Chapter 24 #4
I keep pressing the tip incrementally harder until I break the skin. I’m certain his vision’s already blurry.
“You won’t do any of this shit. It’s far too messy.”
My brother and I laugh.
“Like we give a fuck about that. We have connections, so it’ll all get taken care of.”
Joaquin’s blade presses hard enough against the man’s upper forehead to break the skin. At the same time, my brother pulls the man’s hair, and I’m certain he thinks my brother’s started to scalp him.
I say a prayer of thanksgiving that Liesel isn’t anywhere nearby to listen to even a hint of this. It would just add another layer of trauma to this entire fucked-up week. It would mean she hears what the monster in me can do to someone. I’d give anything to keep that away from her.
“Look, you’re going to die regardless. Like I said earlier, you can decide whether it’s a clean kill, or we hack you to bits and run you down the garbage disposal.
It’ll take us a long time with just these little knives to carve you up.
It’ll be death by a thousand cuts. What are you in the mood for tonight? ”
Our gazes lock, and I know he realizes I’m not all bluster. I bite.
“I know who you are. Maksim ordered me to watch you, so I know you’ve been following a woman. I reported this to the pakhan, but he didn’t tell me to do anything else. He commanded me to observe and stay out of the way. I don’t know why you’re stalking her.”
“You accuse me of stalking? What the fuck are you doing?”
He coughs up blood, and it dribbles down his chin.
“I get it, but I don’t know anything about Gunter Schlossberg besides he’s the woman’s father. He isn’t my assignment. You are.”
“What have you told Maks?”
“That you stay outside her office and watch her. You’ve been inside a few times.”
“And after work hours?”
The man gives me a stare that isn’t a poker face one. It’s a “Don’t tell Maks I haven’t followed you night and day.” Lazy motherfucker.
I step back for a moment and cross my arms. I make sure my shirt sleeves pull tight against my biceps as I do.
I dip my chin, and my brother releases the guy’s hair and pulls his knife away, leaving a shallow cut as he does it.
I flex my pecs right before I drive my fist into the guy’s left rib cage at the same time Joaquin nails the guy’s right ones.
Once more, he howls in pain, doubling over from it.
I grab hold of the guy’s injured earlobe and yank until it looks like I’ll practically rip the ear right off.
If he was too lazy to follow me after sundown, then I’m certain Maks hasn’t made information flow in both directions.
Our captive might be a senior guy here in Frankfurt, but he isn’t more than a midlevel guy in the bratva hierarchy.
He likely oversees the legit deals and some street level hustles, but he’s no mastermind.
Maks doesn’t have confidants who aren’t related to him, so the man’s run out of usefulness.
As Joaquin and I observe and assess him, we know we’ve come to that point where he has no more information to give.
We can torture him for the sake of it, or we can end things.
We won’t get more out of him, and I have better things to do like getting cleaned up and being with Liesel—something I can’t do yet, but it’s what I want.
I know Joaquin feels no personal connection to this guy, so continuing his torture appeals to neither of us.
Joaquin moves his blade to the guy’s throat. He begins to press and pull, making the man presume he’ll be practically beheaded. Instead, I chop off both middle fingers.
“Hold your hands up and say cheese.”
The Russian’s nearly passed out, but he follows my command. I snap a photo for Maks. We might send the fingers to him, or we might just threaten to. If the Kutsenkos are involved in Gunter’s disappearance, they’ll get the significance. If they aren’t, then it’s just a mutilated fuck you.
I pull the gun from my lower back holster and put it directly between our captive’s eyes. He looks up at me, and I match his gaze before I pull the trigger. Blood and other shit splatters, but it’s nothing new to any of us. I hate saying how desensitized we are, but it is what it is.
As soon as we finish with the Russian, one of our men brings us fresh changes of clothes.
Joaquin and I take advantage of the bathroom and shower.
We scrub ourselves, ensuring we take no biological evidence with us.
While Hisham’s team comes to the Russian corpse’s house to make it look like none of us were ever there, Joaquin and I climb into an SUV to ride over to our next destination.
My brother has his laptop, so he’s plunking away on the keyboard as he hacks into the email account of the “Thieves in Law” shot caller. I’m sitting next to him, so I can see his screen. I read along as he types.
“Where should I say the exchange happens?”
“Tomorrow evening at Grüneburgpark. Just before sunset. It’s a public location, so his men aren’t likely to come with guns ablaze. Hell, it’ll force me to be civil too. Drop some Thieves’ names who’ll supposedly be there.”
We decided to send the fingers to Maks’s boevik—guys who carry out illegal operations, and, in this case, second-in-command—to prove we’re serious, and Joaquin attaches the photo to incentivize Masks to make sure someone shows up.
I observe as my brother finishes the email and shoots it off to Maks.
Joaquin spent time hacking prison records yesterday to discover who the Thieves’ main players are. Now he’s looking up the tracking devices our men dropped on these guys’ vehicles. Most of them are at their homes or work.
He’s about to snap his laptop shut because nothing interesting turned up, but Maks’s response pops up as a notification. I skim it before reading it more closely. Joaquin looks over at me, and we shrug at the same time as we frown. I’m the first to speak.
“Nothing about that email leads me to think Maks ordered Gunter’s kidnapping.
He’s too ambivalent. We know him better than just about anyone outside his family.
The only people who know him as well as we do are the Mancinellis and O’Rourkes.
This isn’t him playing it cool. He’s not threatening the Thieves or giving them carte blanche. He’s letting them do their thing.”
“Could he really be giving them enough rope to hang themselves?” Joaquin’s ruminating, but I don’t think he believes that.
“No. He’s told them they can do what they want as long as they don’t fuck up. We know that fuck up means encroaching on the Kutsenkos’ business. He even thanked them for taking out the Heidemann buildings. He really didn’t want us to have them. He’d rather no one did.”
“Do you think he already knows it’s us? Why isn’t he at least pissed about his avtoritet?”
I consider that. “Maybe he knows it was us. Maybe he doesn’t. I bet he knows his operative did a shit job surveilling me, so he was fine to let him go. Let’s be real. The man was completely expendable to all of us.”
“Was this a loss for us?”
“No. We wanted those holdings, but we didn’t need them. Maks can’t sell them to anyone else, so he’s the one who took the loss. Fuck him.”
“We’re no closer to knowing where Gunter is.”
I don’t need Joaquin’s reminder. “I know. I can’t help but feel like a failure for that.”
“Manito, we still have the other two families to strike. This isn’t on you. You and I have worked as long and as fast as we can. You’re doing your best to look for him and comfort Anneliese and her family.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t feel that way, even if it isn’t rational.”
“You care about her. You’re also a worrier by nature, even if you’ve learned to control it.”
What if I fail so badly Liesel doesn’t want me anymore? What if…
“Enough with the what ifs…Don’t give me that look. I know you.”
I nod to my older brother. Maybe he’s gained more wisdom than I have in that whole twenty-one months he’s been alive longer than me.
“All right. For now, the bratva’s a dead end. We have to leave it at that and move on.”
We regroup with Alejandro and our other men at the O’Rourkes’ warehouse.
The ones who went with us to the Russian’s place stood guard around the neighborhood while we worked the fucker over.
Alejandro’s men stood sentry waiting for us here.
My cousin is a fucking ghost, so he’s the one who scouted.
No one’s better at reconnaissance than him.
For being the biggest one in the family, he can be the least noticeable.
Fucking inconceivable until you watch him.
“What’d you find?”
Alejandro, Joaquin, and I are on the frequency that’s locked and for our family’s use only. We’re speaking Macaguán instead of Spanish. I don’t know where this conversation will go, so while Alejandro’s guys know the answer to the question, we may not want them to know whatever comes next.
We’ve divided to conquer. We each have a side of the building, and Josue’s leading men on the fourth side.
“There’re at least fifty kilos in there from their labs. Pedro tested it. Shit quality like usual. They’re getting ready to load the trucks. Ten guys on lookout, five packing, two drivers, and four in the office shooting the shit.”
We control everything coming in and out of Latin America, especially what’s manufactured in the rainforest. The O’Rourkes, along with the Mancinellis and Kutsenkos, know they only have labs there because we allow it.
We’d rather the enemy we know—who won’t fucking blow up endangered flora and fauna—than the ones we don’t.
They also know there’s a set quota on how many labs they can each have—three.
When they try for more, we set up controlled burns.
Usually, they remember not to bite the hand that feeds them.
They also haven’t mastered the quality control we have.
The Mancinellis are a distant—like light years away—second to us. I have no problem saying as much.