Chapter 6 #2
We moved into the bedroom—Rufus lay there, snoring, naked as the day he was born, one arm flung over a girl half his age curled next to him.
Her skin was pale and slack, and her arm still had a tourniquet biting into it.
A used condom was stuck to dirty sheets, the air thick with rotting trash and alcohol.
Novak took it in without expression, eyes narrowing just enough to register disgust or calculation—it was hard to tell which.
I crossed to the girl. Her pulse fluttered, shallow and quick. “Still breathing,” I murmured.
“Lucky her,” Novak said, voice flat, not a hint of emotion.
I snapped my hypodermic and injected her with a small dose of sedative—enough to keep her out longer than whatever poison she’d pumped into herself. She exhaled once, body slackening further. “She’ll sleep it off.”
Novak crouched beside Rufus, poking him and studying him. “If he knows anything, he’s too stoned to talk.” He looked up at me. “I have somewhere we can take him,” he said, and nodded at my wrist. “Do your thing.”
Sedated, Novak lifted him like dead weight, dropped him into the trunk without a flicker of emotion, and turned to face me. “Trust goes both ways,” he said. “You fuck me over, and you’re dead.”
“Likewise.”
Novak regarded me carefully and then nodded, and all too soon we were heading away from Rufus’s dump of an apartment, his unconscious self in Novak’s car, and me following, cutting through the outskirts of L.A.
toward a rundown patch of abandoned warehouses.
The one Novak had chosen had cracked windows and seemed likely to collapse at any minute.
He led the way through a maze of corridors, the walls oozing grime, until we reached a solid metal fire door with a number pad.
The code beeped, the lock clicked, and inside was nothing but a concrete room—a drain in the middle, neon lighting that flickered overhead, and windows too high to see through. He tied Rufus to the chair.
Novak glanced back at me. “You got something to wake him up?”
I pulled a vial from my kit, drew it up fast, flicked the syringe, and jabbed it into Rufus’s arm.
The effect wasn’t instant, but it was quick enough that I didn’t need to make small talk with Novak.
Rufus jerked awake, eyes rolling, pupils blown and unfocused, breath coming in ragged gasps.
He tugged at the rope binding his wrists, confusion twisting to fear as his brain caught up to where he was.
He saw me first, confused, and then spotted Novak.
“Boss?” he said, yanking at his bindings again. “What the fuck?”
Novak dropped to a crouch in front of him, forcing Rufus to look down, and pulled out his knife. “Kyle Rourke,” he said, and Rufus’s expression changed.
“The kid we dropped at St Paddy’s?” he asked, feigning confusion.
Novak’s eyes went cold. He dragged the knife up Rufus’s bare leg, slow enough to make his breath hitch, the tip stopping dangerously close to his cock.
“Try again,” he said, voice low and almost conversational, as if discussing the weather.
The flicker of neon caught the blade, the reflection dancing across Novak’s face.
Rufus froze, muscles trembling. Novak didn’t blink.
He might as well have been asking for the time of day.
“I don’t understand.”
Novak didn’t move for a moment, then smiled—a dead, empty thing that made my skin crawl, although I’d seen worse.
He spoke too calmly. “You will.” He stabbed Rufus in the upper thigh so hard the chair rocked back, the impact knocking the air out of him.
Not near an artery, Novak knew his job, and Rufus screamed and jerked against the rope.
Novak took his time, tracing lazy lines up Rufus’s chest, not cutting deep—just enough to make the skin weep.
He asked the same question again. No answer.
Then came the pain, measured and deliberate: a cut here, pressure there, the dull crack of bone when he twisted a finger.
Each sound echoed off the concrete walls.
Rufus broke eventually. I’m sure that faced with Novak, they always did.
Broken and blubbering, Rufus tried to pull air through the blood clogging his throat. His voice cracked as he choked out what he knew, words spilling between sobs. Novak crouched close, still calm, knife idle in his hand as he summarized for me, tone flat as if reading a grocery list.
“So let me get this straight. You deal with a surgical resident, Alex Dryden-Wells. You split the money with him for what he calls a live one. He sells the organs.”
Rufus sobbed harder, nodding frantically, confirming it with every gasp.
“I can give you half. More if you want it!” he said in desperation.
The words spilled out, incoherent, messy, half-truths mixed with pleas.
I stayed still, watching the exchange—measuring his pulse, assessing damage, detached from the sound of bones breaking.
Novak’s expression never changed, and I watched the torture, impassive. I’d seen worse.
Blood, pain, noise—just another process.
The drain took the runoff, the flickering neon caught every spatter, and when it was over, Rufus was shaking, going into shock, the adrenaline long gone.
His skin had turned a sickly gray, sweat pooling at his hairline as his system struggled to regulate.
I’d seen it a hundred times before—the heart slowing, blood pressure dropping, body closing down to protect what little life was left.
Novak wiped the blade on his jeans, calm as ever, and looked up at me. “Your turn?” he asked.
“I don’t do that shit.” That line belonged to someone else, and crossing it would make me something I couldn’t afford to be. On the other hand, Novak didn’t hesitate, drew his knife across Rufus’s throat, scarlet spilling, ragged breath, and then nothing.
“I’ll deal with this,” he said, and we exchanged nods before I left.
I headed for my car and stiffened as I drew closer, spotting a silhouetted figure in the moonlight.
Leaning there, arms loose at his sides, a gun hanging from one hand, was Detective Rosen.
Dressed in dark clothes as if he needed to disappear into the night too, he stared at me.
Streetlight caught the edge of his badge and the focus in his gaze.
I wish I could see his steady brown gaze as clearly as I had at Redcars.
“Rough night, Doc?” he asked, voice low.
Behind me, I heard footsteps, Novak in the shadows. I waved a hand at my cleaner before he exposed himself.
I cycled rapidly through what I was supposed to be feeling about him being here, but beneath the calculation and control, there was something else—an edge of excitement I didn’t want to name.
It stirred something sharp and dangerous inside me to see him standing this close to my world, seeing what I was capable of.
“It’s okay,” I said back at Novak, encouraging him to stay in the shadows, then gestured at Detective Rosen. “This one’s mine.”