“He wasn’t my friend. Will it work?” I stepped back from it, suitably intimidated.
She guffawed. “Of course it’ll work. It’s a program.”
I squinted at it, watching the lights flicker. “The first time I turned it on, it made a horrible honking sound. I thought it was about to explode.”
Talya covered her hand with her mouth for a moment, and then waved it as she struggled not to laugh.
“What?”
“That’s the floppy disk drive booting up,” she said, choking a little. “It’s meant to do that.”
I sniffed. “I nearly put nine rounds into it. Pure reflex.”
“You’ve never used a computer before?” She had swallowed down on her laughter, but her eyes were still overbright with mirth. Mirth at my expense.
“No,” I replied. “I have a vague notion that you type on it like a typewriter and point at things with the pointer, but that’s about all.”
“Pointer?” Her brow furrowed. “You mean the mouse?”
“I mean the pointer.” I gestured at it. “Though I could be persuaded that the inside of it is run by mice running on wheels, given the noise it makes.”
“No, that is the mouse.” She put a hand over it and jiggled it around on the pad, then picked it up and showed me the underside. There was a ball set in the middle of the casing. “See? It looks kind of like a mouse, with the wire as the tail.”
I scowled. “Mice generally have their balls further to the rear.”
Talya laughed, and the machine beeped loudly and suddenly. I jumped inside my skin, while she turned, suddenly sober and inquisitive. “Ooh, it’s a hit!”
I leaned in while she navigated back to the colored navigation screen and began to click through assorted screens until she had access to a collection of folder icons. Talya chewed her lip as she began to open them into lists of what I assumed were filed documents, expanding the taxonomy in and out at dizzying speed.
“Oh, here we are… wow, he had a modem and email and everything.” Talya used the clicker – the mouse – to scroll through a list of files. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
She clicked an icon, and then recoiled off the barstool with a scream, hands thrown up and over her eyes.
Peter Kaminski was laid out like a gutted lamb in a slaughterhouse, head thrown back so that his face was partly out of frame, his blond hair matted with blood. His coltish frame and the hardness of his jaw were easily recognizable. All of the transplantable organs had been removed and were set aside in Styrofoam coolers around the body. They were all tagged, ready for transit.
My nostrils shuddered as I took Talya’s place, gingerly using the mouse to close the file and open the next, and the next. Each one was uniquely horrific. There were only two more bodies – one of which showed the creation of Pig-Head in progress, one of which was vaguely identifiable as the limbs and torso of Goat-Head. My stomach lurched. The rest was pornography. Adult men and women, the missing children and others I didn’t recognize… and then men I did recognize by their tattoos. Ivanko. Kir. A huge man with rich brown skin and faded prison tattoos that I knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut, was my old friend Ovar. Then I was back to the photos of Peter Kaminski while he was still alive. In one picture, he was clearly drugged and being forced into compliance by a flabby masked man I knew without a doubt was Vanya. Some of these photographs dated from the beginning of the year, involving different children than the ones at Wolf Grove.
Words from the past returned in a wave of remember smell and sensation. Yuri’s grating, poisonous words. “I know what Sergei sees in you. Same thing he sees in all the rest of us poor motherfuckers. Machine parts. Tiny, fragile, cheap machine parts.”
Jana hadn’t been lying to me, and this was what I had never seen while I was stranded on my own conveyor belt in Sergei’s system. Now, I understood why he wanted to set up shop in Thailand. Now, I understood why the other men had always despised me for my chaste demeanor and regarded my chivalric relationship with Crina as second-rate. They were into what they thought of as ‘the good stuff’. They hadn’t asked me or told me because they’d known what my reaction would have been: two shots to the groin and one in the head for each of them.
All emotion drained from my body and mind in an instant, leaving me clear and hard and cold. The cynic in me searched for Pastor Christopher and Aaron, but they were both absent from these pictures. Lily and Dru, however, were present in quite a number of them. The photos of them were far back in the file-list. The dates went well back for several years, and some of the pictures were worse than graphic. I didn’t have to guess at the fates of some of the children who had been ‘homed’.
“Lily was a hyena shifter, wasn’t she?” My voice was stiff.
“Yes. She-” Talya peered at the image I had on the screen, and turned away with a choking sob. “Oh my god. Why… why didn’t any of them ever say anything to us? We would have helped if we’d known!”
How could I explain such a thing? Children were under the power of these adults. The structure of their laws and the degree of secrecy among shapeshifters, as I understood them, had Elders holding absolute authority over kids like these. Clarified behind a veil of practiced dissociation, I leaned and squinted at the photo of the hyena and the child she was mauling. Here and there, her body was stuck with what looked like spines of glass.
Puzzled, I moved the pointer-mouse to the magnifying glass icon, and clicked it. As I’d hoped, the picture zoomed in, but it decreased the quality and I couldn’t really make out the shards anymore. “How would Falkovich get these pictures onto the computer?”
“It’s… oh god… I’m sorry.” Talya gulped back tears, and came up beside me. Her hands were shaking as she navigated out of the folder and back through the hierarchy. “Th-These are p-pictures that this man was sent over Usenet and Telnet. It’s… like a newsletter where you can send letters to a computer over the phone.”
“So other people were sending him these pictures?” Vanya had computers, I knew that much.
“Or he was sending them to other people. They must have scanned them in and shared them. He has logs. I don’t know if I can bear to read them, Rex. I really don’t.”
“Call Ayashe and tell Jenner.” I stood up and back, mind already on the job. “Tell them I have to go pay someone a visit.”
“What? Where?” Talya dashed at her eyes and took a heavy seat.
“Red Hook,” I said. “An office warehouse at the waterfront. Don’t worry about me – I just have to go and have a talk to someone who might know more about this.”
“You really do know some bad people, don’t you?”
I was already halfway to the door. “Not for much longer.”
This time, I was not going to risk being unprepared. I bought eggs from the nearest bodega – a full dozen fertilized eggs – and on a leap of associative intuition, a carton of full-cream milk. Not including Falkovich’s house, the last time I’d been in a major firefight there’d been two Spooks and a demon so toxic that it made the scars on my arm ache to think of it. I could confirm now that DOGs were immune to bullets. Worse than that… they were nourished by them. And it had been hiding in a gun, seeping out like oil when Lev had pointed the weapon at me and fired.
Much as I still didn’t want to rely on guns, lest a DOG emerge from them and kick my ass, this was a job that called for firearms. I had the Wardbreaker, my faithful old Commander, and my larger backup piece, a matte-black Glock 21. The Wardbreaker had never really been intended to be a frequent-fire workhorse: it carried nine .45 full-metal jackets and was meant to work in silence with its fixed magic. The Glock carried fifteen fragmentation rounds. It was noisy, short-range, and it left blow-out wounds that could fit a man’s fist. It was good for stopping people when they tried to run away.
I wrapped the eggs individually in washcloths borrowed from the vanity, and loaded into a backpack and under my suit jacket. It was near midnight by the time I’d
fixed myself up with loaded magazines, rope, wire, knives, styptic and bandages.
I filled Binah’s food dish up like a little kibble mountain, and looked down at her with my hands on my hips. “Be good, girl. Don’t eat anything you shouldn’t. And don’t claw the curtains.”
“Mrra-oww.” Binah looked back up at me, tail flicking.
I turned and left her there. As I shut the door, she slipped out behind me, arching against my ankle.
“No. In you go.” I tried to push her in with my shoe. By way of reply, Binah latched onto my leg, clawed her way up my body, and clung to my shoulder with claws. Decision made, I left Talya on the phone and reused the car I’d taken to Moris’s place. The likelihood of being pulled up in this particular old piece of junk was low, and the drive wasn’t really that far.
There were a few places where I could reliably find Vanya, and I decided to go to the one where he spent the most time: the AEROMOR shipping yard. I’d never spent a huge amount of time with him before. Vanya ran his own Cell out of Red Hook and the bulk of my work was based in and around Brighton Beach and Queens. I knew he’d been brought into the Organizatsiya from Russia when I was a young boy. Back then, he’d been a stocky man with a beak nose and thinning brown hair. As an older man, he had morphed into a pasty, obese Jabba the Hutt clone who smacked his lips a lot, smoked imported East German cigarettes, had a thing for Orientalist decor and laughed whenever he spoke. He was a coward and a shrewd recruiter whose best skill was almost certainly his ability to manage people braver and more capable than himself. He’d hooked Vassily on coke and either masterminded or assisted in his physical and mental ruin. And he was a pedophile.
The main entry to the shipping yards was an archway off Van Brunt Street, the run-down road closest to the waterfront. It was also the most obvious, and the most heavily guarded. Van Brunt turned a sharp corner into Degraw Street, an old docklane lined with crumbling Italian, Chinese and Russian sweatshop warehouses. It smelled like old seafood, and it was backed up with cars and small trucks along one side. I parked my little car down near the end of the street, and put Binah down on the passenger side seat. In the dim glare of the streetlights, she looked up at me expectantly.
“We are so not doing this, Binah,” I said. “You’re a cat. I don’t care if you’re a familiar or not.”
The Siamese yawned, stretched, and hopped over my lap to paw at the door.
“No. I have limits.” I set her back on the seat. “You are staying here.
Binah crouched down, growling with her ears pinned back to her skull, backing away from my hand.
“That’s better.” I went to open the door, and stopped as I saw what she had sensed. Lights, a car turning the corner. My gut twisted as a wave of cold washed over me, and the parasite in my gut stirred. Cutting through the stale air of the docks was the whiff of something unpleasantly familiar: a smell like rotting flesh and burnt sugar. A Violet smell. The smell of DOG.
Chapter 28
Binah growled again. I let go of the door and drew my pistol, submerging in the shadows of the dash as headlights bloomed down along the street and glazed the dusty windows. Seconds later, a car rumbled by, pulling in several spaces behind.
Doors opened, then slammed above the buzz of male voices talking. There was a 'choonk' sound, the sound of a trunk being popped.
The gnawing in my chest built slowly, creeping up a little more with every sound outside. I rubbed my gloved finger against the grip of the Glock in my hand… and tensed as a metal door banged open, only a few cars up from my position.
“Come on, man. What's the deal?" A brusque voice with a pronounced Long Island accent could be heard through the door. “You got it?”
“What does it fuckin’ look like?” Someone snapped back, his English heavily accented. “Stop jacking off and come and help me.”
A high, feral, garbling scream of rage burst out into the air. It was the kind of noise I'd always imagined an angry mongoose makes, and it cut suddenly and with a strange finality with the slam of a head against a hard surface.
“What’s the matter? You want some more dick, is that it?” Long Island raised his voice. I heard scuffles, thumps, and then silence. “Slanty-eyed faggot.”
I startled at the use of the slur. An Asian man? Was that Angkor?
“Get it him in trunk already. The Deacon’s waiting.” The Russian-accented man sounded anxious.
“The Deacon will get his,” the other man grouched. “Like I give fuck.”
“You’ll give fuck if we end up under knife, instead of this spooky little cocksucker.”
There is a saying in Ukrainian: Meni tse treba yak zuby v dupi. Roughly translated, it means: "I need this like I need teeth in my ass."
I risked a periscope peek over the back of the driver’s side chair, forming a rough plan of assault. If I got out there in a duck and roll, I could probably shoot out the tires and then the men inside and pull their victim out. Even as I was thinking it, the front doors slammed and the engine of the getaway car thrummed to life.
“Shit.” Plan B it was, then – and not a bad plan, anyway, because they were about to lead me to deeper waters. Whoever ‘The Deacon’ was, I was pretty sure I needed to meet them.
The car pulled ahead of me, trundling without haste, and rounded the corner. I started up and followed after, just a little faster than I’d seen them leave. The headlights stayed off as I rumbled along behind, watching as they picked up speed down Van Brunt Street and turned down Hamilton Avenue.
“Where are you boys headed…?” I mused aloud as we drove parallel to the expressway, heading towards the entry ramp. “Back to Brighton Beach?”
But they didn’t get onto the highway. Instead, they turned right onto Columbia Street, a long road that led down to the Red Hook waterfront. I tailed them at the furthest distance I could stand, watching as they followed the street around, all the way past the Red Hook park, and then turned a sharp left into a dirt and gravel lot just before the wharf. I knew that road. It led to the Red Hook Grain Terminal.
“Well then.” I accelerated the short way to the gate and came to a sharp stop, wincing as the tires shrieked for a moment on the road. I backed it up and turned so that the car pointed in the direction of escape instead of towards Gowanus Bay, cut the engine, and checked my weapons before getting out, cat in tow.
The air near the waterfront reeked like shit and dead seagulls, an awful, headache-inducing cocktail of rot and chemicals that made it the ideal location for a NO-inspired cult sacrifice. The Grain Terminal loomed like a concrete sarcophagus in the distance, illuminated by the full moon that was now heading for the horizon. For a moment, I wondered if I had done another stupid thing by not waiting for the Big Cat Crew. The Grain Terminal was enormous, and by the time I got there, Angkor was going to be long gone. If they were executing him, they’d do whatever they were going to do and dump his body in the canal before I even reached the outhouse.
The moon cast crazy shadows over the scrap that had piled up to the left of the cracked road, which was half old concrete, half wet gravel. There were huge piles of rusted metal everywhere: the hulks of buses, small boats, even a horse float. Binah followed me at full lope, a ghost on my heels as I ran. There was no keeping her in the car, especially if she was able to warn me of dangers I couldn’t see.
At the end of the road, I saw the car I’d been following parked near the waterside entrance to the ruined grain terminal. Up close, the enormous structure looked even more like a coffin: a grimy, rectangular hulk sandwiched between the Henry Street Basin on one side, the Gowanus Canal on the other, and the continuation of this shitty strip of gravel to the left. Ahead and to the left was the shell of a smaller building – still two stories high – to my right was nothing but polluted water and a flimsy dock anchoring three or four derelict ships. I didn’t have high hopes for Angkor. Gowanus Canal was a dump site for every Mob in the city. One famous detective had wryly noted that Gowanus was the only body of water
in the world that was ninety percent guns. He could be assured that the other ten percent was dead bodies.
Three men – the two from the warehouse and a tall, broad-shouldered, hulking figure I couldn’t make out – were smoking, talking and laughing around what looked like a barrel fire in front of a faded white watchtower. I drew my pistol and dipped down into a cross-step jog, heartbeat tapping against my teeth. Binah and I crossed from the scrap pile to the outhouse, where I slid along the wall and looked around the corner, right at the back of someone’s head. The static guard was sitting on a fold-out plastic chair away from the other men, rubbing his gloved hands and huffing on them.
As I was planning my trajectory, Binah darted out of the shadows, streaking across the yard at a run. I had to bite my tongue to stop from calling her as she pelted between the guard’s boots and bolted at a full gallop for the building.
“Hey, what the fuck?” The guard stood up in alarm, bringing his machinegun to bear. With a finger on the trigger, he stepped back reflexively, scraping his chair a foot and a half or so closer to me and vanishing out of sight of his comrades on the other side of the building. Then, he relaxed a little. “Fuckin’ raccoo-”
I pistol-whipped him as hard as I could across the back of his skull. He crumpled like a heap of stones. I grasped him by the ankles and dragged him back behind the timber, took a minute with the knife to make sure he wasn’t going to get up again, and relieved him of his weapon, a set of keys, and a packet of gum. He was toting a PP-90M1, a cheap Russian military surplus machinegun. It packed a 64-round 9mm magazine, which I unloaded, checked and reloaded. Not a bad start to the night’s scavenging.
Binah was waiting for me in the shadow of the building, smugly washing her face in at the base of an open window. I slung the gun over my shoulder and holstered the pistol, drawing the knife in its place. Smartass cat.
Around the corner, the three guys were still squatting around the fire. Their attention was on the road. I’d taken out the one watching the building, and I’d be ass deep in the building before they realized a thing.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 26