by Lisa Black
“You buy?” Viktor asked.
Coaxed, he confessed his favorite dish to be cheese enchiladas surrounded by a mound of Spanish rice, so Jack ordered from Zocalo. Over a bag of tortilla chips Viktor confided: “The woman in Kirov, I tell you, she is perfect. I met her once. Looks like the perfect mama—a little plump, sweet, she sweat out sincerity from her pores. She could deliver a tiger to the airport and the transport police will usher it right through.”
“How does she get the girls?”
“She works with social services in Balezino. The girls are orphans, usually, or want to run away from home. Their parents abuse them, or they are poor, they want things like cell phones or video games.”
“They think they’re going to be nannies?”
“Or work in factories, that is what they will tell you if you catch them. But they know. They would have to live on moon not to know where they are going. But what else is there for them to do, where they are?”
And that was the modern white slavery trade. No need to kidnap anyone, not when you could get your victims to sacrifice themselves voluntarily.
“Is that where you’re from? Kirov?” Jack asked.
“No, never been there!” Viktor said, as if he found the idea ludicrous. He had grown up in a cramped tenement in Volyn, one of the poorest areas of the Ukraine, not too far from Chernobyl. His father hadn’t cared much for his mother or any other living being and, one drunken night, had killed her and two of Viktor’s siblings. Viktor had spent a few years drifting in and out of his grandfather’s house—another career alcoholic, but too weak by then to do anything to control Viktor.
“I lived with my grandfather for a while,” Jack found himself saying, when Viktor finally paused to eat. “While my parents were divorcing.”
Viktor politely made an inquiring sound around a mouthful of rice, then clarified. “He was cop?”
“No, he was an auto mechanic. There was nothing he couldn’t fix.” Except himself, when age began to take its toll and Jack was nowhere to be found, too busy working extra shifts to pay for his own divorce and then drowning his sorrows regarding same during his boys’ nights out. He came home too exhausted and too buzzed to return the man’s phone calls until, eventually, they stopped coming.
Viktor went on. Taking the matter of his existence into his own hands he had fallen in with a loose group of criminals, some of whom had interesting initiation techniques. Each had a backstory as sad and violent as Viktor’s—perhaps why Viktor seemed happy to share his now. It had never impressed anyone before.
Eventually he had taught himself enough English to be promoted to overseas work. Jack asked how they found their buyers, but Viktor would say only that his customers found him. He confirmed the ones Jack already knew about, but would not give up any new names. Viktor had his principles. His customers paid for confidentiality.
“What about the blond girl?” Jack finally asked.
Viktor scratched at his five o’clock shadow, his expression blank. “Who you talking about? They are all blond. Almost all.”
“The one you killed and left in the cemetery.”
Viktor’s fingers tightened on the tumbler. Then he drained the rest of his Scotch in one swallow.
Jack said, “I’m not judging. I simply need to know—do you skim from every shipment? Is this part of the arrangement?” When Viktor continued to hesitate, Jack added in his most understanding voice: “If we’re going to be partners, of a sort, I need to be aware of liabilities as well as assets. That’s all.”
“Is not liability.”
“I’m not interested in changing your arrangement with your partners, only in getting my cut for making sure your path through the airports remains clear. So—is the last girl part of your standard operating procedure?”
Viktor thought for a long while, then must have figured in for a penny—“Yes. My payment. I do not make much otherwise, barely enough to live on. Maybe you and I can remedy that situation, yes?”
“Money would be better than leaving dead girls around town. That sort of thing attracts attention.”
Viktor shrugged. “The other two I put on trains, I find a boxcar and they turn up in another city. Good trick. This one, yes, I got lazy. But they have no name, no family. Nothing to investigate. They do not really exist when are alive, so . . .”
“What was her name?”
The knowledge of what he had done, the memory of it, glowed within the man, emerging like a fresh being that shook off the skin of the weaselly, often-trounced go-between. “Katya. At least that is what her passport said, but of course that is made up. Half the girls I get are named Katya. I heard the other girls call her Taisia, which means she could not keep her mouth shut if she told them real name. Talked too much. Would have been a problem eventually.”
Jack made himself smile and nodded. “Have you already picked your one from this group?”
Viktor grinned more widely, his wiry frame fairly humming with excitement. “A little dark-haired thing. She says she is fifteen, I think she lies, is younger. Is tight. I like them tight. She is also Katya—I told you, common name.” Then he sat back. “But a customer might want her, so I will be reasonable, maybe pick another. I am a businessman.”
And a fairly efficient one, forcing Jack to act so soon after the Brian Johnson case. This new Katya didn’t have the luxury of time—she would be dead in a few days if Jack didn’t do something. That’s what it always came down to, why he wound up sitting in this room: because someone, eventually, would die if Jack didn’t do something. So what choice did he have? “Of course. You might be more circumspect where you leave this one.”
“You have suggestion?”
“We do have a large body of water not two thousand feet from where we’re sitting.”
“Ah. Good idea.”
“One more for the road?”
“Sorry?”
“Another Scotch?”
Viktor nodded and Jack moved again to the sideboard, splashed two fingers of expensive Scotch into the glass, opened the box behind the bottles. He had fed Viktor his favorite food and his favorite drink, listened to his story and his self-justifications and Jack didn’t have all night. As vital as Viktor’s end was, every minute Jack spent on him took time from his search for Maria Stein, whose victims probably prayed for as quick an end as the blond girl’s. Time to move on.
Why did he bother at all, Jack suddenly asked himself. Why was it important to him that his clients die without fear, with a full belly and a relaxed mind?
He reached over Viktor’s shoulder to set the drink on the table and thought of Taisia, who had died hungry, in abject pain, humiliation, and above all, hopelessness. Why shouldn’t Viktor feel something of the same thing? Why shouldn’t Jack move around to the front of him, let him see the bullet coming, let him know that after all the work he had done to stay alive in this harsh world his life would still be cut off far in advance of its natural end? Why shouldn’t Viktor die in fear?
Because, Jack thought, I am not Viktor. Then he pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession.
Chapter 9
Tuesday, 9:35 p.m.
Jack had thought carting around the skinny Ukrainian would prove a breeze after the muscular Brian Johnson. But it wasn’t, especially with a strong wind off the river. He had decided to take his own advice and mix up his dumping technique—most of his clients were left in alleys and street corners like Brian Johnson, the apparent victim of random urban violence, but Viktor’s foreignness might get Jack’s colleagues a little too curious.
Jack had removed every bit of paper and jewelry from the body, but that didn’t feel good enough. Maggie Gardiner had guessed part of the truth about Taisia with only a T-shirt. So Jack checked the tags on every item Viktor wore—even the underwear, which made him feel weird, plus they smelled since the man had voided his bowels at the moment of death. Unlike the very American outer items, Jack couldn’t read their faded tag in the dim light of the killi
ng room and didn’t feel like going out to the car to get his reading glasses, so he ripped the tag off and shoved it in his pocket. He would be sure to burn it later, along with Viktor’s green card. It would be a DA’s dream to find the murderer with a jigsaw piece of the victim’s clothing in his pocket.
With Viktor de-identified and waiting patiently, propped up in his chair so that most of the blood stayed in his perforated head as it began to coagulate, Jack cleaned the table of fingerprints and bodily fluids. He wiped everything in a five-foot radius with bleach water. He would have to buy more pairs of pants . . . no matter how carefully he tried to complete this task, whitened spots always appeared on his trousers afterward.
He threw all the soiled materials in a garbage bag. Most of the time he did the cleaning in a return trip but for some reason he felt like minimizing his exposure to the city tonight.
Minimizing his exposure had become one of his standard tenets. His very first client had appeared on Jack’s radar when he still seethed with frustration that a judge had let Maria Stein out on bail, free to pick up and leave Chicago as if she had never existed. Jack needed an outlet for his churning, obsessive anger, and found distraction by listening to another detective pour out his heart over coffee one day. A drinking buddy, of which Jack had too many at the time, the detective had been working on a suburban protection racket in which the neighborhood thug raked in cash or else without ever leaving his living room; the else meant he sent out his squad of teenage leg-breakers. Victims were too afraid to testify as were most of the thug’s staff. The individual teens were kept several tiers below him, so that even when they agreed to talk they didn’t have much to say, and tended to relocate to parts unknown at the earliest opportunity. And so the guy stayed in business.
Jack did not consider this a failure on the part of law enforcement or the court system. The police detective obviously cared very much about this case and had worked hard to solve it. And in Jack’s experience, people who went to trial for violent crimes almost always went to jail. “Getting off on a technicality” for a major crime remained a construct of made-for-TV movies. But if someone exercised proper care to stay out of the courtroom in the first place, there was often little to be done—legally, at any rate. That was just bad luck.
The rules could not help them in this case.
That only left Jack.
It hit him with such a blinding flash of clarity that for a moment he ceased to see the chipped Formica of the diner’s table and the waitress’s crisp white apron as she refilled his cup, or hear his companion’s voice droning over the patter of summer rain against the grimy windows.
He had to do something. That was a primary function of human beings—when a problem existed, they did something. Otherwise they might as well be a stone, or a starfish, or a leaf on a tree.
Jack had to protect this man’s future victims, avenge his past ones, and make the world a safer place.
And so he had listened very carefully to the detective’s details, driven to the location in an unremarkable car obeying all the speed limits, and waited patiently for the man to emerge from his living room. It took three nights of waiting, but finally the guy had a midnight craving or a date or simply decided to take a walk, and emerged. Jack shot him four times with his department-issued .45 before speeding off.
Two things had occurred: The guy had lived, though in such sagging health that he gave up criminal pursuits, and Jack’s vehicle had been quite accurately described by a lonely ten-year-old shooting hoops in a driveway up the street.
Eventually Jack settled on having a work space of his own with a lock on the door and a controllable environment, far from the eyes of preternaturally observant children. The housing bust helped, releasing a flood of vacant spaces into the wild. He minimized his exposure.
And he began to use his untraceable .22, at very, very close range.
Now he wrapped Viktor in a fresh tarp and dragged it to the end of the hall. After checking the alley he lifted the tarp and its contents into the trunk. His disposal methods were not ideal, he knew. A five-year-old could glance at his rolled-up canvas and figure out there had to be a dead body inside; perhaps he should learn from Viktor and use a large duffel bag. But Jack’s victims, unlike Viktor’s, probably wouldn’t fit in one.
He had considered leaving the guy outside the Browns stadium, not yet opened for the summer concert season. But the lonely road between the stadium and the lake would be almost too deserted at this time of night; his car would stick out like a laser through fog and they would almost certainly have decent cameras. Just because I prefer baseball, Jack thought, is no reason to get foolish.
Instead he drove down to the Flats, dead and quiet on a weeknight, winding his way past the few bars and restaurants still in business. River Road included a long, steel bridge over the river on its way to Whiskey Island, and it seemed as good a place as any. If the coroner’s office figured out that Viktor had not been a US native then finding him at the mouth of the river, near a busy international port, would raise a number of ideas. He could have been thrown off a ship somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie and have nothing to do with the city at all.
Jack made one pass, driving across the steel bridge that could be horizontally raised and lowered as ships negotiated the twisty river, then turned around. Wendy Park sat on the other side of Whiskey Island, but the area adjacent to the bridge remained industrial; besides, the evenings were still too cool for park activities. As far as he knew Jack might be the only breathing person in the Flats. But that could change without notice and he would have to work fast.
One could not dump a body into the river subtly; only speed mattered. He had tried it once in Minneapolis, having pursued Maria Stein there. He had shoved a wife-mauling animal into the Mississippi, only to discover that the river had frozen overnight and the body landed on the unexpected ice. Worse, the wind blew Jack’s scarf from around his neck and it came to rest only a few yards from the corpse. The sight of the ragged tartan lying on the frozen expanse, and the fact that Maria Stein had apparently left the city before he had even gotten there, had prompted the move to Cleveland. Now, several years later, he felt ready to give water burials another try.
Jack stopped the car, slid the gear into Park, doused the lights, popped the trunk, and moved around to the back in under two seconds. The air smelled of water and diesel engines and spring, at least until he opened the trunk all the way and Viktor added his own aroma to the night. One more reason he would be glad to bid the Ukrainian farewell. He’d have to clean the trunk, in case of any leakage. Maybe use Febreze.
He hefted the inconvenient burden from the vehicle, scraping off an old pair of handcuffs and a flashlight that had been rattling around in the trunk—he really needed to clean out his car—then balanced it on the metal beam that separated the roadway from the narrow pedestrian sidewalk that ran along the length of the bridge. Jack climbed over himself, then transferred the rolled-up burden onto the round railing over the water. No worries about fingerprints on the rails— Jack wore gloves, of course; he wasn’t entirely stupid. Adrenaline kept him from feeling the strain in his shoulders, the pounding of the heart within his chest.
“Hey!” said a voice at his elbow.
The burden shifted, and Viktor tumbled downward, the tarp unrolling with a snap as if it were a banner announcing the start of a parade.
A man stood next to Jack, quizzical eyes peering out from the dark morass of a weathered face, made of pale skin buried under a year’s worth of grime. Tufts of hair protruded from a ski cap labeled Vail, Colorado and an entire wardrobe encased the torso under a stadium coat that had once been khaki-colored. Pants and boots were dark and he smelled worse than Viktor had. But a white gleam peeked out from the few teeth he had left as he grinned. “What’chadoin’?”
For a moment Jack wanted to hurl himself over the side, along with Viktor. Where had this guy come from?
Jack had gotten pretty good at lying over the past fe
w years, smooth even, but it all deserted him under the stare of a homeless drifter. He stammered. “Who—who—”
“I’d be Clyde,” the guy slurred. “Who’re you?”
Jack scrambled to think of a name. Any name. “Bill.”
Maybe he hadn’t seen the body. Jack could have been throwing anything out, garbage, a spare tire—
The man glanced over the railing, toward the water. “And who’s he?”
Jack bent over the metal bar so quickly that he grasped it with both hands to keep from losing his balance, still hanging on to the tarp. Viktor sprawled face down, one arm dangling free on the framework of beams that formed a sort of shelf under the bridge proper. Somehow the body had arced inward just enough to get caught in this sieve instead of plunging into the Cuyahoga—
Jack straightened, speechless. The man at his side cocked his head, studied Jack as if memorizing his features, said, “All righty, then,” and continued along the bridge. Jack watched him go. He felt his own jaw hanging open, uselessly, and snapped it shut. He did not consider, even briefly, doing anything to the guy. Jack’s job was to remove the dangerous from society, and this man did not seem remotely dangerous.
Besides, he would not make a credible witness, even if they did all someday wind up in court. Right?
Jack looked down again; Viktor had not moved. Right.
He pulled in the tarp and flung it to the sidewalk. One foot in the mesh, and he lifted the other leg with the frenzied energy of a man half his age, flinging it over the railing and letting his body follow. The leather gloves helped to keep his grip as well as prevent fingerprints, but when he traveled downward he found that while hanging his weight from the railing seemed a secure matter, clinging to the mesh grating underneath it, much less so. Designed to restrict animals and small children, it bowed and buckled and for one moment he felt sure it would tear away entirely only to follow him into the cold depths of the river.
Then his foot slipped into open space and waved around there.
