Chapter 14 #3
“Watch your back,” Tangaloa muttered to me as the others started to realize we weren’t friendly. One or two might speak enough English to have understood my words. “Lu’ll murder us if you get hurt again.”
“Watch your own fucking back,” I grumbled at him. I could take care of myself. Lu should be worrying about herself and our baby. She did not need to be stressing about me.
I lost track of how many men I killed. And fuck it all, some of the stitches on my back came loose. My hip even started bleeding. I blamed the boots.
Most of the men were naked. Which normally, I was cool with.
You do you and all that bullshit. But not in this case.
Not for this reason. The only good thing about it was that they didn’t have their weapons handy.
Some did, and the occasional gunshot was fired.
One of the twins took a nasty gash to the shoulder.
A few minutes later the other twin had a matching gash.
I didn’t see who did it, but with the accuracy and the location, I had to wonder if it had been his brother.
Tangaloa took down a large man who got in some hits to his face, but my ex-brother-in-law managed to prevail. Tommy had a bloody nose, though I didn’t see what caused it. Spirit had not followed us into the room and managed to get around to the other entrance to block off any who wanted to escape.
Baranov was scrambling to get dressed of all things, letting his men fight for him. The coward.
We were all bloody and sweaty by the time the last man fell. Baranov was pressed up against the wall by an old stained glass window depicting an angel. If there was a god, He’d long forsaken this place. That was fine with me; I didn’t mind doing some smiting for Him.
Baranov was barely five feet tall. He was now wearing a red robe with gold argyles and fucking slippers. As in actual nighttime slippers, like the man was just getting his dick wet before he went to bed.
Short of breath and sweltering in my boots, I looked to the others. “Help the women. We’re going to need to get them medical attention.”
As my men left to work on freeing the women, I turned to the sniveling weasel in front of me. The fucker actually had tears running down his chubby cheeks. The things I would do to make this man bleed for the countless women he’s hurt, both inside and out of this room.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have time. Getting to Nishi was my goal, even if it meant giving this man a faster death than he deserved.
I pulled out the mini English to Russian dictionary I had in my cargo pants’ pocket. “Do you speak English?” I asked. “Trust me, this will be a lot less painful for both of us if you do.”
“Nyet,” he replied, using the one Russian word I knew.
“No?” I repeated, flipping through the dictionary.
“Funny, you seemed to be able to understand me well enough to answer the question.” I took out a printed picture of Nishi.
It was from a few months before she was taken.
Lu wanted me to use a picture from the night Nishi disappeared, but like hell was I using a picture that had Lu in it too.
“Where is this woman?” I found the word I was looking for, and paused.
Well, here goes nothing. “Ga-dey? G-de? Um, ga… Fuck.” I looked up at the man, who had an entirely dumbfounded look on his face. I scowled. This was getting me nowhere.
I looked for another word, hoping it had a few more vowels.
“Zhen-sh-chin-y,” I said slowly, butchering the Russian word for ‘woman’.
“Hawai‘ian zhenshchiny. You,” I pointed at him, “um,” I flipped through the dictionary, “kupil Hawai‘ian women.
Shit, I mean, zhenshchiny. You kupil Hawai‘ian zhenshchiny. For,” I flipped to another section, “geroin.” I glanced up at him, skeptical.
“Really? ‘Groin’ is your word for heroin? Fucking ridiculous.”
The man just stared at me.
I sighed. “Trust me, this isn’t going any better for me than it is for you.
Now, where are the Hawai‘ian women? Who, um,” I went to the back of the book.
“Voz? Who did you sell them to?” Fucking hell, this was going to take forever.
The fucking smugglers helped get us supplies, but they couldn’t spare a fucking interpreter?
I was getting frustrated enough that I was going to want to speak to their manager when we got back to the airport.
“Pro… Pro-da-vat,” I stumbled. “Sell. You sold the women. Who or where did you sell them?”
Baranov just continued to stare at me like I’d sprouted two heads.
“Fuck it.” I shoved the dictionary back in my pocket and pulled out my blade.
But the moment I started towards him, the weasel started protesting, “Nyet! Nyet! I speak English!” in a very heavy accent.
I paused. “Really? You fucker. I’m going to make you bleed for that too.” I put the tip of my blade to his nose. “Tell me where you sold the women from Hawai‘i! I know some went to Amsterdam. I am looking for the rest!”
“Don’t know! Don’t know!” He pressed himself further into the old cement wall, like that would put enough distance between my blade and his face to keep me from cutting him.
It didn’t. Blood started to trickle out of the small cut I made on his nose.
“Konstantin! He do contract. He take girls.” He gestured to the women my club brothers were releasing. “He handle all sales.”
There was such relief on his face. Like he honestly thought telling me that some man named Konstantin being in charge meant he was walking out of this alive. He was raping a woman when we walked in here, and the man was delusional enough to think I’d let that go?
“Who is Konstantin and where do I find him?” I asked.
“United States,” the man answered with confidence.
That was even less helpful than saying the man was in Russia. Did he not realize how big the United States was?
“Where?” I growled.
The twins stayed with me while Tangaloa, Tommy, and Spirit took the women to the nearest hospital. We were going to meet back up at the airport, but first, I had some smiting to do.
We found some rope while searching the rest of the church for other people, either guard or victim.
We found a few more guards, but thankfully, no other women.
In the chapel we’d entered the building through, there was a large cross hanging on the wall.
It was fucking heavy, but we were able to get it off the wall and then use the ropes to create a pulley system with the ceiling beams overhead.
A nail gun would have been faster, but Baranov didn’t have any that we could find and I was done with that fucking dictionary.
We ended up using our daggers to nail Baranov to the cross.
We didn’t hoist him up far, mostly because the fat bastard was heavy to lift.
But enough where he wasn’t touching the ground.
He certainly wasn’t upright either, so his entire body weight was trying to pull him back down to the floor but the blades through his wrists and ankles kept him secured in place.
The twins had pulled the curtains down from the windows and made a pile in the middle of the room under where Baranov hung.
Then I held a match to my English to Russian dictionary, tossed it on top, and watched the place light up.
The building was old, and went up in seconds despite the lack of accelerant.
Baranov’s screams of agony increased the higher the flames grew, but they fell on deaf ears as the man was cooked alive.
“Let’s go,” I told the twins. I was still suspicious about their shoulders. What the fuck was up with that?
“Where to?” they asked in unison.
“Fucking Los Angeles,” I grumbled.
I called Lu while on the plane. She wasn’t sleeping well.
I tried to assure her that I was fine and I would be bringing Nishi home soon, but it didn’t help as much as I hoped.
I didn’t know what we would find in Los Angeles.
From Baranov’s broken English, I gathered that Konstantin was a matchmaker of sorts.
Baranov had the women and Konstantin had the buyers.
For Konstantin’s sake, he better pray he spoke better English than Baranov did.
It took us almost three days to track down Konstantin. The loss of time was frustrating, but I was not giving up until I had found something on Nishi. Lu was counting on me, and I refused to let her down when we finally had a lead after all this time of nothing.
We found Konstantin outside the worst place possible for a man like him: a fucking preschool. He had binoculars, candy bars, and duct tape on the front seat of his car when Tangaloa and I hopped into the back seat.
“What the—”
Tangaloa flashed him his gun as I said, “Drive. Both hands on the wheel. And if you try anything, then your son in London gets a visit from some of my friends.” Neo had been able to find Konstantin’s teenage son went to a private school in London.
My threat was vague for a reason. We would never hurt his kid—but he didn’t need to know that.
Konstantin looked like a typical B-rated movie thug.
Black hair, black beard, black sunglasses, black hat, black shirt, black pants.
I couldn’t see his slippahs, but I was betting they were black too.
While Los Angeles, California, was certainly warmer than bumfuck Russia, it wasn’t as warm as home.
Both Tangaloa and I were in shorts, boots, and t-shirts.
I still felt like I was wrapped up in more cloth than a fucking mummy.
Like a quickdraw from the old west, the man reached for his gun in his shoulder holster, but I was faster.
Over the console, I slipped between the driver and passenger seats, slamming one of my daggers onto the man’s thigh.
It was close to the artery, but not quite.
That would be too quick a death for the likes of him.
As the man screamed in pain, his gun dropped between his door and seat. Tangaloa reached into the small space and plucked it back.