Just as, he imagined, she now felt his.
Baer Creighton snored on the sofa.
“Man needs a bath. And check that leg. Make sure none of that smell is coming from the wound. It’s trouble if it is.”
“I checked first thing this morning,” Mae said. “He just needs a bath.”
“You want to open a window or something. Tathiana’s trying to eat.”
“Ha ha.”
“Where’s Finch?”
“Not here.”
Cinder had looked at the van’s clock before leaving it. Finch was late.
“Tathiana, you ready to go?”
She placed her fork on the plate. Stood.
“Why don’t you use the bathroom. We have a long drive.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Okay, would you go to the bathroom so I can talk to Mae without you hearing it?”
Tat stepped around the table and entered the bathroom. Closed the door.
Cinder took Mae’s hands. “When this is all done, if those videos exist like Finch says, there’s no telling the amount of heat we’re about to bring down on a lot of people. People with a lot of power. That means no matter how anonymous I set things up, eventually it comes back to me. So if you’re in it for a shot at the governor’s mansion—”
Mae giggled.
“—you might oughtta put that out your head.”
“You’d trade the governor’s job for saving those girls in Salt Lake City?”
“No, I’m doing both. But I just wanted to give you advance warning. There’s gonna be shit follows this. I don’t think either of us has ever seen what damage a hundred billionaires can do.”
Mae pulled him down by the shoulders and kissed him.
“You built that buried house for a reason.”
“Atta girl.”
Cinder looked at the bathroom door. Tat’s eye watched from the gap. “You hear all that? Come on out.”
Tat joined them.
“Okay,” Cinder said. “If Finch shows, tell him we left on time and he can try to catch us if he wants. We’re in a blue Chevy van with a plate that starts A3J. Got it?”
Mae nodded.
He kissed her again.
On the steps to the entry, Tathiana said, “How will we know where to go?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“What if—”
Cinder stopped and Tat stumbled into him. He stood her back up.
“Tat. Here’s the answer. We’ll knock down enough walls. All your life, that’s the only strategy you’ll ever need. Detailed plans always fall to shit. So knock down walls.”
Tat put the seat back and slept most of the way to Salt Lake City. The drive took nine hours with rest stops. Cinder drove into the city, then figured it made sense to lay low until night. He took Lincoln Highway east and passed Mountain Dell Reservoir, passed the golf course, and stopped at a turnaround beside Little Dell Reservoir. The temperature was falling, and dusk was upon them.
She’d learned during her short life that other people say and do what they want, and rarely considered her welfare. Had she not acted violently on her own behalf, she could have been raped or murdered multiple times, just in the last two years.
Her mousy size belied her seventeen years. She had lived with her younger sister Corazon, fourteen, since her parents were murdered by a cartel. Her father had been a police captain. Her mother, a nurse. She had lived well, but her parents had never led her to believe the world was anything other than corrupt and violent.
After two years on their own, traveling through cities and jungles, Tathiana understood. People were no better than the wild they pretended to abhor. Animals that would cause her harm were rare and easy to avoid. But human predators were everywhere, and their harm was of a different magnitude. They’d force you to do things. Steal your possessions. Steal your freedom. Some would kill you, given opportunity.
She and her sister had survived in Mexico by the generosity of the churches, old women, dumpsters, and by their wiles. They eschewed human contact, but especially avoided men, and more especially young men. However, they found that even men who were very old were susceptible to finding homeless girls irresistible.
While aware her safety often depended on invisibility, Tathiana at the same time developed a teenager’s rage-fueled recklessness. After killing a priest with a pair of steel scissors in a town outside Puebla City, she began trusting herself more around population centers. She carried the scissors with her afterward, held to her hip with a looped cord she’d tied through holes cut into her waist. She and Corazon ate often and avoided most trouble, until waking one night surrounded by men who tied her and her sister and threw them onto a truck. Then they ate rarely, were drugged and sleepy, and within two days were in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and the next day, were transferred to a different truck, and hauled farther north. Tathiana took the pills they forced her to take on the first day, learned from her mistake, and faked swallowing them afterward. When the boy Francisco received the key from the blond dread-locked man, and escaped without freeing anyone else, and was subsequently shot, Tathiana’s rage gave way to rebellious desperation. If she was going to be a captive, she would not be a compliant one. Regardless of the consequences.
Only after the man emptied the truck of all the girls save her did she realize she’d left her younger sister alone amid the wolves.
She’d seen something different in the gruff man who saved her from being murdered that night. He behaved much like her father. Mostly silent, always wary, but with her father she’d grown to understand—especially in thinking about him after his death—that although he distrusted people because he was a police officer and saw their perpetual, artesian spring of stupidity and evil, he served them in the police because he loved them.
Tathiana sensed in the wildman who saved her something similar. Or maybe she wanted to see it. Her instinct for years had been to trust no man, and but for the freezing cold, she would not have violated that. But the temperature drove her to his fire, and the man proved unlike any she’d been near since her father. He’d not been familiar with her. He brooded and took offense easier than a highbrow woman, but his actions proclaimed him to be her protector, not owner or suitor.
So she came back for him when he bled.
This new man, the one called Nat, drew water from the same well as the other, though he seemed less protective. Maybe because he was partly respectful, but mostly, it seemed, he was uninterested.
It was a relief—and allowed her to make her own plans regarding the fates of the people who held her sister.
Now her biggest fear was arriving too late and learning her sister had already been murdered.
“I’m going to sleep,” Nat said. “Don’t talk so damn much, all right?”
Tat broke her steel look and smiled.
“I shouldn’t have brought you along. Just so you know. But you have a right. When people do shit to you, that confers rights of retribution. I’m going to write a book on it someday. Goodnight.”
Nat leaned back the seat and closed his eyes.
“What is our plan?”
“The restaurant is open until ten. We go in at nine.”
“That’s it?”
“Like I said. We knock down walls.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
They slept in the front seats with the back of the van to the reservoir.
Nat Cinder woke to Tathiana’s soft snores, instantly cognizant of his surroundings and the mission at hand. Almost as if he hadn’t slept, but only relaxed four hours, while his mind probed the plan for weaknesses.
The night before, when they outlined the broad parameters of the rescue, Finch had drawn a map of the floors, the hallways and rooms he knew. The hallway through the inner building, behind the restaurant and nightclub, was secured by locked doors. On the nightclub side they were also guarded.
Although Wayman hadn’t told Finch his process for escorting pedophiles and murderers to the upper
floors, Finch had described to Nat what he had observed over the years. Cinder, with what he already knew of human trafficking, surmised Wayman’s likely process.
Men would either first meet with Wayman in his office or, if they were long established, would be taken through the double doors leading to the storage room, which in turn led to the ground floor hallway and elevators. If it were merely a brothel, Nat figured that wouldn’t be the case. The girl named Amy would be reliable enough to handle the business. Not so with running a pedo operation. It was a different order of risk for all involved. No client would trust a late-teen madam, and no owner would trust a client he hadn’t looked in the eye.
That was magnified a hundredfold for customers wanting the killing floor. Cinder figured they’d be escorted up the steps, across the balcony, and to Wayman’s office. You wouldn’t run a business transferring so much risk onto your own shoulders without a display of power and thorough understanding with your client of the rules at play. Not if you wanted to stay in business more than a day.
Finch had worries about how to pick the locks to get through unseen. Nat told him to see the big picture, and the little details would sort themselves out.
Nat straightened his seat. Stepped out of the vehicle and dropped a golden braid on the driver side rear tire. The thought struck him it was what a dog would do, and he wondered if a dog would also risk its life, fortune and freedom on a rescue mission such as this.
Probably more often than a man would.
The other door opened and Nat finished before Tat could come around the back. In a moment he heard her urine on the pavement.
He liked her. She communicated something in her silence, in her focus. Maybe in translating her manner he added his own purposed fury to the mix, embellishing hers. Either way, she came across as the most no-bullshit teen he’d ever seen.
Her splatter ended, and she came around the front of the van. He saw her silhouetted against the flat, black reservoir, a bare starlight glow to her brown skin and black hair.
“I brought you a couple things. C’mere.”
He moved to the rear and opened the van doors. Dragged a black nylon bag and unzipped it. She stood beside him.
“I guessed your size. Climb up in the van and put on these clothes.”
Tat unrolled the outfit. Black camouflage pants. Black t-shirt. Black nylon insulated jacket. Cargo pockets everywhere. Keeping her eyes on Nat, she shed her coat. Tossed it inside the van. She dropped her pants and pulled off her top. Nat closed his eyes and turned around. Heard clothing sounds.
“Now I look like you,” Tat said.
Judging by the fit of the clothes, he’d guessed right on the size.
Nat gave her a black nylon belt from the bag and she threaded it through her pants loops.
“Okay, you got the clothes. Here’s what you’ve been waiting for.”
Nat withdrew a Glock 19, a compact 9-millimeter in a black Alien concealed-carry holster. He demonstrated on his waist how to attach the holster so the Glock was instantly grabbable, but rode without discomfort on the inside of his pants waist.
Tat affixed the holster clip to her belt.
“That’s the easiest gun in the world. Just point and shoot. Pull it out.”
Tat grasped the gun and pulled. It was stuck.
“Hold on. The holster is fitted to the gun so it won’t fall out. You have to give it a solid pull.”
Tat jerked the gun clean.
“Okay, good. Now point over there at the water. Hang on good. Squeeze the trigger.”
The gun blasted orange.
Tat snorted. It sounded like a surprised laugh. She fired five more rapid shots into the black nothing.
“Nice. You got a sense for the trigger pull. How’s it fit the hand?”
“Very good. I like this.”
“It’s yours forever. Let me show you one more thing. Always keep it pointed at the ground, or away from people unless you want them dead.” He stood beside her. “Hold it in your right hand, open. Okay, see this? Press it.”
She depressed the magazine release. It dropped into Nat’s hand.
“First off, remember when you take the magazine out, you still have a bullet in the chamber.” He waved the magazine. “This holds fifteen. You need to reload it.”
He opened a box of ammo and showed how to press one into the magazine. Then gave it to her. “You have to press pretty hard. See if you can get it.”
She did. Then filled it.
“Okay. One last piece of advice. Don’t use that gun unless you know you have to. Don’t pull it unless you have to. Let me do the heavy work, all right?”
“No.”
“What?”
“I’m here to kill people.”
“Well—shit. I know that. I mean, only kill the people who need it. That’s all.”
“Okay.”
Nat stood at the back of the van and added a second holster to his hip, this one on the left side.
“What is that?” Tat said.
“Just a gun.”
Her eyes wouldn’t leave it.
Nat Cinder nodded. “It’s as wonderful as it looks.”
Nat drove into the city and parked in the alley behind the Butcher Shop restaurant, next to a dumpster.
He’d considered wearing a mask, but decided against, because no one staring at a badge and gun would remember a face, and he planned to carry the building’s video evidence with him when he left.
Nat tried the door. Locked. He pounded on it with the base of his gloved fist. Repeated. The door opened. A man with tattoos up his neck opened the door. He was already turning away when Nat pulled the door the rest of the way open. The man must have thought someone from the kitchen had locked himself out running trash to the dumpster.
“Excuse me,” Nat said. “Take me to your boss.” He opened his jacket, displaying a fake badge hanging by a chain from his neck, and a nylon shoulder holster almost braying with implied threat.
The man looked from Nat’s face to Tat’s and hesitated.
“Friend,” Nat said. “This is a tactical emergency. Take me to your boss, now.”
The man froze.
Wayman’s operation was tight. Probably prepared for something like this. Nat trusted God to favor the bold. He strode through the kitchen toward the dining area, looking for someone with obvious authority, and spotted a gray-haired man in a suit, leaning down as he spoke to the couple seated at a table.
Nat waved to him. The man straightened with a jolt. Regaining his composure, he excused himself from the table.
Nat stepped around the wall hiding the kitchen. Tat followed. The suited man joined them.
“Who are you? What is this?”
Nat showed his badge. Pointed to the double doors on the other side, near an area set up for butchering animals. “Unlock those.”
“I cannot. And I didn’t see your badge. Or get your name and who you represent.”
Nat pulled his Glock. “I’m going through those doors. Either you open them, or I find a cleaver back there to hack off your head, so I can get your keys no fuss no muss. Right?”
The man’s eyes shifted toward the kitchen.
Tat drew her Glock and lowered her stance. Keeping the pistol pointed low, she covered the area for threats.
Nat smiled inside.
“I don’t have keys. No one goes back there from this side. We just can’t do it.”
Nat had already considered the possibility he would have to use force at the first barrier. Although more violence would likely ensue, Wayman and his bodyguards were unlikely to call law enforcement to deal with their security problems. So as long as Nat kept moving, and kept surprising his adversaries, he kept the advantage.
“Let’s go.”
Inside the kitchen, he searched and quickly found what he wanted: a giant freezer on wheels. He moved forward with purpose. Kitchen staff saw their weapons and put up their hands and backed away. “Keep doing what you’re doing, Tat.”
> Nat rolled the ten-foot horizontal freezer away from its wall and with all his strength, pushed it to the double doors.
It bounced away with a thud.
Nat pulled back the freezer. Turned it so its back corner would make first contact with the center of the double doors. As he pushed, the suited man joined him. The freezer bounced again, but the doors emitted a cracking sound and the gap between them expanded.
“The lock secures into the concrete below. Once it’s broken, we may be able to open the doors inward.” The man waved at a waiter. “Joe, come here. Help.”
Nat wondered if the suited man had suspected the other business going on in the same building, and now sensed his last chance to get on the right side of things.
Together, all three men rammed the freezer forward; the doors broke from their hinges. One hung like a severed limb connected by a flap of skin.
Cinder said, “If you know what’s going on upstairs, you know why we’re here. Keep the commotion down here to a minimum. And if you hear gunfire, feel free to evacuate.”
The suited man stepped away.
Nat jumped onto the stainless-steel freezer, sliding across the top, and Tat followed.
They hurried down the hall. Following Nat’s hand signal, Tat stopped at the elevator. Nat ran past. At the end of the hall he pulled his Sig Sauer P220 Elite .45 and from inside his jacket pocket, a Dead Air Armament Ghost 45 suppressor and a vial of water. He dumped the water into the suppressor, then threaded it on the pistol.
“Stay where you are.”
He stood at a bare angle to the industrial steel doors, aimed at the lock above the handle, and fired. The bullet smacking into the metal was louder than his firing it. Blowback irritated his eyes. He always forgot shooting glasses. Squinting, he fired twice more. Pistol at his side, he kicked the door open.
Nat waved Tat forward. She joined him. “We advance one door at a time. I’m going to the next. You guard the rear. Understand?”
She nodded and assumed his space inside the door. She held her Glock groundward but ready.
Nat climbed the steps. At the second floor, he repeated the procedure. The sound echoed in the concrete block stairwell, but he was unconcerned. They were on the opposite side of the building from the dance club, and the priority was to secure the video evidence of the murderers and pedophiles from Wayman’s office. They were close to their first target. Freeing the girls upstairs came next.
Pretty Like an Ugly Girl (Baer Creighton Book 3) Page 21