It’s Not Easy Making Money In the Apocalypse – V5 - Chapter 24

The rideshare pulled up to a factory building that looked rather derelict. The area of town I had my warehouse wasn’t fancy, but it was well-lit. The buildings were all undamaged and the place as a whole had good security. Comparatively, this looked like a particularly shady place, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had told me we had accidentally world-traveled to the Apocalyptic world.

“Cecelia…” I muttered uncertainly as I considered getting out.

“This is where Caleb and his gang reside normally when he isn’t visiting you,” Cecelia spoke with a flippant voice as if it had nothing to do with her.

I let out a sigh. “Fine, it’s not like I think he’ll betray me.”

He was still my slave, and unless Cecelia told me otherwise, his collar was still functional. I stepped out of the car, and the rideshare was all too quick to step on the gas and leave the area. I looked over at a building with boarded-up windows and a door that appeared to barely be hanging on. However, the address was the one agreed upon, and I started to wonder if this was Cecelia’s way of punishing me for taking advantage of the ease of using her. In the future, it might be preferable if I just scheduled my appointments.

I knocked on the door, which squeaked as it opened a crack. My eyes narrowed, but a moment later the door swung open and Caleb was standing there.

“Boss! You came just in time.” Caleb declared. “Hey, come in, come in.”

I followed behind him, but I prepared my inventory to pull out Anweil’s blade and drop a smoke grenade. Thankfully, the environment brought all of my Apocalyptic senses, and I was ready for anything. It turned out my worry was for nothing though, as he brought me into a crowded space. There was a large couch with a couple of guys sitting on it, and they were watching a large television that appeared to be playing some television show.

This used to be the lobby of some former business, and they had turned the reception desk into a makeshift bar. There were a dozen or so bottles of liquor on it, as well as numerous other paraphernalia. Overall, the entire place looked both comfy and trashy at the same time.

“This is the crew I gathered.” Caleb gestured excitedly. “And this is the crib. What do you think?”

“This is where you live?” I asked, trying to keep any expression from showing on my face.

“Ah… no, I don’t have a place this nice.” He responded sheepishly, scratching the back of his head. “Well, I mean, we sometimes crash here when we can’t find a place to stay at night, but it’s not big deal.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I hadn’t expected this guy to live in such a situation. Wasn’t he effectively homeless? I mean, I had met him working under a shady loan shark, so it wasn’t like I thought he’d be in high society, but I wasn’t expecting such a pathetic situation either. I had given him some money. It should have been enough to pay rent for a month. Perhaps, they thought it wouldn’t last?

“The television?” I asked.

I was picking on the only thing that had obvious wealth behind it besides the drugs. I barely knew about the drugs of the apocalyptic world. I wasn’t interested in knowing about this world’s drugs. I wanted to earn my wealth as honestly as I could, and becoming some kind of drug lord didn’t sit well with me.

“Ah… B-boss… when you gave us the money, you said we could use it for expenses. I mean… we held back, but…” He seemed extremely nervous, and the other men turned off the television, sitting up in their seats with concern.

“It’s nice.” I coughed awkwardly. “You’ve been sending stuff to the warehouse properly, I’ve seen.”

“Th-thanks.” He nodded excitedly. “If you have any more requests, I’m your guy!”

I had given him money and tasked him with bringing things over to the warehouse. The part of the warehouse I allowed them to enter was separate from the part where I kept my security, but most of the stuff I sent him out to get was low-level stuff anyway. However, it looked like he had just hit up all the local grocery stores and bought whatever was on the shelves. He didn’t buy things in the unlabeled bulk amounts that Mizuki had been able to send.

“I thought you were going to get stuff directly from a vendor. You would have spent less and had more left over to buy… things.”

I could already guess that most of their money was going into drugs. I didn’t want to police how they spent their money. I wasn’t a philanthropist. If I sold a gun in the apocalyptic world, it wasn’t like I’d get worked up about who they shot at. It was the same here. I could send them more money, but they’d probably just buy more drugs, and as long they were happy with what I paid them, I didn’t feel the need to change that.

After everything that had happened with Mizuki and her family, and the attention was getting working with Lily, I realized that having my people was probably to acquire goods was probably for the best. This is why I didn’t make any more requests from either of them. Mizuki’s family was monitoring anything she did, and Lily might as well be an agent for this Allco shadow organization. Perhaps, that was why I had come out here to talk to Caleb and set him up better as a supplier.

“Sorry, Boss…” He lowered his head as I had berated him. “This was why I was contacting you earlier. We’re having some issues on the supplier side.”

“Issues?” I frowned. “What kind of issues?”

“We were able to locate a cheap supplier. They sell all the goods you been requesting, but as soon as we were about to close the deal, we got shut down.” He declared.

“Shut down?”

“It’s a gang!” He huffed angrily. “They won’t let us you the supplier unless we pay them a finder fee.”

I frowned as I took in what he said. “Caleb… did you go to the gang to find the supplier in the first place?”

“Ah! Boss… it’s not like that!” He held up his hands defensively. “You’re the one who told me to use all my inside resources. All I did was ask a few friends if they knew a place to buy cheap goods out of China. They connected me with a guy. We can buy supplies right off the boat. However, as soon as my friends realized it wasn’t a personal deal and saw how much money was on the line, they got greedy. They demanded we pay. They threatened both us and the supplier.”

I shook my head. “Can’t we just use another supplier?”

“Boss, I checked the cost of other supplies. Since we’re not a big business, they won’t cut us any discounts. I can’t buy for much less than we could already find in a store. It’s five times the price that we’d get using this supplier.”

“How much are they asking for their finder fee?”

“They want $100,000 up front, and then 50%.”

“$100,000!” My eyes widened, but after a moment I calmed down.

It was an exorbitant amount of money, and could even be considered criminal, but I didn’t have the people or the resources to make enemies. I should have enough to pay them that fee.

“We might be able to work something out. If it wasn’t a supply issue, I’m not even against paying grocery store prices. At 1/5th the cost, we can afford to give them 50% of the cost of what we buy. That just means a 150% markup, still over 1/3rd the price of the grocery.”

When we were saving that much extra money, that $100,000 would quickly be overlapped anyway. Once my business picked up in the wasteland, $100,000 would be nothing.

“No, boss.” He shook his head. “They want 50% of all profits!”

“Excuse me?”

“They say if we going to continue to do business in town, they want 50% of everything we make just for the right to do business!”

“So, it is extortion after all.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all this time, Boss.” Caleb declared.

“What is this… gang? What are their numbers?”

“Boss, I know you’re capable, but you can’t possibly be thinking…”

“Caleb…” I gave him a look while crossing my arms.

He swallowed hard, his eyes breaking away from mine. “Yeah, um, they call themselves Tiger’s Den. I don’t know how many people they have, but I know they have their hands all over the underworld. They own the Chinese part of town and the docks. They used to hire me for anonymous runs from the docks to various people in Chinatown. The work started getting too dangerous, so I got a job working as a loan shark tough. That’s how you found me.”

“I see… Is there anything else?”

“Ah… they have their hands in trafficking. When we went to kidnap and sell… ah… your… um… your mom… they were the buyers.”

My lips flickered into a smile, and the men couldn’t help but look at each other worriedly. It did seem like things had a way of working themselves out. I had been meaning to deal with these guys eventually.