by Seth Harwood
The guard slumps to the ground against the wall and holds his hands above his head. “Please do not to shoot.”
And then Jack hears a quiet woman’s voice saying something in another language, a sound like Russian. “Hello?” he says.
“You see someone, you shoot,” Shaw tells him.
She steps through the doorway and into the room, a tall pale girl of sixteen or seventeen wearing only a lacy black negligee.
“Relax, Alvin,” Jack says. “It’s just one of the girls.”
“You be sure that’s all it is, Palms.”
Jack goes to the girl. She’s thin and pale like the others, but with long, straight blond hair and high cheekbones.
“Hello?” she says when she sees Jack. She tries to force a smile, the look of a girl who’s happy to see him, but Jack can see through it. He knows she’s scared, a girl too many miles from home, in a city she doesn’t know, a house she’s probably not allowed to leave except when she’s on a call, and he sees the pain in her eyes, pain and maybe a tiny shred of hope that what she’s just heard—the shooting and the yelling—means something might be changing, that this night might lead to a better life for her.
Jack holds up his hand for the girl to come no farther. She remains beyond the tattered curtains, her hands above her shoulders, the negligee covering only the very tops of her thighs.
“This is it,” the guard says, pointing to his dead friend. “No one but Nathaniel and me.” Jack’s never heard of a Russian guy named Nathaniel, but he’s not going to stop this guy’s story and ask about that. Nathaniel’s dead now anyway.
“We are only ones left. We have small duty.”
“Where’s Akakievich?”
The guy shakes his head. “He is not here. He leave tonight to Nathaniel and to me. We the watch out now. I am Isaak.”
“And?” Shaw raises his voice, losing patience with this guy.
“And?”
Jack looks away as he sees Shaw hit the guard again. He hears the sound of a fist hitting raw meat.
Jack takes another look at the girl and lowers his AK; it feels ridiculous to hold a gun like this on a girl. He waves for her to lower her hands, but she won’t; she keeps them held high. Jack sees the head of a second girl stick out of a room down the hall behind the blond. She says something to the blond, and in a soft voice, the first girl tells her to wait, says something in Russian that makes the other girl disappear inside. Before she disappears, though, the girl takes one look into the front room, directly at Jack. There’s no hope in this girl’s face, no fake smile, just fear.
Shaw barks at the guard, “Where’s Alexi?”
Isaak frowns; he shakes his head, moving his chin from shoulder to shoulder.
Shaw punches the guard in the face twice, hard. Blood spurts from his nose, even more than before. From outside the house, Jack hears sirens: police.
“There’s no one else here?” Shaw asks.
Isaak shakes his head. “No. It is just me and the girls.”
Jack asks, “How many girls?” raising his voice to be heard in the next room.
The guard stops shaking his head. He raises his upper lip, what’s left of it, and runs a bloody tongue across the front of his teeth. He finds the gap in the middle of the row, the place where Jack can see Shaw has knocked out or broken a tooth or two. Looking down, he says softly, “There are now only five.”
44
“What the fuck?” Shaw says. “You mean all this shit’s come down for five girls?”
“There were more. Eight of the most beautiful girls. Now we have less.”
Jack whistles. The prices must be as high as he’d been led to believe, the clientele so high-level he’s surprised Shaw got in the door.
“This is private club,” Isaak continues. “Very exclusive.”
The pale blond girl stands with her hands up. There she is: a human being with a definite price. The idea is so pre–Civil War that Jack feels like he’s in a time warp. Still, if Gannon was right about San Francisco, if sex slavery is a part of the city, it didn’t begin and won’t end with Akakievich.
“Whose is she?” Shaw points to the girl.
“No.” Isaak shrugs, shakes his head. He makes a clicking sound with his tongue. Jack can’t tell whether the noise is intended to mean they’re way off, or if it’s just a noise this guy’s broken mouth makes now. He waves a finger at them, and Jack figures this means the sound was the first. “These girls, even I do not know. Alexi send them out. We do not know.”
“Where’s your list?”
Isaak shakes his head, a small gesture, his chin barely moving from side to side. “No list. Only Alexi know. Alexi and André.”
Jack comes over to the small foyer. “Who killed the other three girls?”
“Killed?” Isaak looks puzzled. “No girls.”
“Where did the other three go?”
“Just they leave. Left here.”
Jack reaches out to Shaw’s arm, lowers the gun. “Relax, big guy. Sounds like we know more about this than he does. Plus, we can show the girls pics to get their Johns later.”
At that moment, Jack hears a floorboard creak in the living room near what’s left of the curtains; he sees a dark figure as he turns and drops into a crouch with the Kalashnikov pointed into the room. A dark-clothed man stumbles in, a heavy machine gun raised in front of him. He wears a suit, no tie. Beneath his ashen face, his shirt is red with blood, darkest around his left shoulder. The gun’s pointed at the front of the house, the covered windows to the right of Jack’s position.
“What you want me to do?” Jack asks Shaw. He steadies his crouch, holding the weapon with one knee on the floor and the other knee raised, supporting his elbow. “This guy’s in trouble already.”
The man makes a noise: not a word, but something Jack hears as an appeal. There’s something about his face Jack recognizes, something familiar.
“That’s the fuck from the Ford at the café,” Shaw says. “I already shot that dude.” He raises his gun and shoots him again, hitting the other shoulder. The guy staggers back and keeps his balance like a mummy in an old movie, lowering his gun as he does so. Then, moving slowly, he starts raising the machine gun, lifting the barrel and swinging it toward Jack, his finger on the trigger.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Shaw shoots him again, this time in the middle of the chest. The guy wheezes but keeps raising the gun. “Fuck is wrong with this asshole?”
Jack raises the Kalashnikov and aims it right at the guy’s face. He looks almost like he’s dead already, like there’s no point shooting him anymore. But even now, his gray arms keep lifting the machine gun.
“Fuck,” Shaw says. “Shoot his ass, Jack. Carve him up!”
Jack holds the Kalashnikov with both hands, sees the guy’s face at the other end of the barrel, his eyes practically closed. There’s a trickle of blood at his temple.
The guy’s less than fifteen feet away. Jack touches the trigger. The cold metal is a foreign feeling, and Jack knows that the last person to touch it is dead now. He sights on the guy’s face and sees Freeman’s: the look of pain that he had in the hotel and his resigned emptiness at the hospital; Jack sees the face of the Russian he shot outside the café, the last look in his eyes after Jack shot him again; he sees the face of the girl, the blond who’s moved to the side of the room now, crouching into the corner with her hands over her face, shaking in fear; and finally he sees the guy, his eyes closed and his face drained of blood.
It’s one of the Suits from North Beach that first night, Jack realizes, the ones who tried to rough him up in the alley. This is the guy who first followed Jack, the one with the cell phone. Mr. Gray Suit.
Then his head shoots back at the same time that there is a loud explosion, and in a blur of red and white, part of his forehead comes apart before Jack’s eyes. The guy steps back, then falls down hard on his back, his gun pointed straight up into the air. He starts to fire, riddling the ceiling with bullets, sending white plaste
r and dust spraying into the room.
Jack closes his eyes, covers his head.
And then the shooting stops. When Jack uncovers his head, smoke fills the room—smoke and plaster dust.
“You freeze up on me like that again, and you’ll be the one I shoot.” Shaw’s voice is cold. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Shaw grab the Russian guard by his shirtfront and hit him hard again in the face with the heel of a gun, the Beretta this time.
“Oh!” The guy shoots both hands to his nose, holding the middle of his face. He starts yelling in Russian, screaming about what Shaw’s done.
In the hallway, a big piece of ceiling comes loose and falls onto Gray Suit, breaking in half when it hits him. The guy doesn’t move. If he feels anything, this piece of plaster isn’t enough to break into his awareness.
Jack looks around. He lowers the automatic rifle.
“You hear me? You want to get us killed?”
Jack thinks back to the guard he shot on the street, how he’d protected Shaw there, but he doesn’t say anything. “Yeah,” he says. “I hear you. Next time I shoot.”
The girl pokes her head up out of her hands and leans forward to see what’s left of the guy. She looks concerned, or worse. Jack realizes he wants this to be the start of the end of this life for her, wants her to be able to become something different. But what that is, he has no idea. Maybe she’ll wind up in the same state of flux he’s in.
Jack stands up and goes over to the body of the Russian. The gun still sticks up in the air, though now the guy’s chest and face are obscured by the plaster. Jack pulls at the gun, and for a second it’s stuck, then it comes free of the dead man’s fingers. He tosses it onto the ground toward the curtain.
The girl says something softly, whispers a name Jack can’t make out. Then she looks at Jack. He offers her his hand and helps her to stand up.
She says something else he can’t make out and pulls him toward the small opening in the wall.
Jack can’t resist following her out of the front room.
“Shaw,” he calls back. “This girl’s leading me somewhere. I think she wants to show me something.”
“Don’t go with her, Jack. We’ve got to get out of here.”
But it’s too late; the girl’s pulling Jack out of the room and into a dark hall. A small red bulb attached to the wall on Jack’s right spreads what little light it has to offer.
He wants to go with her and find the rest of these girls, find them and dress them and take them out of here, bring them to a shelter that can offer them some help, something that will help them make a new start in this world.
She turns, opens a black door Jack hadn’t noticed, and pulls him into a small dark room with dim red lights and taffeta curtains. Here, two girls sit on a bed staring at Jack, both in the same state of undress as the blond. She lets go of Jack’s hand and moves toward the wall to a dresser. He looks at the two other girls, tries telling them to stand up.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” he says. They don’t respond. “Help me explain to them,” he tells the blond.
He looks at her. She stands against the wall holding a small revolver in both hands, pointing it at Jack.
45
“No,” Jack says. He raises his hands and shakes his head in exaggerated motions—anything he can do to let her know he’s okay. He takes his hand off the handle of the Kalashnikov, holds it by the barrel as someone might hold a wooden walking stick.
“Palms!” Shaw calls from the front. “Where are you?”
“One minute!”
“Jack. Get your ass back out here.”
Jack stays where he is. “We’re here to help you.” He leans the gun against the wall, holds up both of his hands. “Help,” he says. “We help.”
The blond holds her gun on Jack. Jack hears a gunshot from the front, then a short scream. The girl looks puzzled—puzzled and concerned.
“You are police?”
This is when Jack starts to feel warm, really warm, and he notices the heater on the other side of the room: one of the electric ones with the bright red elements behind a grill. It makes sense, the girls in negligees like this.
The girl says something Jack doesn’t understand. “No,” he says, shaking his head again. “It’s all going to be okay.”
The girls’ faces are cold. They look at Jack like he’s only the latest in a long line of guards they’ve seen, guys with guns. They look on edge, frightened from the shots. They know some of the other girls aren’t around anymore.
The girl says something else, and from the front of the house, Jack hears a shot. Then another.
“Palms!”
Jack holds his hands up, looks down at the Kalashnikov. “In here,” he says.
Shaw knocks the door open and floods the entrance with his body. He holds the Glock pointed at the blond, looks at her and then back out into the hall. “Take the gun from her, Jack.”
“What, I—”
“Take the gun, Jack. These girls are more afraid of you than they are of these Russians. They think if they go with you, then anything can happen. If they stay here, at least it’s a known.”
Another series of shots comes from the front of the house.
“Do it!” Shaw yells. “We’re taking them out of here with us!”
Jack crouches as though he’s reaching for the Kalashnikov against the wall. The girl doesn’t know what to do with her gun now; she’s waving it back and forth between Shaw and Jack. Jack makes his move fast: stands and catches the girl at her wrists, pushing the gun up toward the ceiling. She lets go as soon as he gets both hands on the weapon.
“Come on,” Shaw says. “Get them out of here and into the hall.”
The girls seem to understand. They nod at Jack, and the two on the bed stand up. Jack looks down at the flimsy bedroom slippers on their feet. “Do you three have anything else you can wear?”
More shots come from the front of the house. “Jack. We got to get going. The SF blues are outside in heavy numbers. They’re going to surround this place.”
Shaw crouches, fires a few shots into the front room.
The blond girl moves toward Jack. His first thought is that she’s coming for the gun, but when she moves past him and follows Shaw into the hall, he sees she’s got other ideas.
“It will all be okay, ladies,” he says, though he’s not sure how he’ll guarantee that.
He follows Shaw and the girl down the hall, leading the last two girls. “Where are the rest of the women who live here?” he asks one.
She squints up her face, says something Jack can’t understand. In the front room, shots riddle the boarded front windows. Shaw is coming back toward Jack in a low crawl.
Jack drops low too; a fresh set of bullets tears through the wood on the far window. Shaw makes it to Jack and comes out of his crawl into a crouch facing back toward the front of the house.
Another set of gunshots comes through the windows, and Jack gets down next to Shaw. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says.
Shaw looks around them at the cramped hallway.
From outside, the unmistakable squawk of a police bullhorn is followed by a stern cop voice telling them that they should come out with their hands raised, that the police have the house surrounded.
Behind the house there’s got to be more houses; there’s no way the police can be all the way around. “How’d this fuck get in?” Jack nods toward the corpse under the white chunk of plaster.
“Fuck if I know,” Shaw says. “But we better find out, because we’re not going out the front. I’m not shooting any cops.”
The three girls watch. They’re agitated, standing on one foot and then the other. One of them says, “Police? You are not police?”
The blond puts her hand on Jack’s wrist.
“No?” she says.
Jack shakes his head. “No. Not police. We want to help you. Help. But first we need to get the fuck out of here.”
“Oh,�
�� she says. “You help?”
Jack nods. “We help. We help you.”
She starts back into the house, past Shaw and down the hall.
“Actually, I am a cop, in case you’ve forgotten,” Shaw says, but Jack cuts him off.
“Come on.”
As the blond goes down the hall, the other girls follow. Jack and Shaw bring up the rear, leaving the gunshots and the commands of the police at their backs. Along the hall are other doors with thin curtains covering them. The doors are very narrow, as if the rooms were designed to be small. Jack opens one to check for other girls, but the room is empty. Just a bed and a small shower in the corner.
“Come on, Jack.”
It’s warm in the house, warmer as they move down the hall. “Where are the other girls?”
Shaw shrugs. “Not here. We’ll have to find out later.”
The blond reaches a bookcase at the end of the hall. It’s been pushed out from the wall, and she slips behind it, out of sight. The other girls do the same. Shaw looks back, raises his eyebrows at Jack, and follows them.
Jack touches the books and realizes that they’re hollow cardboard fronts, that the bookcase is actually the front of a door that’s been left open. Behind it, he finds a narrow set of wooden stairs descending into an unfinished basement.
At the front of the house, a cop says through a megaphone that they’re ready to start coming inside.
Jack can see one of the girls at the bottom of the stairs, but not the others. He hears something loud slam against the front door of the house, the sound echoing down the hall.
“That’s our buddies,” Shaw says, already halfway down the creaky stairs. “You coming?”
Jack pulls the bookcase closed. He looks for and finds a handle on the basement side, pulls on it until he hears the door click shut, maybe locking behind them. Then he ducks his head to avoid the low ceiling and the spider webs, and starts down the stairs.
46
The basement is bare except for what you’d expect—a hot water heater, a furnace, a bunch of old furniture. But as the girls walk around to the back of the stairs, the three of them start screaming. Shaw grabs two of them and holds his hands over their mouths. Jack quiets the blond the same way. When he does, he sees what set them off.