Chapter 42
When I told my daughter to text me if she needed anything, I opened a can of worms. The first thing she does is send me a text flagging their location. This might be a burner phone, but how do you tell a ten-year-old she shouldn’t let anyone know where she is so they don’t track her down and kidnap her or worse?
Sunnyvale is boring. Can you get me out of here?
I want to live with you in New York.
I look down at the phone. It feels like I’m handling an unexploded bomb. But I reply.
Listen to your mother
I stuff the phone back in my pocket.
It’s a clusterfuck, but I can’t think about it as I pull up to the docks. It’s dark and silent at this time of night. A nest of yellow-and-black striped barriers lies in shadow away from the streetlights. Sasha put shipments on hold until we know who’s planning to move against us. A couple of red shipping containers perch on the concrete over the foul water of the Hudson, and a light shines in two rectangles around the edges of one of their doors.
That must be where Sasha is keeping the man we picked up in the attack upstate. If the light is still on, then he’s probably still alive. Good news for me. Less so for him.
I’ve seen shipping containers used for a lot of things, but they’re surprisingly effective as torture chambers. Rinse them off with a power hose, stick them on the back of a truck, and drive the evidence away. Stick it on a ship back to China and no one will be the wiser.
I walk toward the two rectangles of light around the container doors. Opening them, I see Sasha standing over a man slumped in a chair. The man’s feet have been bound to the chair’s legs with duct tape, his hands cuffed behind him. He’s passed out. He’ll wish he stayed that way by the time we’ve finished with him.
“What are you waiting for?” I point at the bucket of cold water in the corner next to a table of saws, drills, and pliers that Sasha has laid out for effect.
Sasha gets off on the fear men feel when they see the hardware store he’s laid out for them, but it’s not usually my bag. I doubt anyone would survive long enough to tell you anything if you used the entire toolbox. I like my kills quick and clean.
This time, though, I’m almost shaking with rage. I want to tear this fucker limb from limb and then slice what’s left into little pieces. He threatened my kid and my woman. Even if I can’t be with them, they’re still mine.
“Let’s wake him up.” I pick up the bucket of cold water and the power hose lying next to it.
“Hang on a minute.” Sasha eyes the door.
“For what? You’ve gotten what you need, haven’t you?”
“No. Kai and Dima are on their way. They’re almost here.” He sits in a folding chair opposite the slumped man.
“Why do we need them?”
“If we want to take over the Bratva and sideline the Night Governor, we need to know who else is coming for us.” Sasha kicks his feet against the metal floor, and they make a clanging noise, but the fucker slumped in the chair doesn’t stir. “Was it a kidnap attempt? A hit? Who did the Italians want to piss off? Us? The Chinese? There’s a whole spiderweb to unravel here, and this guy is the only fly we’ve caught.”
“He’s mine.” I run my fingers over a saw and then pick up the power drill before putting it down.
“You can kill him, but we aren’t wasting our chance to see what we’ve gotten into here. We can’t give back the girl you snatched and smooth things over now that they’ve lashed out at you. The only way out of this is to escalate.” Sasha ignores the toolbox he’s laid out on the table in favor of the curved blade he always carries. He pulls it from his boot.
“Where’s the Italian girl now?” I look over at Sasha.
“The principessa? With Kai. He’s done us a favor, but he doesn’t want to keep her unless we can figure out what’s going on,” he says.
“And if we can’t? What then?”
“That scene at the New York dacha in the woods wasn’t pretty. I haven’t had to dispose of two dead bodies in one weekend for a long time.” Sasha looks pensive. He’s twirling the carved scimitar blade that matches the one he gave me. It’s a nervous tic we both share when things are bad.
“I’m still shocked Andrei survived. I thought he was done for.”
“He’s pretty banged up. Serves him right for disobeying orders and bringing trouble to your door. He won’t be back in action for a couple of months.” Sasha smirks at me. “I suppose you’ll want to bang him up again once he recovers.”
I shrug, looking at the miserable fucker slumped in the chair in front of us. “I might. We’ve got our hands full for now.”
Sasha cups the back of his neck and closes his eyes. “I was trying to get us out of this mess. I want to make millions and attend political fundraisers, not hang around in a shipping container on the docks, beating some fucker to a pulp on a Tuesday night.” He sighs and casts his eyes toward the ceiling as I listen to tires crunch on the gravel outside. “I thought we were over that shit, but it follows us everywhere we go.”
“It’s my fault.”
“It is.” Sasha glares at me, but then his face softens. “But I don’t know if I would have done it differently. It’s like years of work we’ve laid out are about to come crashing down. My dead sister’s look-alike appears in a brothel when you go to pick up protection money, and how were you to know she was related to Spataro, daughter of the craziest fucker in New York?”
“And then to top it all off, my long-lost daughter turns up.” I laugh. “I feel like we’re living in a Mexican telenovela.” I look over at the red and pulpy face of the man slumped in the chair. “Why did you call Dima over? I thought he was in London.”
Sasha looks toward the door. “I asked him to fly back. The tectonic plates are shifting, and we’re in for earthquakes. We could end up controlling a lot more money or losing everything.”
Dima’s black curls appear in the doorway, and he steps in. “Good evening, gentlemen. Let’s get this party started.”
“Ever the optimist.” Sasha grins at him.
Kai follows Dima through the open doors and closes them behind him.
“Well, sometimes it all works out for the best. I was ready for a trip to New York. London is dismal and gray at this time of year.” Dima cracks a grin. I don’t see the joke, but who knows.
I walk over to Dima and grab him in a one-armed hug. “How’s London?”
“Easier pickings than New York. We’ve bought half the government. Those fuckers would sell their grandmothers for a donation to their political machines. Getting access is a piece of cake.” Dima smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
I turn back to Sasha. “Dima’s always glass half-full. But why are you hopeful that my fuck-up in picking up the girl could work in our favor?”
Sasha looks over at all of us. “Because someone lashed out by sending men against us. Why not just call me in for a meeting? Why send the cavalry over to carry out a hit?”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I say. “It’s not something I would have done. It’s the act of a panicked man.”
“Have you been working closely with the Italians?” Kai says from the doorway, where he’s leaning against the side of the shipping container.
“We’re better with money, if you ask me, but they have stronger ties with America, which used to work well for everyone. We rub along well enough with them.” Sasha looks over at the other two men. “This kind of drama is out of character.”
Dima looks pensive. “Yeah, Sasha’s right. They’ve never ordered a hit without a conversation. Something must be going on inside their ranks to have triggered it.”
Sasha stares at me. “It might be worse. It could be something going on in our ranks. One of the bodies had Russian gang tattoos.” He glances over at Kai. “How’s the girl?”
“First she was scared. Now she’s just furious. I’ve left her alone to cool off. She’s entertaining some fantasy that I’m going to let her go.” He shrugs. “But at least the food bill’s not big. She says she’s going on a hunger strike.”
“Sorry I brought trouble to your door, man. I’m glad you were able to step up.” I nod at him.
What if that happened to my daughter? This is not a world to bring a kid into, and if I need any more proof, I only need to look around me.
“Let’s get this show started.” Sasha picks up the bucket and dumps it over the guy’s head. “Rise and shine, fuckhead.”
The man slumped in the chair groans. One eye is swollen shut and the left side of his face is already a puffy mess, but he opens his right eye enough to take in the four of us standing around him. “I didn’t do anything. I was just following orders.”
From behind me, Kai’s deep voice echoes off the container’s metal walls. “And those orders were?”
“Pick up the pop star and her daughter and get out of there as fast as possible.”
“So you were supposed to keep them alive?” Kai adds.
“I guess . . .”
His words fade as Sasha takes a knife and slices through the man’s pants in a couple of sharp swipes. He gouges deep enough to draw blood and show he means business, but not enough to do much damage.
The man bites his lips until they’re white, but he doesn’t scream. “Fuck. I don’t know anything. You can hack me to pieces, but I won’t be able to tell you much.” He levels Sasha with a direct stare.
“Well, we can do this clean or we can do this messy,” Sasha says with a grin. “It’s entirely up to you.”
“We were supposed to pick up the woman and the kid and the tall guy with the scar. But we didn’t know there would be three tall guys. It was a mess.”
“There now.” Sasha pulls out the pliers and walks over to him with a big smile. “That’s something that we can agree on.” He grabs the man’s hand and rips out a fingernail.
I’ll give the fucker credit. He doesn’t scream then, just bites his lips and pants heavily.
“We wasn’t gonna kill them. We was supposed to hold ‘em and exchange them for the girl.”
“Which girl?” I ask to be sure. As if it isn’t obvious.
“Spataro’s daughter. She was supposed to marry who she’s told to.” He looks at me through his swollen eye and tilts his bloody face to the light. “You shouldn’t have touched Alessandra,” the man bites out. “Spataro had been holding that girl until he found the right use for her, and now you’ve fucked up his plans with the Russians.”
Sasha goes still. Then he turns to me, and we share a look. “We haven’t just pissed off the Italians. The Night Governor has his hands in this,” he grits out.
The man in the chair is a bit older—a slight paunch hangs above his waistband, and his muscles have turned to fat—but he can control his emotions. Sasha picks up the drill and starts the bit whirling, but the man in the chair just closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. No drama.
“What did Spataro want to do with the Night Governor? Why did he need a marriage?” Sasha asks.
“I dunno, man. It’s above my pay grade,” the man says. “I was just supposed to pick up the women and bring them back. I think the boss was gonna swap them for his daughter.”
I look over at Sasha. “Do we give the girl back?”
Sasha picks up the drill again. “Too late for that, I think. He’s already struck us. We back down now, we look weak.”
“Where were you going to take the singer and her kid?” I ask the man.
“Back to the boss’s penthouse. He said it would be safer that way. We wasn’t gonna hurt them.”
“That’s good.” I can hear the smile in Dima’s voice. “You’ve got a little girl, don’t you? Isabella, was it? And Chiara? Such a pretty name for a wife,” Dima adds, walking toward him. He doesn’t need to brandish a weapon. The names of this guy’s family members are sharper than any blade on the table.
The man begins to shake. “Don’t touch them. Don’t fucking touch them. Women and children should be off limits.” His voice wavers, but I cut him off before he can say anything else.
“Like my family? Or did the limits not extend to them?” I say. “We could have handled this in a civilized manner.”
The man in the chair lifts his head. “What are you going to do to my daughter? Where is Isabella?”
“Your daughter went to school today, and she came home to your lovely wife,” Dima says. “They were wondering where you’d been when I went to the house and asked for you.”
The man raises his head and glares at Dima, but he appears to come to a conclusion. He has to give us something.
“Spataro is weak. He needs this marriage. If you don’t return Alessandra to her father and she doesn’t marry the Night Governor, then the Italians will start fighting over the businesses in the US. The garbage and recycling will be first. Then the drugs and the girls. It’ll be carnage, and for no good reason.” The man pleads with us as if we can stop Spataro and the Night Governor from picking fights.
Dima picks up the gun and aims it between the man’s eyes. “Tell us everything or it’ll be your wife and kid next.”
“Spataro is getting old. He’s losing his grip, but the Night Governor is a psychopath. It won’t be great to have him in control. We respected the don, but people fear the Night Governor because he’s unpredictable.”
“We know what we need to know.” Dima lifts the gun again, but Kai’s voice stills his hand.
“Keep him alive. He could come in handy.”
Dima lowers the gun, and Sasha glances over at the power drill.
“Christ, Sasha. I thought you were trying to move in more elevated circles,” I say. “Playing with the contents of a hardware store in a shipping container isn’t exactly going to help you win friends and influence.”
Sasha cracks a grin. “It might. Depends on the people.”
As if to highlight the mess my life has become, the burner phone buzzes in my pocket.
When we come back home will you come over?
Can I come and stay at your house?
I look at the slumped man in the chair. The man whose wife and daughter we just threatened.
I cock my head at Sasha. “He’s mine.”
I walk to the chair, send a fist into his stomach, and then rain a series of blows down on his face. His cheekbone cracks against my knuckles.
“That was my kid you threatened. That was my woman!” My fists fly faster now, and his face is a bloody mess. His blood coats my knuckles before Sasha grasps my arms and pulls me back.
“If we want to leave him alive, then you’d better give it a rest,” he says.
His steady voice anchors me back to the grubby steel walls and the swinging overhead bulb. I pull out my phone to reply to my daughter’s text, getting blood all over the keys of the old Nokia.