Stalking Steven

by Jenna Bennett

  “They’re stopping!” she said finally, in an excited whisper.

  “Pull over and stay where you are. Don’t go any closer. I’m almost there.”

  I was almost there. It took a couple of minutes, during which Rachel gave me the exact address and reported that the car had driven straight into a basement garage, and she wasn’t able to see anything that happened after that.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “I’m coming around the corner now. With my lights off.”

  I switched them off just as I swung onto the street where Rachel was parked. I could see her car halfway up. And I was reminded of what Mendoza had told me a lifetime ago, the day before yesterday. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where cars were parked on the street. Rachel’s little white compact stood out like a beacon.

  I picked up the phone again. “Drive off down the road. You’re too conspicuous sitting there. There aren’t any other cars parked on the street.”

  I imagined her taking the same look around as I’d taken when Mendoza told me the same thing two days ago. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’m going to pull into this driveway,” I said, and did. The house was dark and silent, and the inhabitants were probably dead asleep at this time of night. “Go around the block, park out of sight, and come back and join me.”

  A second passed, and then Rachel’s car rolled off down the street. With the lights on. I rolled my eyes, but refrained from comment. Chances were nobody around here was awake to notice, and if the Russians happened to be looking out the window, then all they’d be concerned about, was the fact that she was leaving.

  I stayed where I was, in the driveway of a house two doors down and across the street. The view of the house where Rachel had said the Russians went in, was pretty good.

  It looked like your standard mid-century split-level, one of four or five I could see on the block. A rectangular shoe box, it had pale brick on the bottom half and what looked like vinyl siding on the top half. One door, a little offset from the middle, sat halfway between the top and bottom floor, with a double picture window to the left and two single windows to the right.

  My right.

  The driveway led directly to a two-car garage on the bottom floor, below the two single windows. On the opposite side from the garage, past the front steps, was another double window, only half as tall as the one above.

  I figured the bigger picture window was probably the living room, while the two single windows were bedrooms with a window each. The basement room could be anything from another bedroom to a den or a workout room or something like that.

  There were no lights on anywhere. Not even a sliver where the curtains didn’t quite meet. The inhabitants were either werewolves, who could see in the dark, or they’d boarded up all their windows.

  A shadow suddenly appeared next to the car, and I swallowed a scream. Edwina, who had curled up to take a nap now that the car was finally still, raised her head and gave a short, sharp bark.

  “Shhhh!” I told her. “It’s Rachel. You know Rachel. You like her.”

  I unlocked the door and snagged the dog so Rachel wouldn’t sit on her. “That was fast.”

  “I’ve been working out,” Rachel said and slid into the passenger seat. Edwina growled, but once she recognized Rachel—one of the two people who gave her treats and took her outside when I wasn’t there—she subsided.

  “You didn’t tell me you were bringing the dog,” Rachel added.

  “I was afraid she’d pee on David’s white shag rug. She isn’t used to the apartment yet. Plus I like the company.”

  Rachel nodded. “What do we do now?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure, to tell the truth. I’d wanted to find out where the Russians took the girls after the nightclub closed. And we’d done that. I wasn’t sure why we were still here. I could have just told Rachel to go home, and then tomorrow, I could have called Mendoza and told him where to go. I wasn’t really sure why I hadn’t done that.

  “I guess we could have a look around.” Although we probably couldn’t expect to find much. Especially since I wasn’t sure what we were looking for.

  Unless… Was there a chance that Anastasia was working with this group, and they had Steven inside? Was that why they’d beaten up Zachary when he came around asking questions? Because they didn’t want anyone to realize what was going on?

  “That’s possible,” Rachel agreed when I said so. “They’re clearly up to something. And after what happened to Zachary, it’s pretty obvious that Anastasia has something to do with it. One way or the other.”

  It was.

  “I’m not sure whether we shouldn’t just let Mendoza know what we’ve found out and let him deal with it, though.”

  “What if they kill Steven?” Rachel said.

  “Why’d they do that? It wasn’t Steven’s fault that they didn’t get the money this evening.” Or what they thought was the money. “Diana was there with a big bag. Nobody came to pick it up.”

  “Maybe they recognized you,” Rachel said. “Or Mendoza.”

  Maybe. I thought back to the crush of bodies at the Arena as the game let out. Had I seen either of the Russian men in the crowd? Even just in passing, without really realizing it?

  I didn’t think I had. And I didn’t think they’d gotten a look at Mendoza this afternoon, so they wouldn’t have recognized him.

  Although they could have picked up on the police presence without actually recognizing Mendoza. And I didn’t have to have seen them for them to have seen me. There’d been so many people there that someone I knew could have passed within a few feet of me and I might not have noticed.

  “We should go take a look,” Rachel said, with a glance at the house in the rearview mirror.

  I didn’t really want to take a look, but she was right: we probably should. They might have Steven tied to a chair in the basement, and if they did, we owed it to him to find him as soon as possible.

  “Fine. But I’m leaving Edwina in the car.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that we bring her,” Rachel said and opened her door. “Come on.”

  I put Edwina back in the passenger seat and told her to be a good girl. “I’ll be right back. Ten minutes, tops. Much better than last time.”

  She sighed, but made a circle on the seat and settled into a curve with her nose on her back legs. I closed the door softly and followed Rachel down the driveway and across the street.

  We approached the split level through the yard next door. Less chance we’d be seen that way, if we skulked along the shrubbery. There was the risk that the neighbors might notice us, or that they had an alarm system with flood lights that would come on if someone tried to sneak across their property. Hillwood, where I’d lived with David, was full of such things.

  Not here. This was more of a working class neighborhood. The houses were closer together and people weren’t worried about intruders. We made it across the neighboring property without attracting the attention of people or guard dogs, and without setting off alarms or flashing lights.

  The split level was dark and silent. We approached from the side opposite the garage, so the first thing we got to was the double-wide, half-height window on the lower level, just above the ground.

  I signaled Rachel to stop while I squatted for a closer look.

  There was nothing to see. The window was covered by blinds, shut in such a way that it was impossible to see between the slats, and there might even have been curtains or something else on the inside of the window, since not even a sliver of light peeked through.

  Then again, at past two in the morning, there were probably no lights on, so maybe it wasn’t so surprising.

  We moved on, around the back of the house.

  There was less to see there. No windows on the lower level, which was built into the bank in the rear. The ground sloped up, so once we reached the back of the house, we were standing just below the top level windows.

  They were dark, too.
Again, not surprising, since it was the middle of the night.

  I saw a crack in the curtains, and went up on tippy-toes to press my nose to the glass. A forest of dark shapes met me. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust enough that I could make out a dining room table and chairs, with a living room beyond. And a kitchen off to the left. I could see the glow of the digital clock on either the stove or microwave. Or perhaps it was the ice dispenser on the fridge. We humans have a lot of small lights in the kitchen.

  There was a tall window, likely a bathroom, beyond the kitchen, too high up the wall for me to see through.

  “You can stand on my shoulders,” Rachel offered, her voice soft.

  It was tempting, but— “I don’t really think there’s going to be anything interesting in the bathroom. Do you? If they have Steven at all, they wouldn’t lock him in there. They’d have to move him every time someone needed to use the bathroom.”

  “Unless there are two,” Rachel said.

  I supposed there could be two. A lot of these older homes—and this one was from the early nineteen-sixties—only have one bathroom to share. But there might be a second bath downstairs. Or maybe one of the bedrooms was a master, with an attached bath of its own.

  I was still contemplating the bathroom situation when hell broke lose. Two dark shapes hurtled toward us, one from each end of the house. I had enough time to squeal, but not enough to run, before they were on us. A fist connected with the side of my head, and that was all she wrote.

  * * *

  I wasn’t knocked out. I was pretty woozy for the next few minutes, though. Woozy enough that there was nothing I could do to avoid what happened.

  The shorter Russian—the one who had sat inside the car earlier today—hauled me up over his shoulder. It was uncomfortable to hang like that, with my head and arms dangling and his hand in the vicinity of my butt, keeping me in place, but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as the pain radiating from my head.

  Behind us, the second guy, the one who’d been driving the car, the one I’d been talking to, grabbed Rachel under the arms and began dragging her around the house.

  They took us up to the top floor and into the living room, where they pretty much dropped us onto the sofa. And sat there, with guns in their laps, while they waited for us to wake up.

  Or I should say that they waited for Rachel to wake up. The second guy must have hit her harder than the first guy had hit me. I was conscious, and pretty much alert. Rachel was out cold.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” I told them, as I looked around surreptitiously.

  The living room was furnished in late twentieth century castoff: a fairly ugly sofa they might have picked up second hand at a thrift store, with two mismatched chairs opposite and a chipped coffee table in the middle. No pictures on the wall, or other decorations to speak of. A big screen TV opposite the sofa. An ash tray on the table, filled to overflowing with ashes and cigarette butts. An open pack of Marlboro’s and a lighter next to it.

  And two men with guns staring at me.

  The three girls had to be here somewhere, but there was no sign of them.

  “You’re the lady with the son,” the first guy said, as if he’d just now realized that.

  I nodded. Best to just let them believe I was still looking for Zachary. “I followed you from the nightclub. To see if you were going to where my son is.”

  I looked around, like I expected to see him materialize out of thin air.

  “Your son’s not here,” the second guy said.

  “Would you mind if I took a look around?”

  He hesitated. Then he opened a hand as if to say, “Knock yourself out.”

  I got up from the sofa and headed off down the hallway. My knees were a bit weak, so I had to brace myself against the wall at regular intervals. And my head really pounded.

  Of course I knew that Zachary wasn’t there—he was safe at Southern Hills hospital—but they weren’t trying to stop me from looking around, so I figured I might as well take advantage of it. I thought maybe I could find Steven, or see the bloodstains from where they’d beaten Zachary, or something.

  In that I was disappointed. There were three bedrooms at one end of the house. Two in the front, one in the back of the house. All three were empty. Of people if not furniture. So was the bathroom.

  One of the men with the guns followed me anyway, and watched me look into each room. “Where are the girls?” I asked when we got back to the living room. Rachel was still out cold, or maybe just pretending to be out cold. But if she was pretending, she didn’t give me a sign to let me know.

  The two Russians looked at one another. “Girls?”

  “The three young women you had in the car with you when you arrived at the nightclub this afternoon. The three young women you marched back out to the car when you left tonight. You didn’t stop anywhere on the way, so they were still in the car when you drove it into the garage twenty minutes ago. They have to be here somewhere.”

  “They’re downstairs,” Russian guy number one said. “Would you like to see?”

  I wouldn’t mind. I had no real illusions that they’d let me walk out of here, but if by some miracle I made it out in one piece, at least I’d have some information I could give to Mendoza. And if I didn’t… well, I’d just left my hand prints all over the upstairs. Hopefully Mendoza could make something of that, if I didn’t survive the night.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to see the downstairs.”

  “We should bring your friend along,” the Russian said, and nodded to his friend, who grabbed Rachel under the arms. “Why don’t you take her feet?”

  I didn’t want to take her feet. I’d prefer to have both hands free, just in case I had a chance to knock either or both of them cold with a handy fire poker or something. Or if nothing else, so I could leave more handprints for Mendoza to find. Like bread crumbs down the basement stairs.

  But I didn’t think the objection would go over well. “Shouldn’t we just leave her here?”

  “I think we should take her.” He gestured with the gun. I picked up Rachel’s feet and moved toward the stairs to the lower level.

  If it hadn’t been for Rachel, I might have tried to get out the front door when we passed it. If the two goons had been carrying her, I might have had just enough time to get the door open and get through it before they put her down and pulled one or both of their guns. Although even then I would have thought twice about running away and leaving her behind.

  As it was, there was nothing I could do. I glanced longingly at the door as we staggered past—a regular lock, a deadbolt, and a chain; something to remember if I got the chance to get back up here—but there was nothing I could do, not with that gun pointed at me.

  So I continued down to the lower level, and ended up in a sort of den or man cave between the garage to the right and another door on the left, that must go into the room with the short double windows that I hadn’t been able to look into.

  There was a key in the lock. On the outside. The Russian with the gun—the one who wasn’t carrying Rachel—turned the key. “In.”

  “It’s dark,” I protested. “I can’t see where I’m going.”

  He clearly didn’t care, just gestured to me to proceed. With the gun. “In.”

  I went in. Rachel was shoved in after me, and the door slammed. The key turned in the lock, and we were left in what the poets are pleased to call stygian blackness.

  Chapter 16

  Something rustled. In the first moment of panic, I was sure it was a mouse. Or maybe a rat. Something big.

  It didn’t take much more than another second before I realized that I was hearing bed clothes. Blankets. Sheets. Something like that.

  Then a light came on.

  My eyes had gotten so used to the dark that for several seconds I wasn’t able to see anything. Finally, as my pupils adjusted, I could squint around at my surroundings.

  A room, roughly twelve by twelve feet or so. Maybe a l
ittle less. Institutional green. Plain to the point of looking like a prison cell. Two bunk beds, one on each side of the room, with a chest of drawers between. Four drawers. And three Russian girls, long blond hair falling over their scantily clad charms, sitting up. The top bunk on the left was empty, and I had a pretty good idea who used to sleep there.

  I tried a smile. “Hello.”

  They stared at me. And stared at Rachel, slumped on the floor. Finally, one of them said, in accented English, “What happened?”

  To Rachel, I assumed. “They hit her.”

  She glanced at the other two. All three of them slithered out of their beds and gathered around Rachel. A second later, they had dragged her to the nearest bunk and laid her out. One of them checked her pulse and said a couple of words in Russian. Or Ukrainian or Belarusian or wherever they were from.

  The spokesperson had hair that was a little more honey than the others’, and while they were all pretty, her face was heart-shaped and sweet. “Her pulse is strong,” she told me. “She’ll wake up soon.”

  Good. At least we wouldn’t be stuck in here with a corpse.

  “My name is Gina,” I said. “I came here to find out what happened to my… um… son.”

  My purse was in the car, with my cell phone in it. Smart move, Gina. Not only didn’t I have a picture of Zachary to show them, I had no way of calling for help, either.

  Next time I was going sleuthing in the dark, I’d definitely stick my phone in my pocket.

  Although, given the circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to keep it anyway. The bad guys would have taken it before they shoved me in here. So it was a moot point.

  “His name is Zachary,” I added. “He came to Stella’s last night. Not tonight. Yesterday night. He has red hair, like mine.”

  I put a hand to it. I wasn’t sure how much they understood, so it was best to keep things simple. Only one of them seemed to be comfortable communicating with me. Perhaps the others didn’t speak English well enough. Or at all.

  If they were in the US doing what I thought they were in the US doing, that probably didn’t matter.