“You fucking drive!” He snarled back. But he did slow, and the back of the Buick stopped fishtailing as we headed for the empty intersection. At this time of night on a Monday, the only people out were the ones staring at the conflagration behind us. It made the oncoming sirens all the more audible.
“You need to turn left at Avenue Z, then left at Hubbard,” I said. “Turn right on the Parkway and we can lose them. Slow it down, take everything legal, and we’ll make it.”
Duke laughed, the high, hysterical laughter of someone high on adrenaline and speed, and slowed sharply at the end of Banner Avenue to merge into the traffic. "We are so fucking lucky. SO fucking lucky!”
“What the hell happened back there?” Zane was fighting his own adrenaline high with a locked jaw and deep breaths. “What caused the explosion?”
“Russian Mafia meth lab.” I bent down and reached a shaking hand out to my cat. Binah stared up from between Zane’s feet, ears flat, eyes wide. “That’s what the police report will say.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Duke replied.
“What about this fucking Russian mafia kiddy porn studio, with our damn kids?” Jenner turned in her seat, eyes flashing. “How are we going to prove anything now?”
I couldn’t answer her for a moment. The adrenaline was wearing off, and I was hurt. My arms felt like I had torn something in them from the multiple impacts on the way down. The gut shot had been a close quarters full-impact round. I felt like I’d been bludgeoned in the chest with a mallet.
“The video was worthless. We could have taped a confession and saved enough of the footage if your man hadn’t lost his cool.” I settled back and scrubbed the sweat and ash from my forehead.
“Did you know?”
“I had no idea they had kids. One of the reasons I left the Organizatsiya is because I knew that our Pakhun – the ‘Don’, so to speak – wanted to assign me to a job that involved human trafficking. He didn’t mention children. He didn’t even hint at… at movies. I assumed he meant adult women and men for labor.”
“So did you tell anyone about this?” Zane’s eyes narrowed. “That he was getting involved in this shit?”
All three of them were tense with hostility. I drew myself up, ready to fight. “What was I supposed to do? Walk into the nearest Supernatural Support Unit and say ‘Good Afternoon, I’m an illegal mage with the Yaroshenko Organizatsiya, an organized criminal outfit you’ve never heard of. I’d like to report the hypothetical activities of men who have never been arrested in America, who are discussing trading people in Thailand’. There is no evidence they intended to do this kind of work in the USA.”
“You could get them under RICO,” Zane replied.
“Prosecution under RICO still requires hard evidence,” I said. “A two-month old conversation is not evidence. Even wiretaps can fail as evidence in court.”
“I have to say, Rex,” Jenner said. “This really doesn’t look too good. Like, for you.”
“Why? Because Duke ruined a perfectly good interrogation?” I replied, coldly.
“Jesus, get the fuck over it,” Duke snarled.
“Shut your cockholster, Duke.” Jenner turned on him for a moment, and then back to me. “I didn’t say the whole fuckup was your fault, Rex. But it’s going to be real hard to convince Ayashe of that.”
Binah crawled out from her hiding place. She struggled and failed to get up on the back seat with Zane and me, so I bent down to help her up so that she could sit in my lap, staring at Jenner the whole time. The Siamese folded herself against my body and followed my line of sight to glare haughtily at her, one royal cat to another.
“We can’t convince her of anything, but I killed them,” I said. “Every one of those pedarasti motherfuckers is dead.”
Zane made a sound that was half exasperation, half unspoken curse. Jenner’s eyes narrowed. And then she snorted, a strange half-smile pulling up the corner of her mouth on one side. “You know, I like you, Rex, but I don’t trust you. Nothing personal.”
“You’re well within your rights.” I jerked my chin up, stroking Binah from neck to rump. Her remaining fur had a dry green whisper through my palm, another sign of her ill health. “But now you’ve fulfilled your part of the deal, I’ll commit to the contract.”
“There was a contract?” Duke was calming down, but his voice was still shaky. “Does it have a random explosion clause?”
“It has a ‘shut the hell up before I turn you into a leopard print man-thong’ clause,” Jenner said. She sounded a little more like her usual self. “So anyway, now that we’re not being shot at and-or blown up, did you and Ayashe have a good one-on-one?”
“Yes. And now we have multiple leads into the case, mundane and Occult.” Though I wouldn’t be able to do much unless I could remove the… thing that was cutting me from my Neshamaic link. A terrible thought occurred to me, then. What if I died with this parasite in me? Would it stop me from leaving my body? Would it turn me into an upir, like Sergei?
Suddenly, I felt very foolish for having charged into the kitchen under a hail of gunfire.
“Oh. Well, that’s good.” As if nothing had happened at all, Jenner turned and plopped down into her seat, huddling down in the trench coat. “Let’s go and get burgers!”
“No.” Zane and I said at the same time. We looked at each other, and he spoke. “No burgers.”
Duke bounced excitedly in his seat, which caused the car to jerk to the right and dip into the next lane. “Hell yeah! Burger King!”
“No!” Zane clutched onto the back of the driver’s seat as we righted again. “You don’t have any goddamn pants! Neither of you have pants!”
“C’mon man, lighten up. We’ll go through the drive-thru. The little red rocket is all shrunk up from the cold-”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” It was the first time I could remember hearing Zane swear.
“-so they aren’t gonna see anything if they aren’t looking, and if they’re looking then they’re totally into me anyway-”
“Shut up, or I swear to God…”
We managed to get on the Parkway without incident, and sure enough, we ended up passing through the Burger King drive-thru. Duke conceded by laying a t-shirt over his lap, but the exhausted woman who served us, her bouncy hair crammed under a cheap plastic visor, barely gave us a second glance as she handed over two very large paper bags of junk food and a tray of soda. Whatever we looked like we’d been up to, she’d seen it all before.
Zane and I both kept looking back behind us, expecting to see flashing lights in the distance, but finding nothing except orange-lit damp nothingness. When we realized that we weren’t being tailed, that we’d somehow gotten away with it, we both settled into our seats. The cabin was now thick with the odor of processed beef, sauce, onions and French fries. It was bad, in that it was junk food, but it covered up the lingering smells of blood and burnt powder. Takeout from the big burger chains somehow always masked every other smell in a room.
I got given a burger. Zane looked uncomfortable but stoic as he ate, gazing at the street through his window. Duke and Jenner talked about things which held no interest for me, mumbling around mouthfuls of food. I held my shivering cat with my free hand, and when I was done with ‘dinner’, I carefully and gently examined her wounds. They were filthy, but living in an alley next to Eee-Zee-Pawn for a month had basically inured me to filth. I was more concerned by the burn injuries. Several of them were infected, oozing when I squeezed.
“Why’d you do it?”
I looked up to find Zane watching me. For a moment, I thought I saw the big cat in him. The way he lounged, ankle crossed and foot twitching, reminded me of a leopard in a tree. “What?”
“Take them out,” he said. “Back there.”
“It was actually kind of an accident. I was planning to start a normal fire, but the buyki arrived back before I could and charged the kitchen.” I turned back to Binah, picking over her as I cataloged her wounds. She endured it
placidly, purring all the while. “I had to search for some things.”
“Right. What’s in the bag?” He motioned to it with his head.
“My annotated Mishnayot. Agrippa’s Book Two, a very venerable Occult reference. Magician’s tables, my own studies of gematria. A rare book by Carl Jung.” I reached down, still stroking Binah’s ears with my other hand, and fumbled around in the plastic bag. I searched for the folder I had stuffed into the photo album, feeling through the pages. When I found it, I drew it up through the opening of the bag and accidentally pulled a photo of Vassily and Mariya with it. They were sitting together at a table bristling with bottles, food, and a small two-tier cake. Vassily was grinning from ear to ear. He had his degree scroll in his hand, his eyes fixed confidently on the camera. I remembered taking that photo. It was our private family graduation celebration for his MBA.
A small shock and a sharp, tight pain lanced through my gut. I slid the photo back into the album pages and cracked open the Manilla folder instead, trying to focus on the words through the sudden wave of gray fatigue that washed over me. The man beside me leaned across, peering down at the pages.
“This is a transactional record,” I said, before Zane could ask. “Pick-up and delivery instructions. I paused to grab them from the desk, and that’s why I got delayed… but they could be useful.”
“What’s it say?” Jenner turned around in the seat, looking back at me. In the dark, her bony face was deeply shadowed.
I flipped through the pages, digesting the contents. Delivery instructions, when written down, were generally coded in Russian military shorthand. It wasn’t exactly the Enigma code, but the truncated Cyrillic worked well enough in an English-speaking nation like the USA. Even native Russian speakers couldn’t make heads or tails of the abbreviations and prison slang terms that were passed on from Kommandant to soldier.
The first few pages of notes had annotations from both Vanya and Nicolai. Ivanko’s unit was shuttling heroin through my old house, a fairly common tactic. Drugs and other hard assets were ‘washed’ by cooling them down in safehouses. It was a cycle of storage and delivery: orders were placed with suppliers in Mexico, Miami and Canada, who delivered by sea or overland. The hot product was rested after delivery, then distributed to street managers who further distributed it to dealers. The managers kept a stable of thugs to make sure everyone got paid properly, and they had to report back to the command. This document was to advise Ivanko of the dates and locations for delivery.
“They were going to drop off bundles of heroin to some of our management-level dealers,” I said, scanning the list of addresses. No names, of course: just addresses. I don’t see anything about trade in children, or a kidnapping or transport job… just drugs. Though there is an address in Yonkers.”
“What’s the address?” Zane leaned in a little curiously.
“734 Broadway,” I read it out.
“What?” Duke said.
Zane stiffened. Jenner knelt up on the front passenger side. “Wait. Read that again.”
“734 Broadway, Yonkers.” I tapped the page with a finger. “Do you know who lives there?”
“Yeah,” Jenner replied, her eyes solid black in the gloom of the cabin. “Lily and Dru Fucking-Ross.”
Chapter 16
We split at the clubhouse, tired and stunned. Zane was apparently living here, because he disappeared into the top floor of the house while Jenner and Duke went to call John Spotted Elk and Michael to tell them what we’d learned. That left me, my suitcases, and my cat in the Twin Tigers M.C flophouse. There was no time for me to rest: The night’s work had only just begun.
The first thing I did was have a shower and put on real clothes. After weeks and weeks of greasy jeans and worn t-shirts, the sensation of fine wool and clean, smooth cotton was the closest I had ever come to physical ecstasy. I had to tighten my belt by two extra holes, but when I looked at the mirror and saw a clean man, a well-dressed man with a collared shirt and tie and proper leather gloves, I recognized my face for what seemed like the first time in years.
The next thing I did was walk to the nearest convenience store and buy cat food. Binah ate like a starving wolf. I sat by her bowl, cross-legged, watching on as she cleared the dish and licked out every crumb of minced chicken. My once beautiful and sleek familiar was now nothing but skin and bones.
Nothing could be done for her injuries until she was clean, but I had never bathed a cat before. She was my first pet, and while I had a working knowledge of the habits of felines, animals are not a big feature of the Murder, Inc lifestyle. There are a lot of things that cats, hitmen and mages have in common, though… neatness, caution, patience, the predatory instinct. One thing I especially liked about her – and about cats in general – was her fastidious nature. She was sure to enjoy a bath the same way I had enjoyed my first recuperative shower.
Dutifully, I stripped back down to undershirt and trunks and ran a shallow warm bath. I added some shampoo and some hydrogen peroxide to the water, then lay a couple of towels beside the tub before I went to the kitchen and fetched her. Binah licked her whiskers in satisfaction as I carried her to the waiting bathroom and shut the door. She was still weak from her prolonged incarceration, and did not resist me as I lowered her into the water… where she promptly exploded into a howling whirlwind of claws and teeth.
“Binah, stop kvetching.” My first instinct was to hold her in the tub to try and get her adjusted to the water. The cat slipped through my hands, launched herself at the side of the tub, and sunk her claws a quarter inch into my forearm. “Bin-AAARGH!”
Let it be noted that when your familiar is wet and covered in soap, she is automatically stronger, faster and more capable of defending herself than you are of restraining her.
Using my flesh as leverage, Binah hauled herself from the bathtub in a wave of water and suds and bolted at the closed door, howling like a firetruck.
“Binah!” I set off in hot pursuit, blood streaming down my arm. I made the mistake of bending down from the waist to scoop her up, and the deep tissue bruising I’d taken from the bullet made itself known. My gut cramped, and I slipped and fell on the now-wet tiles while Binah dashed under the bathroom sink.
For several long moments, I just lay there on my side in a pool of water and blood, staring at my shivering cat. My growing conviction that this GOD organism was actually out to get me was intensifying by the moment, and only grew stronger as I picked myself up and my familiar, sensing my intent, scrambled underneath the claw-foot bathtub and hissed.
After a good ten minutes of pursuit, I finally caught Binah up in a towel and immersed her while wrapped up. She wailed the whole way through, but she couldn’t claw me. With the towel as buffer, I washed her, rubbed her down, balmed her wounds, and used a safety razor to carefully lift the dirt-black scabs from her burns. The warm water revealed that some of them needed to be lanced, but doing that while she was wet was unwise. When she was clean, I drained the bath and let her scramble out, grimacing as she flung dirty water up into my face.
Someone rapped the bathroom door and twisted to look back, buckling when I straightened too fast and my entire back spasmed. “Who? What?”
“Hey, is everything all right in there?” Zane’s raspy voice was muffled behind the wood.
“No.” I replied sourly. The bathroom was trashed. Binah was hiding behind the sink again, washing her face with a paw. She radiated pure, unadulterated disdain.
Zane cracked the door open and peered inside to see me slumped on the edge of the bathtub, soaked, grimy and bloody. “Well… okay. This happened.”
“Cats don’t like baths.” I pulled the cuffs of my gloves higher up along my wrists. The claw wounds immediately began to itch, so I pushed them down again.
Zane sniffed, looked between me and the sulking cat, then back to me. “I could have told you that.”
I took up the drier of the two towels, and began to mop up the mud from the floor around the tub, gruntin
g as a stab of pain shot through my chest on one side. The more time passed, the more I wondered if the first shot to the chest had actually broken one of my ribs. Rib fractures were like that… you sometimes didn’t feel them until they moved.
“Hey, Rex?”
I glanced up, and found Zane regarding me with an odd, piercing expression. “What?”
“Now that I can see you properly, I need you to tell me something,” Zane said. His voice was low and sonorous. “Tell me you didn’t know about the kids.”
I knelt back, the towel still bunched in my hand. “I didn’t know about the children or the videos. I swear on my sworn-brother’s grave.”
He held my gaze for a space, nostrils flaring, and for the first time, I glimpsed the animal he hinted at but never spoke of. It was in the eyes and the poise of the throat and legs. Under the intimidating, introverted exterior, Zane had the graceful intensity of an ambush predator.
"Good.” He eased down by inches. “You need a hand?”
I looked up at him, momentarily confused. When I was this tired, the default answer was ‘no, I already have hands’, but the metaphor sunk in after a moment’s reflection. “Yes. Help me clean, and I can start testing out gematria.”
“Roger that.” Zane got the towel, and bent to the task of cleaning. Binah slunk to the closed bathroom door and began to paw at it. “What’s gematria?”
“Gematria is where letters are assigned certain meanings and are associated with numbers, which also encode their own separate meanings. The gematric tables that occult magicians use to compose invocations is fundamentally based on an esoteric Judaic tradition of decoding hidden meanings in the Torah. It’s complex.”
“Complex is the right word.” To my great relief, he started on the hard to reach places, leaving the easier surfaces to me.
“In its most simplistic form, people think of gematria as being ‘Bible code’,” I continued. “The idea that combinations and patterns of words in the Bible – when turned into numbers – have hidden meanings.”
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 15
