by Ryan Schow
“I should have called,” he said.
“Did you find the girl?” Katryna asked.
“I have a lead I can follow, but I haven’t found her yet.”
“Kofi gets paid when you find her,” she said, almost like she expected her helping him would have cracked the case. It didn’t, but it definitely helped.
“Is it money?” he asked.
The look in her eyes affirmed it. He pulled out some of the cash he had, peeled off a few bills for her, the equivalent of a thousand dollars, and said, “For the burden I’ve brought to you.”
She took the money, grateful, then pulled him into a hug and said, “You don’t know what this means to us.”
He smiled, but inside his heart ached. If he gave her a million dollars, two million dollars, it would not be enough to assuage the guilt steadily tainting his soul. He tried to shake these kinds of thoughts loose and focus on more pressing issues. The most important issue being his need for sleep.
“I’m going to turn in early if that’s alright,” he said.
“You okay?” Kofi asked coming inside.
He reeked of cigarette smoke and body odor. Looking down, seeing the shopping bags filled with men’s clothing, he said nothing. Atlas saw it, though. The look of a man who felt less than.
“I’m good. We have a lead on Vanko. And it turns out Dasha is a mean motherfu—” he started to say but stopped because he didn’t want to curse in front of Maxim.
“I get it,” Kofi said, unconcerned.
Atlas relayed the more important, less scandalous details of the day. Although his and Cira’s outing was productive, he wanted this over as quickly as he could. Every minute to Kaylee would feel eons-long under the naked, sweaty body of a desperate john.
For a brief, horrible second, he realized that an entire day was ten men to her. His insides churned, his face feeling flushed, like he was going to vomit. Couldn’t he do something now? He had to! Then again, what he was doing to meet Vanko wasn’t something you could rush. There was artistry in not-forcing an outcome.
Worse than Kaylee’s predicament, Atlas began to worry that Vanko’s people would be checking up on him, running his background, trying to determine if he was going to be a problem. When his lie about being in the UFC was discovered, when it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, would they ditch him, confront him, or worse? All he could do was take it one day at a time. And right now, the day was done and he needed rest for tomorrow.
With nothing left to say and his eyelids bobbing, he thanked both Katryna and Kofi for their hospitality, then picked up his clothes and retired to his and Maxim’s room for the night.
After brushing his teeth, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks, then slipped out of his pants and his shirt and crawled into bed. Curling up so his feet weren’t knocking the metal end of the bed frame, he closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep. If there was one thing he’d learned to do in prison, it was sleep the hours away.
Now in Ukraine, in this twin-sized bed, he just wanted to give his body a chance to recover. The last thing he expected, however, was to be awakened in the middle of the night with the barrel of a gun pressed against his eyeball and some meat-head telling him to be quiet or the gun would get loud. But that was what was about to happen, so yeah, things were about to go sideways.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ATLAS HARGROVE
The pain of something digging into his left eye, and his inability to open it, meant he was in trouble. He worked his good eye open, saw the shadow of a very big man standing over him in the dark.
“Shhh,” the man said, so he said nothing. “You are looking for Dasha, yes?”
“Who?” Atlas asked, coming from that awkward place of both being asleep and having fresh adrenaline pumping into your bloodstream.
“You asked about Dasha.”
“Oh, yes,” he said.
“I’m Dasha, what do you want?”
“You’re not him,” Atlas said. “Which means you’re ruining my beauty sleep.”
“We’re all Dasha,” the beast of a man said, “which is how we protect and insulate Dasha.”
“I was told I could get a girl,” he whispered, trying not to wake Maxim. “I’m a friend of Jasha Stasevich, from Saint Petersburg. He said if I was ever in town, I should look him up.”
“What is your friend’s name?”
“Jasha Stasevich. He’s friends with Oleg Igorevich. You know, lots of girls, big house, a handful of guards?”
“Ah yeah, Oleg. Follow us.”
The man with the gun, and his partner, walked him out of the apartment quietly. Atlas was wearing nothing but briefs. They took him outside, into the cold, and then they looked at him.
“This is not what I expected when I asked about Dasha,” Atlas said.
“We work differently than you do in Belarus.”
“In that case, I didn’t ask about Dasha, and I think I want to go back to bed.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” the armed man said.
They walked Atlas to a car—the one that had been following him—and put him in the back seat. The gunman’s buddy slid in beside him, jammed a pistol in Atlas’s side. On closer inspection, these were definitely the two clowns he had seen coming back from Ibiza Beach Club and at Afina this afternoon. The guy with the gun said, “What kind of girl you like?” to which Atlas replied, “The old ones are uninteresting. Younger is better.”
Both men laughed under their breath. From the front seat, the gunman said, “I hear that all the time.”
“When you say old,” the other asked, his weapon relaxing a bit in Atlas’s side, “how old are you referring to?”
“Eighteen seems too old to me by a few years.”
“What would be too young?”
“Thirteen?”
“You like to see their growing boobs, then?” the gunman asked.
Atlas swallowed hard, casually wiped a slick of sweat from his brow, and said, “At the very least.” Talk like this made him want to puke.
“We have lots of girls like that.”
“No blonds,” Atlas said, shaking his hand. “I’ve had my fill of them.”
“You like black girls, Asian girls, African girls?”
“I like brunettes, Eastern European or American,” Atlas said, “if you have them. But I don’t know why we’re talking about this. I don’t have my wallet, and I’m hardly presentable as a suitor, much less comfortable.”
“You are a man of distinction, I see,” one of them said, the line cheesy and transparent. “You keep a fine company of women around you.”
“Except when he sleeps in rooms with little boys,” the other said with laughter in his voice. Atlas didn’t find this funny, but the gunman did, and that was telling in itself.
He decided he shouldn’t say anything else, because if they were taking him to the girls and he had to run a rescue op in his undies, then there was nothing one could say to make that bitter pill go down smooth. But if they were just keeping him calm while they escorted him to a kill box, then he needed to come up with a plan. Unfortunately, he had no suitable weapons with which to execute such a plan.
They pulled up to the outskirts of Odessa, near a shipping yard. He got out of the car, stepped on bare dirt with lots of little pebbles. The night was cold, the air smelled of the ocean, and he realized if they wanted him dead, he was dead. He’d put up a fight, for sure, but it wasn’t that time. Not yet.
Instead, they ushered him into a warehouse, then walked him inside to where there were dozens of girls in cages. In that moment of horror, he was struck with something hard enough to knock him out.
Sometime later, he woke up naked with his wrists and ankles bound. He’d been beaten while he was unconscious. Was that so he wouldn’t fight back, or so he’d hurt when he woke and be unable to fight then? Either way, he was in a dark room and his body ached all over.
“Ah, you are awake,” the voice said. Someone had been standing in the
corner of the dark cell-like room, using silence and the shadows to conceal himself.
“Where am I?”
“Right where you need to be,” the man said. “Are you hungry?”
“Starved,” he lied.
The man knocked on the heavy wooden door. A moment later it opened, and in the light, he could see the man’s silhouette. He was maybe six feet tall with a thick head of dirty-blond hair, a rough beard, and a decent build. He looked like something between a Russian playboy and a mafia hitman. When he left, the cell was quiet again. Deathly quiet.
Just as he was acclimating to the dark, the overhead lights snapped on—bright lights and a heat lamp. He was cold, so he didn’t mind the heat. But soon he’d be cooking. Rather than lament the situation, he tried to enjoy the cool air before it started to feel like an oven.
When the door opened, the same man who had been in the cell with him earlier brought Atlas a plate of food. On the plate were a perfectly cooked steak, steamed broccoli, and a baked potato with all the Russian fixings. He set the food down just out of reach. Atlas was chained to the wall like a rabid dog, one his owner couldn’t trust.
He tried to reach for it, even though he knew it was not to be, and he pulled up short by an inch. He stretched his fingers out, but it was still not enough.
“The way it smells just makes your mouth water, right?” the blond man said. Even in the bright lights, Atlas could see steam lifting off the broccoli and the potato, and he could smell the steak. It was heaven incarnate, but because he could not eat it, the meal was also hell.
The man sat down before the plate, then without a word, he proceeded to eat the entire meal, looking at Atlas through most of it.
“Is it warm in here, or am I just full?” he asked.
“You’re just full.”
The man stood up, burped, then squeezed out a sideways fart. When he looked down at Atlas, something in his expression changed and he started to beat on Atlas in ways he’d never been beaten on before. At some point, he passed out. When he woke, the air around him had a distinct fecal smell to it. The lights were still on, but the dinner plate was finally within reach. Rather than a steak and veggies, however, he’d been left a slick, long turd, one pushed onto the ivory-colored dinnerware solely for his benefit.
He turned and vomited. Then he saw that his underwear had been taken off him and he was naked. As he sat there tasting blood, his pain renewed, not sure what was next to come, he realized he should have been less curious, more apprehensive. Of course, if he succeeded in finding Kaylee, he’d go back to prison, but if he failed, he’d be in another kind of prison, maybe dead. Either way, he was incarcerated. Resigned to the fact that he could solve nothing in that moment, he closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off to sleep. Despite the pain, the warmth from the heat lamps, and buckets of sweat being drawn from his body, he eventually managed to fall asleep. He wasn’t sure how many minutes or hours had passed, but a heavy clacking sound shook him from his rest. He opened his eyes, say up halfway. He expected another beating. But the loud snapping sound was just the sound of the lights switching off. Soon he would be shivering. He closed his eyes again and fell back asleep.
Atlas’s dreams were the kind that left you in states of disarray, even frustrated rage; they were cut short, however, by the very distant sounds of things around his wrist clicking open. A fist, or a foot, smashed into his face, rattling his brain. He opened his eyes to the two men from before, the two idiots who’d brought him there.
“It turns out all the girls had dates, so we’re hoping a strapping UFC fighter like you appreciated your meal. That’s on us, by the way.”
“It was fantastic,” he said, barely able to hold his head up.
The two men walked him past all the girls in cages, out into broad daylight, then threw him into the trunk of the car. It was dark, tight-quartered, and hard things were jammed into his spine, his knees, the back of his head. Each bump felt like he was being tapped with a ball-peen hammer. If there was a silver lining, though, it was that he had seen an address and street name. Of course, this information only mattered if the two morons spared his life. Were they going to kill him? He felt like they were. For some unexpected reason, he wasn’t opposed to a quick ending, if it came to that. Dying so far from home and being properly disposed of meant he’d no longer disgrace what was left of his family. Did he really want to die, though? He couldn’t be sure. That was why he closed his eyes and said a short prayer to the big man above.
“Lord, please guide me into this troubling time with the strength to see it through, for the wicked things I’ve done have surely brought me here, to this awful place, and I accept whatever punishment you see fit.”
A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped, a car door opened and a car door closed. When the trunk lid opened, the daylight stung his eyes. Rough hands dragged him out of the car, pitched him to the asphalt ground. There he curled up, waiting for the kicks, for the bullet. Instead, the footfalls of the two men leaving confused him. A car door opened, a car door shut, then the car started up again, clunked into gear and drove off.
When he opened his eyes, he realized he was out in front of Kofi’s place with a whole new set of complications. It was a busy morning, and he was a naked foreigner with hundreds of yards between him and Kofi’s apartment…where Kofi, Katryna, and Maxim were sure to see his state of undress and not recover from such a sight.
A man standing near him, along with several other bystanders, said, “Are you okay? Because you don’t look like you’re okay.”
He nodded his head, staying curled. The man pulled a newspaper from under his arm, offered it to him.
“Thank you,” he said, taking it and standing up.
He could only cover his privates up front unless he split the newspaper, which he could do with no grace. He did it anyway, then made his way up to the apartments, where he knocked and waited.
When the door opened, it was Katryna, who looked him over and gasped.
“Your face,” she said.
He felt the lumps where he’d been hit, and for the first time, he looked down and saw all the bruising on his body, too. All less-than-subtle reminders not to ask about Dasha anymore.
She hustled him inside and said, “Let’s get you some clothes and look you over. Let me call Kofi first. He’s worried about you.”
“Is Maxim okay?” he asked.
“He’s scared, but he seems to be okay.”
The boy popped his head out from around the corner. “Hey, buddy,” Atlas said. “I’m okay, are you?”
He pulled his head back, not wanting to talk to Atlas, or see his condition. In the bathroom, he looked at his body, saw how bad of shape he was in, and blanched. He looked like a rolled bum.
In the doorway, Katryna appeared with a new package of underwear he’d bought on his excursion to Afina yesterday.
“Can you set them on the counter?” he asked, still holding the newspaper in place. She did just that. “Is there any hot water left?”
She slowly shook her head, then said, “But the cold water might feel good on those bumps and bruises.”
He stood under the cold water until he began to shiver. For whatever reason, it made him feel better. He hurt, but things inside him started to change. He found himself being not just inconvenienced by this whole thing, but mighty pissed off. Like he could kill some people for what they had done to him.
When he walked out into the kitchen, he saw a bald girl with an empty expression and the same clothes he’d seen her in last.
“You,” he said.
Cira walked out of the bedroom and said, “Good God,” to his appearance. He was in fresh briefs and a pair of jeans.
She looked him over, then touched his wounds and said, “Does it hurt?”
“Do bears dump in the woods?”
“Who did this to you?” she asked. “Vanko or Dasha?”
“Dasha.”
“Did you get any intel during your brief st
ay?”
“I don’t know, maybe enough.”
“You don’t know, or it was enough?” Cira asked, confused.
“What I got was really, really mad,” he said with a darker tenor to his voice, “and that’s enough to make me want to gut these pricks. Whether we find Kaylee or not, I’m going to settle this score, and I’m going to settle it with blood.”
“Well, you won’t be doing it here,” Cira told him. “Get your things, you’re staying with me at the Continental.”
“What changed?” he asked, thinking there were more than a few things that had changed.
“Maxim,” Katryna said.
At that, he nodded his head, not just in understanding but in agreement.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ATLAS HARGROVE
That night, outside the Continental, Atlas waited for Zoya to pick him up. When the beautiful Maybach arrived, and a brunette (who looked a lot like the photo of Ruslana) rolled down the window, he found he’d stopped breathing and blinking altogether. At that moment, he was a thirteen-year-old boy seeing the most beautiful woman in the world for the very first time.
“Aleksander?” she asked.
He nodded, got in. He sat next to Ruslana, who sat across from Zoya. The blond offered him a champagne flute, which he took less than gracefully.
“What happened to your face?” Zoya asked.
“Training for a fight.”
Ruslana said, “For the UFC?”
“Exactly.”
“The Ultimate Fighting Championship?”
“Sort of, but not all the way. It’s the Unlimited Fighting Competition.”
“What’s that?” Zoya asked, expecting a different answer.
“It’s an endurance event where they line up men to fight you and you have to outlast your opponents. Sometimes we fight for an hour or two. Sometimes it’s just a few minutes.”