The Wrong Girl (John Taylor Book 3)

by Travis Starnes

  “There’s a worse part?” Taylor asked in genuine surprise.

  “I know their security is just a shakedown, but even after all those payments we make to them, they still prey on us. One of our neighbors, his daughter was such a lovely, sweet girl. They took her. Of course, they denied it, but I saw her at their warehouse, for a time. They took her and sold her. We’ve never seen her again. My daughters are young now but in a few years . . . I just don’t know. We may have to just give up the land and move back to Czechoslovakia, poorer than when we left.”

  Taylor didn't say anything. He wanted to tell the man that, when he was done, they shouldn’t be in danger anymore, but that wasn’t something he could promise. If possible, he’d like to get both Kara and Mary Jane out without violence, although that seemed like a long shot. Even if he did somehow manage to wipe out the twenty or thirty guys he thought were going to be where he was going, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t move back in. The way Taylor understood the Bratva, this was just a small set up, not the whole body. More people could come in behind the men he removed, even if he removed them all.

  “I wish . . .”

  “I know,” Sebastian said.

  Their conversation was interrupted by his wife returning to the room, carrying a pot, trailed by the two small blond girls.

  “Ahh, let’s eat,” Sebastian said, standing and smiling.

  Taylor followed him to the table and, seeing their home and the small farm they lived on, he had no doubt these people lived near the bone. Sharing their meal with him would cost them, he was certain. But he was also certain that Sebastian wouldn’t listen to any of Taylor’s protests of why he couldn’t share their meal.

  Marta served the bowl in front of Taylor first, although the look on her face made it clear she wished he wasn’t there. She then served her husband, the two girls, one of whom was forced to sit on her mother's lap, since Taylor took one of the four chairs, and finally herself.

  The food was a simple stew, with root vegetables and a few pieces of meat, cooked in a lot of liquid, topped off with sparse seasoning. Considering the food that would keep into winter months, and how valuable sheep and milk cows would be, meat and other vegetables were probably not common stables for these people.

  “It’s very good,” Taylor said to Marta and received a snort instead.

  “You lie,” she said in Russian, getting a glaring from her husband, which she promptly ignored. “No, this man is here, eating our food, bringing danger here. You know what would happen if they found out we had a stranger here.”

  “They won’t find out,” Sebastian said. “He was completely hidden until we got to the house, and the weather was turning when I got him out. And why would they watch us.”

  “Maybe the men from Serpurtau . . .”

  “There are no more of the men in Serpurtau,” Sebastian said ominously.

  Taylor remained silent, watching the byplay.

  “What?”

  “They had decided they wanted twenty percent more for protection. I told them we didn’t have it, and they were showing me why I was wrong when John showed up. He freed me and killed them. All of them.”

  “And you brought him here!” she said, alarmed.

  “I would have been dead or beaten so badly I couldn’t work if John hadn’t shown up. And you know what twenty percent more would have cost us. That is a death sentence on its own.”

  “But when the men in Reuya find out!”

  “They won’t. In the morning, I’ll drop him on the other side of the mountain. And, if his plan goes right, there might not be any more men in Reuya.”

  “Sebastian,” Taylor said.

  “I know, you aren’t promising that, but it’s a chance we have to take. Marta, you know where things are going. We can’t continue living like this. If I can, even in a small way, make a change, I have to.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry I’ve brought danger to your family. And I can’t promise to change the situation here, but I will do my best that no one will ever know I was here. I don’t want to bring you any trouble.”

  “It’s too late for that,” she said, fire dancing in her eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling very well.”

  She stood, collected her bowl, and carried it into the kitchen. The girls looked at their mother then back at their father with worried expressions. He said something to them in Czech, and they returned to eating.

  “You said you were trying to get back a girl who was taken. What happened to her?”

  “She was taken from the United States, her and five other girls. Her mother hired me to come and find her daughter. I retrieved the other girls already, but the man in charge of the operation in Serpurtau took the girl I’m looking for with him.”

  “So you’re American?”

  “Yes, I’ve been told my accent stands out.”

  “Well, I too have an accent, so maybe that’s why I didn’t notice. So you are some type of policeman?”

  “Not really. I was a soldier for a long time before being . . . wounded, several years ago. I ended up helping someone, then ended up helping someone else, and before I knew it, I was making my living doing this.”

  “Helping people?”

  “Kind of. I’m not sure what I’d call my job since it wasn’t something I did on purpose, but instead it just kind of happened. I guess you’d say I’m a retrieval expert.”

  “So you get people who are missing back?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you’re very good at this?”

  “I’m OK. I’ve failed a few times . . .” Taylor started to say then dropped it. His track record was not something he liked to focus on. People who just looked at the numbers, always told him how impressed they were with his success rate, but Taylor could only see the faces of those he hadn’t managed to help. “I’m OK.”

  “You are better than OK, from what I saw in the warehouse.”

  “I had the element of surprise, which counts for a lot.”

  “Do you know how you’ll deal with the men in Reuya?”

  “Not particularly, not until I see how things are set up there. And even if I did, I’m not sure I should talk to you about it. The more you know, the more danger you and your family could be in.”

  Sebastian nodded but didn't say anything. Marta came back out and retrieved the girls, who had finished eating and took them toward the room on the other side of the house.

  “Well, the weather is picking up. I need to go check on the livestock, make sure they’re all undercover before it gets worse.”

  “I’ll help you,” Taylor said.

  “You don’t ha—”

  “I want to. Plus, sometimes some physical activity is just what a man needs.”

  Sebastian shrugged in understanding. Taylor followed him out the front door and around to the back of the house. The wind was blowing pretty hard now, and true to Sebastian’s prediction, it was difficult to see very far through the dense snow filling the air.

  A small barn and a pen sat behind the house, before the fields that currently lay barren under a white bed of snow. Once they got in the barn, they found the handful of sheep and two cows Sebastian owned, already moved there by his wife before they had arrived. They spent several minutes on each animal, checking to make sure it had fresh feed and water thawed enough to drink. They also checked all the doors and shutters, in case the snow got high enough to push through.

  Once they’d finished, it was late in the afternoon, and they had to plow through deep snow to the house. Had Sebastian not been right next to him, Taylor wasn't sure he could have found his way back to the house. He’d never seen a whiteout before, but it was obvious how appropriate the name was.

  It wasn’t evening yet when they got back inside, but Taylor was already beat. Marta never reappeared, nor did the girls, who probably stayed with their mother. He and Sebastian spent a few more hours, talking about things that didn’t touch on what Taylor was planning on doing. He told Sebastian abou
t his days in the army, and Sebastian talked about how, even in Prague, he’d wanted to be a farmer. As a young man, his grandfather had run a farm that had been in their family for generations, which had been lost during World War II. After the war, he’d had Sebastian’s father, and talked about having been a farmer. Stories that had been later passed on to Sebastian himself, and taken root.

  While his current situation wasn’t what he’d been thinking of, he admitted that the few years before the criminals had moved in and started shaking everyone down, had been his idea of a perfect life. Taylor couldn’t imagine it. He didn’t have much of an idea of what it was like being a farmer, but it definitely wasn’t the life he would have wanted for himself. But he couldn’t fault a man for his dreams.

  True to the farming life, Sebastian called it a night just after the sun went down. He brought out a thin blanket and was apologetic for putting Taylor on the couch, which Taylor didn’t mind. He’d slept in much worse places.

  Once Sebastian had excused himself to what Taylor assumed was the bedroom, he lay there, listening to the wind whistling outside, and tried to work out what tomorrow would bring. Of course, he couldn’t make any plans until he saw what, exactly, he was up against. As he drifted off, his brain started going through all the possibilities the two girls he’d lost would be facing, that held the promise of bad dreams.

  CHAPTER 14

  Taylor jerked awake, not fully remembering the dream that had plagued him, but the sweat that dripped off his face in the otherwise cold room told him it had been bad. He opened his eyes and found himself looking into the small eyes of a young child.

  “Hi,” Taylor said hoarsely through a dry throat.

  Her eyes got big, and she disappeared around the back of the couch, the sound of small feet telling of her continued dash for her parents' room. Taylor smiled to himself at the thought as he swung himself up and leaned forward, rubbing his face.

  “Do you always scream like that?” a voice said behind him.

  He sat and half-turned, seeing Marta in a tattered robe standing in the doorway, a small blond head peeking around her leg.

  “Not as much as I used to, but sometimes when things go wrong . . .”

  “What went wrong?” she asked, alarm creeping into her voice.

  “Nothing with you or your family, I promise. One of the people I’m going to Reuya to retrieve, I had and lost back to the men there. Even if I get her back, a few days in these men’s hands isn’t something I’d wish on anyone.”

  “But you’ve had these dreams before?”

  “Similar, yes.”

  “Well, you woke the children.”

  “I’m sorry. I should be gone today, and I promise not to bother you or your family again. I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”

  She glared for a minute, “The sun is coming up soon. I will make breakfast. The smell usually wakes Sebastian up. You two will need to clear the driveway so you can go. The earlier he drops you off, the less likely it is that someone will see him.”

  “Is there a shovel? I can go clear the driveway now.”

  “Inside the door of the barn.”

  Taylor got himself up, put his shoes back on, and headed outside. Light had just started to creep into the valley, washing everything in a deep blue instead of the black of night. Snow was no longer falling, but it was packed deep, and Taylor had to push himself hard to wade through the mass that had formed between the house and the barn, his legs getting wet and cold in the process. Thanks to his trip to the barn the day before, however, he found the shovel with ease.

  It was a lot more backbreaking than he had expected, pushing shovelful and shovelful of snow off the wide gravel driveway, making a path for Sebastian’s truck. Dawn had given way to the bright sun of early morning when Taylor looked up. A wide swath was cleared around the truck and a few feet back, but a lot of driveway was left to clear, and Taylor started to worry that the time this was going to take was going to push their departure much later than he’d been wanting.

  He finished the slow turn from looking at his handiwork when he caught sight of Sebastian, leaning on the wall by the front door, smiling at him.

  “I don’t know what you're smiling at,” Taylor said, “we have a lot more to clear before we can leave. Go grab a shovel and help me.”

  “Did Marta put you up to this?” the man asked, not moving.

  “Yeah, she said the driveway needed to be cleared before we could leave.”

  Taylor was surprised when Sebastian laughed, bending at the waist, and hitting his knee.

  “I’m not sure what’s funny about that,” Taylor said, annoyance creeping into his voice.

  “I think Marta put one over on you,” he said, stepping off the porch and coming over to Taylor, taking the shovel. “We only really need to clear a small area around the truck. We get a lot of snow here, so I have a plow attachment for the front of the truck. It will do most of the work.”

  “Why . . .”

  “Don’t be mad at her. I think you still make her nervous, and with me asleep she wanted to find somewhere for you to go outside of the house, so she asked you to do this. Not that it’s all a waste. We would have had to do some of it to get the blade attached.”

  Taylor thought about it, including how he’d woken her with his screaming, and let out a laugh of his own, “I guess she did get me.”

  Sebastian clapped him on the back, directing Taylor back toward the house, “Let’s get some breakfast in you, get the plow attached, and get on the road.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  To her credit, Marta was properly embarrassed by the trick she’d played on Taylor, although she made it clear she was in no way apologetic. Sebastian took the opportunity to tease her about her sneakiness, which she took in good stride. Sebastian ate quickly and excused himself, leaving his wife and Taylor to sit in uncomfortable silence for twenty minutes.

  When Sebastian returned, Taylor thanked Marta and again apologized for imposing on her family, over Sebastian’s continued denial it was at all a problem.

  Taylor noticed that the back of the truck had been partially unloaded and something new was up on the bed of the truck, covered in a canvas sheet, but let it pass as Sebastian asked for help carrying the plow over.

  They got the plow attached to the front of the truck, which was easier than Taylor suspected it would be since it was just attaching the wedge-shaped metal piece to brackets on the front of the vehicle. Once on the road, Taylor was very glad they hadn’t pushed through the day before. Sebastian’s description of the switchbacks going around the various hills didn’t do them justice. The roads were small, seemingly too small for two cars side by side, ending in a cliff face on one side and a sharp drop off on the other. While the drop offs weren’t what you’d see on a larger mountain, they were steep enough to be deadly, and the lack of any kind of guard rail made them seem somehow worse.

  With the ice and snow on the road, they had to crawl along the road most of the time, going only a few miles an hour as they wended their way around. A drive that should have, at most, taken thirty minutes was stretched into over two hours; some of it white-knuckled as they wound their way around. Taylor was watching the turns Sebastian made closely, trying to commit each in his memory, in case a hasty retreat was needed, and to help from focusing on the treacherous roads too much.

  To Taylor’s surprise, as they neared the town, close enough to see it in the distance, Sebastian turned off onto a logging road.

  “We’re not going into town?”

  “No. I’ve heard enough things to know if they are holding the girls you are looking for anywhere, it’s going to be in the compound about a mile away from town on the other side. But a lot of the people in Reuya get money either directly or indirectly from those scum. I rarely come over to this side of the mountain, and never with a stranger. I thought you might want to avoid someone calling back and reporting an unusual sighting.”

  “Good thinking,” Taylor said
as they wound their way along the logging trail, its narrow one lane causing his teeth to hurt as they bounced through ruts and holes.

  Finally, they pulled to a stop, the road still extending into the distance, trees thick on either side.

  “This is as close as I can get you. The compound is about a half a mile through the trees, that way,” Sebastian said, pointing out the passenger’s side window.

  “OK. I’ll take it from here,” Taylor said, “I really appreciate all the help. Now get back to your family, and try to stay safe.”