The Burning Soul

well.

‘You know what General Patton said about pearl-handled grips?’ said the visitor. ‘He said that only a New Orleans pimp would carry a pearl-handled gun. Guess he was wrong. Looks like shitty New York pimps carry them too.’

Now Rudy did reach for the gun, and the visitor shifted the cell phone in his hand. Two barbed darts shot from the tip, penetrating Rudy’s shirt and attaching themselves loosely to the skin on his chest as fifty thousand volts coursed through his body. Rudy fell to the floor, convulsing madly. The woman ran for the living room, screaming for help, while the visitor appropriated Rudy’s pimp gun for himself.

A second man appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, bigger than Rudy but dressed the same way. His hair was shaved tight, and he had blunt, Slavic features. Unlike Rudy, he was sufficiently alert to have a gun in his hand already, but not prepared enough to make himself a smaller target. The two shots from Rudy’s gun hit him in the chest. He held on to the frame of the door, then collapsed to his knees. He raised the gun again, and the third shot flung him back, his knees trapped beneath him, his body convulsing just as Rudy’s had, but this time to a different end.

The visitor kicked the dead man’s gun away and kept moving. The living room was empty, but he could hear the woman in the kitchen. He followed the sounds and found her searching in the silverware drawer. He kicked at the drawer, trying to slam it closed on her hand, but she was too fast. She came at him with the carving knife, but her arm was high, the blade raised to the level of her head, the tip arcing down. He stepped inside her reach and used his left forearm to force her hand against the wall while his right brought the gun down on the side of her head. He hit her twice and she slid to the floor, moaning. After checking that there was no one else in the apartment, he went back to the hallway and saw that Rudy had crawled into the bathroom. Carefully, the visitor approached the open door. Rudy had already removed the second.38 from under the sink when the visitor appeared in the doorway.

‘Don’t,’ said the visitor.

Rudy fired, but he was still shaky from the electric shock. The bullet took a chunk out of the plaster a foot to the right of the visitor’s body, and in response he emptied two shots from the Llama into Rudy, then tossed it aside. He entered the bedroom. The girl named Anya had crawled into a corner by the window, her hands on her ears.

‘Odensia,’ he said. ‘Bystro.’

The girl didn’t move. She was trembling hard and stared at him without blinking, as though fearful that, in the instant her eyes closed, he would put an end to her. The visitor tried to remember the word for ‘friend,’ and managed to dredge something from his memory.

‘Drug,’ he said, then corrected himself: ‘Druz’ja.’

It seemed to have the desired effect. The girl stopped trembling, although she still looked frightened. He repeated his injunction to her to put some clothes on. The girl nodded and went to the closet, retrieving a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt decorated with a spangled cat. He watched her as she dressed, but she didn’t seem to mind. He figured that, after all that she’d been through, being semi-naked in front of a stranger was a minor inconvenience. She slipped on a pair of laceless sneakers. He indicated that she should go ahead of him, then followed her into the living room.

He thought that he heard a sound from the hall outside, a door opening and then quickly closing again. The gunfire had been unfortunate but not unexpected, and the visitor did not panic. He searched the apartment, finding two iPhones and a BlackBerry, as well as $4,000 in cash, not including his own $1,000. The woman had stopped moaning and had lapsed into unconsciousness. Her breathing was shallow, there was a blue tinge to her skin, and blood was flowing from one of her ears. He wasn’t sure that she’d live, which suited him just fine.

He took the girl’s hand and pulled her into the bathroom, forcing her to step over Rudy’s body. He could hear sirens approaching as he opened the window, revealing the fire escape. He made the girl go ahead of him, and stepped down after her. A Lexus pulled in at the curb, and he put the girl in the back before climbing into the passenger seat.

‘So how’d it go?’ said the driver. He was short and dark-haired, wearing old jeans and a worn leather jacket. He didn’t look like the kind of man who should be driving a Lexus, not unless he’d stolen it. His name was Angel.

‘Noisy. Messy,’ said his partner, both professionally and personally. His name was Louis, and he was dressed like an executive with one of those shadowy, discreet firms that handle other people’s money, and handle it well. His hair was cut close to his ebony skull, his skin almost entirely unlined. It would have been difficult to tell his age were it not for the gray beard that he had begun to cultivate, an unconnected goatee and mustache arrangement known in the trade as a ‘balbo’ but known to his partner as ‘that fucking growth on your face.’

‘Bad?’ said Angel.

‘Two down, one pending.’

‘You get hurt?’

‘No.’

Louis took out the phones and the BlackBerry, and checked the numbers and contacts.

‘Lot of good stuff here,’ he said. ‘Lot of names.’ He took a netbook from under the seat, powered it up, and began transferring the contact details from the devices to the computer.

‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘I gotta ask: Are we on a crusade?’

‘Unless you got a better word for it,’ said Louis. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d never introduced me to Charlie Parker. I suspect that he may have contaminated me with idealism.’

‘You think you’ve come a long way. I used to just steal stuff.’ Angel looked in the rearview mirror. The girl stared back at him. Her eyes were those of a shell-shocked soldier.

‘You okay, honey?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think she speaks much English,’ said Louis. He dredged up the remains of the little Russian that he knew. ‘Kharasho?’

The girl nodded.

‘Ty v bezopasnosta. Druz’ja.’

‘What did you say?’ asked Angel.

‘I told her she’s safe, and we’re friends. That’s all I got. Anything more, we’ll have to stop in Brighton Beach and get a waiter to translate.’

He felt pressure on his arm. The girl’s pale hand rested on his forearm.

‘Dina,’ she said. ‘No Anya. Dina.’

‘Dina,’ repeated Louis. He took her hand in his, and held it as they drove.

The shelter was in Canarsie, almost within sight of Jamaica Bay. When they were a block away, Angel made a call from one of the stolen cells. He told the woman who answered that they had a young girl with them who was the victim of sex traffickers, along with the phones used by those responsible. They killed the lights in the car, and pointed out the shelter to the girl. He handed her the phones, and the cash.

‘We’ll watch you, Dina’ said Louis. He touched two fingers to his eyes, then turned them to the girl, and toward the shelter. ‘Ja tvoj dryg.’

Angel opened the passenger door for her. The girl put one foot out of the car, then paused.

‘Ya nichevo ne videla,’ she said.

Louis raised his palms in frustration and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The girl frowned, then spoke again, this time in English. ‘I see nothing,’ she said carefully, then left them. They marked her progress, watching for strangers on the street. A door opened as she approached the shelter, and a woman appeared. Gently, she laid a hand on Dina’s shoulder, and ushered her to safety.

Dina did not look back, and the gentlemen from New York drove away.

14

Dempsey and Ryan were sitting in a chain coffee joint at Boston’s Scollay Square. If there was a more sterile part of Boston than Scollay, then Dempsey hadn’t found it yet. Oh, there were places that were skankier and rougher, projects and wastelands and dumping grounds, but Scollay Square was in the heart of downtown, a series