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  “Yes, Daddy,” nodded the toddler vigorously.

  Ten Years Later

  As Chin planned, this introduction to cranes set the path for Queenie’s life. Fascinated and enchanted, she discovered, as she grew, that the birds were more than pretty playthings. At eight, she began using crane feathers in clothing. Feathers started showing up on her tops, dresses and jeans. When she was ten, she found out feathers had a more sinister use. Properly sharpened, the innocent-looking quills were instruments of pain, torture and death, knowledge that she shared with no one but was always prepared to use.

  The entrepreneurial young girl saw opportunity. She began selling clothing and specialty pens, using the colorful feathers from her pets. This was a most profitable enterprise, and she learned how to leverage the power of others. She farmed out work to her classmates, who were happy to make a few bucks. It was the kind of initiative Chin hoped might happen. How many twelve-year-olds made three hundred bucks a week, tax free?

  Like her father, Queenie had incredible muscle speed and strength. Like all her siblings, she had rigorous martial arts training and was able to fend off paramours, perverts, and posers with well-placed shots to the windpipe or groin.

  On her fifteenth birthday, an Asian teenaged guy snagged her outside of her apartment and shoved her into the car. Queenie didn’t resist because, well, this guy was definitely intriguing, somehow familiar-looking, but most importantly, damn hot.

  “No, I’m not going to rape you,” opened the stranger.

  “You could if you wanted,” replied Queenie curiously and more than slightly interested.

  “I’m not into incest.”

  The intensity of Queenie’s questioning glare amused King, who grinned, “Yup, I’m a brother from another mother. I’m King. Dad told me to take you to the airport. You’re going on a ride.”

  “Where to?” wondered the flabbergasted girl.

  “Timbuktu, also known as Hokkaido. I’m half-Japanese and our dear father thought I should take you there. It’s beautiful at this time of year with all its snow around the lake’s reserve.”

  “Why are we going?” asked Queenie, curiosity rapidly turning to irritation.

  King’s voice hardened. “Because you’re so damned stupid. Yeah, you’re making some dough, but the profits are going up your nose or into your arms.”

  “It’s my life and I will do with it what I want and I want to Now!”

  “NO!” thundered King as he grabbed her. With an incredibly forceful grip, he kept her captive until they arrived at a private airport where they silently boarded one of their father’s jets.

  Sixteen hours later, they arrived at the Red-Crowned Crane Sanctuary by Tsurui, Japan. King opened the door and pushed Queenie out. “Don’t come back until you see the light.”

  With nothing else to do, the rebellious teenager drifted toward the sanctuary’s frozen lake. The shivering girl cursed her father until…until she saw poetry. Thirty red-crowned cranes appeared and engaged in a mating dance, ballet-like in its beauty and execution. Almost, as if human, pairs of cranes bowed to each other, jumped in the air, then floated back to earth. The sight of the lustrous, elegant winged creatures gliding through the shimmering atmosphere brought her to tears as she realized: I am a Crane.

  Below the multi-colored lights of the aurora borealis in this natural paradise, she made a decision. She trudged through the snow back to the plane where King was waiting for the awed girl at the door.

  “No more drugs. I quit cold turkey.”

  “There’s hope for you yet. If you prove yourself, maybe someday I’ll allow you to do business with me.”

  On the ride back to New York, Queenie decided to rid herself of negative influences. At the top of the list was her mother.

  Elizabeth, at thirty-three, was washed up and Chin hadn’t touched her in years. Queenie hated seeing her mother’s pitiful attempts at offering herself up to any man with a dollar bill in one hand and some kind of mind-altering substance in the other.

  She moved out and, at fifteen, she became a woman.

  That didn’t mean Queenie didn’t learn something from her.

  From seeing Elizabeth in action, Queenie learned how to use men. She knew just how far she could push before she might really have to deliver. She also had no qualms about delivering if it meant she could get something of value.

  And, if guys didn’t feel like giving her what she wanted? She had an ace up her sleeve—the dance she learned from watching the cranes on the frozen lake in Japan drove men wild. Suddenly, closed doors would open, tight fists would unclench. But Queenie vowed that was a last step that she never wanted to use.

  Queenie determined to have her own stable of cranes. She concentrated on two main species: the Sandhill and the Japanese red-crowned cranes. While they were from completely different geographies and their plumage was not at all similar, she loved the red patch of skin on top of their heads.

  She started to breed the birds. Considering the rents in New York and the space needed to keep each five-foot-tall, twenty-pound adult bird, her twenty birds were an expensive but necessary cost of doing business—they were the source of the feathers. More birds allowed her to harvest additional raw materials to make more feathered clothing, boas, and quills.

  Naturally, she kept the best for herself. Already an attention getter, her amazing use of feathers added to her allure. She didn’t have to do any marketing at all. In the very elite circles she traveled, she became known as “the crane babe.”

  While she stopped using drugs herself, Queenie immersed herself in the drug culture. With the profits she made on her feather lines, she began making deals in the lucrative New York markets.

  Between the drugs and her crane lines, she was pulling in over ten grand a month. Not bad for a kid who wasn’t legal to drive so, when her Grade 9 English teacher promised to give her an “A” if she spent extra time “studying” with him, she ended her school days by shoving the business end of a quill into the creep’s eyeball, permanently blinding him.

  Like her mother when she was young, this exotic-feathered Eurasian girl was a magnet to men. Unlike her mother, she knew just how far she could push before she had to deliver.

  Seven Years Ago

  Three years flew by and, on her eighteenth birthday, Queenie had one of her increasingly rare visits from Chin. It was less than three minutes, long enough to hand her a black leather briefcase and say, “Be smart with this because that’s the last you’ll ever get from me.”

  The box contained a million dollars in cash.

  As soon as her father left, she got on the blower to King who, at that time, was a hired gun to transport illegals from Asia to America. From watching those he worked for, King knew he was missing out on the big money of collecting a percentage of every illegal worker’s pay for years on end until the “transportation debt” had been paid off.

  If he was going to get into that business, he needed not only a financial partner but a strategic partner.

  Queenie, wanting to expand her own personal empire, fit the bill perfectly. The two hammered out a basic plan. King would head the Asian operations; Queenie would handle North America.

  King would find illiterate unskilled people desperate to leave China, Thailand or Laos to find any job they could. King would arrange their shipment to North America as cheaply as possible. They could also make few extra bucks by sneaking in a kilo or two of Southeast Asian heroin and selling it once it got to its destination.

  Queenie would find the North American Chinese restaurants, shops, bars, and massage parlors that wanted cheap labor and paid in cash. The illegals worked at a fraction of minimum North American wages, knowing it was still far more than they could earn at home. Of course, Queenie’s own network could handle any drugs King brought in.

  They approached their father for startup money—twenty million dollars. That would have been enough to buy ships, arms, helicopters, drug runners, land transportation, and officials in as
many as five different countries.

  Chin’s one word answer was, “No.”

  He didn’t give a reason and it was pointless to ask. He was just a jerk.

  “Screw him,” was their mutual response. “We’re just going to it.”

  Developing their own clientele and sources took tough years of slogging it out. Queenie and King hated it and decided to expand and control their own destiny.

  Without their father.

  Queenie and King never considered that the reason Chin refused in the first place was that he wanted them to build their own empires. If they knew where every buck was spent and where every skeleton was buried, that would have been the foundation for a real business.

  Instead, so blinded were they by the glitter of potential profits that they broke one of Warren Buffet’s dictums for success. “A debt-free life is the best life. Start with thinking that borrowing money is not an option.”

  Not that they would have any attention to the Oracle of Omaha. Patience was totally not their style.

  New Toys

  Hong Kong - Three Months Ago

  The two leveraged themselves to buy a tramp steamer and another helicopter. King vetted his “cargo” carefully and Queenie did extreme due diligence in ensuring that the clients for the illegals were trustworthy and timely in their payments.

  The maiden voyage was fabulously successful. King and Queenie congratulated themselves. They managed to pay down a quarter of their debt and began preparing for their next shipment, using the same caution as on their initial venture.

  But something came up.

  An unbelievable deal dropped into their laps. Five hundred pounds of Burmese heroin for a third of the going rate was available.

  Queenie and King called, cajoled and begged everyone they knew to lend them some cash but no one bit. The two were still way over-leveraged and it would take only a puff of wind to blow down their house of cards.

  But they didn’t want to let go of this “deal of a lifetime.”

  As a last resort, Queenie approached Alexei Gudonov, a mid-level Russian mobster. Alexei had met Chin years earlier and ever since had tried to get the Shaolin Triad leader to help him get into the lucrative Chinese market. Chin played Alexei, never saying yes but never closing the door, either. He arranged for Queenie to meet with the Russian. Alexei, not knowing Chin arranged the introduction in hopes that the Russian would no longer bother him, thought it was a positive sign. He thought Queenie might be the entry he craved into Chin’s vast network.

  So, when Queenie approached him about borrowing a million dollars, he agreed, even though he thought her plan was rife with holes. But she was Chin’s daughter, and everything the Triad leader touched turned to gold.

  When Queenie phoned King to tell him the news, the two drooled over themselves at the huge payday that was just around the corner.

  Of course, things changed.

  Unfortunately, it was for the worse, not the better.

  New York - Present Day, Wednesday

  Taking in the view from her $10,000 per month, two-thousand square-foot penthouse in Manhattan, Queenie was pissed. Where the hell was King? He had gone completely dark and it had been more than a week since the Eurasian beauty spoke to her brother. “Speak” was not exactly the right word. She was so angry that she blistered his ears for half an hour when he told her there would be a further delay in the delivery of the three hundred Chinese illegals and five hundred pounds of heroin onboard their newly acquired tramp freighter.

  “Don’t worry about me. You know schedules are always in a state of flux,” was his reply.

  And, as much as she didn’t want to hear that, it was a sad and infuriating fact of life.

  Their decrepit sea vessel had barely left the Chinese port of Guangzhou when King called her to say, “I need Cheryl for a little job.” While Cheryl had assisted in transporting thousands of illegals around the globe, it was only her second voyage as captain. Queenie was positive that the only reason Cheryl got the gig was because of King’s libido. He had bored Queenie for hours with tales of the former Olympic gymnast’s “acrobatic virtues.”

  When she stated her reservations, King assured her, “Relax. It’ll only take an extra day.”

  She reluctantly agreed but, when she didn’t hear from him for three days, she started calling for an update. Initially, when he didn’t answer, she was ticked but not angry. However, as the unanswered texts and voicemail messages mounted into the hundreds, she felt herself wanting to shove a lit stick of dynamite up his rectum. When King finally picked up, there was no apology, only some comments about dealing with “family business” in Shanghai.

  That’s when she went ballistic. He patiently listened to her tirade before answering with a flippant, “I feel for you. Talk to you soon.” Then he hung up without explanation.

  And that was the last Queenie heard from him.

  She called back right away but King didn’t pick up. Then, she called back again…and again…and again. First, daily and then, for the past week, on an hourly basis.

  This was so not good.

  The customers awaiting the illegals pressured her about the delay and wondered aloud if they’d made a mistake in giving her a down payment. There were constant phone calls from San Francisco to New York and none of the conversations were pleasant. And she had the huge monthly nut to pay for living in one of the most highly priced areas in the world, not to mention the upkeep of her birds.

  Now Alexei wanted to meet in three hours and there was no way to delay him again.

  The squeeze was on.

  Her cell phone vibrated. There was no ID from the caller, but that was totally normal. She had a generic way of answering these calls that either encouraged business or flattered the caller, making him want to get to know her better.

  Queenie punched the familiar green button with a telephone image. “Hello, Sexy. I got the time if you got the cojones.”

  “I get enough for free,” said the familiar voice.

  Queenie chomped on her lower lip. Not a good way to start a conversation with your father. “Hello, Father.” She could never bring herself to call this almost totally absentee parent “Dad.”

  “What do you want?” There was ice in her voice.

  “King is dead,” stated Chin in a flat voice. “And there’s no point getting emotional. That’s not going to help you.”

  Queenie dug her fingers into her cheeks, trying to control herself. This confirmed her worst fears. She took a breath. “Do you know what happened to my boat and cargo?”

  “Confiscated by the authorities.”

  “Cheryl should have been able to handle them.”

  “Cheryl’s dead, too. King took her on a wild goose chase.”

  Complete screw-up. Queenie’s entire being trembled with rage. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve been waiting for him to contact me.”

  “I didn’t know the two of you had a deal on the go until just before this call, after my man went through King’s computer. There were no details, but enough for me to figure out that you should change plans.”

  Chin waited as Queenie unleashed a string of four-letter obscenities before continuing. “Now you know why I didn’t come in on your deal. Greedy people wind up with nothing. You and King were greedy. You thought you could become billionaires overnight with little work. It took me years to build that fortune, not weeks.”

  “My whole damned life is on the line and the bastard will take me apart if I don’t pay up. It’s your fault. You introduced me to him.”

  Chin interjected, “Who are you talking about?”

  “Alexei Gudonov.”

  “The Bolshevik Meathead?” sneered Chin with undisguised contempt.

  “Yeah. I’ve got to go see him after lunch. I owe him a million bucks and I got bupkis to give him. King found a deal for some Asian hard candy but it was a bulk buy deal that needed to be done fast and King and I didn’t have enough cash. We needed to bring in a partner
. Alexei gave us a million bucks prepayment for a shipment. It’s worth crazy times that on the market but no one else came through so we had to take it.”

  “Live and learn.”

  “That is so corny. Any real advice?”

  There was a brief pause as Chin pondered. “One, don’t let him know what you’re thinking. Two, don’t let him see you sweat. Three, don’t defend; attack. Four, think outside the box. Whatever you do, do not play it safe or play it normal. Otherwise, it’s your funeral.”

  “Thanks.” Queenie punched the end call button viciously, glaring at the phone as if it was the phone’s fault she was in this jam. She sat abruptly on the floor. The shipment she and King had put together was gone. Pretty much everything she had was invested in that deal. As she put things in perspective, she decided there was no point in being mad. That was no defense against a baseball bat clubbing her head or a bullet to her brain.

  It was pointless to ask for an extension. This was a disaster and she needed to put a brand-new plan together on her own and, most definitely, without help from anyone.

  Fast. Unless she just wanted to disappear, but that was not her. The exotic femme fatale, like her siblings, was determined to show the world—and their father, that they were equal and more to him.

  Think outside the box. Queenie frowned. She didn’t have to do that. She’d use the weapon that beautiful women have used against men since time immemorial.

  Just like her mother.

  She entered her bathroom and showered with the hottest water she could stand for ten minutes, scrubbing herself thoroughly. After drying herself, she applied moisturizer to her face and breasts. Waiting for the moisturizer to absorb, she dyed a crimson patch on top of her jet black hair.

  Satisfied, she applied delicate amounts of glitter to her cheeks. On and around the tattoo of a Japanese red-crowned crane on her left breast and the nipple of her right breast, she sprinkled more sparkles.