The Wizard slides the newspaper off the sofa, pats the seat next to him. It’s been days since he was serviced, and the feeling that pulses in his groin is urgent and animalistic. For a moment his brain is all verbs. His eyes drop. Louise slides the scissors into her back pocket, then pushes herself off the counter and crosses the room to him, slipping down onto the sofa, her skin slick with sweat. Up close, the Wizard smells like wood smoke and rosemary. In his lifetime he has spent more money on clothing than he has on sex, and yet there is nothing he thinks about more. Hand jobs and blowjobs, boobs and butts. His mind is a Kama Sutra of sexual domination. His needs are insatiable. When Louise was in his regular rotation back in San Francisco, Evan told her that the Wizard was being served up to five times a day, young girls recruited to give him “massages” for cash. Some he would coerce into a wank or suck, some he would rape, some he would force to watch him jerk off. It all depended on what he thought he could get away with—what vibe the girl gave off—victim or Victim.
If he was feeling generous, Mobley would throw $1,000 at a girl, but that was rare. Usually, it was a few hundred dollars, but if you saw him three days a week it added up, especially for high school and middle school girls, who had no rent to pay, no taxes or student loans.
But let’s say for the sake of argument he spent $500 a fuck, averaging three fucks a day. That’s $1,500 a day x 365 days or $547,500 a year.
Now multiply that by twenty years and you get $10,950,000.
Think about that. Mobley has paid eleven million dollars to underage girls over the last twenty years, under the auspices of buying a “massage.” （Not including a few million in payouts to girls who went to the cops, plus bribes paid to the cops themselves.） If each fuck on a given day was with a different girl, that means Mobley saw three different girls per day. Now, assume that the most a single girl would come to give Mobley a “massage” was three times a week—3 fucks x 3 girls = 9 fucks per week, subtracted from the total 21 required fucks per week.
This meant Mobley would need at least one additional set of three girls, or probably two sets to be safe to cover the remaining twelve fucks.
So nine different girls a week. But hold on. Let’s not forget that Mobley was always on the move—meaning from week to week he might be in a different city or country, and therefore would require an all-new set of girls, and that those girls would have to be recruited and available at a moment’s notice. So, assume nine girls on call each week in six locations, or fifty-four girls available to Mobley somewhere on Planet Earth each week.
Three girls a day x 365 days = 1,095 fucks per year. Fucks requiring a small army of scouts and recruiters, all trolling for girls in the Bahamas, in France, New York, California, or wherever he chose to fly—girls between the age of fourteen and twenty who could be manipulated, intimidated, or coerced into becoming his sexual servants.
From here the statistical analysis begins to randomize. One must factor in his travel schedule in any specific month, which was always changing, plus a shifting rate of return among the girls. Some came once. The more brainwashed or desperate came for years. Mobley himself has lost count of the number of girls he has forced himself on in his lifetime, but it’s safe to assume there have been thousands.
Thousands of girls coerced and/or raped a grand total of 21,900 times in twenty years, all at a cost of just .01 percent of Mobley’s total net worth （$100,000,000,000）。
For perspective, the median family income for 2019 was $68,703.
.01% of that is $6.87.
Six dollars and eighty-seven cents. That’s what the lives of these girls meant to him, the regard he had for their value. They’re sofa change. They’re a pack of cigarettes—not individually, but together—thousands of daughters and sisters smoked and crushed under his heel for less than the cost of a six-pack of Budweiser.
I defy you to find a dragon in Middle Earth who has ruined more lives.
Louise crosses her legs. She has never told anyone what happened in rooms like this with Mobley over a period of six months. She was a fourteen-year-old girl with a deadbeat mother and a cleaning obsession, who was still trying to figure out adolescence. Yes, she had had a few drinks and taken a few pills, but she had no idea the monsters who were out there in the world, lurking, watching, waiting to devour her whole. She had no idea the things men wanted to do to women’s bodies. The debasement, the violence. To be choked and spit upon. To be bound and penetrated.
Isn’t that the definition of evil?
Mobley picks up a remote, turns off the televisions. He smiles at her, but not in recognition. It is a shark’s smile, the smirk of a crocodile. Louise is not a human being to him, not a face worth remembering. She is a Kleenex to be sneezed in and thrown away.