I continued down the narrow hall. It seemed to get narrower as I got to the end. I knocked on the door of apartment three.
To the right of it, at chin-level, was a replastered hole in the wall about the size of a fist or a heart.
Didn’t hear any footsteps, but as I stood there the white dot center of the peephole went dark as someone on the other side examined me.
Chapter Ten: SWING AND A MISS
From behind the door, a woman’s voice asked, “What d’you want?”
“Making a pick-up.”
“Who send you?”
“C’mon, open up. You know who sent me.”
The white dot at the center of the peephole returned, but it was still a handful of seconds before a deadbolt turned and the door finally opened.
She was a tall young woman, twenty or twenty-one. She had a helmet of blonde hair and very pale ivory skin. Below her brown eyes were dark jaundiced pouches, a flattish nose, and a wide mouth now set in a tight straight line like she was biting down on the meat of her lips. She looked frightened. She said nothing, just reached out one bare arm from behind the door and handed me a black plastic bag. Something small and heavy swung like a pendulum at its bottom, but I didn’t relieve her of it. I hadn’t come here just to be handed a bag.
I’d never seen her before in my life, but I felt a vague sense of recognition. Trying to pin it down, I stalled her.
“Open the bag, show it to me.”
“What?”
I didn’t care what was inside the bag, but a dark suspicion was niggling at me and I wanted to see the other hand she was keeping out of sight behind the door.
“How do I know it’s what I’m here for?”
“Please, take and go away. I want no more.”
I heard it clearly then, the Eastern European accent that had been barely audible in the monosyllabic responses she’d given before. But no mistaking it now, nor the sound of her voice. She was the woman who’d left the message on my machine asking for George Rowell.
I’ve never had much of a poker face, even when the stakes were low, and I must’ve shown my excitement now. I spooked her and she yanked the hand with the bag back in and tried to slam the door in my face.
I gave it my shoulder and all my 155 pounds with interest. My enthusiasm got the better of me. The force knocked her down on the other side with a thump that shook the floorboards.
As I stepped into the dim apartment, she was scrambling to her knees. She’d dropped the plastic bag, but she’d held onto what she had in her other hand. A lethal-looking carving knife with an eight-inch blade.
My momentum carried me too far into the apartment to back out into the hallway. I retreated a step and my spine hit the door, shutting it with a smack.
It was a studio, what real estate brokers like to call a cozy pied à terre, with a kitchen area, a living room/bedroom area beyond, a tiny closet, and a door that presumably led to a tiny bathroom. The room was decorated mainly in glass and chrome, nicer than you might expect from the condition of the building—or of the young woman occupying it.
She was on one knee in front of me. She held the knife low to her chest, the point in line with my groin. More than an arm’s length away, but still…
I reached behind, pulled out my gun, and pointed it at her.
“Don’t move,” I said.
The Luger’s safety was on. I left it that way. I really didn’t want to shoot her—didn’t want to shoot anybody. But I also didn’t want a knife in the pecker. So I kept my thumb ready near the safety.
This is the reason I hate guns: they end thought. Pulling a gun preempts all other options. You’ve got a gun, you don’t have to think how else to work out a situation, just hike up and unleash your piece. If I’d left mine back in the office, I wouldn’t be facing the task of convincing this woman I wasn’t a threat to her. But I had my gun out now, so I had to make do.
I instructed her, “Put down the knife.”
She shook her head no.
“Put it down. I’m not here to hurt you. But I’m not here to get hurt either.”
She looked me in the eye and then cast a long look at the knife in her hand. She stopped pointing it at me. Turning it sideways, she reached over and drew the edge across her other arm. A shallow three-inch gash smoothly opened across the back of her forearm. Blood humped up out of the fresh slit, swelling from her wound thick, wet, and dark.
“Christ, what are you doing?”
She said in her thick accent, “Put the gun down.”
I shook my head. Correction, I shook all over. Head to toe. She had shaken me. I was shook.
“Put it down,” she told me. “Or I say you do this to me. You come in here and you cut me.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Look, go bandage that up, willya?” I said. “We can’t talk with you standing there bleeding like that.”
She half-frowned, glancing at the wound, at the blood from the cut trickling into the hair on the back of her arm. Her nose wrinkled at the sight. There was something oddly familiar about the expression, though also something strange about it: no show of pain, no emotion. Her eyes empty, flat, as if saying, “What? You mean this? This is nothing. I can do worse.” And the tracery of scars on her arms showing that, many times before, she had.
She raised the knife again.
“Stop,” I said, “you win.”
I tilted my gun up so the barrel pointed at the ceiling. From where I stood, it looked like a capital L. L is for Loser.
But what was I supposed to do? I’d just seen her do worse to herself than I would’ve ever dreamt of doing. She was more a danger to herself than others.
Though lord knows she could still be a danger to others, starting with me.
I put my gun away in my jacket pocket. It sagged there.
She said, “Now go away.”
“No. Not yet. And no more Ginsu demonstrations, either. Put something on that cut, then we need to talk.”
She reached over to the sofa, picked up a crumpled t-shirt, wrapped it tightly around her arm. “Okay, talk now.”
“I’m the guy you called this morning, asking about George Rowell. You left a message on my answering machine. My name is Payton Sherwood.”
I reached in my pocket for my wallet, intending to show her my driver’s license. Instead, the first thing in my hand was the photograph of Owl and the young girl. I brought it out, started to ask if she knew this man, when all at once I knew: it was her. The girl in the picture, Elena.
She asked, “Where did you get that?”
“From Owl,” I said. “Are you Elena?”
She backed away from the question.
I said, “Look, relax. I put the gun away, didn’t I? I told you, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a friend. Owl hired me this morning. I was supposed to help him out with a job he was doing.”
“Where is George? Why isn’t he here? He doesn’t answer at his hotel. Where is he?”
“Let’s sit down first.”
She raised the knife once more and stepped forward. I stiffened to keep my hand from reaching for my gun again.
“It isn’t good news,” I said. “Owl—George is dead.”
This time the D-bomb hit its target.
Elena’s face collapsed and I saw her hands start trembling.
“No. No. I do not believe—when did…?”
“This morning, around nine-thirty. He was hit by a car.”
“No!” She was whipping her head back and forth.
“I’m sorry.”
“Who are you? Why do you tell me this?”
I took out both my driver’s and my investigator’s license.
“See,” I said, “I told you, I’m Payton Sherwood.”
“How do I know you tell the truth? Those could be a fake, I have as good. You could be anyone.”
“I wish,” I said glumly. “And also that it wasn’t true, but George Rowell is dead.”
“How did it h
appen?”
“It was an accident.”
“Did that woman have something to do with it? Did she?”
“What woman? Which woman?”
“The one with the green eyes.”
“You mean Michael Cassidy?”
She looked confused. “That’s a man’s name. I said woman. With bright green eyes. She come this morning when George was here. We was having coffee. She just open door and walk in on us.”
“What do you mean, walk in?”
“She has key.”
“How come she had a key to your apartment?”
“It’s not my apartment—my boyfriend house-sits, for owner. This woman, she say she is friend of owner.”
“How long you been living here?” I asked.
“From June. Since owner has been away, traveling.”
“Mr. Andrew? That the owner?”
“Yes. And he must have gave this woman the key.”
“What happened when she came in?”
“She was drunk, or maybe drugs, she’s laughing, crying. She close the door and sit down on the floor. She say she friend of owner, she come for help. She say someone try to kill her.”
“Kill her?”
“She was drunk, talk talk talk like crazy. She keep saying, They try kill me with hot bag. I don’t know what she means. How can someone be killed with bag that is hot?”
I thought I knew, but I didn’t explain it to her. “Hot bag” was a street term used by addicts to describe a too-pure or even a spiked dose of heroin. The easiest way for dealers to get rid of an over-talkative junkie liable to roll over on them was by slipping him a hot bag.
I asked her, “What did you do?”
“I do nothing. She pass out. George look at her a long time. I think he recognize her. He start asking me all these questions.”
“About what?”
“Same as you asked, whose apartment is this, who is owner…”
“And then what?”
“He walk around. Sit down over there.”
She pointed to the other end of the room at the only non-modern piece of furniture, an ornate writing desk painted in white with twisted rose vines painted up each leg.
She said, “He open the drawer. Some of the owner’s papers are there. He look around inside. Then he take a book down from shelf.”
“Which book?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
I asked what color the cover was.
“White. Or maybe brown. I don’t remember. He put it back on the shelf.” She gestured with the knife, its point at shoulder height. “When he come back he had that look in his eye, like when he knows something no one else knows. Like when I first meet him…”
Her voice choked up. I reached out past the knife and put one hand on her shoulder, caught between an impulse to stroke her gently and one to shake her firmly. I wanted to comfort her—but I couldn’t indulge her grief just yet. There was too much I still needed to learn. What Owl had been doing in the city, what he’d come to see Elena for.
I prompted Elena, squeezing her shoulder lightly: “Go on. What happened then?”
“George say wake up, wake up, he get her on her feet. He walk her to the couch. He talk to her, feed her coffee—I make, full pot, and she drink, drink. I don’t hear everything they talk, but I can tell he’s using his persuasion on her.”
“His persuasion?”
“How he get people to do what he want. It was a nap he have.”
“Knack,” I corrected.
“Yes. He convince her she’ll be safer if she come with him. He walk her out the door. That was last I see him.”
“What time was that?”
“Little after seven in the morning.”
“Why go out so early?”
“He’d been here all night. My boyfriend is away, work all night at garage. George come over to help me to figure out…” She seemed to consider saying more but decided not to.
“Help you figure out what?”
“Not important,” she said, and before I could ask again she went on, “Tell me truth, did this woman hurt him, is that how he died?”
“No. It was an accident. She wasn’t even there. He left her back at his hotel room. She was waiting for him when I got there.”
“Then it must be the other person, the one he say been following him.”
“What do you mean? What other person?”
“You don’t know? He tell me it’s why he want to hire you.”
“Told you when?”
“He call me when he reach hotel room with woman. He say he’s picked up snake. No, not snake, what word he use…tail. Picked up tail.”
“He saw someone tailing him?”
“He say it’s just a feeling. But he trust his feeling.”
I nodded, remembering the way he’d sensed me looking at him from my window. I trusted his feelings myself.
She said, “He tell me he gonna hire you to find out who’s following him.”
Owl had said he wanted me to tag someone following one of the people leaving Yaffa. He just hadn’t mentioned that the person being followed would be him. And of course it didn’t play out the way he’d planned. When the time for the meeting came, Owl was dead, so he never showed up at Yaffa; and either his tail knew this and never showed either or else did show up, saw Owl wasn’t there, and left without my noticing. Unless I had noticed—unless the person Owl had been supposed to meet was Sayre Rauth and Jeff had been his mysterious tail…? But no. Jeff had been so incompetent at it, Owl would’ve spotted him in a heartbeat and a half. Maybe the blonde kid, FL!P? He’d tailed me earlier—and he’d been there when Owl’d had his accident. Or maybe it was the Russians in their Grand Cherokee…?
Elena was saying, “I knew something was wrong. I been frightened since he don’t call me…” And she started shaking again. I squeezed her shoulder harder, brought her back.
“Elena, I need to know, what was Owl helping you with?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why was he here? Did you ask him to come?”
Nothing.
“Was it the problem you’re having with your super?”
“What? I don’t—Luis? He’s a drunk. I know how to handle drunks.”
“He said you punched a hole in the wall.”
“Me?” She held up her small hand. It did look unlikely. “He do that himself,” she said. “He drinks, and he forgets what he did—so he blame me. But he is harmless, he’s no problem.”
“Then what was George helping you with?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Whatever it is, you know he wanted me to help, too.”
She looked at me a long moment.
“What does it matter to you?” she said. “If George hired you and now he is… You don’t need to do nothing more. It’s over for you.”
“It’s not over for you,” I said, the resolution warbling my voice, “so it’s not over for me. George came out of retirement to help you. He told me he owed you a favor and he wanted to repay it. It’s my job to repay it now. And in our line of work, we finish the jobs we’re hired for.”
“George owed me nothing,” Elena said. “I told him this a thousand times. He did more for me than I ever did for him. He got me into this country. I wouldn’t be here—wouldn’t be alive—if not for him. This is better life than I could ever hope for if I stayed in Ukraine.”
“That’s where you’re from? Ukraine?”
It was a stupid thing say. It put her back on guard just when she’d finally begun opening up. But a voice in my head kept whispering, Ukraine, Ukraine… something about Owl in the Ukraine… Then I had it.
“Hang on,” I said, “does this have something to do with that case with the kidnapped American girl?” I looked her over. She was in her early twenties now, she’d have been about the same age as that girl when it happened—which was also, I realized, roughly the age she’d been in the photograph with Owl. “I remember hearing a story,” I s
aid, “about a case Owl had that took him to the Ukraine. Maybe ten years ago? I heard it from two different guys, actually. About how he helped rescue an American girl from a child pornography ring there.”
She was nodding, the knife she’d been gripping all this time finally lowered. I saw that the t-shirt bunched around her arm was soaked a dark red, but at least the stain had stopped spreading.
“The way I heard it,” I said, “he was hired by the grandparents of a missing girl who’d been abducted by her father. They’d sought custody after their daughter died the year before in a car accident. There were signs of sexual abuse by the father, as I recall, but the grandparents didn’t press for criminal prosecution as long as he didn’t contest their custody. They won the case—but lost their granddaughter. A month later the father kidnapped her and they both vanished without a trace.
“So the grandparents hired George Rowell. He tracked the girl down after photos of her surfaced on a child pornography website based in the Ukraine. He went over, learned that the girl’s father had involved her with, what was it, a child modeling agency?” Elena nodded. “But not the sort of modeling agency you’d want your child working for. It was all porn, right? Photographing and videotaping naked girls between the ages of seven and sixteen.”
“Six,” Elena said softly. “There was one girl who was six.”
“And you,” I said, “how old were you?”
“Eleven,” she said. “When I started.”
I thought back to being that age, what had I been up to? Moving my lips to an Encyclopedia Brown at the public library, not disrobing in front of a camera.
I cleared my throat and asked her, “These people kept you prisoner? Locked up?”
“No. Not how you mean. We were…prisoners, but not locked up. Where I lived in my country, everyone was poor. These people, they offer us too much money for taking these pictures. Too much to refuse. And the girls, most didn’t mind. It was only being naked. Not sex. Not for most of us. For some girls, it felt exciting, even glamorous. I never liked it. But I had no choice. It was too much money. Cristy—that was the American—she’s like me, she don’t like it either. But she does it, every day, because, well, her father says do it, the other girls, they do it, I do it, what she gonna say, no, I refuse? So they roll tape, they say, ‘Pull, your panties down, darling, bend over, darling, blow a kiss, darling, sweetheart, princess,’ and she do it. I do it. We all do it, with a big smile, show all our teeth.”
LOSERS LIVE LONGER (Hard Case Crime Book 59) Page 9