by Ryan Schow
“It’s me,” he said when she didn’t answer right away.
The door opened. “I was just deciding if I should let you in again.”
He brushed past her, collapsed on the bed, and told her the whole story. When she began to undress him, he didn’t stop to object.
“I just took a couple of sleeping pills,” she said. “You want one or two?”
He nodded, then said, “Absolutely.”
When he swallowed them down and got into bed, Cira shut off the light and it was a bit weird. He hadn’t been in bed with a woman since Jade. And he hadn’t shared an actual bed with an actual woman in two years.
“Don’t molest me in my sleep, okay?” he said, sincere.
“I may want to cuddle,” she said, sleepy sounding, “but that’s about it.”
“I can deal with that.”
He fell asleep quickly, stirring briefly when she curled her arms around him. She was pressing her thighs and breasts into his legs and back, but the comfort of her body wasn’t enough to keep him awake. The last thing he felt was her nestling her face into the crook of his neck. He wasn’t going to lie, he enjoyed the touch of a woman, and he didn’t want to rob himself of it a second night in a row. Then again, the sleeping pills were his safety measure. His barrier between her sexual needs and his apparent weakness.
When he was awakened again, it was not to Cira trying something on him; rather, it was to her being ripped off the bed and thrown into the corner of the room like a discarded jacket or a throw pillow that had outworn its welcome.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ATLAS HARGROVE
He didn’t move or even stir when the lights came on, but when Cira’s arms were ripped off him and the grunt of someone throwing her—followed by her crashing into a table—made a huge freaking racket, he opened his eyes to a man standing over him.
“Morning, fuckface,” Atlas heard himself slur. The sleeping pills were working entirely too well.
The man laughed like he couldn’t believe the response. He glanced over at his goons, who were smiling. On the ground, Cira appeared to be unconscious.
Looking back at this monster, he saw the man who had eaten his steak and left him a turd in return.
“Dasha, I presume.”
Laughing again, like Atlas was a riot, he started to nod. “I heard you were smart. But really, because I’m here, I’m pretty sure you’re not.”
“I hear that too.”
“Why is my name on your tongue, again?” he asked, his voice like broken glass, his skin smelling heavily of cigarettes and sweat.
“I was looking for a synonym for the word shit, and all I could come up with was Dasha. That’s what it means, right?”
“So are you still looking for me?” he asked.
“My curiosity about you ended when you found me,” Atlas said, the hypnotic slumber wearing off enough for him to realize it was still the middle of the night and he was in real trouble.
“Yet you asked about me again.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you saying you were not with Ruslana earlier this evening?”
“I was, but I wasn’t asking about you.”
“You were asking about a girl,” he said. “An American brunette.”
“Yes,” he said. “I have a photo.”
“Let me see it.”
“It’s in my pants pocket,” he said, pointing at the pants laid out over the chair. “Back left pocket, I think.”
Dasha snapped his fingers and a man fetched it. Atlas looked on the floor, saw a cut on Cira’s head where she’d hit the table. She pretended to be knocked out, but Atlas knew otherwise, which meant Dasha might suspect as much.
The Ukrainian stood over her like a demon who’d downed his prey and was waiting for it to twitch just so he could step on its neck. When she didn’t move, Dasha looked up and said, “There is a place where people who have exceeded their usefulness go to become one with the earth. This girl in the photo, I believe she is there.”
“You mean like a dumpsite?”
“That sounds right,” Dasha said. “Get dressed, I will take you there.”
Atlas got out of bed, started to dress. Dasha, however, knelt down before Cira, studying the bleeding cut. Bending down even farther, he grabbed her by the back of her hair, turned her face-up, then flattened his tongue and licked straight up the wound.
Cira did an amazing job pretending to be knocked out at this point. When he was done, smiling like a piranha, the vein in his forehead bulging like an earthworm, he glanced over at Atlas and said, “Twenty-eight years old, maybe twenty-nine, but not by much.”
“Twenty-eight,” Atlas confirmed. “That’s a cute trick. Must really get the girls wet.”
The man smiled, then he stood and kicked Cira in the gut so hard it actually hurt Atlas’s spine to witness it. When an expulsion of breath escaped her, Dasha kicked her in the face just as hard, his boot connecting with the cut.
“I hate fakers,” he said in sloppy English. “They taste like cowardice. Come with me, asshole, before I change my mind.”
Atlas didn’t hesitate. Down in the car, they drove to the outskirts of Odessa, to a place where there were old war parts, shadows of a mid-century weapons factory, and a football-field-sized swamp filled with grassy lumps and rusting fifty-five-gallon barrels.
“All those lumps you see,” Dasha said, “are bodies. Much of this chemical pollution is from a huge spill during the war. When we declared our independence to Russia, we tried to bury this site with dirt and gravel, but these chemicals keep finding their way to the surface.”
“It looks disgusting.”
“The city has condemned it, and the cops don’t come near it, so even though they know what’s here, they don’t care what’s here.”
“How many, do you think?”
“Bodies?”
“Yes.”
“A hundred, maybe more.”
“So everyone knows about this?” Atlas asked. Dasha nodded. “But no one does anything about it?”
“We are not Belarus or America,” Dasha said, “or whatever shithole country you come from.”
“That’s rich, you saying I come from a shithole while we sit in front of this.”
As they crept along a bumpy tire-tracked dirt path around the site, Dasha handed him a large flashlight and said, “When we get to where she is, I will show you where to look.”
“Did you put her there?” Atlas asked.
“No.”
“Vanko?”
“It’s possible,” he said.
“Who else would do this, if not you or Vanko?”
Dasha shrugged his shoulders, then said, “See what you need to see, Mr. UFC, then maybe you can leave our country, and leave us be.”
“So you’re not worried about the authorities?”
“Not when you own them, no.”
“No one owns the authorities,” Atlas said, realizing how naïve that sounded.
With a humble laugh, Dasha said, “When your product is my product, and the authorities partake in my products, then yes, you own the authorities. But they don’t even try to deny their impulses. Here in Odessa, we indulge. Are you American?”
Atlas shook his head and lied. “No.”
“I think you are, and if you were, then you—of all people—would understand such indulgences.”
“You sound confident about that.”
“Your people are our best customers.”
“You ship girls to America?” he asked.
He didn’t know why he was surprised, but then again, he’d spent the last four years living in a bubble, so really he had no international perspective.
“We ship girls and other things,” Dasha teased. The SUV pulled up to the dumpsite. He rolled down the window, pointed to a pile of what could very well be more bodies. “Over there. That’s where the fresh ones have been going.”
The stench hit him a second later. Holding his nose, Atlas got out
, walked over the uneven earth, rolled an ankle on a half-buried piece of metal, then found his way to the bodies. The stink was worse than ever. He shined the light on the pile and found half a dozen faces looking back at him. Pale-skinned, eyes dusted with dirt, little lonely faces looking into deep space. He turned, bent over, felt the rolling heat in his stomach. His gut clenched; his spine curled. He put his hand over his mouth but refused to swallow. The next lurch sent a torrent of digested food surging out of his mouth.
In between convulsions, he thought he heard Dasha and his men laughing. Or maybe those were the voices in his head giving away his last bits of sanity.
Standing back up, wiping his mouth, he turned the light on the girls, taking in their features, their little broken bodies. He saw a hand. There was a missing finger, two missing fingernails. Tears welled in his eyes immediately. He didn’t want to do this. Turning away, looking up in the sky, making small mewling sounds, he felt the tremors hit his heart first, then spread out to the rest of his body.
A loud, flat slapping sound pulled him from his reverie. Dasha was smacking his hand on the outside of the SUV’s door.
“Hurry up,” Dasha said.
Atlas started pulling the bodies apart, flies and a putrid stench assaulting him. The beetles were the worst, though, crawling in and out of the clothes, into open mouths, unimpeded nostrils. By now tears were streaming down his face and his nose was running.
Then he saw her. Kaylee. His heart all but stopped. For a long moment, he just knelt there, looking at her—this girl he was supposed to save. But he hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t saved those kids from getting run over. And he hadn’t even saved his own daughter from being taken.
“Did you find her?” Dasha asked.
He didn’t move, didn’t respond to Dasha’s question. The screaming sound of a horn made him jump. He looked up and saw Dasha looking back at him.
“Yeah,” he said, choked. Then louder, he said, “Yeah, I found her.”
Feeling so detached from this moment, from his own body, yet so connected to this moment, he found himself brushing the dirt off her abused face. There was an incredible amount of bruising. He pushed two other girls’ corpses off her. The wet stench of chemicals, rot, and earth hit him even harder. Bugs scurried all across her half-naked body, the soil damp and squelching.
If he had his phone, he would have snapped a confirmation picture. Then again, he might not have taken her picture. He wouldn’t want her remembered like this. Whoever had done this to her…it looked like they’d beaten her to death. She would have suffered incredibly.
“Let’s go already!” Dasha barked, slapping the car door again. “I’ve got company coming.”
“At this hour?” Atlas asked.
“At every hour.”
Atlas discreetly wiped his eyes, then walked back to the SUV where the three thugs were waiting. He climbed inside, said nothing. Wordless, they drove him back to the hotel.
When Dasha dropped him off, he said, “If I see you again, you’ll make me start to wonder about you. Don’t make me wonder about you. Because when I wonder too long, I tend to kill the thing I think about most. Have you heard the saying, ‘If you don’t understand it, kill it first and question it later?’”
“I can’t say I have.”
“I just made it up. But you get the point, yes?”
Atlas nodded then got out, hoping to God not to get shot in front of the hotel. Being dumped there earlier was already embarrassing enough. Then again, getting killed there still wouldn’t be as bad as being dropped naked in the street at Kofi’s apartment.
In the hotel room, he found Cira with a doctor who happened to be staying at the hotel. She was getting her head cleaned with antiseptic in preparation for stitches.
“Are you okay?” she asked, not moving as the man began stitching the two open flaps of skin together.
“Yeah, you?” he lied, his stomach still queasy from the dumpsite.
“All things considered, yeah,” she said. “What about Kaylee? Did you find her?”
“He took me to her.”
“And?”
He slowly nodded his head, not wanting to get into the details in front of anyone else.
“Is it bad?” she asked. He felt his eyes tear up again, which was enough for her. “Okay, yeah. When I’m done here, we’ll call Leopold.”
Turning away, he went into the restroom, turned on the fan, and let himself cry.
Chapter Thirty
LEOPOLD WENTWORTH
Leopold got the call from Cira. She’d been providing him with regular updates, but this was the call. He felt it in her tone, in the big breath she took.
“Don’t say it yet,” he said, getting out of bed.
It was early in the evening, but the woman he’d started seeing was a lawyer who had to be up at five. He couldn’t fall asleep this early, but for this lawyer—who was one of the sexiest women he’d ever met, and so damn smart—he said he’d try to deal with her screwy schedule.
She stirred, mumbled something in her sleep, then settled back down with an audible sigh. He tiptoed out of the bedroom, then plodded down the hall. In the den, he turned on the lights and sat down in his smoking chair.
“Am I going to need a drink for this?” he asked, looking at a decanter of brandy.
Cira cleared her throat. “One or two drinks, maybe.”
“Dammit,” he muttered. Drawing a deep, stabilizing breath, he said, “Alright, give it to me straight.”
“She’s dead, Leopold.”
“Fuck.”
He poured himself a drink, his sipping whiskey now more of a slug of help-juice than a fine spirit to savor. One more, he thought. After another drink, he felt ready to resume this conversation.
“Is Atlas there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Better than we all expected, until this.”
“Put him on the phone,” Leopold said firmly, clearly pissed off.
“He’s in the bathroom crying,” she said. “He’s pretty messed up. I think this might have broken his mind.”
“I don’t care about his emotions right now, Cira. I want to know what the hell—”
“I’ll call you back when he’s ready.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, ending the call. He poured himself three fingers of the brandy, let the alcohol work its magic on his nerves.
He paced the decadent room, then punched the wall and shook the pain from his hand. Finally, he got up the nerve to make that one dreaded call.
“Halden Barnes,” the man answered.
“It’s Leopold.”
“Tell me you have news,” he said, hopeful.
“I do.”
“Did you find her?”
“Yeah, we think so,” Leopold said, a terrible actor under those kinds of conditions.
He heard the man stiffen, take a shaky breath, then let out a small cry he tried to stifle. “Is…is she…?”
“I think so,” Leopold said.
He’d never heard a grown man cry like that, but he sat there and listened to every single tear, searing it into his memory. This is the sound of failure, he told himself. This is the sound of me not doing a good enough job. God, the man’s pain took so much from him. It was taking something from them all.
“Do we know for sure it’s her?” he asked, sniffling.
“It’s early in the morning over there,” Leopold said. “I just got the call.”
“So it could be someone else?”
“I wouldn’t hold out hope,” he said. “But my team is thorough, so we’ll be double-checking in the morning.”
“So it’s dark outside?”
“Yeah.”
“I want pictures,” he said, pulling himself together. “I want to see her for myself.”
“Let me talk to my man on the ground. I’ll call you back in a few, okay?”
“Didn’t you already talk to him?”
“I�
�m told he’s been through hell. This case wasn’t what we thought it would be. It was much, much worse.”
“I didn’t pay you this kind of money to tell me about your man on the ground, or his feelings. I’m paying you to find her and bring her home.”
“I’ll be in touch,” he said.
Halden hung up.
So angry, so pissed off at himself, he started to second-guess the whole operation. He knew he was in way over his head before, but this was ridiculous. Who the hell did he think he was?
“Get your head right,” he muttered.
He made the call. A few minutes later, Scotty Chase, his detective, answered.
“Yeah,” Scotty said.
“What are you doing?”
“Stakeout.”
“They think they found the girl.”
“That was quick.”
“Yeah.”
“You want to know what I got?” he asked.
“I do.”
“A whole lot of fuck-all,” Scotty said. “That’s not to say I don’t have a few irons in the fire. I do. But this takes time, man. You know that.”
“This guy slaughtered a serial killer, flew to Russia and put half a dozen assholes in the dirt, then went to Odessa and found the girl, and you’re sitting in a damn car telling me you don’t have shit and you’re supposed to be the professional?”
“Relax, Leopold,” he said, spitting out something into a cup. Sunflower seeds, it sounded like.
“Don’t tell me to relax!” he roared.
“I might have something, but I need it to pan out.”
“When will you know?”
“In the morning.”
“What’s your problem?” Leopold barked at the former spec-ops guy.
“Time, Leopold. The best in the business walked away from this case after years and you suddenly have this giant hard-on to get her found in less than a week?”
“I want a clue, Scotty. One. Damn. Clue.”
“Time,” he repeated.
“How much time do you need?”
“For this case, who knows? For a clue, progress, something to hand to you? Maybe a week if I get lucky.”
