26. Twenty-Six
Something was whirring at the most annoying frequency.
I winced and inhaled. Wherever I was, it reeked of motor oil, concrete, and blood.
Pain lanced sharply through the left side of my skull, then faded to a constant dull throb.
When I tipped my head to one side, a second, sharper throb started in my ear that said, "Hey, you were shot. Quit moving, asshole."
I listened to the voice.
There was a particular, unfamiliar strain in my shoulder joints that told me my hands were tied behind my back.
Plastic zip ties. Creative. They were around my wrists and ankles.
The left shoulder had its own complaint — the round that spun me on the road had punched clean through the meat of it, and arms wrenched back behind a chair was the worst way you could hold a man who'd been shot there.
Nobody had bothered to check it, and nobody was going to.
At least they'd left my suit on. That meant I was in for a beating instead of one of the Italians' more creative torture sessions.
I was almost disappointed. Whoever had done my wrists had cinched the tie over my shirt cuff.
Sloppy. Pavel would have known better, but Pavel was dead.
There was a bolt head on the chair frame behind my hands, and I set the plastic against it and went to work, slow, letting the generator cover the sound.
Every pass dragged the bad shoulder. I worked through it; I'd worked through worse.
I finally opened my eyes and squinted as I took in my surroundings. A garage, or close to it. A single bare bulb hung from a chain in the ceiling, and in front of us was a big, rolling corrugated metal door, the kind you'd run a car through. No windows.
Someone groaned low and pained to my right. I turned my head.
EJ. That's right. The kid had decided to do the brave thing and lie to Kastelani, hoping it'd keep him alive. Brave, yes. But stupid. He'd only prolonged the inevitable. Once K found out he didn't know shit about the diamonds, he was still a dead man.
And he'd dragged me into the dirt with him.
Not that I'd had far to fall. K had me the second the trees opened up. But the kid had been on the gate. I'd looked at his dumb, starry face in the car and decided, against every instinct I had, that this one wasn't going in the ground tonight.
Then he'd opened his mouth on the side of the road and put himself in the ground, anyway.
I clenched my jaw to see if it still worked.
It did, more or less. The motion pulled at the crust on my neck, and a fresh trickle of sweat ran warm down under my collar.
Somewhere behind the bulb, water dripped.
The generator droned on. No voices yet. That was the part I didn't like.
K wasn't a man who left prisoners alone in a room unless he was hoping the isolation and silence would do half his work for him.
I'd done the same thing to better men than EJ. I knew the play. Knowing it didn't help.
"Hey, kid. Wake up."
The kid's head came up. He sucked in a sharp breath before jerking his arms so hard that the chair almost tipped. They'd put him in a folding chair, the kind you stack in a church basement. Amateurs.
I snorted. "First time?"
He stopped fighting and looked over at me, eyes widening. "Mr. Laskin! You're alive!"
"Unfortunately," I grumbled.
He blinked. "What?"
"Alive means torture, kid. Bet you're wishing you'd kept your fucking mouth shut the first time, huh?"
EJ ran his tongue over his split lip. "I don't regret anything."
"You will."
"No." He puffed out his chest like a damn fool. "Whatever happens, I can take it."
Fucking kids and their fucking bravado. They all thought they were fucking heroes. The minute K's men started prying off fingernails and slicing off eyelids, they were pissing themselves and crying for their mommies.
"Listen to me," I said. "When K comes through that door, you tell him the diamonds are in a lockbox at Buckeye National, you hear me? You tell him that you're the only one who knows the combination. You cry, you piss yourself, and you tell him exactly that."
The kid stared at me like I'd stabbed him. "I'm not a fucking rat."
"Better a live rat than a dead hero."
EJ shook his head.
"With respect, sir." The eye that still opened held mine. "I'm the fatherless son of a whore from the Foxhole." He swallowed. "This is the best death I can hope for."
That stupid, stubborn son of a bitch. I'd have slapped him if my hands were free.
"The best death you can hope for?" I shook my head. "You're, what. Nineteen?"
"Twenty."
Christ. The kid wasn't even old enough to drink legally, and he was going to die here for principles and oaths he didn't even fully understand.
"Twenty years old and you've already decided the best thing you'll ever do is bleed out in a garage for a man you met yesterday. You know how that sounds, kid? That sounds like somebody who was never told he was worth a goddamn thing."
The kid's jaw worked. I'd hit something. I didn't feel good about it.
"That why you did it?" I said. "Back there. The name."
He went still.
"I know your name's Renko," I said. "That's what you told me when we first met. Evander Renko." I leaned as far as the chest tie let me, which wasn't far. "So you tell me, real slow, where a Renko gets off calling himself a Laskin in front of the one man in Ohio who'd know the difference."
He held my eyes for a long time. Long enough that the generator filled the whole room.
"It’s my name," he said.
"Come again?"
He took a deep breath. "Sacha Laskin was my father."
If I hadn't been tied to the chair, I'd have fallen out of it. Once the shock wore off, though, something red hot burned in my chest behind it. "I thought you said—"
"That's what she told me." His chin came up, swollen eye and all, daring me to laugh.
"My mom. Before she died. Said my dad was a Russian, big deal in the organization, name of Laskin.
Said he came around the Foxhole back when, and then he stopped, and then there was me.
" He swallowed. "She kept his name for me. It's all she left."
I looked for my father in his face. The Laskin men all came off the same press, Niko and me both stamped out of Sacha whether we wanted it or not, and I sat there in a dead man's garage and ran this kid's face against the one I'd buried.
And the results came back inconclusive. His eye was too swollen, his lip split. Even if he'd been fully healed, he was too baby faced to tell. Put him in a lineup of a hundred whoresons and he could've been anybody's brat.
Including Sacha Laskin's.
"Lot of men passed through the Foxhole, kid."
He swallowed and shifted. "Doesn't matter right now, does it?"
"No," I conceded with a sigh. "Guess it doesn't."
We fell into a silence after that, waiting.
I closed my eyes and thought about Fin.
He'd be pissed at me for being late now, the bastard. He was probably pacing back and forth in my bedroom, planning what to shout at me when I came through the door.
Except I wouldn't be coming through the door ever again. That thought left a hole in my chest that ached worse than the one the bullet had torn through my shoulder.
At least Niko would protect him, keep him safe until he got on a plane for home. I'd left him with instructions that even he couldn't fuck up.
I was glad Niko hadn't come on the operation with me like he'd wanted.
We'd argued about it, thrown punches at each other over it.
He didn't like being told what to do, and I didn't want him there to show me up, so it never would've worked for a thousand reasons.
I was glad for that. Otherwise, he'd be dead alongside all the others.
At least this way, one of us would live.
Niko was the better choice, anyway. He'd been somebody once. He had our father's smile and had known him better than me. While I lived with our father's ghost, he'd actually gotten to live with the man. He'd be better at carrying the Laskin name into the future than I ever was.
Stay alive, you fucking asshole, I thought at Niko, and at Fin, I thought about the three words I hadn't yet been able to say out loud. I love you, you Scottish brat. Sorry I was too stubborn to say it.
Then the lock on the door rattled, and EJ stiffened.
"Steady," I whispered. "Remember what I told you. Honor is for dead men."
The door went up on its rails and cold night air rushed in, followed by damp. Kastelani stepped in with two of his Italian friends. "Buonasera, signori Laskin."
He pulled a stool out of the dark with the toe of one shoe and sat. "I confess I did not expect the discount. I came to Ohio for one Laskin and I am given a matched set." He looked between us. "Brothers?"
"He's nobody," I said. "I told you that on the road."
"You told me a great many things on the road.
You told me his name was Renko." He turned the swollen ruin of EJ's face toward the light with two fingers, almost gently.
"And then this one told me it was Laskin.
Both of you are so eager to correct the record.
It makes a man curious which version costs him money.
" He let go of the kid's jaw. "Because I am not here for names, signori. I am here for what is mine."
"Then you came to the wrong garage."
"Did I?" He turned to me, and that was almost a relief. Every minute he was focused on me was another minute for EJ to change his mind about being a fucking hero. "Let me tell you a story."
"Fucking Italians and their fucking stories," I muttered.
"Very well, then. Facts. Four hundred of my diamonds are missing. Taken by your Russian friends. That's a significant amount. And my friends would like to know where they can recover their lost assets. Whether that amount is recovered directly or paid for in flesh and blood is entirely up to you."
He smoothed his lapel. "You're wondering how I knew you'd be on that road.
You gutted my tailor and thought I wouldn't count my Thursdays.
A shop goes dark three days before a shipment, Mr. Laskin, and I notice.
I moved the plane, I put four men in a car, and you shot them for me. That is what your confidence cost."
I snorted. "Four hundred tiny ass diamonds. You really crossed an ocean and burned a dozen men over a bag of shiny rocks? Must be hard times for the spaghetti mafia."
I saw the backhand coming, but I still wasn't ready for it.
My head went sideways, and the bad shoulder lit up like someone had put a match to it. The room swam and came back. I worked my jaw, tasted copper, spat a red string onto K's shoe.
"There," I said. "Now I've cost you a little more."
He shook out his hand. The ring on it had opened my cheek; I felt the warm start of it down toward my jaw. "You have a small repertoire, Mr. Laskin. I had hoped for more from Volkov's right hand."
"Yeah, well. I’m here all night."
"I'll ask once more, like a gentleman," K said. "Where is Volkov holding my stones?"
"You're awful fucking desperate for some cheap ass diamonds," I pointed out. And then a thought occurred to me, one that explained everything. "Unless they're not your fucking diamonds."
Kastelani's jaw clenched, and he didn't answer, which told me I'd hit the nail on the head.
"They aren't, are they?" I pushed. "You don't fly into another man's city and start a war for diamonds you own.
You write those off. You eat the loss and you live.
But you came yourself, and you're bleeding men over it, and that's not a man protecting his money.
That's not a man counting a loss. That's a man who needs these specific diamonds.
You've got blood diamonds, and you're holding them for someone else.
You're not the big, bad Italian mobster Fin thinks you are, are you? You're just the fucking bag boy."
He drew his fist back, and I braced for a hit that never came.
"No," he said, lowering his hand. He flexed his fingers and glanced at EJ. "I've been doing this all wrong, haven't I?"
"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey you Italian prick! Motherfucker, look at me!"
He ignored me completely and stood, going to tower over EJ. He took EJ's chin in his hand. "Who are you, sweet boy, that Aleksi Laskin would put his neck on the chopping block for you? You call yourself a Laskin, but I can find no record of you anywhere."
EJ swallowed.
"That's because he's lying," I said, hating how desperate I sounded. "He's just a dumb kid. He's a fucking cleaner. You don't want him. You want me. Come on, K. I'm the one who stole Fin out from under you. I'm the one who fucked up your operation. You look at me, goddammit!"
He released EJ's face and opened a tool cabinet. A cold chill went through me as he selected a pair of pliers. "Let's find out, shall we?"
He came back to EJ's chair with the pliers and crouched. He found the smallest finger and worked it loose from the fist the kid was trying to make.
"Kastelani." I rocked my chair, and the bad shoulder paid me back for it. "Listen to me! Just fucking listen. He's nineteen. Twenty. He wanted to play vory, okay? So I let him. But I'm telling you he doesn't know shit. He was the gate operator. That's it. Kid wasn't even fucking armed."
"You see," K said to EJ, not to me, "how he talks?
On and on. A man who knew nothing would let you go.
A man who knows where my property is talks like this, to fill the room, so that I am listening to him and not working.
" He fit the jaws of the pliers around the first joint and EJ's breathing sped up.
"Be braver than he is. You called yourself a Laskin. Bleed like one."
"EJ," I called, but the kid's panicked eyes stayed fixed on the finger he was about to lose. "Evander, look at me!" Finally, he looked at me.
I didn't know what to say, or do, or anything. Hell, I barely knew this kid, and he was willing to die for me. It was wrong on every level. If he wasn't a Laskin, he was sure as fuck acting like one.
"Ty svoy," I managed. "You hear me? Ty svoy."
You're one of us.
K leaned on the pliers. EJ's eyes widened, and his face twisted in pain.
And then K stopped at the sound of tires screeching outside.
Kastelani lifted his head and shouted something in Italian. His two bodyguards drew their guns and went out the door.
The pliers moved away from EJ's hand, and I slumped with relief.
K stood up straight and dusted off his suit, looking at me. "Looks like we're about to have a few more guests. Don't get any ideas."
He drew a gun from inside his jacket and pressed himself against the wall, waiting.
I turned back to EJ. "Whatever happens next," I told him, low and fast, "follow my lead."
For once, the kid didn't argue.