“The bar has a concrete floor. The walls are soundproofed. None of that is an accident,” she said. She ran the edge of the telescoping baton along his shattered knee. “You will tell me what I want to know or I will rape you with this baton.”
A cold terror enclosed his heart. He looked up at her and saw, in a flash across her face, all the women he had sold. Past her shoulder he saw the red prince, in his portrait, the splatters of paint marring his face. He could see his own blood splatters, low on the bar’s front.
“Do you understand me?” Mila said.
“Y-yes.”
“Where is Sam?”
He babbled out the address of the brewery and directions. She moved the baton toward his groin. “Please… please…”
“Shut up. You don’t get to ask for please. You don’t get to ask for mercy. Those are human concerns, and you are a human being in species only.” She stood. He sobbed, clutching his knee, moaning in pain.
“Stand up,” she said.
“I can’t, I can’t, you bitch.”
“It would take ten of you to make a real person. You shot one of the Moldovan girls in the calf when she fought you,” Mila said. “I know. She told me. She managed to stand. I’m just seeing if you’re made as tough as those women were. Stand-or the baton goes up your sorry ass. Ten. Nine. Eight…”
On two, he was on unsteady feet, shuddering in pain and rage.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s not my fault, it’s just a business… I had to make money. My parents are ill…”
“Shut up,” she said. “You are Piet Tanaka. You never knew your father and your mother is a dead whore. I don’t care that you hurt right now. No one cares. You made your choice about life. Your whining bores me.”
Tears leaked from his eyes. “I told you, I can provide information…”
“Those girls you send. To Israel, to Britain, to Spain, to Africa. They don’t get mercy. They don’t get to cut a deal. They don’t get traded to the police. They get used up and then they get killed. They get raped two dozen times a day.”
“Please…” Piet tried again.
“I think you need to know what it’s like. To be taken into a dark room and know that you are only there to be used. To be hurt. To be treated as less than human.”
Piet grabbed the brass railing along the floor, in front of the bar, squeezing it in agony. He sobbed.
She pulled a phone from her pocket and dialed a number. “Hello? Nadia?”
Nadia was the name of one of the girls. He remembered: the redhead.
“I have him. He has a broken leg, a broken nose, and he’s beat up good. He can’t get away from you. He can’t hurt you. Do you want me to bring him? You all could do with him what you like.” A pause that lengthened. “Are you sure? It might make you feel better. No. All right, then.”
She rang off. “The women don’t want to ever see you again. I guess they’re better than you.” Mila shrugged. She closed the baton.
“Please… please.”
“The women are also better than me.” She pulled a gun from the small of her back and she shot him in the crotch. Pain beyond imagination. He screamed and writhed and howled and clawed at the concrete.
Mila began to count. Leisurely. “One-Amsterdam. Two-Amsterdam. Three-Amsterdam,” while Piet sobbed and shuddered on the concrete. When she reached eight-one count for each young woman she’d saved from him- she put a mercy bullet between his eyes. He jerked, his corpse hissed out a purring breath, and lay still.
She didn’t look at him again. She picked up the phone and called Henrik. He answered on the third ring.
“I need you to clean up a very serious mess. Use the dump site out past the airport-and keep the bar closed today until you hear from me.”
“I understand,” Henrik said.
She unlocked the door, relocked it, and hurried to her car, arrowing onto the still streets. She started to shake about five minutes out of town, thinking of the dying man’s terrified eyes. A gaze that pled for a mercy she could not give.
Do you think he ever thought of the women’s eyes? Mila asked herself. He never did. Ever. Let it go.
She did and she drove. She wondered if Sam Capra was still alive, if she would ever tell him what she’d done. She thought not.
75
I felt the lock give. I pushed open the door. My back was soaked with sweat.
I ran upstairs. I could hear distant shots. The men lay where I’d left them, except for one. He was by the wall.
All of them had bullet holes in their foreheads.
I ran up to the vat room. The guard I’d shot on the catwalk was down by the stairs now. Bullet hole in forehead.
I stumbled up the hallway to the storage room. The spill of cell phones still lay on the floor; the video game had run its course, showing an empty battlefield. The steel door was partly open; I pried it back. The five I’d corralled into the freezer room sat slumped. All of them shot dead at point-blank range.
I felt stunned. Edward had killed his entire team.
Why?
I hurried back up to the loading dock area. It smelled of blood and beer.
I could surrender to Howell, tell him about Lucy.
And hope that he believed me? If Lucy was already gone, I had no proof. And Howell would not let me escape again.
So.
No surrender.
I had to get out without being seen.
I heard the back door crashing open. I ran. Or rather, I half stumbled, half ran. I darted through the wide open rooms, ran past the dead men. A window in the brickwork faced an empty field and a slightly decrepit windmill. First one I’d seen since getting to Holland.
I pulled myself up to the window, worked the lock, shoved it open.
“Stop! Sam Capra!” Howell’s voice rang out like a bolt from the blue. I stopped. I shouldn’t have. But I did. I looked behind me and he had a gun leveled at me, two men behind him, Glocks aimed at me.
“Step away from the window, Sam.”
“She was just here,” I said. “Lucy. She was just here.”
“Step away from the window and we’ll talk about it,” he said. He wanted me alive.
“You don’t believe me,” I said. “I know. She was just here. I came here to rescue a hostage they have and Lucy is with them. You were right. I was wrong.”
Howell’s voice was stone. “Let’s talk about it, Sam. Come tell me what you know and we’ll find her.”
I looked at him, in his pressed, perfect suit and his steel-rimmed glasses and his stage actor’s voice. I hated him. “I’m going to find her myself. She’s alive. She lost the baby.” I didn’t want him asking about my child.
“Just come down, Sam.”
They were going to shoot me; that was my last invitation. “How did you know where I was?”
He nearly laughed. “Our informant in the Ling organization wasn’t happy you robbed their shipment. She called us. We tracked the truck with a GPS device the Lings keep hidden inside the cab. I can guess how you found out about the Lings. August went for a long walk the other night, didn’t he?” He shook his head. “You should be ashamed, ruining your friend’s career. Get down from the window, Sam, or I’ll shoot you in the back.”
I considered my options. Get shot or throw myself through the window or surrender. None were good. He would not let me escape from him again. I’d be bound and tied and kept with a pistol to my temple and not given a mockery of a life in Brooklyn. I’d be back in that prison that wasn’t supposed to exist, the plaything of Howell’s
