Ned Mahoney and I were stuck in a close, dark, pigsty of a bedroom with the suspect, Rafe Farley. The woman, who assured us she was his girlfriend, had put on a filthy bathrobe and been taken into the kitchen to be grilled.
We were all angry about what had happened outside. Two agents had been wounded by a booby trap. Rafe Farley was the closest thing we had to a break in the case, or a suspect.
Things kept getting weirder. For starters, Farley spit at Mahoney and me until his mouth went dry. It was so strange and crazy that, at one point, Ned and I just looked at each other and started to laugh.
‘Think this is fucking funny?’ Farley rasped from the edge of the bed where he was lodged like a beached whale. We’d made him put on clothes, blue jeans and a work shirt, mostly because we couldn’t stand the sight of his flaccid rolls of fat, tattoos of naked women, and a purple dragon that was eating a child.
‘You’re going down on kidnap and murder charges,’ Mahoney snarled at him. ‘You injured two of my men. One might lose an eye.’
‘You had no right comin’ in my house, middle of the night! I have enemies!’ Farley yelled and spit at Mahoney again. ‘You barge in here, ‘cause I sell some weed? Or I screw a married broad who likes me more than she likes her old man?’
‘Are you talking about Audrey Meek?’ I asked.
Suddenly he went quiet. He stared at me, and his face and neck turned bright red. What was this? He wasn’t a good actor, and he wasn’t real smart either.
‘What the hell’re you talking about? You been smoking my shit?’ Farley stammered. ‘Audrey Meek? That chick they kidnapped?’
Mahoney leaned forward. ‘Audrey Meek. We know you know all about her, Farley. Where is she?’
Farley’s piggy eyes seemed to be getting smaller. ‘How the hell would I know where she is?’
Mahoney kept at him. ‘You ever been in a chat room called Favorite Things Four?’
Farley shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘We have you on tape, asshole,’ Ned said. ‘You got a lot of ’splaining to do, Lucy.’
Farley looked confused. ‘Who the hell is Lucy? What are you talking about, man? You mean, like, I Love Lucy?’
Mahoney was good at keeping Farley off guard. I thought we were working okay together.
‘You’ve got her in the woods somewhere in Jersey. We have it on tape,’ Mahoney yelled, then stamped his foot hard.
‘Did you hurt her? Is she all right? Where is Audrey Meek?’
I picked up.
‘Take us to her, Farley!
‘You’re going back to prison. This time, you don’t get out again,’ I shouted in his face.
It was as if Farley were finally waking up. He squinted his eyes and stared hard at us. Lord, he smelled, especially now that he was scared.
‘Wait a fucking minute. Now I get it. That Internet place? I was just showin’ off.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Farley slumped down into himself as if we’d been beating him. ‘Favorite Four is for freaks to talk. Everybody makes shit up, man.’
‘But you didn’t make up the stuff about Audrey Meek. You know things about her. You got it all right,’ I said.
‘The bitch turns me on. She’s a fox. Hell, I collect catalogs from Meek, always have. All those skinny-ass models look like they need a good, unh, unh, uh!’
‘You knew things about the abduction, Farley,’ I said.
‘I read the newspapers, watch CNN. Who doesn’t? I told you, Audrey Meek turns me on. I wish I’d abducted her. You think I’d be sleeping with Cini if Audrey Meek was around here?’
I jabbed an index finger at Farley. ‘You knew things that weren’t in the newspapers.’
He shook his huge head from side to side. Then he said, ‘Got a scanner. Listen in on police radios and such. Shit, I didn’t kidnap Audrey Meek. I wouldn’t have the balls. I wouldn’t. I’m all talk, man.’
Mahoney cut in. ‘You had the balls to rape Carly Hope,’ he said.
Farley seemed to be shrinking inside himself again. ‘Nah, nah. It’s like I said in court. Carly was a girlfriend. I didn’t rape her none. I don’t have the balls. I didn’t do nothing to Audrey Meek. I’m nobody. I’m nothing.’
Rafe Farley stared at us for a long moment. His eyes were bloodshot, everything about him was pathetic. I didn’t want to, but I was starting to believe him. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. That was Rafe Farley, all right.
Chapter Forty-One
S terling.
Mr Potter.
The Art Director.
Sphinx.
Marvel.
The Wolf.
The cover names sounded harmless, but the men behind them weren’t. During one session, Potter had nicknamed the group Monsters Inc. as a joke, and that was an accurate description. They were monsters, all of them; they were freaks; they were deviates, and worse.
And then there was the Wolf, who was in a whole other class.
The meeting was on a secure website that was inaccessible to outsiders. All messages were encrypted and required a pair of keys: one key garbled the information; a second key was needed to recover it. More important, a hand scan was necessary to get on to the site. They were considering using a retinal scan, or possibly an anal probe.
The subject under discussion was the Couple, and what to do about them.
‘What the hell does that mean – what to do about them?’ asked the Art Director, who was jokingly called Mr Softee because he could get very emotional, the only one of them who ever did.
‘It means just what it sounds like,’ answered Sterling. ‘There’s been a serious breach of security. Now we have to decide what to do about it. There’s been sloppiness, stupidity, and maybe worse than that. They were seen. It’s put us all in danger.’
‘What are our options?’ the Art Director continued. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’
Sterling responded instantly. ‘Have you read the newspapers lately? Do you have a TV? A team of two took a woman in a mall in Atlanta, Georgia. They were spotted. A team of two abducted a woman in Pennsylvania – and they were seen. Our options? Do absolutely nothing – or do something extreme. An object lesson is needed – for the other teams.’
‘So what are we doing about the problem?’ asked Marvel, who was usually spookily quiet, but who could be nasty and dangerous when he was aroused.
‘For one thing, I’ve shut down all deliveries for the moment,’ said Sterling.
‘Nobody told me about that!’ Sphinx erupted. ‘I’m expecting a delivery. As all of you know, I paid a price for it. Why wasn’t I informed before now?’
No one said anything to Sphinx for several seconds. No one liked him. Besides, each one of them was a sadist. They enjoyed torturing Sphinx, or anyone else in the group who showed weakness.
‘I expect my delivery!’ Sphinx insisted. ‘I deserve it. You bastards! Fuck you all.’ Then he went off-line. In a huff. Typical Sphinx. Laughable, really, except none of them was laughing right now.
‘The Sphinxter has left the building,’ Potter finally said.
Then Wolf took over. ‘I think that’s enough idle chat for tonight, enough fun and games. I’m concerned about the news stories. We need to deal with the Couple in some decisive manner that satisfies me. What I propose is that we have another team pay them a visit. Is there any disagreement?’
There was none, which wasn’t unusual when the Wolf had the floor. They were afraid of him; all of them were petrified of the Russian.
‘There is some good news, though,’ Potter said then. ‘This fuss and attention… it is exciting, isn’t it? Gets the blood boiling. It’s a hoot, right?’
The group shared a laugh. ‘You’re crazy, Potter. You’re mad.’
‘Don’t you just love it?’
The well-protected chat room was not protected enough.
Suddenly the Wolf said, ‘Don’t say another word. Not a word! I think someone else is on with us. Wait. They’re off
now. Someone broke into the den, and now they’re gone. Who could have gotten in here? Who let them in? Whoever it is, they’re dead.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Lili Lynch was fourteen and a half years old, going on twenty-four, and she honestly believed she’d heard everything, until she hacked into the Wolf’s Den.
The sick bastards in the well-protected-but-not-protected-enough chat room were all older men, and they were gross and despicable. They liked to talk incessantly about women’s private parts, and having vile sex with anyone and everything that moved – any age, any gender, human or animal. The men were beyond disgusting, and they made her want to puke. Only then it got a lot worse, and Lili wished she had never even heard of the Wolf’s Den, never hacked into the highly protected chat room. They might be murderers!
And then the leader, Wolf, actually discovered Lili was on the site with them, listening to everything they’d said.
So now Lili knew about the murders, and the kidnappings, everything they fantasized about, and possibly did. Only she didn’t know if any of what she heard was real or not.
Was it real? Or were they making it all up? Maybe they were just nasty, sicko bullshitters. Lili almost didn’t want to know the truth, and she didn’t know what to do about the stuff she’d already overheard. She had hacked on to their site and that was illegal. If she went to the police, she’d be turning herself in. So she couldn’t do that. Could she? Especially if the stuff on the site was just fantasies.
So she sat in her room and pondered the unthinkable. Then pondered it again. She felt so bad, so sick to her stomach, so sad, but she was also afraid.
They knew she’d hacked on to the Wolf’s Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she was them, she’d know how. So were they already on their way to her house?
Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed.
When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. ‘Holy shit! Holy mother! It’s them!’
Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering.
Domino’s pizza! Jesus!
She’d forgotten all about it. It was a pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn’t going to die, after all.
She opened the front door.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Wolf had seldom been angrier and someone had to pay. The Russian had a longstanding hatred for New York City, and the smug and overrated metropolitan area. He found it filthy-dirty, foul beyond imagining, the people rude and uncivilized, even worse than in Moscow. But he had to be there today; it was where the Couple lived, and he had business with them. The Wolf also wanted to play some chess, one of his passions.
Long Island was the general address he had for Slava and Zoya.
Huntington was the specific one.
He arrived in the town just past three in the afternoon. Actually, he did remember the one other time he’d been here – two years after he had arrived in New York from Russia. Cousins of his owned the house and had helped set him up in America. He had committed four murders out here ‘on the Island’, as the locals called it. Well, at least Huntington was close to Kennedy Airport. He’d be out of New York as soon as possible.
The Couple lived in a typical suburban ranch house. The Wolf banged on the front door and a goateed bull of a man by the name of Lukanov opened it. Lukanov was part of another team, one that worked successfully in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Lukanov had once been a major in the KGB.
‘Where are the stupid fucks?’ the Wolf asked once he was inside the front door.
The bull Lukanov jerked a thumb toward a semi-darkened staircase behind him, and the Wolf trudged up. His right knee was aching today, and he remembered a time in the eighties when members of a rival gang had broken it. In Moscow that kind of thing was considered a warning. The Wolf wasn’t much for warnings himself. He had found the three men who’d tried to cripple him, and broken every bone in their bodies – one by one. In Russia this gruesome practice was called zamochit, but the Wolf and other gangsters called it mushing.
He entered a small, sloppily kept bedroom and immediately saw Slava and Zoya, his ex-wife’s cousins. The pair had grown up about thirty miles from Moscow. They had been in the army until the summer of ’98, then they emigrated to America. They’d been working for him for less than eight months, so he was just getting to know them.
‘You live in a garbage dump,’ he said. ‘I know you have plenty of money. What do you do with it?’
‘We have family at home,’ said Zoya. ‘Your relatives are there too.’
The Wolf tilted his head. ‘Awhh, so touching. I had no idea you had such a big heart of gold, Zoya.’ He motioned for the Bull to leave, and said, ‘Shut the door. I’ll be down when I’m finished in here. It might be a while.’
The Couple were tied up together on the floor. Both were in their underwear. Slava had on shorts patterned with little ducks. Zoya wore a black bra with a matching bikini thong.
The Wolf finally smiled. ‘What am I going to do with you two, huh?’
Then Slava began to laugh out loud, a nervous, high-pitched cackling. He had thought they were going to be killed, but this would just be a warning. He could see this in the Wolf’s eyes.
‘So what happened? Tell me quickly. You knew the rules of the game,’ he said.
‘Maybe it was getting too easy. We wanted a little more of a challenge. It’s our mistake, Pasha. We got sloppy.’
‘Never lie to me,’ the Wolf said. ‘I have my sources. They are everywhere!’
He sat on the arm of an easy chair that looked as if it had been in this hideously ugly bedroom for a hundred years. Dust puffed from the old chair as it took his weight.
‘You like him?’ he asked Zoya. ‘My ex-wife’s cousin?’
‘I love him,’ she said, and her brown eyes went soft. ‘Always. Since we were thirteen years old. Forever, I loved him.’
‘Slava, Slava,’ the Wolf said and walked over to the muscular man on the floor. He bent to give Slava a hug. ‘You are my ex-wife’s blood relative. And you betrayed me. You sold me out to my enemies, didn’t you? Sure you did. How much did you get? A lot, I hope.’
Then he twisted Slava’s head as if he were opening a big jar of pickles. Slava’s neck snapped, a sound that the Wolf had come to love over the years. His trademark in the Red Mafiya.
Zoya’s eyes widened to about twice their normal size. But she didn’t make a sound, and because of that the Wolf understood what tough customers she and Slava really were, how dangerous they had been to the safety of the organization. ‘I’m impressed, Zoya,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk some.’
He stared into those amazing eyes of hers. ‘Listen, I’m going to get the two of us some real vodka, Russian vodka. Then I want to hear your war stories,’ he said. ‘I want to hear what you’ve done with your life, Zoya. You have me curious now. Most of all, I want to play chess, Zoya. Nobody in America knows how to play chess. One game, then you go to heaven with your beloved Slava. But first vodka and chess, and, of course, I fuck you!’
Chapter Forty-Four
On account of secrets that Zoya had told him under significant duress, the Wolf had to make one more stop in New York. Unfortunate. This meant that he wouldn’t be able to catch his flight home out of Kennedy, and he would miss the professional hockey game that night. Regretful, but he knew this was the right thing to do. The betrayal by Slava and Zoya had jeopardized his life, and also made him look bad.
At a little past eleven, he entered a club called the Passage in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. The passage looked like a dump from the street, but inside it was beautiful, very ornate, almost as nice as the best places in Moscow.
He saw people he knew from the old days: Gosha Chernov, Lev Deniso
v, Yura Fomin and his mistress. Then he spotted his darling Yulya. His ex-wife was tall and slender, with large breasts he’d bought for her in Palm Beach, Florida. Yulya was still beautiful in the right light, not so much changed since Moscow, where she had been a dancer since she was fifteen.
She was sitting at the bar with Mikhail Biryukov, the latest king of Brighton Beach. They were directly in front of a mural of St Petersburg, which was very cinematic, thought the Wolf, a typical Hollywood visual cliché.
Yulya saw him coming, and she tapped Biryukov. The local pakhan turned and looked, and the Wolf closed on him fast. He slammed a black king down on the table. ‘Checkmate,’ he roared, then laughed and hugged Yulya.
‘You’re not even happy to see me?’ he asked the couple. ‘I should be hurt.’
Biryukov grunted. ‘You are a mystery man. I thought you were in California.’
‘Wrong again,’ said the Wolf. ‘By the way, Slava and Zoya say hello. I just saw them out on Long Island. They couldn’t make the trip here tonight.’
Yulya shrugged – such a cool little bitch. ‘They mean nothing to me,’ she said. ‘Distant cousins.’
‘Or me either, Yulya. Only the police care about them now.’
Suddenly he grabbed Yulya by the throat and lifted her out of her bar seat with one arm. ‘You told them to fuck me over, didn’t you? You must have paid them a lot!’ he screamed in her face. ‘It was you. And him!’
With dazzling speed, the Wolf pulled an ice pick from his sleeve and stuck it into Biryukov’s left eye. The gangster was blinded, and dead in an instant.
‘No… Please.’ Yulya struggled to get out a few words. ‘You can’t do this. Not even you!’
Then the Wolf addressed everyone in the nightclub. ‘You are all witnesses, are you not? What? Nobody helps her? You’re afraid of me? Good – you should be. Yulya tried to get revenge on me. She was always stupid as a cow. Biryukov – he was just a dumb, greedy bastard. Ambitious! The godfather of Brighton Beach! What is that? He wanted to be me!’
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