Chapter 592: How much?

Chi Lian raised an eyebrow and looked at Sally, but the other nodded, and smiled everything was going as expected judging by the look on her face.

Sally leaned forward and she said, "The small red rat sticker at the top of the door tells us that you are a rat vendor but the black rat at the bottom says you don’t just sell information, you buy it as well. I have heard about people like you, you buy secrets from the desperate ones and write them down, after all, the right secret in the ears of the one who needs it the most is worth quite the sum. I don’t like your kind, you have been the cause of blackmail and death to so many innocent people."

"Miss," the young woman raised her hand to stop Sally from speaking any further. "I think you are mistaken about who I am and what I do here?"

"No, I am rarely wrong about people like you. Perhaps you don’t know what you inherited, you seem to be new to the business. How long has it been since you inherited the shop, a month or two? I am guessing you were briefed on how things are done but you hate it. You have a new two year old poster of happy couples and travelers on the London bridge. That particular tour package was offered by a company called Forever tours and travel two years ago. Those posters used to be everywhere and back then, on every wall, every bathroom, every convenience store all around the empire. The marketing was aggressive but short lived because the tour was awfully expensive and limited. A few months later those posters were torn down and yet that one looks new. You are a young girl, who grew up in poverty but you have big dreams which is why we have come to you, to make those dreams come true."

The young woman bit her lip, all of her false bravado gone, she looked like any other eighteen or nineteen year old girl. "I don’t know what you are talking about."

"Yes, you do." Sally stood up, walked to the wall and ripped the poster off the wall.

Chi Lian was surprised, why would Sally do such a thing?

The young woman jumped up from her chair and glared at Sally angrily, she pointed her perfectly green manicured finger at her and shouted, "What are you doing?"

Walking back slowly, Sally crumpled up the poster, threw it to the ground and stomped on it with a disdainful look on her face.

"Wow, I like her, she means business." T4 said.

"Of course you do," Chi Lian said back, "She would have gone along with your kill this one or that one plan in a heartbeat."

She on the other hand was feeling quite uncomfortable at Sally’s actions.

"I was once a foolish girl with dreams which I allowed to hinder the good opportunities which came my way. I suffered, I begged, I cried but I learned, so when the next opportunity came to me after many years, I grabbed on to it with all my strength. I did not care if my fingers broke and I bled, I was not letting go. Consider this as me doing you a favor, when you get the chance to claw yourself out of the gutter as a young uneducated woman, do it because the opportunities dwindle as we age."

She took a big sip from the beer bottle and licked her lips, then she sighed and added, "You are what, eighteen, you should be in school, when holidays come, take vacations, buy yourself a house, start a business, meet a nice man and have some babies. We will provide all the money you need for all these things, we can top it off with a nice nest egg that you can pass on to your children."

Chi Lian could see the wheels turning in the girl’s eyes as she calculated how much money Sally was possibly talking about. Occasionally, her eyes would glance briefly towards the wall on which only small pieces of the poster remained.

She was calculating, weighing things and deciding what was more valuable in her mind.

"Don’t think, we have no time to waste." Sally said, and to increase the pressure, she said, "There are five other rat vendors here, it can be you or someone else."

"What do you want?" the young woman asked. She caved so quickly, melting under Sally’s cold gaze like ice cream on a hot day.

Sally smiled now, and rubbed her hands together, she looked at Chi Lian and nodded. ’Now we are going to get down to what brought us here.’ her gaze said.

"We want what your predecessor left behind, your mother, father, grandparent or whoever brought you into the business. You people have different names for them, your holy grails, gold mines, lifelines or whatever you call it. We want it all and you will be paid very handsomely for it."

"I want one hundred million." the young woman blurted, "Grandmother said, if anyone ever came looking to buy the books, I should ask for nothing less than one hundred million, she said it was worth it."

Sally chuckled and Chi Lian laughed as well, so she had been pretending not to be aware of what they were talking about all along? She knew what it was, had it and there was a price attached to it.

"It will give you answers to the building and so much more," the young woman added, "There used to be an old man who would sit in the convenience store by the gas station and and watch the entire street,he was a nosy old man that knew everyone and everything. He was good friends with my grandmother, that old man was best at eavesdropping and drinking. He was also quite a talker when he was drunk and some of the things he said, they were scary. In this street, a loose tongue will kill you faster than a heart attack if you mean serious business, I will pack up my few belongings right now and lead you to my lifeline."

The deal was all but done, but Chi Lian still had one last question for the young woman. "Are you in school?"

The question took Sally by surprise, and she looked at Chi Lian, ’why’ her eyes seemed to say.

"No." The young woman replied.

"Why?" Chi Lian asked.

"No money." The young woman replied.

"Why?" Chi Lian further inquired. "You could have sold your lifeline, or information."

"My grandmother died of lung cancer, all our savings were spent on her treatment. I have no other family and business has been very slow ever since she died, I am not a very good cook after all. I can’t sell the restaurant because this street is a shithole no sane person wants to move to. I am also the youngest rat vendor on the street, people take one look at me and look for someone more mature, someone with more experience that has seen more in life than I have. And selling the lifeline, forget it, if I told anyone about it, my throat would be slit in the night by someone else that is greedy for it."

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