by Seth Harwood
Jack looks behind them at the traffic headed onto the bridge. “Guess we’re not going to get my car.”
22. Home
They head west now, back into the city. The H2 follows Harrison toward Mission but doesn’t go far in this direction. Soon Alexi has the driver turn left on 4th Street to head down toward Mission Bay, a district where Jack knows there’s very little for anyone to find. It’s the part of the city where the San Francisco Giants play at their Corporate Sponsor of the Moment Park. Around the park are bars and scattered nightclubs, trendy condo buildings, and offices mixed with the not-so-trendy. Beyond that, beyond McCovey Cove and the Mission Creek Marina, are a few odd warehouse buildings and a whole lot of construction.
They follow the old bridge over Mission Creek, pass the commuter train station and the China Basin landing. Below that the world flattens out to open lots and short, long buildings. The huge structure of an old power plant still stands among the sparseness. Here, someone could scream all day and never be heard. Hopefully, somewhere in all of this, Jack will find Mills Hopkins and Mills will get to die.
Akakievich looks back over his shoulder at Jack. He smiles. “How is your arm, Jack?” Jack shakes his head. He won’t nod or say anything to encourage the Russian psycho to do anything else. Now he just wants to get to Mills, even as it’s starting to occur to him in many shades of clarity that he might not have thought this all the way through, that getting to Mills might very well wind up being the worst thing Jack’s ever done.
“You’re not going to let him go when we get there, are you?”
Alexi frowns. “I might.” Then he tilts his head. “Or I might even let you kill him.”
Jack looks down at his good hand: it’s still trembling from the burns but it’s stronger than the other. If it has to, this hand will do the job; it can still do what Jack needs. This is the hand that shot Freeman, killed the Russian outside of the cafe, the hand Jack used to break Tom Gannon’s nose and to drive a hunting knife into his thigh. It’s not a dirty hand, but it’s done some very dirty things. When Jack looks up, Akakievich still eyes him carefully, waiting for an answer to the question he hasn’t asked.
“If that’s what he needs me to do,” Jack says. “Then I’m up to it.”
“Good.” Alexi laughs a short laugh, something like a bark. He points toward one of the old buildings ahead of them, a two-story warehouse or what might’ve been an old manufacturing plant. It’s got windows along what looks to be a tall open space on one side, the kind with metal wire running through them, and yet these are still broken out in places, spots where nothing would keep a bird from flying in or out of the building, where someone must’ve thrown a big rock. Maybe this is the place that’s nasty enough for these people to keep Mills.
The driver turns into the lot and pulls up right in front of this old structure, parks next to a shiny black Crown Vic with tinted windows. If Jack had to guess, he’d bet this one has a considerable amount of Mills Hopkins’s blood caked into the walls of its trunk. The two thugs get out of the Hummer’s back seats, both waiting for Jack to pick a side.
“We are here.” Alexi tilts his head toward the building.
Jack decides to get out on his right. As soon as he moves, Ivan grabs his shoulder and arm and pulls him the rest of the way out of the car, practically carries him through the air and drops him on the ground. As Jack lands, his feet are unstable for a moment, but Ivan holds him up. Suddenly, as he steadies himself and remembers what it feels like to have stable knees, he gets kicked in the back of his left leg. His knees hit the rough ground. Even with jeans on, Jack feel the scrape of hard asphalt. He looks up at the dark, menacing building, but apparently not fast enough; from behind, Sasha claps a head-lock onto Jack, holds his face up at the dark structure.
“Look up,” Sasha whispers into Jack’s ear, his breath warm.
“Yes, Jack Palms,” Alexi says. “Welcome to your new home.”
Jack squeezes out the words, “I see it.”
Sasha pulls Jack up onto his feet again and releases him with a push toward the warehouse, toward the sliding door the driver’s working to roll back.
Alexi tells him, “Now you will see all I’ve done.”
23. Shake ’em Down
Back at the Regis, in their seventh-floor suite, Vlade collapses onto the couch across from Niki. Al paces in front of the television, recounting the events of the last few hours: how they got away from the cops, the H2s came out of nowhere, Niki did some incredible downtown driving to get away from the cops, and how they ditched the Escalade.
He’s been talking in the same caffeinated, nonstop manner ever since the got into the cab outside the Hyatt. So the ride back to the hotel was a long one, especially since the fastest route would’ve kept them on Embarcadero and far too visible, so they’d had to cut back into the city and take a series of angling, small side streets back down to Market and below to their hotel.
But the upside to it all, as far as Niki is concerned, is that no one followed them; they got rid of the police, the Russian KGB bastards, and made it back to their hotel. He hopes something similar happened for Jack, knows the only chance of that is Shaw being very good at his job.
Niki lights a cigarette and sucks in the smoke as Vlade and Al do a few lines off the glass table in the middle of the sectional couches.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Vlade yells, nodding in between each line. He claps Niki on the shoulder. “Yes. That was good in the downtown driving.” They used to speak only Russian, but now that they’ve been in the States for close to three months, they continue speaking English at every chance they get, hoping to continue getting better. They’ve still got accents, and they know it.
Niki nods his thanks at Vlade, removes his gun from the harness inside his jacket and starts to take it apart. He’ll examine the parts and see if it needs to be cleaned. Since it hasn’t been fired today, it won’t need another cleaning, but going through the steps of disassembly calms him down, gets him to focus on the things outside his thoughts.
With a few hits of blow boosting him higher, Al goes into his room and comes back with a gun. He waves it at the TV, trying to talk shit in English at the screen. “Fuck you with a broom handle,” he says to the anchorwoman on the news. He points the gun at her. Usually Vlade gets upset when Al goes off like this and tries to rein him in, but now he sits quietly, his eyes closed, hopefully planning their next move.
“We go after Akakievich again today?” Niki asks. Vlade sits all the way back into the couch, puts his feet up on the coffee table and shakes his head.
“This I do not know,” he says. “We do not know where to start. Call Palms.”
Niki tries Jack on his cell and gets nothing. That’s when Vlade’s cell phone rings. As soon as he answers it, he slides his feet back to the floor and sits up straight. “This is who?” Vlade’s face goes concerned, like he’s trying to put some pieces together, but he doesn’t like the parts he has in his hands. Al scratches out two more lines on the table with a credit card and knocks one down. Soon Vlade says, “Yes, we are back at our hotel.” He nods, closes his eyes and says, “Yes.”
When Vlade hangs up the phone, he drops his face to the table and snorts up Al’s second line. He leans his head way back to get it all in, holding his finger up to his nostrils, and then stands up like everything’s just gotten really serious. “That is the FBI woman,” he says. “She is with the black cop.”
“Shaw,” Niki says.
Vlade shakes his head. “They are in city near and below us, in part called Mission Bay. They say they have followed Akakievich and his Hummer. They say that Akakievich had Jack Palms in the back. He took Jack.”
Niki stands up. He holds the pieces of his weapon and reassembles them as Vlade speaks, clicking them together. The truth is, he’s so familiar with the procedure, he can do it without even thinking about it, which is good because his mind keeps running to what Alexi Akakievich might be doing to Jack.
Al jumps
up onto one of the couches and waves his gun at the ceiling. “We got to shake those fuckers down!” he yells.
Vlade does a quick shake of his head that Niki knows from experience is him trying to get all his senses about him for action. They’ve been together long enough that Niki knows he can do it too. Vlade brings his hands together in a loud clap and tells Al to get down off the couch. “This is time we roll,” he says, patting himself to make sure his gun is where it should be. He looks up and around the suite. “We will need more weapons. Get other guns.”
The smile that comes across Al’s face is almost comical. Even with the coke in him, Al never shines like he does when guns come up. The thought of Vlade letting him shoot at things charges him up like nothing else. And this is what worries Niki most: when Vlade lets Al have a gun. Even before Vlade says it, Niki knows that he will.
And so he starts toward the door of the suite. “I guess we will take taxi?” he says, picking up the courtesy phone to call down to the desk.
Vlade shakes his head, already going through the leather duffle with the clean automatic weapons in it—Uzis and TEC-9s—and handing one to Al. “No,” he says. “We will need car. Not taxi.” Vlade holds up a slim jim from the duffle, the thin metal tool used to open a car door through a window, and tosses it to Niki.
“We will go to basement garage,” Vlade says. “And get a car. For finding Jack, we will definitely need car to drive.”
Niki scratches his head. When things get like this, there’s always a fine line between following Vlade’s leadership and going head first into a grand mess. He’ll have to be ready to take control if Vlade’s feeling too invincible from the blow. For now, Niki will follow and they’ll try the car idea, but he’s already had one set of cops chasing him today and barely gotten out of it. Soon, if they haven’t already, their faces will show up on the news. Niki doesn’t want to go through a chase like that again.
Soon he might have to take control.
24. Down Lineman
Alexi Akakievich starts to laugh, chuckling at first and then all out howling, as they enter the dark, run-down warehouse. Beyond the outside light from the street, Jack doesn’t see any interior light on the first floor, just a dark, empty room with a flat concrete floor and a hallway leading off to the right. There’s a stairway further into the room, but Jack can just make out its first steps, nothing else. As Ivan pushes Jack farther inside, Jack notices a smell he’s not familiar with—possibly oil, like the parts of a great machine, but strong enough that it smells like they’re inside it.
Ivan pushes Jack from behind, toward the direction of echoing footsteps—what must be Alexi walking down the hall.
Jack takes the hint to follow Alexi and in the dark, he takes the moment to grab the Vicodin pills with his good hand. Once he gets the bottle open, he shakes out a few into his hand—it feels like two but could be three—and tosses them into his mouth. Hopefully they’ll give him some protection against the pain of the burns and whatever else Akakievich has in mind. Jack’s right forearm still stings and the only good news about that is it keeps his mind off the shoulder. Now, hopefully, the pills will help with both.
Farther down the corridor, Jack hears the sound of a big metal door rising up to reveal a freight elevator with a single naked light bulb inside. As Jack gets closer, he notices two things: one, Alexi’s smile looks more annoying than ever and two, the light bulb is low enough to reach. He steps inside, considering what kind of move it would take to knock out the bulb and what chance he’d have with the three Russians—the guy who drove the H2 seems to be staying downstairs—in these close quarters, one-armed.
It’s not a good proposition.
When Ivan enters the elevator last and slides the door down, Jack’s surrounded by the three of them. If he had his jacket off, sure he might be able to go for the light, knock it out, but then what would he do? It’d be close to a steel cage match against three guys who probably have more combat training and are better fighters than him. Plus, with one arm, he’s not going to be kicking any asses. He tries moving the bad arm, and he can get it to go just a few inches before the pain’s too much. The Vicodin still hasn’t kicked in.
As they rise to the second level of the building, much more light comes into the car and shines all around them. Here, through the grates of the elevator shaft, Jack sees a large, open room with high ceilings, rafters, and beams, a peaked roof far above. He sees the shattered windows he noticed from outside and the afternoon sun shining through into the room, the front of which is cluttered with rows of high tables. Tables line the room along the right side, the side opposite the windows, and are lined up in front of the elevator as well. Jack notices a girl in lingerie tied down to a table in the corner near them: she’s on top of a thin mattress and wearing next-to nothing, but she doesn’t struggle. Her arms are tied above her head, her ankles to the bottom corners of the table. She lies flat, her ribcage moving as she breathes slow, methodical breaths.
On another table, a young girl in a black teddy sits with her legs hanging over the edge, slumped over. She barely looks up as they step out of the elevator and come into the room. A few tables away, Jack sees another girl curled up into a ball on top of another table with a mattress on it. She has a pillow clutched to her chest, sleeps soundly.
The room is tall and long. Beyond the tables with the girls, Jack sees another Russian standing next to some kind of easel, an angled platform with something on the other side of it. He recognizes that the Russian is Andre, his old friend from the alley and the cafe—the guy whose BMW Jack stole. And beyond that, two tables full of red cellophane-wrapped bricks of what has to be coke.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “I see you’ve brought me to the inside.”
“Yes,” Alexi says. “Welcome.”
Jack steps forward awkwardly; he knows the elevator has stopped moving, but the ground feels unstable. Maybe his ankles are going weak on him, or maybe the three Vicodin are starting to take effect. “Yeah,” Jack says. “Where’s the good cop?”
“Come, Jack. I have another friend of yours who you should meet.”
As Jack walks between the tables, Alexi laughs and nods to his boys, who take Jack by his arms—the left one feeling like it’s practically about to come out of its socket, like a drumstick on an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey—and carry him into the room.
“What the fuck?” Jack says.
They take Jack to a table on the right side of the elevator and put him down in front of a wheelchair with Freeman Jones in it.
“Fucking Jack!” Freeman struggles to his feet. His legs are both wrapped above the knees and one of his hands is covered in gauze. He uses the armrests of his chair to steady himself and gets up slowly onto both feet with a look on his face like it’s tearing the collagen out of his knees to do so. The pain on Freeman’s face is the first thing to strike Jack. The second thing to strike Jack is Freeman’s fist.
Jack spits blood onto the floor. The big Samoan steps forward from the chair to sit on a long metal table. He pushes at the wheelchair with one leg but doesn’t get it to move. “Motherfuck this, Palms,” Freeman says through his teeth. “You see this shit, fucker?” He slaps Jack again with the back of his left hand, the one without the gauze. Jack has to focus for a second not to see two of everything.
“See what you fucking did to me? I was in the Pro Bowl, motherfucker!” Freeman tries to hit Jack again, but Jack steps back away from the table so Freeman can’t reach him. The big man frowns, a dour look that covers the half of his face that isn’t already covered by his tattoo.
“Yes,” Alexi says. “We wanted to bring you in connection with your friend. In fact, it is a shame that we do not have Mr. Ponds still alive to greet you as well. I could say we have his dead body here and that we will gladly tie you to it, but I am afraid that is not the case.”
The Russians laugh at this, but not Freeman. “That shit’s not funny,” he says. “Don’t talk shit about Junius.”
A
lexi stops laughing long enough to stare down Freeman, then he waves at the bigger man and starts to laugh again. “Your little Junius,” he whines. “My only regret is that I did not have the chance to kill him myself.”
Freeman shakes his head. “Don’t—”
“And do not you forget, Mr. Jones, why you are here and who it is you owe for your favors. Do not forget who shot you in your hands and both your legs.”
“Good point.” Ivan and Sasha push Jack forward, and Freeman brings his fist down onto the top of Jack’s head, drops him to his knees.
“I’m sorry, Free.”
“Sorry, Jack? Look where the fuck you are. Think you weren’t going to end up here at some point? I was just trying to save your ass the trouble. Now, you fucked around and we both wound up shot up. And we’re still here. You see that? Think you didn’t make things worse with your bullshit?”
Jack shakes his head. “I—”
“No, man. I fucking told you.”
Jack would like to disagree with Freeman, but instead he tries to clear the cobwebs. The good news is the Vicodin’s coming on strong and he’s feeling less of everything, kind of floaty; the bad news is he’s in Alexi’s warehouse and getting sleepy. Keeping his thoughts straight is becoming steadily harder. He looks up at Freeman, sees he’s still angry.
“Have a look at what they did to your boy Mills,” Freeman says in thick tones. Jack recognizes his mind might be getting foggy.
“Yes, Jack,” Akakievich tells him, the words slowing down. “Come here and look at your friend, the Sergeant Hopkins. Or what is left of him.”
