Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Kill File Extract
Copyright
For Bryon
///1
Blunt Knuckles and Shaved Heads
It’s not easy to find a nice, quiet spot to torture someone in L.A.
Most of the apartments are cheaply built, with thin walls and neighbors stacked right on top of each other, so the noise carries and there are always plenty of people around to complain. Same goes for the hotels, and even the worst rent-by-the-hour dives have security cameras and require credit cards, which leaves a nice trail for the police when the bodies turn up. Storage units have thick concrete walls and 24-7 access, but random witnesses could show up at any moment.
But L.A. does have a regular supply of people falling off the treadmill of the California dream, failing to make it big and make their payments. This means a lot of foreclosures and vacant homes. A smart psychopath will keep a list of ones out in the canyons, or way off the main roads in the Valley, where the neighbors are likely to think that the screams are just a funny echo from someone’s TV.
This is why I’m on my knees in the bottom of an empty pool somewhere up in the hills while a Russian carefully unpacks a red toolbox.
He takes out a cordless power drill and tests the trigger. He frowns at the noise it makes and slaps in a fresh battery. Then he tries it again and smiles, and begins laying out a selection of drill bits, starting with one that looks like it’s meant to carve a hole in concrete.
I don’t know for sure. I’m not much of a DIY guy.
My client is next to me. Nik. Short for Nikolai. Like me, he’s on his knees, hands tied behind his back.
His dad is a Russian billionaire, with interests in oil and gas and commodities and finance. His youngest child, Nikolai, however, wants to be in the movies. So his father tucked a couple million for milk money into Nik’s black leather jacket and sent him to Los Angeles. And then he got on the phone and hired me to look after him.
You could argue I’m not doing a great job.
Before tonight, I escorted Nik to a few meetings, mostly with a few indie producers who look at him and see dollar signs dancing around him. (Seriously. It’s like in a cartoon.) But Nik has spent more time chasing women than making deals. During a peek inside his head, I saw that he’s actually got a list of famous targets in a file on his laptop, with pictures of his favorites. We spent most of his time and his father’s money in clubs, looking for Scarlett Johansson. He never met her, but he was able to find plenty of acceptable replacements. Most of the time, I just stood nearby as he sat at a VIP table, dry-humping the leg of any actress/model/whatever willing to put up with him.
He liked to play the hard man. He thickened his accent whenever anyone asked about the Russian Mafiya. In reality, Nik had never actually seen a gangster outside of a movie.
Until tonight, that is.
To be honest, babysitting Nik is beneath my skill set. But I’m just back from an extended vacation, and I need to remind the One Percent that they can depend on me to clean up after them again. I thought Nik would be an easy job, unchallenging and uneventful.
Maybe that’s why I made a rookie mistake and left him alone in the back room of a strip club with the two dancers earlier. They were both Russian as well, talking a mile a minute in their native tongue, and Nik seemed happy. He told me to fuck off, and I was all too happy to comply. I scanned both of the women and they had nothing but indecent intentions toward him. Visions of a threesome were dancing in his brain. Seemed safe enough if he wore a condom.
I stood outside for a good long while, listening to the thumping bass of the strip club and the thoughts of the people nearby—dull lust from the patrons, mostly boredom from the dancers. Nik and the women were out of my range. I thought I was giving him his privacy. I also didn’t really want the image of a strip-club hand job in my head.
After about thirty minutes, Nik hadn’t emerged from the VIP area. Neither had the dancers. That was much longer than Nik had lasted in the past.
I went looking for them, but it was already too late. The bouncer stationed at the back door told me they’d left almost immediately.
Little bastard had ditched me. He probably felt pretty smart, getting away from his nanny. But I was fine with calling it an early night. I planned to get some sleep and then find him again in the morning.
I was halfway back to my hotel when my phone rang.
It was a voice with a Russian accent, but it wasn’t Nik.
I got an address and instructions to bring a substantial amount of cash in a duffel bag.
I didn’t have the cash, and I wasn’t about to call Nik’s dad and tell him I lost his son. I went to the address anyway.
A bunch of men with blunt knuckles and shaved heads grabbed me as soon as I pulled up in my car. They looked me up and down, checked out my suit and my shoes. They searched me for weapons. Found none. One called me a suka, and they all laughed. I smiled and pretended not to know what it meant.
They asked for the money. I told them I didn’t have it. So they tied me up and put me in the empty pool with Nik.
I picked up the events of the last couple of hours from his memory easily. One of the strippers suggested they meet up with friends at a bar. Her friends turned out to be these guys. Nik thought they were cool. He finally got to meet real gangsters. He paid for their drinks, listened to their stories of murder and dismemberment with wide eyes, and talked about making a movie about them.
Then they walked out to the parking lot, where Nik’s new friends clubbed him with pistols and threw him into the back of a black Range Rover.
I can see the mistake like neon, blazing in the front of Nik’s head.
He mentioned his father’s name.
His dad is an authentic Russian tyrant: Sergei Denisovich crawled out of the KGB at the end of the Cold War and grabbed whatever he could when Russia collapsed. He moves oil and commodities and currency around the globe now, but there is murder and blood behind him. These guys are fresh enough from the old country to know his story, and stupid enough to figure that he’ll pay big money for Nik.
Now every time the goon takes something new from the toolbox, Nik makes a little noise like a dog’s squeaky toy.
Then the alpha male of this little pack shows up.
He walks down the steps into the empty pool slowly, glaring at both of us the entire time. He’s milking the moment for all the drama it’s worth. It seems to take him an hour.
I read him in a split second. His name is Vasily. He got called out from his cheap rental above West Hollywood by his thugs. At first he was annoyed, but then he heard the name of Nik’s dad, and he got excited. He decided he had to be here in person.
Vasily stands in front of us for a long time before he speaks. He’s covered in muscle and tattoos, but he’s got a weak chin. It looks like he’s swallowed half his neck. Unlike the other thugs, h
e’s wearing an almost-new Hugo Boss. He’s been watching a lot of TV lately, and he thinks this makes him look like a real gangster. But he didn’t bother to get it tailored after he took it off the rack, so the sleeves come down past his fingers and he’s got the pants hiked up almost to his sternum.
All of this makes it difficult to take him seriously, despite the gun in his hand.
“Where’s the money?” he asks quietly.
He tries to come across with an air of indifferent menace—he’s thinking of De Niro and Pacino in Heat—but I can tell that he’s dancing inside. Nik’s dad should be good for at least 500K. That would be enough to get him out of his crappy apartment. Maybe even someplace on the Westside.
He’s so far out of his league here, I can’t resist messing with him. “Left it in my other pants,” I say.
Vasily doesn’t take that well. He scowls. That’s enough to set Nik babbling in Russian and in English. He promises his father will get the money. He barely knows me, I’m just a stupid bodyguard, Nik can get the money, he swears, just don’t hurt him.
Vasily doesn’t speak. He kneels down so he’s face-to-face with both of us. Nik shuts up. Vasily nods at one of his guys, who starts taking a video with his phone. Then he nods at the other guy, the one with the tools.
“I think we take a few chunks off you,” he says to Nik, in Russian, ignoring me now. “We’ll send the pictures to your father. And then we see how much you are worth to him.”
The goon with the tools leans forward. He’s got a pair of pliers in his hand.
He’ll do it too. I can see it in his brain. These guys have all learned the thug’s secret of success: always be willing to go too far.
So I have to be a little careful here. I clear my throat and speak directly to Vasily.
“Look. I know what you’ve got planned. You think you just found a winning lottery ticket. A soft kid with a lot of cash. But see, here’s where we have a problem. I’m being paid to keep him alive and in one piece. So I tell you what. You leave now, quietly, and I’ll let you live.”
Vasily cracks a smile as he looks at me, tied up and on my knees, surrounded by big guys with guns. He finds it funny. Or at least it scrapes at the part of him where normal people keep their sense of humor.
He turns his snake-eyed glare on me. “Babysitter. Keep sitting. We’ll get to you.”
I could have ended this long before now. But I figured Nik needed a little lesson: gangsters are cool only on-screen. The truth is, people like this are not actually capable of the kinds of operatic heights of passion and feeling you see on HBO. They muddle around in the midranges, always looking for the shortcut and the easy way out. That’s what makes them dangerous. They will take almost any chance because they never think it through all the way to the end.
Nik is ready to leap out of his own skin, he’s so scared. I think he’s over his crush on the Mafiya. And his terror is making my headache even worse. It’s time to earn my ridiculous paycheck.
“Excuse me,” I say loudly. “Did any of you wonder how much you were going to get from Vasily for this? Or is he going to screw you all like he did on the pot shop?”
It’s like a needle drag in the middle of a song. Everyone stops, thrown off the rhythm for a moment.
This is a sore spot. They hit a medical marijuana dispensary a few months ago—those places are full of cash, since no credit-card company or bank will work with them—and it turned into a clusterfuck. They barely got away before the cops arrived, and had to split up. Vasily had the bag with the cash, and he said they managed to steal only a couple thousand.
But I know the truth because I saw it inside Vasily’s skull.
“He took home close to twelve grand. What did he tell you?” I say.
Vasily tells me to shut up, but they all start to talk at once. A lot of Russian begins spitting through the air.
Vasily has to turn away from me and Nik to answer his crew. He tells them I’m lying. But the dynamic in the pool has shifted. Vasily is losing control of the situation.
I decide to help it along.
“Hey, which one of you is Alexei?” I ask, shouting to be heard.
The guy named Alexei thinks,
So I look right at him when I say, “Did you know Vasily here fucked your girlfriend?”
I know he doesn’t. I knew it when I took the fact out of Vasily’s memories.
But the look of surprise on Alexei’s face is so pronounced that it almost makes me laugh.
He turns to Vasily, who’s too shocked to hide his own expression, and that’s all the confirmation he needs. He begins stalking across the pool, murder in his eyes. “Vy skazali, chto vy byli prosto khoroshimi druz’yami!”
Vasily raises his gun. Again, operating on instinct. He sees the threat, and he responds.
But he’s just pulled a gun on one of his own. The thugs all get quiet then. They watch and they wait. Suddenly it’s not us against them. It’s every man for himself.
Not that it takes much of a push. There’s really no such thing as honor among thieves.
“Don’t feel too special, Alexei. You’re not the only one,” I say.
Vasily turns and looks at me, mouth open wide. He’s still baffled, rather than scared. He has no idea how I know this. But he figures that if he shuts me up, he can still salvage a payoff from this mess.
He pivots to bring the gun around at me.
Playtime is over.
I think hard, and I find a memory of a grandfather who dropped dead of a massive coronary right in front of Vasily when he was five. It left an impression. Vasily doesn’t even smoke now. He eats lean meats and spends a lot of time doing cardio.
So I push into his head and light up the amygdala region of his brain. That’s the part that controls breathing, heart rate, and the fight-or-flight response. He’s suddenly drowning in his own adrenaline. His pulse is hammering behind his ears. His chest tightens. He can’t breathe.
He immediately thinks he’s dying. He drops the gun and clutches at his heart as he falls to his knees.
The others see this and freeze in place. They’re already agitated and angry. Terrified is an easy push from there. I hit them, one by one, fast as I can, with pure fear. Their adrenaline spikes, their limbs feel numb, and their guts turn to water.
They’re not sure why, but they all feel like they’d be a lot safer many miles away from me. Only stubbornness and inertia keep them from running for their lives.
So I concentrate and hit Vasily again. I take a memory of being stabbed in the arm—what can I say, I’ve had an interesting career—and transfer it over to him. It’s close enough to the pain of a real heart attack that he screams out loud.
Then I look around the pool, and in the most demonic voice I can manage, I say:
“Run.”
That does it. Vasily’s crew starts sprinting. I’m going to pay for all of this later, but it’s almost worth it to watch them struggle over the sides of the pool and across the dead lawn.
Vasily is huddled in a ball, trembling. I roll off my knees and onto my back, then bring my bound hands under my legs to get them in front of me. I pick one of the blades from the toolbox and slice away the ropes on my wrists.
I cut Nik free.
“And this,” I tell him. “is what happens when you wander off on your own. I won’t tell your father if you don’t. Deal?”
He looks almost as scared of me as the guys who just left were.
“Magic,” I tell him. “Come on. Let’s go.”
We walk past Vasily, who’s still in a heap, eyes shut tight, hugging himself like he’s afraid something vital will fall out.
I could kick him while he’s down, but honestly, there’s no point.
He was never really a threat to me. He’s barely even the same species.
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///2
Not as Much Fun as You’d Think
Being inside a club in Los Angeles is like wading in a pool of toxic waste, even for someone who doesn’t have my particular talent. On the surface, the people are all beautiful and bored, doing their best to keep their pretty faces as blank and still as statues because, in this city, showing emotion really does cost money.
But inside, their minds are churning.
It gives me a headache. Everything gives me a headache.
But Nik is in heaven. He needed a drink after his ordeal in the pool, and so I let him drag us to this after-hours place. Then he found two actual porn stars near the bar, and immediately invited them to his table.
Now they are all drinking gold-infused vodka as he describes his favorite scenes with them. It should be graphic and tasteless, but the women find his overwhelming enthusiasm and thick accent genuinely charming. Nik is happier than I’ve ever seen him. He’s finally found people whose work he respects.
Something pings my radar, and I look around. It’s not another threat to Nikolai. It doesn’t feel like anger or hostile intent. Someone in the club recognizes me. Her focus on me raises thoughts out of the background noise.
I pick her out of the crowd a second later as she makes her way over to me.
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