Those to whom the food made little difference came as a rule, from homes where good food was normal.

Even Heledaro found he was losing weight and getting fitter.

His weight reduction translated into more autonomy for her. Ezzy used that to ask for improvements in her next project: she wanted to upgrade the interior of the hen house to make it seem like home to the girls. Maybe even a better home than most of the girls had ever known. That was done during Pip’s second year. Daro’s product line experienced a surge in value as the girls were more easily transformed into high-end whores, clean, healthy and usually mentally fit.

Aside from seeing that the girls were fed and healthy, Pip was expected to get to know each of the girls and assess their characters. Heledaro, a sucker for sophistication that had no price tag stuck to it, wanted to know his products to ensure that the girls he sold could live up to expectations. He needed a record, but he wanted it all done by hand.  Most traffickers would never think of such a thing, but since he, himself assumed he had many of the same appetites as his clients, he felt it only made sense while sampling the goods to keep track of features that could improve his bottom line. This encouraged repeat business, which is always easier and more profitable than breaking new ground.

Being forced to babysit such a collection of girls was hard on Pip. She had a conscience that was far from a match with her current lifestyle. She was stressed about her wards as well as her own lost home. As her future appeared stable for at least the short term, with Daro, she knew she was safe, was being looked after, educated and protected from further abuse or harm. So far, at any rate. In short, she had the closest thing possible to a real family and a home with a big black hole for a future. All things considered, she was as happy as a child could be under such circumstances. With each passing day, her old life faded as the new, colourful one occupied every waking moment. Nevertheless, she knew where she came from and considered this life to be a lie.

Daro fancied himself as a ladies’ man and took a personal interest in his stock and trade. He loved them in a way and, if it were possible, would keep a lot of them. But since he couldn’t and since he was a sucker for a fresh face, he had become a voracious consumer. That he was destroying lives in the process, he didn’t think about. He called it selective compartmentalization. He didn’t see himself as the monster he knew he was. He’d long since rationalized all of his actions to the extent that in some respects, he lived in a dream world. Even so, that didn’t mean in the slightest that he ignored the harsh realities required to protect, conceal and grow his enterprises, including his girl habit. He decided he needed better records than he had. The logical person to collect the data he wanted was Pip.

By doing this, he figured that, by default, he would be backhandedly forcing Pip to learn his sexual preferences. Maybe his quirks, too. He figured he must have plenty of those that were far beyond normal that he had always taken for granted. Since Pip was so young and not a virgin when he’d bought her, she was safe from his advances. Heledaro was not interested in fucking children. Young girls who looked like women, yes, but not little, prepubescent kids. He drew the line at developed twelve-year-olds. After sixteen, he lost interest. He wanted virgins with no mental or physical baggage. Race made no difference to him, but he kept a record, a sort of running tally. He didn’t pursue any of them in particular, it was just interesting to keep track of where his inventory was coming from and where it was going. Knowing where your best merchandise came from was good business practice.

He became annoyed over time that Pip had been ruined before he got her. He’d never owned such a specimen before. She was clearly a beauty with sultry facial features that were unbelievably delicate in one so young. Her bright red hair was amazing. It glowed in the sun. Her skin was perfect. He wondered about the tattoo on her back, but being just numbers and symbols, it was meaningless to him. 

Eventually, the thought crossed his mind that it might not be meaningless to international authorities if she somehow came to their attention. No one would mark a meaningless girl like that. He asked Pedro to photograph it. Later, he took the photograph to a computer expert. The computer expert told him the image was a scientific formula that had something to do with DNA. From there, he took it to the University Hospital in Bogotá the next time he had business in that city and asked if someone could interpret it for him. He left a copy of the image with them. A week later, his office received a callback number. When he returned the call, a scientist told him that. "The symbol is indeed a DNA sequence that we traced to an internationally known genetic sequencing experiment done in South Korea. The sequence was tattooed on seven children in order. This child was #7 of 7 whose entire family disappeared without a trace. The baby was a girl, and her father was one of two lead scientists. This child and her parents are listed with Interpol, and the search for them is ongoing. Would you be able to supply any details about how this symbol came into your possession, sir?"

"Oh, it was in a children's book I picked up in a second-hand book store in Medellin. I was just curious; that's all. Thank you for your help, though. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something serious," he responded.

"It's serious, for sure," the woman replied. “This image is of a sequencing that was done to cure a fatal genetic disorder. There were other anomalies noted about this child. She is flagged by that tattoo. But since she disappeared, the outcome of the gene sequencing is unknown.

That was too much for El Heledaro. He was spooked. Daro deduced that Pip was meant to be remembered. There was no possibility she was ever going to be surfacing for genetic testing. He decided he’d have it erased at the earliest opportunity. Then, uncharacteristically, he forgot all about it. Other things came up.

She had been raped right off the bat by her abductors. In his mind, they had no right to do that. One man was already dead thanks to Pip herself, and another, a Venezuelan trafficker named Jacob, he’d located and had gutted. His contacts were still looking for Lionel. Yes, he knew exactly who Lionel was. That man would pay for ruining a perfectly good girl he knew he would have enjoyed when the time came. Now, it wasn’t going to come. If the girl wasn’t a certified virgin, he couldn’t be interested. He’d had his share of venereal diseases, and he had no intention of ever being infected again.  He knew for certain now that he could not risk taking Pip to a hospital to find out for sure if she was clean. However, she could be used to make sure no girl he ever touched could infect him. 

To ensure his own safety, one of Pip’s new duties was to learn the sexual history of each girl in the henhouse and catalogue it. He expected and wanted to find nothing but a V for virgin next to each girl’s name on a single sheet of paper. That way he could be sure to always have clean girls on hand at the very least. The other consideration, of course, was that he could not afford to be selling tainted merchandise. Unwittingly, he gave Pip the hiding place she’d been looking for. She no longer had to hide the records under a the dog’s bedding in a dog house; Daro’s own safe would do much better.

In the Coop, Pip had to deal with the girls before and after they had been sampled by Heledaro. They were delivered to his door, as asked for, one at a time, the first time.  Sometimes after that, he’d have anywhere up to three once they were broken in. Depending on whether the child met or exceeded his expectations, determined her fate for the next month or so. From there it was a matter of exploring and exploiting each girl until she was sold. He thought of each of them like a blank canvas that was begging to express itself. Of course, the girls had no idea and, in most cases, would have been panicked to learn what he had in mind.

He didn't waste a moment worrying about whether or not he impregnated any of them. He rather enjoyed the thought that he probably had sons and daughters all over the world by now. The best part was that someone else was paying for their upkeep. It didn't matter to him if they grew up slaves or not. When you are born, you play the hand you're dealt and make the best of it, same as he, himself had done.

As for his visibility in the eyes of the law, Heledaro knew he had nothing to fear there since the child trafficking laws in Colombia barely met minimum international standards. Convictions he knew, were almost non-existent. He owned the police, and Interpol had no presence in his country. It was a wide-open racket with no overhead and no real legal restrictions. He was free to do as he pleased. 

His drug empire was a different story, and he was coming to wish he could get rid of it. He couldn't, though, because the drug smuggling had too recently moved into another plane of existence. He and other cartel owners had pooled their resources and had expanded their business into international transport - by submarine. 

Mules, boats and aircraft were all too easy to locate, search and seize. Each time that happened, an entire shipment was lost. Every so often, they sacrificed a shipment as a decoy to divert government resources while bigger or numerous smaller shipments went undetected in other directions. Submarines changed everything. 

Submarines could carry two tons of product and were notoriously difficult to detect even if the sub were expected. That made them the cheapest, safest way to export products, first to the USA and more recently to Spain and soon to other parts of Europe. 

He put measures in place to distance himself from it, but even so, pressure was being brought to bear. 

Knowing this, he decided he would provide for Pip in the event he was detained or even extradited to the US. He cleaned out the contents of his safe and put its contents in a rental storage locker under an assumed name. He had the locker modified. Everything important went into the vault. The key went into a Safety Deposit at a bank in Trinidad.

He knew he was an extradition target, and one day, his fears came home to roost in the form of an international drug raid on one of his cocaine labs. It seemed an army of police, supported by three helicopters, swooped down on his operation. Men were running everywhere for cover, but it was no use. The lab was surrounded. Not a shot was fired. 

Daro, of course, was not there. But he was contacted during the first moments of the raid.  At that point, he knew his time was short. The lab had likely already been traced back to him. He had to act. His prime concern was not his holdings, it was Pip. If he survived, he still wanted Pip in his life for more reasons now than just her personality. 

Soon after, he got the call he'd been dreading. A ring composed of joint drug enforcement agencies led by the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was forming around the Hacienda.  They were still a mile out. He didn't have much time. Where was Pip?