Now Mikhael and Dmitry rushed in. Kaley kicked out at their shins and, for a brief moment, felt the anger of someone else who had once been in this room. It wasn’t the boy this time, no, it was another girl. This girl had bitten. She’d grabbed hold and bitten, so—
Kaley grabbed at the first outstretched hand—it was Mikhael’s—and held onto it with both hands and bit as hard as she could on the first bit she could shove into her face. It was his right index finger, and she heard a sharp crunch. There was blood, and screaming, and then the world turned to fire.
The volts from the Taser hit her, controlled her, and owned her. She fell backwards stiff as a board and landed on top of Bonetta, who screamed and shrank away.
Olga was standing over her, snarling down at her, her visage a bog hag from a scary nighttime story. She screamed a string of Russian words and then slapped Oni. Mikhael clutched his ruined hand and fell back against the toilet. He screamed. Olga screamed. Dmitry screamed. Olga shoved Dmitry, who ignored this and reached out to snatch Shannon’s right arm. He yanked her off the ground.
Kaley tried to scream, tried to tell Little Sister to run. But nothing came out. She was still paralyzed by the Taser’s kiss. And once again, the empathic connection had cursed them. Shan hadn’t wanted to sever the Anchor. Get out of here! Kaley willed at her. Shan felt Big Sister’s command, but too late. She was now in the clutches of something far worse than the White Ninja had ever had to contend with.
As they carried her kicking and screaming from the room, Kaley fumbled impotently with her own fear, as well as Bonetta’s, and Shan’s, and the slimy ink that was Oni’s lust. “Shan…Shannon…?”
“Kaley!”
“No,” she whispered, trying to will herself to her feet. “No…Bonetta…please…”
Bonetta was off someplace crying to herself. As useless as a rainstorm in the Mojave Desert, as Ricky used to say. The thought came out of nowhere, and settled in.
They hauled Shan out the door. Before it closed, Kaley managed to scream, “Take me! Taaaaaaaaaaaake meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
But the door slammed closed, and SLAM!
Click.
After that, there was nothing for a while but the screams. Kaley’s body continued to spasm, jump, and tingle as it remembered itself. She rolled onto her side, and started crawling. She vomited from the coalescing fear, and watched the white-brown mixture spread out in front of her. Half out of her mind, she watched as chunks of meat floated in that pool.
She felt the hands of the other children in the room trying to help her to her feet. Or was that imagined? Probably imagined, yes. But there was definitely empathy there. There was…
Bonetta’s whimpering. Kaley was so sick with anger that she would probably throttle Bonetta Harper with her bare hands were she able. At the moment, all she was able to do was crawl. The door of cracked and peeling paint was a million miles away, it seemed. From the floor, all she could see was Monopoly money, as well as the shoe pawn and the dog pawn. Shan always wanted to be the dog, and Ricky was always the race car. Community Chest cards were mixed in with the balls of Hungry Hungry Hippos. She would never play these games again, and in years to come it would be difficult to explain to others just why she refrained from joining in with them.
She made it to the door, and came to her knees. She pulled weakly at the doorknob, and did not stop trying to turn it no matter how many times it failed to open. “Take me,” she said. “Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me.”
Several minutes passed. Several eternities.
This was all a dream. She was convinced of it. Nothing so horrible could happen to people so good. This sort of thing happened in places like you heard about on TV, in Darfur or Rwanda, not here, not to people like her or her sister. A bullet perhaps, yes, but not—
She was impaled by the pain and terror long before she heard any screams.
And she sank…
In the Ocean of Sorrow, she sank, deeper and deeper. And like any drowning creature she reached out. Not physically with her hands, but with her beseeching heart. It was so frail and timid that it needed someone, something to show her the way. Her world was darkness. Though her eyes still worked and she was somewhat cognizant of Bonetta Harper standing over her, shaking her, Kaley was blinded. She could see, but saw nothing.
She reached out for someone, anyone at all, to help her. No, not help for her. For her sister. The pain…
Oh, chil’…you got a lotta hurt comin’ yo way.
It swirled in great eddies. Much pain churned beneath the waters. It was the screams of anyone who had touched these walls, this floor, the toilet, the door…
…and Shannon.
Kaley gave up. As she imagined any drowning person must eventually do, she resigned herself to her fate. She would swallow the water and drowned. It must be easier at some point to just accept your lot in life than it was to keep fighting it. The fire she had formerly felt was doused. All light diminished. The pain filled her mouth and nostrils, the terror coursed through the arteries of her heart and choked them off. The passion she had felt when fighting back Olga and Dmitry and Mikhael had ebbed, too small a current against the pain. She was exhausted afterwards. The heat of that passion was dwindling.
And yet, at the very center were coals that were still warm. And perhaps, just perhaps, she saw an ember there? Kaley sighed the sigh of her last breath, and when she did, the air touched at the coals and heated them. “You gotta blow on the coals, give ’em some air,” Ricky had once told her on the first, and only, camping trip he’d ever arranged for them. It hadn’t been far. Kennesaw Mountain, forty-five minutes north of Atlanta. She remembered that trip. It both seemed like not so long ago and yet a hundred years.
Kaley steadied her breathing. She inhaled slowly, slowly, then exhaled slowly, slowly, and felt a calming heat wash over her. “Blow gently now,” Ricky said. “Add some more kindlin’, I reckon. Then build it up slowly. Add too much too soon, an’ it’ll smother it. Put some twigs in, then a few small branches, then the bigger stuff. Let it catch fire slowly. Slowly.”
And she did. She started with her memories of Ricky. Those were first. She focused on them, breathed, and focused. She saw him sitting in front of the TV wearing his Atlanta Falcons cap, saw him sitting with a smaller version of Shan in his lap while he watched reruns of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. That gave her something. It gave her hope in a well of hopelessness. Kaley had told Bonetta to forget about hope, but in truth it was about balancing hope and reality. She saw that now. She saw it crystal clear.
Now came Aunt Tabitha, her with her kindly church woman’s words. There Aunt Tabby was with Shan, sitting on the back porch eating ice cream after having taken them to church and fed them a big lunch. Their one-Sunday-a-month ritual. Hope flared, but threatened to die out without more kindling and soon.
Next came Nan. Yes, Nan was good kindling. She shared something with Kaley. They were both the firemakers. They brought kindling. They were enkindlers. That’s a nice word, she thought. Better than “charm.” We are enkindlers, and we carry the kindling. Yes, Nan had enkindled Kaley and her sister each time she passed around a banana sandwich, each time she touched their heads affectionately, each time she—
The pain! It soared to new heights. Shannon’s screams were now audible through the door, her resonance felt even more deeply by Big Sister. It wouldn’t have been as bad if it was Bonetta in there, but it was her sister. Not only that, but her sister was an enkindler too. The feedback was dousing the flames, putting her back where she had been before, utterly lost in despair.
“You need good kindlin’,” Ricky reminded her.
Next, her mother…
No! No, her mother was not good kindling. Her mother would be like cold dirt to the flames, dousing them and ruining the foundation of the fire. Kaley needed kindling, and all her mother provided was a void. Kaley needed fire. She needed anger. She needed audacity.
She sea
rched for the charmed touch left by the other kids who’d occupied this room, and found nothing. Those threads had been little more than echoes, shadows without substance. Her mind, her heart, groped for something that was truly fire. It could be anything. Bonetta didn’t have enough—there was a flicker of something in her now, but Kaley needed more. She needed something to smother that which she felt resonating from the next room.
“Or maybe fire’s not the answer.”
Who said that? The words had come from everywhere and from nowhere. Kaley figured they may have come from her own lips. Lost in delirium, swimming in the Ocean of Sorrow and being force-fed her sister’s agony, who knows what she might—
Him.
She knew it in an instant. It came to her from…from…
Shan? Shannon? Is that you?
Nothing else. No other response, just the screams from the other side of the door.
Kaley ruminated. Not fire, then. No, not fire. So what, then? What could Shan be—
Not fire. Cold. Cold fury! God help us, Kaley! It’s too hot! No more heat! Cold!
“Him,” Kaley whispered. Bonetta was over her, her lips were moving, but no words seemed to be coming out. Many things were now becoming obvious to her, her senses more perceptive. The light in the room enhancing. Beads of sweat and grease collecting on Bonetta’s forehead. The individual glints of light off of Bonetta’s locket, dangling from her deck, inches from Kaley’s face. The screams. The sound of the faucet drip-drip-dripping away.
“The void,” she said. It came back to her; that charmed insight she’d had at Dodson’s Store. It came to her in full resonating detail, what she had felt, what she had seen, what had seemed to utterly transfixing about him. At the time, she hadn’t known what it was.
I have empathy, she thought. He doesn’t.
“You,” she flung at him. “I need you.”
Where was he? He was somewhere out there. Now hyperaware of many things, she felt air molecules cascading down her trachea. She felt the air as she pushed it out, felt the bits of spittle that popped out at each hard consonant. “Where are you?” she asked, puzzled at her own certainty. “I’m talking to you. Do you hear me?”
Outside, the screams continued, and she felt Dmitry’s climax.
11
“Who the fuck is Yevgeny Tidov?” Leon asked.
Agent Porter had his own forensics kit in the SUV and had pulled out a pair of rubber gloves with a plastic zip bag to place the cell phone within. The three homeless men stood to one side, getting vigorously questioned by Agents Stone and Mortimer, and all of it was being copied by the two Atlanta city police officers who’d shown up as backup first. Another squad car was present, the two officers fanning out. Three other patrol cars were moving around the area looking for signs of Pelletier, including David Emerson who, against all counsel, was still on the job.
“All I know is that they said he asked the officer at the Parole Commission for information on a guy by that name,” Porter said. “The call came from this phone. He was standing right about here less than thirty minutes ago when he made the call.”
“And then he called Tidov’s parole officer?”
“Yep. Got all the info he needed from the Commission office. You up for another ride?”
“Where? To Tidov’s?”
“Where else?” The agent walked over to hand the phone to one of the officers taking down the statements of the three bums. “Make sure that forensics gets this when they arrive.”
“Yes, sir.”
Leon watched Porter give Mortimer and Stone meaningful looks. “What do we got?”
“Not much,” Stone said. “They said a guy matching Pelletier’s description just tossed it at them. Pretty much hollered, ‘Here you go’ and then took off.”
“Must’ve known we got to O’Connor’s apartment after he left. He knew we’d track it. C’mon, you’re driving, Mortimer.”
They piled into the SUV and took off before anyone had their seatbelts on. Sitting in the back, Leon was checking in on the call he’d made to dispatch to send units to Tidov’s residence. He’d gotten the address from Porter’s friends at the bureau, who’d gotten it from a man named Eugene Evans, who, to hear Porter tell it, was incredibly confused about what was going on. “Fuckin’ Parole Commission needs to run a tighter ship. I’ve always said that. They don’t have enough real oversight, just helter-skelter.”
“Who is this Tidov guy?” Leon asked.
“He sounds like another vor—”
He was interrupted by a female dispatch officer over Leon’s radio. “Detective Hulsey?”
“Hang on a minute, sorry,” he said. He touched the send button on his radio and spoke into it. “Go ahead for Hulsey.”
“An update, Detective. Units have already arrived at the Tidov residence. They’ve knocked and there’s no answer. Waiting on a warrant now to enter.”
Waiting around holding their dicks, he thought. Do they need reminding how to walk around the house and find an excuse for probable cause? “Has anybody called Judge Hodgins yet? That man’s pretty liberal with a pen.”
“I don’t know, Detective. I’ll pass that along.”
“Ten-four,” he sighed. To Porter, he said, “Go ahead. You were saying he’s a vor?”
“Well, Tidov’s certainly got a red bear tattoo on his arm, according to Evans. But he didn’t have that going into the joint, apparently.”
“Who are these vory, exactly? They’ve been in Atlanta for a couple of years now, but I don’t know much about them, and I didn’t know they were that organized. We’d heard rumors about them abducting people off the streets, but it was pretty vague. They’re not standard Russian Mafia, are they?”
“No,” Porter said. He then pointed to the GPS and gestured for Mortimer to hang a right at the next light. “No, the vory v zakone are an old group. Started in the old country, in Stalin’s Gulag. Bunch o’ prisoners were getting beat down for a time, and got pretty tired of it. So they banded together, made a tight-knit gang of thieves, sneaking in a little o’ this, a little o’ that, and generally just meant to buck the guards of the Gulag to survive that hellhole. The highest a person could ascend to was the rank of vor, a high-ranking thief respected for his skill and commitment to the group.
“Vory v zakone translates to ‘thieves-in-law.’ They live by a strict code.” Porter used his fingers to tick off the rules. “No gambling without being able to cover losses. Thieves must be willing to teach the trade to young beginners, and make good on promises, but only those promises given to other thieves. They should also never drink so much alcohol that they lose their reasoning ability. They must take the blame for a theft if it will create confusion and enough time for another thief to make a break for freedom. They must also keep secret all knowledge of hideouts, lairs, dens and safe houses. A thief must never join the military, or take weapons from the hands of authorities. A thief must have good command of Fenya, the thieves’ jargon or cant language, which is always evolving so that they make wiretaps almost pointless for feds. The cant language they use on the phone sounds like complete gibberish, almost no identifiable Russian in it at all. I forget the other rules.”
“A thief must never, under any circumstances, work,” Agent Mortimer supplied, “no matter how much difficulty this brings; a thief must live exclusively off of the profits of his thefts.”
Porter paused. “Yeah, I forgot that one. There’s also to be no molesting of minors, and sex crimes in general are frowned upon. They’re usually pretty strict about all of these rules.” He thought for a moment. “If they’re involved with the Rainbow Room somehow, then these vory we’re dealing with are probably outcasts, a few rogues doing the job that the other vory would never do.”
Leon said, “But you said they’re all thieves. Which means, outcasts or not, they’ve got the theft thing down.”
Porter nodded.
“Which means that before they got booted from the vory v zakone, they all probably recei
ved pretty good instruction in how to steal and kill without getting caught.” This held far-reaching implications. How long had these men been “stealing” people right off the streets? How long had they gotten away with it? How efficient had they gotten, exactly? How many missing persons could be attributed to them?
Leon would get his answer in about five minutes, when he showed up at the house of Yevgeny Tidov and had his warrant from Judge Hodgins.
Some might’ve left the Russian his pants, and therefore his dignity, which might’ve made him more pliable. Others might’ve cut his balls off right then and there. Spencer Pelletier had never suffered any such vainglorious rectitude, and wasn’t like to start.
The smelling salts worked quickly. He waved the bottle underneath the Russian’s nose and he jolted and thrashed for a second before he realized where he was. Or, rather, where he wasn’t.
Spencer thought Yevgeny Tidov looked as dumb as a retard stepping off the short bus and having a look around at an aquarium. It must have been very confusing for him. He was in a dark, damp tunnel with scarcely a sliver of moonlight. He sat slumped, his hands cuffed to the rung of a solid steel ladder that was embedded in the stone wall and went up to the manhole above him, through which he’d plummeted when Spencer shoved him through. His head had smacked hard, and he was bleeding from the right side of his face.
Spencer’s stomach growled. He was still hungry.
Nearby, a Droid phone splashed white light against Spencer’s face like a flashlight on a kid gathered round a campfire to tell a spooky story. “You’re in a sewer,” Spencer announced. He sat on his haunches in front of the Russian. Tidov looked about, blinking, no doubt recalling the dream he’d had where a man named Blake Madison had duped him. “And you’re in trouble.”
Tidov did not respond to that. Instead, he looked down at his legs and feet, all bare. In fact he wore nothing now besides a pair of boxer shorts.
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