Crush (19 page)

It was unlocked.

She threw the door open walked in, gun at the ready. No one there. She searched the house.

No one anywhere.

Until she got to the gym.

The maid was lying in a pool of blood by the elliptical machine. Her breathing was raspy, and the crack in the back of her skull was bleeding profusely.

Donleavy called 911. She lifted the maid's head and put her jacket under it. Next to the maid, a heavy kettle bell lay on its side, the bottom of it flecked with blood.

The maid's eyes drifted open.

“Do you know who did this to you?” Donleavy asked.

The maid shook her head, feebly. Even that movement was too much for her and she cried out in pain. Donleavy held her steady.

“It's all right. The ambulance is on its way.”

“What about Mr. Trask? Is he all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, he's fine,” Donleavy lied.

Whoever had hit her on the head must have taken him. Trask was gone.

TWENTY-SEVEN

W
hen it came back to him, Rush's vision was foggy and blurred, like he was looking at everything through a smeared pane of glass. His breathing was hard and ragged and labored. He felt pain in every muscle.

And then there was the fact that someone was punching him repeatedly in the kidneys.

Rush tried to shake his head, hoping that might clear his vision, but his head weighed too much to shake. As he drifted further into consciousness, he became aware that his arms were chained to a rusted pipe over his head and that something was tied to his face. A pair of goggles and a respirator—the kind worn by men working in hazardous environments.

“Good, you're awake,” Ivankov said.

Ivankov was standing in front of him, holding a limp sock filled with something. Rush tried to move toward him and realized that his feet were tied, too—bound tightly together with his own belt.

Rush looked around. A couple of the Russians were sitting on the floor, nursing their wounds. Amelia was crouching in a small wire crate, stuffed in there like an animal. But she still had her clothes on. Rush took that as a good sign. Guzman was chained to the same pipe as Rush, bleeding from the bullet hole in his arm and, blessedly, unconscious. And Rush? He couldn't see himself, but he guessed he didn't look much better.

He did notice that no one else was wearing a respirator, so that told him there hadn't been a gas leak. No, the respirator was on him for another reason.

Ivankov walked up to Rush and tapped on his face mask with the butt end of a lit cigarette.

“Where is it?” Ivankov asked.

Rush didn't respond.

Ivankov held up the sock, which drooped over his fist. It looked like a blackjack.

“You know what this is?” Ivankov said. “It's a sock filled with dirt. In the Russian prisons, you had to make do.”

He stepped around to Rush's back, swung the sock back, and struck him hard on the kidneys. Rush groaned.

“Where's the flash drive?” Ivankov asked.

“What flash drive?” Rush said, his voice muffled by the respirator.

Ivankov struck again, harder this time. “Where is it?”

Rush twisted wildly against the bonds. “I don't know,” he lied.

Ivankov hit him again. “Where is it?”

“Did you check your pockets?” Rush asked. “Lots of times, when I misplace things—”

The sock, again. Harder.

“I'm talking about the flash drive that has all of Trask's books on it,” Ivankov said. “The real books. The ones that incriminate me. Tell me where it is.”

Rush felt faint from pain. He nodded his head toward Guzman. “Ask him. I thought he was the one you wanted.”

Guzman hung from the pipe, unconscious. Or pretending to be.

“Oh, I did want him,” Ivankov said. “I'll get to him. But I don't want him to tell me anything. I just want him to feel pain. You have to tell me something. Where is it? The bitch told me she gave it to you,” Ivankov said looking over to Amelia. Her eyes were wide.

“I had to give it to him!” she said. “He made me! He tortured me!”

Rush didn't blame Amelia for lying. In a few minutes, he'd be telling Ivankov anything he wanted to hear.

Ivankov laughed. “Torture. That word gets thrown around a lot these days.” He reached out to the valve on Rush's respirator and turned it, cutting off his air. “Let me tell you what torture is,” Ivankov whispered.

Rush started to panic as he tried to suck in oxygen and got nothing.

“It's not humiliation,” Ivankov went on. “That's just embarrassment. That's fucking
life
. No, torture is pain.
Crippling, destructive pain. And along with it, the hope that somehow, some way, you just might survive. Hope is the real torture.”

Rush began to struggle, to twist on his chain.

Ivankov watched with great interest while Rush's face turned red and then blue.

As Rush bucked against the restraints, tiny pinpoints of blood began to appear in the whites of his eyes. His body shuddered and he passed out.

Darkness….

The darkness was quiet and comforting and oh so still. It felt so good to rest. It would be good to rest forever.…

Then it started again. The THUD, THUD, THUD—the dull pain in his kidneys. He had thought he'd left pain behind.

Rush experienced wrenching pain as the respirator was ripped from his head, and then all-encompassing agony as his lungs spasmed and filled with air. It felt like a hundred knives were being plunged into his chest from within.

Rush opened his eyes. Ivankov was standing in front of him, holding the respirator.

“It felt like dying, didn't it?” Ivankov said with a smirk.

“Made a nice change,” Rush tried to mumble. He wasn't sure if the remark was audible, but it made him feel better to try to say it.

“I could do it again,” Ivankov said. “Or this.”

Ivankov recommenced beating Rush's kidneys.

“I can do this all night. You'll be pissing blood for a month. If you ever piss again. Dead men don't piss, eh?”

Rush gritted his teeth. He refused to cry out. Not crying out was the one way he had of maintaining control over the situation. It wasn't much, but it was something.

“You think you're strong enough to take this?” Ivankov said. “You're not.”

He twisted Rush around on his chain to see Guzman hanging next to him, bloody and unconscious.

“He wasn't.”

Ivankov twisted Rush back to face him. “You know why I wanted him? Because he did me a favor. Favor that bit me in the ass. Now look at him!” Ivankov's breath tasted hot and fetid in Rush's mouth.

“My grandfather used to carry an anvil around on his back in the old country. Just for fun. The Ministry of Internal Affairs took him. They broke him. They made him their bitch.”

“
Otvali!
” Rush said and spit in Ivankov's mouth.
Otvali
meant “piss off” in Russian. Rush was getting tired of all this.

Ivankov struck him again with the blackjack.

“Where did you learn Russian?” he asked.

“
Vor v zakone
,” Rush said. From the Thieves' World.

Ivankov's eyes widened. “What do you know about the Thieves' World?”

“More than you,
sucka
!” Rush spat. “Look at my heart.”

Ivankov considered...then ripped the T-shirt off Rush's chest. His ribs had an ugly purple and yellow bruise from the impact of the rubber bullet, but that wasn't what made Ivankov take a sharp breath. It was the tattoo beneath it that shocked him. The elaborate tat covered Caleb Rush's entire chest and was executed with homemade precision in needle and ink instead of an electronic machine. It depicted a grinning skull with a knife in its jaws, tears falling from the empty eye sockets, manacles hanging from the blade. Behind it all, rising like a mushroom cloud of destruction, was the onion dome of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, cracked and bleeding like a boxer who'd taken too many blows to the head.

Ivankov didn't say a word. He pulled a Ka-Bar knife from his boot, as if to defend himself from the ghastly image.

“Who carved this on you?”

“My father,” Rush said. “Blaz Kusinko.”

He might as well have said his father was Jesus Christ. “I should cut this off your skin,” Ivankov said.

Rush's eyes locked with his. “I'd thank you for that.”

Ivankov laughed. He turned to his henchmen, who were sitting against the wall, happy to let Ivankov torture away so they could rest.

“Blaz Kusinko!” Ivankov said to them. “Sergei, Danzig, have you ever heard of him?”

They didn't know how they were supposed to react. One nodded and one shook his head. One of them had to be right.

Ivankov was disgusted. “Punks today. They have no respect for history. He was one of the founding fathers! The first boss of Brighton Beach. In the seventies. Ancient history, I suppose. Came straight from the gulag, thank you Perestroika. Those were the days. Started the Russian mob here in America. And you know how he died? Peacefully. In bed. With one of his whores.” He cocked an eye toward Rush. “Was your mother one of his whores?”

Rush just stared at him.

“Look!” Ivankov laughed. “Look how proud he is! His mother must have been a good whore!”

The Russian strutted around Rush like a runway model.

“That's how I'm going to die too,” Ivankov said. “Not in prison for some pissant white-collar crime! Not because I hooked up with her crazy family.” Ivankov spit in Amelia's direction.

Rush started laughing. “You invested in GlobalInterLink?”

That struck a nerve. Ivankov stamped his foot like an angry three-year-old. “I did not! I just wanted to put my money somewhere safe. So I could retire with dignity. And then this one.…” He socked Guzman's unconscious body like a punching bag. “He introduced me to the fucking Trasks!”

“Is that the favor he did for you? Is that why you hate him?”

“Isn't that enough? Oh, the Trasks, they liked me at first. I was their pet Goodfella. I got to pimp for her brother. Tell them the stories about my wicked ways...and in return they gave me tips, they gave me info that only they knew. Places to invest.” He turned to shout in Rush's face. “What's illegal about that?!”

“It's called insider trading,” Rush replied, calmly. “Ask Guzman about it.”

“So what? Everybody does that! I am not going to prison for that. Not after all the things I've done!” He grabbed Rush by the hair and shoved the respirator back on his head, yanking it in place. He put his fingers back on the air valve. Smiling, he turned off Rush's air.

Rush tried not to panic. “So that's why you're going to kill Guzman? And that's why you killed her uncle?”

“I didn't kill her uncle. I just killed her brother.”

Amelia looked up at him, shocked.

“Now, I'm asking you one more time,” Ivankov said, staring into Rush's eyes. “Where is the flash drive?”

Rush couldn't help trying to breathe. His lungs strained. The world began to blur.

Ivankov opened the valve and Rush sucked in air. Blessed air. If he lived through this, he was going to thank God every time he inhaled.

“
Ne znayu,
” Rush said, not because he was trying to be clever, but because he was lapsing into the tongue of his childhood.
I don't know, Momma.…

Furious, Ivankov grabbed his cattle prod from the rough wooden table and zapped Amelia with it. She screamed.

Rush yanked against his restraints.

Ivankov laughed at Rush's reaction. “Ooh, you don't like that! You're not Kusinko's boy. He loved watching girls scream. You squeamish about that, Crush?” He turned to one of his henchmen and barked. “Sergei, put her on the table.”

Sergei unlatched the crate, pulled Amelia out by the hair, and threw her onto the wooden table.

“I heard what old Blaz used to do with his whores when they stepped out of line. It was ugly.” Ivankov laughed and turned to Rush. “But I bet your mother liked that. You know, I probably screwed your mother. I screwed a lot of Kusinko's whores. What was left of them.”

“It's in the car!” Rush said. Ivankov looked at him. “The flash drive,” he went on, “it's in the back seat of the GTO.”

Ivankov eyed Rush, suspiciously. “Where?”

Rush jangled the chains that held his wrists. “It'll be easier if I show you.”

Ivankov picked up a Glock from a pile of weapons in the corner. He leveled it at Rush. “Now why should I do that?” He gestured to Sergei. “Get it.”

Sergei moved to the door of the car and reached to open it.