Stalking Steven

by Jenna Bennett

  “I spoke to him,” the girl with the honey-colored hair said.

  “You’re Tatiana?”

  She nodded. “It was only a few words. He didn’t… he wasn’t…” She flushed. “Yuri took me away for a customer.”

  Right. I could read between the lines on that one. Zachary wasn’t there to buy sex, and other men were, and she was expected to take care of them.

  “He wanted to know about Anastasia,” she added.

  I wandered over to sit down on the bunk next to Rachel’s feet. “Anastasia used to be one of you?”

  She nodded, and sat down opposite. The two other girls swarmed up to the bunk above her head, and curled up, listening. It was possible they understood more than they could communicate, so I kept my questions simple. “How did you end up here?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “Newspaper ad. Modeling.”

  I glanced up at the top bunk. “You two, as well?”

  They both nodded, so at least they’d understood that much.

  “And Anastasia?”

  “Anastasia is smart,” Tatiana said. “She knew it wasn’t modeling. But she wanted to come to America.” After a second she shrugged, “Everyone wants to come to America.”

  The land of opportunity. Or at least the land of more opportunity than Russia.

  “But when you got here, it wasn’t modeling?”

  They shook their heads. “Stella’s,” Tatiana said. “Dancing. And taking care of the customers.”

  She glanced up at the other two and back at me. “They told us after three years, we can stop working. But we don’t think we believe them.”

  I wouldn’t believe them, either. “What happened to Anastasia?”

  One of the girls on the top bunk said something, and Tatiana nodded. “She said she would get away,” she told me. “That she would escape, and then she’d come back and help us. But she hasn’t.”

  “How long ago did she escape?”

  They conferred for a moment. “Three days,” Tatiana said.

  So probably the night before I’d seen her in Crieve Hall. “How?”

  The glanced at each other again. “Her father helped her,” Tatiana said.

  “Excuse me?”

  It probably wasn’t a smart thing to say, because it made Tatiana think she’d pronounced something wrong. She said it again, more slowly and clearly. “Her father helped her.”

  “I heard you,” I said. “She had a father? Here?”

  She nodded. “She sent a letter to him. We distracted Yuri and Konstantin and she pretended to run away, but all she really wanted was to put a letter in the mailbox.” Her face darkened. “They hit her when they got her back, but they didn’t realize the letter was there.”

  “And Anastasia’s father got it? And came to the club?”

  “Two times,” Tatiana said. “First to meet her. To make sure she was...” She trailed off, searching for the words.

  I nodded. “To make sure she was who she said she was.”

  She lit up. “Yes.”

  “And he believed her?” This had to be Steven. I had no idea how he’d ended up with a Russian daughter that it seemed neither he nor Diana had known about. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d helped her just because she needed help, whether she was his daughter or not. But we had to be talking about Steven.

  “He helped her,” Tatiana said. “He came back. He paid for thirty minutes with Anastasia. Olga,” she glanced up above her head at the two girls perched there, “broke the fire alarm in the club. There was water pouring down, and people screaming and running. Anastasia and her father got away.”

  Good for Steven. Although it might have done more good if he’d gone to the police when he first met Anastasia and heard her story. That might have saved all the girls, and not just one.

  But it explained a lot of what was going on. “I guess when Zachary—my… um… son—came to the club asking about Anastasia, the two goons—” What had she called them? “—Yuri and Konstantin probably thought he knew more than he did?”

  “He had seen Anastasia,” Tatiana said. “They wanted to know where she was.”

  Of course they did. Having her on the loose would be a threat to them.

  And Zachary had probably told them what they wanted to know. Given that they were beating him up, I wouldn’t blame him.

  Had they then gone back to Araminta’s house, where Zachary had seen Anastasia, and found her and Steven there?

  If they had, they had stashed them somewhere else. Anastasia and Steven were nowhere in this house. Unless there was a part of it I hadn’t seen yet. And I didn’t think there was.

  Of course, they could both be dead. But then Yuri and Konstantin would be looking at a much bigger mess than they were looking at now. They hadn’t killed anyone yet. Not as far as I knew.

  Next to me, Rachel groaned, and I turned to her. “Finally.”

  She blinked, her eyes unfocused. It took several seconds for her to recognize me. Or put my name with my face. Or process that I was there. Something. “Gina?”

  I nodded. “We’re in the basement of the split level. Yuri and Konstantin knocked you out and dragged you inside.”

  She looked blank, and I added, “Do you remember following the sedan from the nightclub?”

  She tried to nod, and winced. “Yes. We went to check out the house.” She lifted a hand to check the back of her head, and her face twisted. “Ow.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She tried to raise herself on one elbow and seemed to think better of it. “How come you’re not flat on your back?”

  “I don’t think they hit me as hard as they hit you,” I said. “Or one guy didn’t hit as hard as the other guy. I got lucky. I’ve been awake for most of it.”

  If you could call it lucky. My head still hurt, and had been hurting since they hit me. Rachel had only woken up to the pain now.

  She looked around, moving mostly just her eyes. They lingered on the low window high on the wall. “Basement room?”

  I nodded. “Looks like they boarded up the window.” That was why we hadn’t been able to see even a strip of light when we were outside. A thick sheet of plywood was nailed to the window frame all the way around. With a lot of nails.

  “What are we going to do?” She decided to try to sit up again. I gave her a hand, and managed to haul her upright. She slumped against the wall, but at least she was awake and mostly aware.

  “We hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” I said. “Turns out the Russian girl really was Steven’s daughter. Or so it seems. He helped her get away from the guys who run the club. They brought her and these other three girls—” I gestured to them, “here from Russia to work at Stella’s.”

  Rachel nodded.

  “They beat up Zachary because he’d seen Anastasia and they wanted to know what he knew about her. But we don’t know whether they have found Anastasia and Steven or not.”

  One of the girls said something, and Tatiana nodded. “They would have told us if they found Anastasia. They would want us to know that we can’t get away. That they’ll find us.”

  Good point. “They probably don’t have them, then,” I told Rachel.

  “But they have us,” she responded.

  And of course they did.

  She added, “What are they going to do with us?”

  I had no idea. It wasn’t as if they could make us work in the club, the way the girls did. And I didn’t like to consider any of the alternatives.

  “We probably won’t be here long,” I said, trying to inject some optimism I wasn’t feeling into my voice.

  “We’ve been here more than a month,” Tatiana told me.

  “Yes, but nobody knew you were here.” Other than the patrons at the club, and the kinds of men who went to a nightclub to purchase sex from young women couldn’t really be expected to care about those girls’ wellbeing. “My car is parked in the driveway across the street. With my dog in it. Once your neighbors wake up and find it, I’m su
re they’ll call the police.”

  “Unless Yuri moved it already,” Tatiana said.

  I dug in my pocket. “I have the key.”

  “My car is parked around the corner,” Rachel added. “Someone will probably notice that, too.”

  And chances were, when Diana tried to get in touch with me tomorrow morning, which I hoped she’d do, to hear that recording of Steven, and when she found the office empty, and she couldn’t raise me on the phone, she’d call Mendoza and tell him I was missing. I had to trust that she’d do that, and that he’d take action. He might know me well enough by now that he’d realize I would have taken an interest in the nightclub and the girls.

  Although that put our rescue out another day, since Mendoza couldn’t very well follow Konstantin and Yuri home from the club until they’d actually been to the club for another night.

  And that was if they wanted to take the risk of bringing the girls there tomorrow night. After tonight, they might think things had gotten a little too hot for that. And they wouldn’t be wrong. But that meant Mendoza had no way of finding them—or us—at all.

  If that happened, we could be here a while. Unless we found a way out on our own.

  “I suppose you’ve tried to take the plywood off the window?”

  Tatiana nodded. “The first day we were here. We can never get enough of the nails out in one night to get out, and the next day they always nail them back in.”

  Understandable. It isn’t easy to pry nails out of plywood without any tools, and of course the bad guys would check for something like that.

  “I guess we’ll just have to wait until they come back, and overpower them.” There were twice as many of us as there were of them. We ought to be able to figure something out.

  All three girls looked at me in disbelief. “They have guns,” Tatiana pointed out, as if I could have missed that.

  “I know. But they can’t shoot all of us. At least not at the same time.”

  There was a pause. “Are you volunteering?” Rachel wanted to know.

  I guess I would, if it came to that. If there was no other choice. But we weren’t there quite yet. “What about the door? Any way out of that?”

  They shook their heads. “There’s no lock on this side,” Tatiana said. “No knob, either.”

  There wasn’t. But there was both outside. And when we came down here, the key had been in the lock.

  Offhand, I couldn’t think of any way of getting it out of the lock, though. And anyway, without a lock to unlock on this side of the door, having the key wouldn’t do us any good. Although I supposed it would keep the bad guys out…

  “They feed you, right?”

  All three girls nodded.

  So all they’d have to do would be to withhold food, and starve us into giving them the key back. And we’d be right back where we started.

  “Can we take apart one of the beds and brain them with a piece of wood when they come down with breakfast in the morning?”

  One of them would be carrying the tray, I assumed. If there was a tray. And the other one would be standing by with a gun, to make sure none of the girls made a break for it.

  If I could knock the gun out of the second guy’s hand, while the first guy was still holding the tray, we might have a chance.

  “We tried to take the beds apart,” Tatiana said.

  And presumably they didn’t come apart, since they were in one piece at this point. A pity. Now that I looked at them more closely, they were made of metal. A nice metal pipe would be handy.

  “Is there a bathroom?”

  “They let us use it before we went to bed,” Tatiana said. “They take us, one by one, to shower in the morning.”

  If there was a lid on the toilet tank, that might offer opportunities. Or the shower curtain rod, if there was one.

  At any rate, it seemed that we’d get the chance to attack our captors. If only we had something to attack them with.

  I looked around. There was nothing here but the two bunk beds and the dresser. The beds were a no-go, according to the girls. And they were probably right. It’s not easy to take apart metal without tools.

  The dresser was made of wood, though. (Hard to find a dresser that isn’t, I guess.) Each drawer would be a little too unwieldy to lift, but perhaps we could take it apart…

  I got to my feet and wandered over to the it.

  It was tallish, but sort of squat and solid. Nothing elegant about it. The legs were fat little stubs of wood, to short to do any good. I wanted to be able to hit the Russians from at least a foot away. Once I got close enough to grab, I wouldn’t give much for my chances of success. But if I could hit the arm with the gun, and the gun went flying…

  The three girls and Rachel watched me as I pulled out the top drawer and examined it.

  It was full of clothes. Mostly skimpy underwear, plus some oversized T-shirts, like the girls were sleeping in.

  I dumped the contents on the bed next to Tatiana and took a closer look at the drawer itself.

  Like all drawers, it was made of four pieces of wood put together in a rectangle, with a bigger, thinner piece of wood nailed to the bottom.

  If we could take it apart, there’d be a piece of wood for each of us. We’d give the big piece to Rachel, since I didn’t expect much help from her. I had a feeling she had a concussion. She’d been out cold a long time, and her pupils weren’t quite the same size.

  “If I start throwing this around,” I asked Tatiana, “will they hear me? Do they go to sleep, or does one of them stay awake on guard?”

  One of them stayed awake and on guard. Of course. “But this,” she glanced around the room, “is sound proof. If the landlord sends someone here—for the bugs, maybe—they can’t hear us if we scream.”

  That was disturbing. Yuri and Konstantin seemed to have thought of everything.

  However, now that attention to detail benefited us. If I started tearing at the drawer, they shouldn’t be able to hear me.

  I lifted it, experimentally.

  It was well made. Old enough that the joints were dovetails, and the two pieces of wood were not just nailed together. Although the dovetails were neat enough that they’d probably been cut by a machine, not by hand.

  I decided that the bureau was old, but not so old that destroying it would be a crime. And between you and me, I would have taken a Sheraton apart if I thought it would get me out of here in one piece.

  It took time and some hard work. At first we tried to pull the drawer apart. It didn’t work. We either weren’t strong enough, or the glue between the dovetails was too strong. But after Tatiana and I hung off one side, and the other two girls (still up on the top bunk) held onto the other, and the drawer still didn’t budge, we gave up on that idea.

  “You’re sure they can’t hear us?” I panted.

  Tatiana nodded.

  “Even if they can, I guess it won’t be a big deal. We want them to come down here. And if it’s just one of them, to see what’s going on, maybe that would actually be better.”

  “They can’t hear us,” Tatiana said.

  Fine. I took a better grip on the drawer and swung it, straight at the upper corner of the bunk bed.

  The girls shrieked. The drawer held.

  And nothing else seemed to happen. Nobody came running down from upstairs to see what was going on.

  So I did it again. And again. And one more time, for good measure.

  By the time the drawer splintered into pieces, I was out of breath and sweaty, and it’s possible I may have strained a muscle in my upper back. But I had four dangerous-looking, jagged pieces of wood. Nothing I personally would want to run afoul of. The splinters alone would be enough to take out someone’s eye.

  I distributed them among the girls. “When the door opens, be ready.”

  They looked dubious, but nodded. Rachel was dozing, and I left her alone, although I made sure to poke her every now and then, just in case she did have a concussion. The last thing I w
anted was for her to slip into a coma. If we had to fight our way out of here, I wanted her alert and able to move under her own steam.

  The girls drifted off to sleep one by one. They’d probably had a long and hard night, no pun intended. I should have been worn out myself too, after the day I’d had, but by now I’d gone beyond tired and was as wired and twitchy as if I’d downed a gallon of cappuccino. Instead of getting drowsy from the dark and the closed-in room and the regular breathing of everyone in it, all the little noises made me hyper alert.

  And so it was that, an hour or three later, I was the first to hear the tiny scrape of the key turning in the lock.

  A slight miscalculation on my part. I’d thought I’d be able to hear someone coming down the stairs. But if the room was sound proof—and it seemed as if it was—of course I wouldn’t be able to hear anyone moving around outside any more than they’d be able to hear me screaming my head off in here.

  By now it was too late to try to wake the girls. By the time they woke up and got ready, the door would be open and our chance gone. I had to deal with this myself. So I took a better grip on my part of the bureau drawer and raised it above my head as I moved into position next to the door.

  The knob turned.

  On the outside, I mean. We didn’t have a knob in here. But the door started inching open. I held my breath as I prepared to bring the piece of oak down on a Russian head.

  The door swung back, and a figure stepped into the doorway. I braced myself for attack.

  “Gina?” a voice said.

  I brought the drawer front down in a whistling arc, half an inch from Mendoza’s perfect nose.

  Chapter 17

  He was not pleased. I wouldn’t have been, either, had it been my nose.

  “I didn’t actually hit you,” I pointed out, not for the first time, later. “And it wouldn’t have happened if you’d given me some warning.”

  He scowled. “I did give you warning.”

  “And that’s why you don’t have a broken nose right now. If you hadn’t said my name, I would have cracked your skull open.”

  He glanced at the jagged piece of drawer front, lying next to me on the front steps of the house. “I believe you.”