by Ryan Schow
Sitting up, she said, “Tell me everything.”
“We’re not eyes-on just yet, but our new lead is a guy named Oleg Igorevich. Apparently, he was the one who procured her from America and loaned her out to André.”
“André was with that boxed lunch delivery hub, right?”
“Yes.”
Cira sounded like she was up and getting dressed, or slipping into her shoes.
“We rescued fourteen girls if you’d like to know.”
“How many didn’t make it?”
“Girls or creeps?”
“Creeps.”
“Three of them,” Atlas said.
“What were they like? And how was the takedown?”
“Considering these were three scumbags you wouldn’t want raping other rapists with a three-room, fourteen-girl operation going, the takedown felt good.”
“So it was bad, then?”
“Good God, Cira,” he said, huffing out an irritated breath. “If we’re going to play twenty questions like freaking kids, I’ll give you the details. It was a real shithole, alright? Rooms and beds partitioned off to maximize sleep space, and maybe even fuck space. There was also some nosy Nelly down the hall, a big, scared woman with a heart larger than her fear. She took the kids and promised to find their homes, or get them new homes if they were orphaned.”
“So the three creeps—”
“They went bye-bye from this life,” he said, interrupting her. “Not nicely either.”
“I hope they suffered,” she said, her tone deepening. “And I’m glad you didn’t puss out and stab them with a pen or something.”
On Cira’s line, he thought he heard a faint knocking in the background, then Cira’s hand covering the phone. Was someone knocking on her door, or was she knocking on someone else’s door? He stuck his finger in his other ear to hear better. All he heard was the muffled sounds of her talking to someone. Then her hand came off the phone and it sounded like she was walking again.
“Are you coming or what?” he asked.
“I’m getting a car now.”
“You’re not going to get a car,” he said. “Call a Marshrutka, then we can meet you in the suburbs near Oleg’s house.”
“A what?”
“It’s like a minibus that runs routes, but not just inside the city. It heads into the suburbs as well.”
“The concierge told us we can phone 089 and order a taxi. He said it’s cheaper than hailing a taxi on the street, although I don’t really care now.”
“Do you speak any Russian?”
“A little, but not much.”
“How much?”
“None really,” she confessed.
“Grab a taxi outside the hotel or get a Marshrutka,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Just get here already.”
“God, calm down already.”
“You didn’t see what I saw at André’s apartment. I don’t want Kaylee held captive by these monsters for one second longer than is completely necessary.”
“You don’t need to wait for us.”
“Us, who?”
“Why do you need me anyway?” she asked, irritated. “You should call me when you find her and then we—”
“If Kaylee’s here,” he snapped, cutting her off, “I’m going to want a female escort to get her out. It sounds like these animals have already run through her, so she’s bound to be traumatized, or worse.”
“Until you called,” Cira said, “I didn’t realize you went out.”
“That’s because you’re luxuriating in your swanky room with your million-dollar view, and Kofi and I decided it was better to work late than to try to catch some shut-eye shoulder-to-shoulder in some dump. Now are you here to sleep or here to work?”
“You don’t get to tell me my job.”
“Then you run this op!”
He glanced over at Kofi and saw the man nodding, apparently every bit as bothered as Atlas by the sleeping arrangements.
For a second, he thought she’d hung up on him. He wouldn’t blame her. Kofi turned left into a private road. Hoping she was still on the line, Atlas said, “When you’re in the car, or minibus, call Codrin. Have him completely dismantle the website, but get a hard list of past and repeat customers, just in case.”
“He’s already compiled a list,” she said, butt hurt but on the line. “It’s already been sent to Leopold.”
“Good,” he replied, pleased. “Now tell Codrin to burn that site to the ground.”
“Roger that. I need an address if you want me to meet you at Oleg’s place.”
“Sending it over as soon as I hang up, which is in five, four, three—” He pressed the red END button and blew out a sigh. Kofi looked at him, frowned, shook his head.
Eventually, they pulled to a stop a few houses past the target house. It was gorgeous, maybe even a bit intimidating. Atlas texted Cira and told her to park behind Kofi’s beater. She texted back, saying she wasn’t that far out.
“Let’s go in now,” he told Kofi, his adrenaline still surging.
“Okay, bolván,” Kofi said in English, grabbing his gun. “We’ll do it your way.”
Atlas actually laughed. “You calling me a blockhead in Russian while speaking clunky English is about the funniest thing I’ve heard since Leo said he could spring me from the can.”
The two men discreetly hopped the chest-high wrought-iron fence surrounding the property, ducked down low behind some shrubs, then drew their guns and waited. While Atlas had his eyes and ears peeled, Kofi was checking the suppressor at the end of his pistol. He wasn’t sure if they’d encounter armed guards, but when they did, Kofi dispensed of both men quickly. Atlas dragged one body into the bushes while Kofi got the other.
After waiting for another few minutes, they circled around the house under the cover of night. When they rounded the house and found themselves in a heavily manicured backyard, they saw a third guard standing by the pool, facing out into the property. The big man was smoking a smelly cigarette and gazing out into the night sky.
Atlas moved in silently, weapon ready. He was but a few feet away when the guard saw him and jolted into action. Atlas put on a rush of speed, cracked the guy in his chin with a sloppy Superman-punch that did the job. He would have pulled the trigger, but his suppressor wasn’t exactly new, which meant it wasn’t exactly quiet. Even though they’d taken out three guards, the house was huge. There was no telling what kind of muscle was inside waiting. When the man he’d just put down grabbed Atlas’s wrist, he jumped. Hadn’t he just knocked this bitch out?
Atlas rolled his wrist, covered the guard’s arm with his other hand, then reversed the grip and cranked the wrist. The man winced, his face straining with unchecked agony. When he tried to pull his wrist free, Atlas shifted the momentum and head-butted him. The strike was solid, but it wasn’t enough. Huge arms wrapped around Atlas, squeezing him tight. He did the only thing he could. He thrust his face into the man’s face, opened wide, and bit off a large chunk of the guard’s nose. The flesh came off too easily. Atlas leaned out and spat the nub on the pool decking beside him. The minute the guard started to scream in either pain or horror, Atlas broke the man’s grip, then bunched his fingertips together and drove his hand as deep as he could into the guard’s open mouth. The gagging was gross-sounding and immediate. He grabbed the guard by the back of his head, held it there. The man started to shift, to thrash around; Atlas checked his shins, his ankles, caught him with a knee in the thigh.
“Kofi, dammit!” Atlas hissed.
The guard wasn’t dying fast enough, and even worse, his jaws were more powerful than Atlas suspected. He started biting down on his fingers. Was he going to bite one or more of them off? Could he do that?
Kofi jogged over, angled his weapon right, then put a suppressed round through the man’s forehead.
“Good God, man, where were you?” Atlas hissed, wiping the blood from his lips and looking at his fingers.
“Checking the other side of th
e house. I thought you had him covered.”
Brushing himself off, spitting the man’s blood from his mouth, he said, “Next time you clowns get me a suppressor, make sure it’s new. This one’s like shooting in a coffee can.”
“The first suppressor seemed pretty good,” he whispered. “The second one was obviously used.”
“If yours is quieter, then you lead next time,” he said, pissed off and checking to see if the goon’s teeth had broken any of the skin on his fingers. He spat again, angry. “What about the pool house?”
Across the pool, set farther back, was what looked like either a mother-in-law’s quarters or a pool house. It had several windows and a front door. All the windows were dark.
“I had to rescue you before I could clear it,” Kofi said with a frown.
The pool was dark, the still water placid against the warm night air. Atlas and Kofi lowered the dead guard into the pool. It was a moonless night, the sky somewhat overcast. If not for some low lighting along the pathways and the pool deck, there would be no light. In other words, there was nothing to illuminate the dead man as he floated face-down in the pool. Eventually, he’d take on enough water to sink to the bottom. Sooner was better than later. Or maybe he’d bloat and float. It didn’t matter. Right now Atlas was just happy they hadn’t been killed.
When they were finished, he and Kofi glanced across the pool at the pool house. They’d need to clear it at some point in time, but all he tasted was the dead man’s blood in his mouth and it was making him sick.
“Let’s go inside,” Atlas whispered. “I need to rinse out my mouth, and I’m not doing it with pool water.” Glancing down, he saw the nub of skin on the patio.
“What is that?” Kofi asked, seeing it too.
“Part of his nose.”
“You bit off his nose?” he asked, flabbergasted.
“You use every weapon you have in a fight, Kofi,” Atlas said as he kicked the fleshy chunk into the pool. “I would’ve thought you’d known that by now, especially living here.”
“I don’t live here.”
“You know what I mean,” Atlas said, heading toward the main house.
He checked the rear sliding-glass-door and found it open. Mr. Bloat and Float had apparently gone out for a smoke and some star-gazing, neglecting to lock it up. Then again, would there even be a reason to? He was security. He had two men covering the front. Well, not anymore. But at the time, he’d thought he did.
“Leave it open in case we need to get out fast,” Atlas told Kofi as they quietly moved inside. The man nodded. They both had their weapons out.
Moving through the house, they let their eyes adjust to the all-encompassing darkness of the large home. The estate was more than spacious, and well-appointed from what little they could see of the furniture, the fixtures and the flooring. In the foyer, they marveled at a grand staircase sweeping up the side of the wall. It had heavy wrought-iron spindles and a smooth oversized wood railing. Kofi took the lead because he had a suppressed weapon. Atlas was still pissed off that he’d gotten stuck with the noisemaker. An old can might as well be a cow-bell for all the good it did him in a stealth operation.
When they reached the upper hallways, they saw one wall lined with lighted sconces. They appeared to be on dimmers, for the light coming from them was so low, they registered in the darkness as a faint, warm glow.
All along the hallway there were closed doors presumably leading to bedrooms, bathrooms or coat closets. All of them had locks on them, and they were all keyed to lock from the outside rather than the inside. He was getting close. Was Kaylee in one of these rooms? Judging by the décor, this was not a destination location, and judging by the lateness of the hour, Oleg didn’t handle the girls directly. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of an operation this was, or if André had lied to him and sent him on a wild goose chase.
At the end of the hallway, he found what he assumed was the master bedroom. It was the only door that could be locked from the inside. Kofi tried the door handle, found it open. Turning to Atlas, he nodded, then slowly pushed the door inward. They were greeted with a pitch-black room. If not for the soft glow of an alarm clock on the nightstand, they would’ve been feeling around in the dark.
Both men snuck inside, Kofi going right, Atlas moving left. He walked on the balls of his feet, rolling rather than stepping. A gunshot shattered the silence. The bullet whistled by Atlas so close, it actually whipped up his uncut hair. He ducked left, dropped into a shooter’s crouch, tried to identify the exact location of the threat.
The sounds of a scuffle on the bed made it hard to tell the bodies apart. Kofi. He started to get up, but more gunfire rang out, the wooden door and walls behind him eating three or four more bullets. Atlas kept low, charging up the side of the bed. He dove in sideways, not sure what he was going to hit, but certain he was going to hit someone. He hammered the body in bed, Oleg. He also hit Kofi, who fell on the floor with an oof! Scrambling for position, he found the man’s head, grabbed it, and started slamming it into the headboard. When the Russian went limp, Atlas sat up and said, “Get the lights, Kofi.”
While he waited, he searched for his gun. It had slipped out of his hand and landed somewhere. He felt Oleg starting to stir, so he started slugging the body again in the hopes that it wasn’t Kofi. He was so bothered at having lost his own weapon that he forgot to take Oleg’s gun from him. Atlas told himself that if Oleg could, he’d shoot him. That was why he started blasting the man’s rib cage with heavy fists. Surprisingly, he took an elbow right on the kisser. There wasn’t much power in the strike, but it still hurt like hell. Tucking his head into the man’s body, he went back to work pulverizing the ribs. When the presumed Russian started to curl up, Atlas struck him in the side of the head with one vicious shot after another. His body went limp, his hands falling down to his side, no longer protecting him. Pretty soon it was like punching a rag doll.
The lights went on, but Atlas couldn’t make himself stop.
“He’s unconscious,” Kofi said.
He finally got control of himself. Sitting back, breathing heavy from exertion, Atlas studied the slack body, the half-hanging face, the cuts, and the swelling. Blood leaked from the man’s nostrils as well as his mouth.
“What took you so damn long?” he turned and roared.
Kofi simply stared at him. Atlas frowned, then hunted around for his weapon. When he found it, he crawled off the bed, glancing at his red-spattered fists. There was a bloody mess of a man lying unconscious on the bed. Somewhere deep inside himself, he felt levels of satisfaction unavailable to him until now. Kofi walked toward the heap, then quickly turned away and grabbed his nose, his entire face crinkling.
“What?” Atlas asked.
“You literally beat the crap out of him,” Kofi said in English.
“Really?” he asked, taking a cautious sniff. Kofi nodded. It wasn’t uncommon when you beat a man that badly for his bowels to evacuate. That was when he caught a whiff of the powerful stench. Turning away, he echoed Kofi’s sentiments. “Wow, that’s nasty!”
Atlas’s phone buzzed; he looked down at it and saw Cira’s message telling him they were outside.
“We need to clear the house first,” Atlas texted back. “Then we’ll give you the go sign.”
“Cira?” Kofi asked.
“Yeah. We need to clear the house.”
“I’ll get started,” Kofi said, leaving the room quickly. In his defense, the air was taking on an offensive poopish aroma.
With Kofi gone, Atlas had this creep to himself. He slapped the Russian’s face, trying to rouse him. He didn’t stir. Atlas hit him again, then barked at him in Russian. “Wake up!”
The man’s eyes fluttered, his body finally stirring, his mouth moving around as he assessed the damage.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Oleg creaked open his eyes, swallowed blood, made a sour face. When at last he had his wits about him, he chose to look for his gun rat
her than take Atlas seriously.
Atlas showed the Russian that he’d confiscated his weapon. “When I kill you—and I will kill you if you don’t tell me everything I want to know—it will be with your gun, and with your bullet.”
The man touched his two nostrils, drew back two red fingertips.
“Are you Oleg Igorevich?”
“No,” he said.
Atlas punched him in the mouth so hard, his lower lip gashed right open and nearly all the fight left his face and body. He was like a guy who had just done a nine-inch line of coke, fallen back into the couch, then settled in for the long high.
“Let’s try again,” Atlas said.
“I’m Oleg.”
“Good,” Atlas purred. “That was easy, no?”
“Less easy than I imagined,” Oleg admitted. “What do you want to know?”
He stuffed Oleg’s pistol into his back pocket, then withdrew the photo of Kaylee Barnes. He shoved it in Oleg’s face, watched his eyes focus. “You’ve seen her, yes?”
“Lots of girls look like her, but she is the billionaire’s daughter, yes?”
Atlas nodded, a slow grin forming on his mouth.
“I sold her already,” Oleg confessed. “No longer so sweet, or so tight.”
The anger began to boil up through him again, adrenalized rage supercharging his entire body.
“Tell me about her,” Atlas growled.
“What should I tell you?” Oleg asked, coughing up his own blood. That was about the time the creep realized he’d soiled himself.
“Yeah, that stink is you,” Atlas said. To Oleg’s question, Atlas added, “I need to know everything you know.”
Back when he was a cop, he’d treasured even the smallest of details. More often than not, those minor details later became integral parts of the investigation. Right then, he feared the trail to Kaylee was warm with a chance of cooling. That was why he needed to keep the fire on Oleg, right to the bitter end.
“You want to know it all, you asshole American?”
“Start at the beginning,” Atlas said, not taking the name-calling bait. He was an American asshole after all. “I want to know who sold her to you, who first broke her in, how you decided that renting her out to that pig’s ass André was a genius idea after only a few weeks of work.”
