Chapter 17 #2
He dipped his head. “Yes, I am. My name is Harry Bolt and I am Chloe’s brother though we don’t share a name.” He tilted his head to his right. “And this is Barney Lewis. Happy to meet you.”
And then he did something so unusual Consuelo didn’t recognize it. He offered his hand. For a second, she thought maybe he was showing her something and looked at his hand to see what it was. But the hand wasn’t palm up, it was simply outstretched. Outstretched for her.
She looked at it for a moment, then up at him. His face was so like Chloe’s, yet utterly male while hers was so feminine. It puzzled her. She had no family and none of the other girls at the Meteor had families. She’d never seen family resemblances before.
Hesitantly, because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d shook anyone’s hand, she reached out. His grip was warm, strong, brief.
“Ma’am,” a bass voice said and she turned to the other man.
Where Harry Bolt looked like a successful businessman who worked outdoors sometimes—as opposed to the lawyers and CEOs she had sex with—this man looked…
dangerous. Someone you’d cross the road to avoid.
Even taller and broader than Harry Bolt, he was huge, rough, biceps bulging out of a tee shirt.
He, too, took her hand and squeezed it even more briefly than Harry Bolt had, but with great gentleness. He could crush her hand on a whim, but everything about him spoke of enormous strength under enormous control.
“Sit down, please, Ms…”
“Consuelo,” she said. She’d almost forgotten her last name, Sanchez, she said it so seldom.
“Consuelo, please take a seat.” Harry Bolt indicated a comfortable chair, walked back around his big desk and sat down. The dangerous one, Barney, sat in a chair next to her.
Both men looked at her with expressions she couldn’t figure out until it hit her. They didn’t know she was a prostitute. She was dressed in jeans and a white blouse. They didn’t know.
Oh God.
For a second, she just sat there with two men she didn’t know and who didn’t know what she was. Who looked at her and treated her as if she was a normal woman.
She spent most of her life inside the Meteor. She couldn’t remember the last time a man didn’t treat her like a whore.
She breathed this in and breathed this out. If everything went well, there was a possibility of a life where this would happen every day. Leave it all behind.
Please.
“So.” Harry Bolt folded his hands on his desk. He was going to get her to say why she was here but there was no pressure on her, none. It was a busy, successful company, that was clear from everything she’d seen, but he was giving her his time. “You’re a friend of my sister’s?”
Another breath. Just one more second of being normal.
She lowered her eyes, raised them. “Yes. It’s my fault Chloe was hurt. My fault and the fault of a few of my—my friends.”
Nothing changed in his expression. Consuelo turned her head slightly to look at the other man. Barney. No expression there, either.
“How so, Consuelo?” Bolt asked gently.
“She talked to us, encouraged us. Gave us a little courage. Some of us started to—talk back. Rebel a little. They couldn’t stand it and they sent the Russians.”
He straightened suddenly, shooting a glance at the other man.
“The Russians? What Russians?”
Another deep breath. It had been such a brief moment.
She lowered her eyes again, spoke to her knees. “The Russians at the Meteor Club, where I…I work. Four of them. They’ve been there for about three months. They’ve put money into the club, a lot of it. There’s something coming, they’re preparing for something. Something big is about to happen.”
She finally raised her eyes, expecting to see scorn and disgust. Instead Harry Bolt looked thoughtful. He met the other man’s eyes again, tapping the desk with a pen. Both of them turned to her again but she saw absolutely nothing in their gaze to show they’d understood her. Nothing.
How could that be?
“Do you know what the Meteor Club is?” she blurted out.
“Yes, of course,” Bolt answered, mind obviously elsewhere. “So two of those Russians were the ones who attacked Chloe?”
Amazing. She had just told these two men she was a prostitute and they simply ignored it. She’d stoically thrown away her pleasure at being treated like a lady when she told then where she worked. Her chest had become tight, her breath shallow, but at their reactions, the tightness eased.
“Yes. Their names are Lyov and Ivan. They are thugs. Violent men. They beat up two of my friends at the Meteor. One had to hospitalized. She was taken across the border for medical care. We never saw her again.”
“Hold on.” Harry Bolt never took his eyes off her as he picked up a cellphone and pressed just a couple of buttons.
“Yeah,” he said suddenly as someone picked up at the other end.
“Something has happened. We’ve got a lead on the men who attacked Chloe.
Russians, she was right.” He listened. “Uh huh. As soon as you can. Hurry.”
He switched off. “So, why is it that they attacked my sister?”
“These Russians. They’re making some big investment, as I said.
Something big is coming. The owner of the Meteor, Frank Sands is always trying to make a good impression on the Russians, wanting everything to be perfect.
Chloe—she talked to us. Listened to us. Made us feel…
better. She has a special way, you know? ”
Bolt nodded grimly. “Yes, she does.”
Consuelo wanted to rub her damp palms together, wanted to look at the floor again, but she did neither. She straightened her shoulders and looked Chloe’s brother right in the eyes.
“Chloe held group sessions. I don’t think it was really therapy, but I wouldn’t know.
She listened, mostly. But all of us felt better afterwards.
Felt better, felt cleaner. And then we had to…
go back. Back to the Meteor.” Her voice became hoarse.
She coughed to clear it. “Each time, it was harder. And I guess we started rebelling a little. It wasn’t Chloe’s fault.
She didn’t say anything to us about what we should do, how we should behave, but it was just—some of us couldn’t go on.
Our boss, he was furious with us. He’s trying to make a good impression on the Russians.
He doesn’t want any problems at all. Susie—one of us—said she was going to quit, that Chloe wanted her to quit.
It wasn’t true. Chloe never said anything like that at all.
She never gave us advice, never pushed in any direction, she just listened.
But what Susie said was enough to make the Russians mad. ”
“So that was it?” Bolt asked. “The reason why they attacked her?”
Consuelo nodded. “To get her to back off. Stop making waves.”
“Son of a bitch.” The man’s face grew even grimmer, white brackets appearing around his mouth. He looked briefly at the other man, who looked as if he wanted to hit someone, too. “Those men are going down. The top Russian, too.”
Her moment!
“This might help.” Consuelo dug the thumb drive out of her purse and slid it across the large, shiny desk. “I…took it off the head Russian, a man named Nikitin. I don’t know his first name. It must contain something valuable. He kept it in his jacket pocket.”
“Intel, eh?” Bolt carefully examined the device.
“Russian manufacture. I guess that’s not surprising.
” He turned and plugged the thumb drive into his computer and watched the screen carefully.
He manipulated some keys. Consuelo knew nothing about computers.
It was forbidden for the girls to have computers.
Bolt made a sound of frustration. “It’s encrypted. Looks like a strong encryption, too. That’s a pretty strong degree of protection. Take some doing to crack.”
Consuelo barely understood him. All she really grasped was that maybe what she’d brought wasn’t useful. She’d paid such a steep price for it. She blinked back tears. “You can’t read it?”
Oh God, she’d been counting on this. Counting that because of the thumb drive, they’d help her disappear. She’d left the Meteor forever, there was no going back. But if there was no going forward either, what was going to happen to her?
“No, not without some work. And we’d need to find a cracker who speaks Russian.” Bolt spoke absently, then looked at her. Though Consuelo was used to hiding her emotions—all whores learned that or they couldn’t work—she found she couldn’t right now. What she was feeling was right there on her face.
She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think.
“What’s wrong?” That deep voice was suddenly gentle.
She twisted her hands, then stilled them. She looked down at herself and was horrified to see that the modest white cotton blouse was fluttering over her left breast as her heart pounded with panic.
She looked at Bolt and at the rough-looking man, Barney.
“I can’t go back,” she whispered. “I brought that to you as—as payment, because they say you help women disappear. I had no idea that Chloe’s brother worked here, but I thought that if the Russian had information, it must be valuable.
I can’t go back. I can’t—" Her voice broke and she stopped talking, breathing shallowly in her panic. “I can’t go back. I can’t go through that again.
The Russian—he put a cloth over my face, poured water over the cloth and—"
The other man, Barney, all of a sudden stood up. “You were fucking waterboarded?” he roared and Consuelo shrank back.
She’d long learned to recognize men’s moods, she had an animal instinct for it. And this man had turned dangerous.
She stiffened, turned her face blank.
“Can it, Barney,” Bolt said. “You’re not helping. You’re scaring the lady.” He nodded at her. “Sorry about that. Barney’s not angry at you, he’s angry at a man who could waterboard a woman. So you’ll have to excuse him, ma’am.”
Consuelo blushed. She hadn’t blushed since she was eight years old and found barefoot and hungry scrounging in a heap of garbage in Tijuana.