by Genovese, CM
Palach. The motherfucker who’d caused me to choke Cassie last night.
BP hadn’t wanted to say much over the phone, but when we parked beside him in the nearly empty parking lot, Pipe and I climbed into the back of the van so he could explain the situation to all of us.
“You know I don’t say much over the phone,” BP said from the front passenger seat. Slitz sat beside him. Nugget was in the back with us. “I don’t think Palach is in there. But this might lead back to him, brother.”
I nodded and waited for more.
“Nugget, tell ‘em what you told me.”
Nugget cleared his throat, clasped his hands together, and stared into them like a small child whose mother had told him to explain to his father all the bad things he’d done today. He always had that kidlike quality about him. Nothing was ever very serious until it was, and then he sort of locked up like he might get in trouble.
“I have a friend—“ Nugget started.
“A hooker,” Slitz interrupted. “Tell the fuckin’ story right.”
“Well, am I telling it or are you telling it?” Nugget shot back.
“Tell it right,” Slitz repeated.
“Fine, a hooker,” Nugget said. “I have a hooker friend. Her name’s Mercy. That’s what she goes by anyway. We been kinda—”
“Jesus,” BP said, “Get on with the fuckin’ story, will you?”
“Mercy said she was here at the Boom Stick club the other night and there were these two club promoters with Russian accents. One of them seemed really interested in her friend. Offered her to come back and talk about a job the next day. Mercy talked to her a few minutes before she came in for the job interview, and she never heard from her friend again. Mercy was worried about her, so she told me about it. I was going to come in here and ask questions, but you know, Russians… it’s kind of our problem right now so I thought it would be better to wait for the rest of you.”
“Good call,” I said.
“That’s all we’ve got right now,” BP said, “but we ain’t above roughing up a couple of motherfuckers, if you know what I mean. It’s about time we push back on the Russians again. Seems burying their buddy last time didn’t get the point across. This shit ends now. We go in, get the info we need, and plan our next step once we find out how to reach the head honchos of this fucked-up organization.”
“Sounds good,” Pipe said.
“I ain’t been able to hurt nobody in far too long,” Slitz said. As our enforcer, he was always itching for action.
“You’ll get first crack at ‘em,” BP promised him.
“Unless Palach is in there,” I said.
“Of course. If Palach is in there, nobody touches him but Rain.”
In the hazy dusk of late afternoon, we didn’t even hide our kuttes as we walked in the door. The cops around the city didn’t fuck with us none. We didn’t bother them, and we didn’t cause any unnecessary problems. We’d be doing them a fucking favor anyway by disposing of these pieces of shit.
Slitz led the way into the club with Pipe, Nugget, BP, and me close behind. This wasn’t a strip club, so nobody was working during the day except those responsible for stocking the place, those needing to clean it up before start of business tonight, and the two club promoters. A manager might be lingering around somewhere too, but with the lights off and no crowd, the place was unimpressive.
A young man was wiping down tables when we entered. A woman was behind the bar, straightening up the bottles.
“Yo, any club promoters around here?” Slitz asked the guy with the rag and spray bottle.
“Promoters?” he asked.
“Any fuckin’ Russians here?” BP stepped in. “I don’t give a shit what their positions are. Is there anybody with a foreign fucking accent working here?”
The young man pointed to a set of stairs in the corner.
“Thank you, partner,” BP said as we walked toward the stairs, then he called out, “Pipe, Nugget, y’all two stay down here and make sure the jackass with the spray bottle doesn’t make any phone calls. The chick behind the bar too. Watch our backs.”
The three of us headed upstairs. Slitz was out front. Our Pres rarely led the pack in case someone came out guns blazing. In many ways, Slitz was like a bulletproof vest. He was a mad dog when he got started too. Like a chainsaw that would sprout feet when it was cranked, this motherfucker was deadly. I was pretty sure a few bullets wouldn’t stop him even if someone did fire first and ask questions later.
Slitz didn’t knock. He turned the knob and walked into the office like we owned the place.
A manager, or who I assumed was a manager since he was the only person sitting on the other side of the desk, was in the middle of explaining something. “Once we get Closure up and running too—” He stopped mid-sentence and glared back at us. Sitting in chairs in front of him were two young men. One had spiked black hair and a neatly trimmed beard. The other had long blond hair and wore sunglasses even though we were inside.
“Heard y’all were hiring,” Slitz said.
“Excuse me,” the manager replied, as he stood up from his seat. He wore blue slacks with a white dress shirt and a blue blazer.
BP held up a hand to stop him from talking. “What’s your name?”
“I don’t see how that’s…”
BP pulled a pistol from behind his back and pointed it at the man. “I asked a simple question, friend. What’s your name?”
My eyes darted across the ceiling where, of course, there were no cameras installed. If these pieces of shit were snatching women, it was highly doubtful any of the cameras on the premises were actually recording.
“Russ,” the manager said. “I’m Russ.”
“You’re ex-military?” BP asked.
Russ hesitated and said, “No.”
“You’re a fucking liar, Russ,” BP said, “Look at that straight-as-fuck gig line.”
The gig line was the way the buttons of the shirt lined up perfectly with one side of the belt buckle and the zipper of the pants. This guy’s was impeccable. He’d definitely stood in front of his mirror this morning and fixed that shit up right.
“I’m sorry, but why are you here?” the dark-haired young man with the spiked hair asked. His accent was unmistakably Russian.
“Yes, maybe you should go back out and knock,” the blond one in the sunglasses, and with the same accent, suggested.
BP laughed. I had to put a hand to my mouth to stifle my own because I knew what was about to happen. BP nonchalantly walked back to the door, opened it, and called out to our brothers at the bottom of the steps. “Hey, tell the staff they can go ahead and go home. The club ain’t gonna be opening tonight.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Russ asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“Slitz,” BP said. “Sic ‘em.”
“They’ll call the cops,” Russ threatened. “You told them to go home, but they’re not stupid.”
“You bring women in here under the guise that they’re getting a job,” BP said. “In broad fucking daylight, so I really don’t think they’ll be saying anything at all. One, because they’re afraid of you. Two, because they’re afraid of these two pussy-ass fellas right here. And three, because they’re afraid of us.”
Russ’s face blanched white. He knew BP was speaking the truth. Nobody was going to do or say anything. He and his comrades here could disappear from the face of the earth and nobody would know about it. The Boom Stick employees had been taught to keep their mouths shut. That shit was about to backfire.
“All I want to know is where are you taking these girls and why are you doing it?” BP asked.
“What girls are you talking about?” Russ asked.
BP looked at Slitz who immediately raised his silenced pistol and pulled the trigger. In the small room, the blast was still quite loud, but not enough that it would alert passersby outside. The shot hit Russ below his kneecap. The asshole howled. It would shatter his bone and hurt like a motherfu
cker. But, he’d live as long as he got to the hospital soon.
“The girls?” Slitz asked.
The blond Russian leapt to his feet. I was closest to him, so I grabbed him by his hair kicked my left leg out behind his kneecaps and smashed a ridged right hand into his throat. He flipped over my leg and hit the floor so hard I thought he might go through it and end up on the first story below. I drove a knee into his chest the second he was on the ground.
The brunet Russian lifted off his seat only an inch before Slitz smacked the back of his head with the pistol muzzle. “Fuck, man!” the guy yelled before shouting what I assumed were profanities in Russian.
“Put your cell phones on the table,” BP ordered.
I reached down, took the phone out of the blond’s pocket, and tossed it on the table. The brunet put his there on his own. Russ found his, with his now trembling hand, and placed it next to the others.
“The landline too,” BP said.
Slitz reached for the desk phone and ripped the cord out of the wall.
“How many women have come through here and made their way to your Russian friends?” BP asked.
“Fuck you,” the guy under my knee spat.
I brought my fist down with a crushing blow that smashed his face between my knuckles and the hardwood floor. At least two teeth fell through his lips, and I imagined several others were broken too. He wasn’t going to be telling us much, which made him the lucky one, because his buddies were about to be put through all kinds of hell.
Pipe came through the door carrying some rope. He tossed it to BP and said, “I thought you might need this. We sent everybody home and locked up. It’s only us and…” he turned his attention to the guy I was holding down and the gunshot victim on the other side of the desk before adding, “… wow. Y’all motherfuckers are in trouble.”
“Tell Nugget to stay down there,” BP said, “but we might need your help holding this guy down.”
This guy was the brunet, and his eyes widened when BP pointed at him.
Pipe called down to Nugget, who whined a little. “All right. I see. I’m the one who leads you here and I miss all the action. But I’ll do what I’m told.”
Once Pipe returned and closed the door behind him, BP said, “Tie him up.”
A few minutes later, having grown tired of the tight confines of Russ’s office, we dragged all three of them downstairs to the main club area. The guy with the crushed jaw, the one I’d accidentally shattered, lay on top of the bar, hogtied. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Russ and the dark-haired Russian sat at a table. Russ was tied to a chair and was bleeding out all over a plastic tarp we’d found in his upstairs office. It covered the floor beneath the table. What they’d used it for, one could only imagine, but I hoped to God it had nothing to do with the kidnapped women. The Russian was tied up too, but only with his hands behind his back. He wasn’t stuck to his chair. He couldn’t be for what we had planned.
“This tarp don’t look good, Russ,” BP said. “You into water sports? Pissing on women? Maybe having them piss on you?”
“No, I swear,” Russ said. “It’s not like that.”
“I reckon it’s for blood,” Slitz piped in. “This punk motherfucker is hurting women right up there in his office. I bet he does that shit during open hours when the music is too loud to hear them scream.”
Russ’s face twitched, giving him away. He tried to deny it, but his words came out hollow. He wasn’t into urine games, that much was true. But blood, he got off on that shit.
“You have no idea,” the dark-haired Russian said in his thick accent. “You have no idea what is going to happen to you after today.” He laughed. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Not yet,” BP said, “but I have a feeling you’re gonna tell us all about it. Nugget?”
Nugget was the largest of the men we had with us, and he nearly giggled with excitement to hear his name called. Finally, he was being asked to participate instead of only watching.
“Yeah, where you want me, Pres?” he asked.
“Rain, you and Nugget lift him up by his shoulders, please. High up,” BP ordered.
“You think you scare me?” the dark-haired Russian spat. “You are so fucked for this. My uncle will kill you. Maybe you have heard of him, no? They call him The Executioner.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Palach,” he replied, “maybe you have heard of him, no? He will hear of you. He will come for you all. I bet you have pretty woman, no? I bet you have pretty woman he will fuck again and again…”
He might have taken my lack of expression for fear, but my brothers knew the truth, and Slitz immediately walked around to my side to help Nugget lift him up, freeing me to be the host of today’s games.
I reached for the pouch in my kutte pocket. It was where we all carried our most prized possession. Our tool of the trade.
The dark-haired Russian kicked his legs wildly, knocking the table back a couple of feet where its leg slammed into Russ and he cried out in pain.
“Pipe, hold his legs, man,” BP said. Then he looked at me and added, “Rain, he’s all yours, brother.”
Pipeline moved around to the back of the Russian and grabbed hold of his thrashing legs, pinning them together.
“Closer to the table,” I said softly.
They moved him closer and BP unzipped the guy’s pants. That’s one thing I could always say about my chapter president. Bi-Polar Bear wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He would never ask any of us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself. With his bare hands, he reached into the guy’s zipper, grabbed hold of his cock, and stretched it out of his pants.
It was uncircumcised and it was quite impressive.
It’ll set the perfect example.
“Hey. Hey, man!” the guy yelled. “No, that’s not funny. This is no manly way, you know? Hey!”
He’d been all tough guy a second ago. It quickly faded when his cock was in danger. I wondered how many women had sat in the office upstairs, staring at this dick, in fear for their lives. How many of them had he raped? How many had he tortured? How many had been on top of this tarp bleeding out.
BP stretched his cock out on top of the table. The guy thrashed around, but he didn’t move much with three of my brothers holding him in place. They didn’t give him much wiggle room. The pouch I’d pulled out of my kutte pocket was heavy in my palm, itching to do its work, so I opened it up and pulled out its contents.
The glimmering blade of my recently sharpened ulu knife was only slightly larger than my hand. It didn’t need to be big. Its handle fit perfectly in my palm. Its blade was shaped like a guillotine, only curved up at the ends, like something you might use to dice fruits and vegetables. It was sharper than shit and punched through flesh like it was pressing through hot butter.
BP lay his flaccid cock against the tabletop like a slab of meat about to be hacked apart by the butcher. Stew meat. Pieces for a grandmother to take home and throw into a soup.
Bringing the blade close to him, I lifted one edge and brought it up over his cock, where all I had to do was lean forward and roll the blade to cut him completely off.
“No!” he yelled.
“Don’t, please,” the guy with the shattered jaw mumbled from the bar.
I looked back and saw him watching us with tears running down his face. Were they related? Were they brothers? Cousins? Lovers?
“Tell them!” the blond said.
“Women are brought from the lower United States,” the dark-haired Russian said. “To go to Russia. And sometimes the other way. Women from everywhere. Other countries too. The number. The amount. It is logged. And it is confirmed by the boss.”
“The boss?” BP said. “Who is the boss?”
“I don’t know!” the brunet shouted. “Truly. We are nobodies!”
“Go on,” I said, letting the blade touch the flesh of his cock.
He winced and rattled off more information.
“Things happen. Women die on the way. Or… like in Nevada… sometimes… you fuck things up for us.”
“We?” I asked.
“Royal Bastards,” the guy replied. “In Nevada. You don’t know?”
“Sounds like Grimm and Rael are all over this shit,” BP said.
I remembered my conversation with Trish the other night and how she’d mentioned her friend being taken. She must have told our boys down there. Good girl.
“That’s Nevada,” BP said as he looked at me over the begging man’s cock. “I heard our Tampa brothers are shutting shit down, too. This shit is nationwide, brother.”
“Worldwide,” I replied. “Women from all over the damn place from what I’ve heard.”
“And brought right to our fucking backyard,” BP said through clenched teeth. He slammed his free fist down against the table and added, “Cut this motherfucker, Rain.”
“We,” the guy under my blade continued, desperate to say enough to see himself freed, “we are nobodies. Club promoters. I get phone call from my uncle—”
“Palach,” I interrupted, just to be clear.
“Yes, now. Before, when Palach was in prison, someone else called. They tell me they lost five women on the way. Need quota filled. I find five women. That is all.”
“How do you get a hold of Palach?” I asked.
“Never,” he replied. “Never do I call him. He uses different phone every time. Very smart, my uncle. He calls me. Always he calls me. That is all I know. I swear! He calls, I get women, he pays well, the end.”
“How can I find Palach?” I asked.
BP looked up at me, his fingers still gripping the head of the man’s cock. When the guy didn’t answer, he squeezed his head hard, and the guy screamed.
“How can we find Palach?” BP asked.
“Do you know my uncle?” the guy replied.
I ran my left thumb across my scarred neck and said, “Very well.”
It took the guy a second to get it, but then he did, and he burst into laughter. “Oh, he tell me that story!”
“Where can we find him?” BP asked.
“You don’t,” he said, still cackling with laughter. “He will find you!”
Turning toward the blond lying on the bar, I said softly, “I will need you to give Palach a message for me.”
