Chapter 42 Ian
I wasn’t entirely accurate when I told Collette about his trip. Going to Ireland was a tricky situation, since there really wasn’t any way to keep the Mob from finding out that we were on his turf. Edmond Kelly would know as soon as we reached the airport, if not before.
A large part of me hated that she had to be here. I would’ve preferred her to be home and safe, but our new beginning wouldn’t survive that. She wouldn’t tolerate being left behind.
One of the things I hadn’t mentioned was that Edmond Kelly wasn’t exactly going to be an easy person to sneak up on.
He was the head of the Irish mafia. Unlike some of the other mafia families, the Kellys were integral to Ireland. They owned Ireland. The family had been part of the under-dealings of everything criminal since they’d needed a force to try to keep the British out back in the seventeen hundreds. It had grown into a huge power that could make anything or anyone appear and disappear at will. The cops weren’t going to do any real digging when the Kellys were involved in the situation.
Nobody would dare. That was why the official investigation had stalled so fast and the FBI had hit a brick wall.
The Kelly family had found the connection between me and Andrew, and the bodies had been a message about interfering with Kelly business. Don’t mess with things or we’ll do the same to you. I was supposed to back off, but it wasn’t something that I could do. It wasn’t in my nature. Even more so now, since Collette would no more drop this than me. I had to protect her as much as I could.
It made my stomach churn at the idea of what they would do to her.
Andrew would have had a well-thought out plan which wouldn’t have made a lick of difference if he’d given himself up in trade for Heather.
That was the other thing that I hadn’t told Collette. Andrew had left an insurance policy. I hadn’t viewed the contents of the thumb drive yet, but I planned to now.
We’d both known that going to Ireland was dangerous and a gamble. Heather’s father wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. Andrew had found something that would help him convince Edmond that he should let them be.
I shook my head at our stupidity. I’d never been na?ve, but Andrew had convinced me that he would be okay. The information that he had wasn’t something Edmond wanted coming to light. It had been Heather’s insurance policy, but she’d never had a chance to use it against him.
That was why I planned to watch it now. To see if it was useful. We’d go forward with the plan regardless, but it might mae it easier. Given who it was supposed to be used against, I hadn’t particularly wanted to watch it before. I doubted it was images of questionable accounting practices.
I clenched my fist. Angry at myself, at Edmond Kelly, and at Andrew for getting into this situation and getting himself killed.
I glanced at Collette, dozing on the bed in the back room. A fist clenched around my heart at something happening to her.
I walked over and nudged her. She blinked at me, sated and sleepy.
“I have blackmail that Ian planned to use on Heather’s father. It’s probably horrible stuff. DO you want to watch it with me and Rossi?”
She sat up with a snap and grabbed her clothing, dressing fast. “Of course.”
I called Rossi back and plugged it into the laptop.
The video started in a bedroom. In one corner a girl, barely past puberty, huddled naked in a dog cage. She shivered and cried. The sound was hoarse, as if she’d been doing it for a long time.
My stomach twisted. I glanced at Collette, whose hands were clasped in front of her in a white knuckled fist. I stopped the video.
“Are you sure you want to watch this?”
I asked quietly.
“Yes,”
she answered, her tone flat.he wore a dark grey tailored suit. When he turned to face the camera, his face was rugged, with a slightly crooked nose, broken in a fight years ago. His piercing green were sharp and calculating as in the moment before he turned away to gaze at the girl in the cage, whose sobs became whimpers.
In the next ten minutes, I saw more of Edmond than I’d ever wanted to.
I liked inflicting pain during sex, but I had my limits and no interest whatsoever in children. Edmond didn’t share my limits, and by the time he was done, she couldn’t scream anymore.
Bile rose up in my throat, I swallowed to make myself not be sick, but this was something I would never be able to get out of my head for the rest of my life. Colette shook next to me, huddled, and I put an arm around her.
Rossi had gone so expressionless that I knew he was almost at his limit too.
Edmond rolled off her, calmly grabbed a gun from the nightstand, and put a bullet in her head. Then he dressed.
“Take out the trash, Sergi Petrov,”
he said, the first words he’d spoken. ,walking away. No remorse, just selfish, cold, calculated callousness.
A moment later, Sergi Petrov walked into the frame. A little shorter than Edward, he had a wiry build. He’d cut his hair since I last saw him; the buzz cut was barely a shadow on his scalp. He stuffed the girl's body into a doubled garbage bag. As he did so, the camera got a full view of his face.
Icy blue eyes, fair skin, a faded scar running across one cheek. A man women found attractive until they discovered the monster he actually was.
The video ended as Sergi worked.
“We’re going to have to be really careful, boss.”
Rossi breathed.
“Yeah, we will. If Edmond even has a hint that we have this, he’s going to make our lives hell until we give it back to him. On the off chance that Andrew didn’t have time to reveal anything, we might have a chance to work out the deal that he couldn’t.”
I rubbed my temples in frustration.
“The older man was Emdmond Kelly. The younger was Sergi Petrov. He also goes by Pyos and uses dogs to hunt and hurt people. I would be more than happy to fly you right back to LA, Colette.”I really wanted her to go now. I could picture what they would do to her.
While her face was pale, her eyes flashed. “No. Sergi is the guy with the dgs, right? Who killed Andy?”
“Probably. Edmond would have ordered it through,”
I responded honestly.
Rossi shook his head. “None of this feels right. I think we’re just walking into a trap. The added problem of Sergi Petrov makes the risk even higher. He is more of an issue than Edmond ever could be.”
“You know that’s not true,”
I protested. “Just because he has an old beef with me doesn’t mean that he’s gunning for us.”
“Right? And I’m the tooth fairy.”
Rossi drummed his fingers on this leg. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this video and the entire situation might all be just an elaborate hoax cooked up by Sergi Petrov to get back at you. You lose your best friend and he gets you to come to him where he has access to you.”
I stared at him. “Seriously, you think that Sergi had someone date Andrew for over a year, get pregnant so they could lure him over here to kill him? That’s a little far-fetched.”
“It’s not, though. Think about it. He has some woman come over here and hook up with your best friend. Then instead of going with him to find her, you just send him. The woman wasn’t that far along and she might not have even been pregnant. What if she just told Andrew what she needed to get him to contact you?”
“Andrew wasn’t a bad judge of people,”
Colette said. “I don’t think anyone could have fooled him like that.”
I sighed and slid back into the seat. People would do elaborate, crazy things for revenge. I tended to side with Collette, though.
“Why do you have to be so practical about everything?”
I asked rhetorically.
“Isn’t that what you pay me for?”
The humor in his tone was unexpected.
He laid out a Glock and began the process of cleaning it.
There was no way that I or Collette were going to be unarmed while in Ireland. I was taking no chances.
While we were on foreign soil, we had to work through the proper channels to ensure that we weren’t arrested with guns. There were other safety measures that had to be taken care of before we could start our search.
Rossi had secured us licenses to carry, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t get in trouble if arrested. This whole thing could go sideways in a second, and there wasn’t a lot more I could do to prepare us.
Sergi Petrov Ivanov needed to stay out of my life, and I was going to make a permanent ending to the situation. The time had come to finish things and put all of our grievances to rest.
We’d made plans to be as inconspicuous as possible. Rossi had arranged most of the bookings through a third party so our names wouldn’t trip basic precautions. Kathy was already staying at an economy hotel in Dublin and Rossi had booked us rooms on the same floor.
Collette sat next to the window of our rental car and gawked at the wonders of a new city, even though her face was shadowed with stress.. Maybe when things were settled, we would steal a few days so she could enjoy this experience.
“Are we there yet?”
She stifled a yawn, and I couldn’t help but enjoy how cute she was.
“Nope, but we’ll get you tucked into bed for a couple of hours.”
I pulled her over to let her head rest on my shoulder. She didn’t even protest.
“The time difference will mess with your system for a little while.”
International travel was always a bitch, and we needed to be sharp. Rest would help with that.
The morning traffic from the airport wasn’t too bad, and I was relieved that we hadn’t run into any trouble when we reached the hotel. Kathy met us in the hall.
“Hello, Mr. Holdt, Colette. The Daderson project blew up while you were in the air. Are you up to helping me sort out some of the fall out, Colette?”
Colette laughed. “Is a meal involved?”
Kathy grinned back at her. “I’ll order room service for all of us.”
Rossi and I saw them into Kathy’s room, which was mostly office, before checking out our rooms.
The first room had a large king bed. The decor was uninspired, but it was clean. That was fine for now. As soon as this was over, Collette would only experience the very best that life had to offer.
Rossi’s room was attached and I unlocked the door on my side. Trouble was going to find us, it was just a matter of when.
The bellhop arrived with our suitcases and I pulled out a twenty-pound note for his trouble.
“I’ll wait while you shower.”
Rossi stood in the doorway.
I took the gun he handed me and sat it on the nightstand, then headed for the shower. Colette would need one too, and it was best to get necessities out of the way.
And after she had her shower, we could get to our work.