Last Hit (Hitman) (30 page)

"Sergei sent us here to relieve you of guard duty. We’ll take her off your hands for a bit." The American gestures at me.

My eyes widen and I take a step back toward the bathroom. Yury is the devil I know. I’m scared of him, but I’m even more terrified of this new man because I haven’t seen him before. He might be four times as sadistic as Yury. How can I trust any American that works with these horrible men?

"
Nyet
," Yury says. "We are having fun, aren’t we?" And Yury looks over at me.

"Fuck you," I say, my voice trembling. And I flinch backward in anticipation of someone attacking me.

But the men only regard me with the same cold, shuttered expression I’ve seen far too often.

"See?" Yury says in a flat, mocking voice. "Fun. She likes me. And I am sure she will be friendlier once she has something to eat. She will be good to me, then."

I won’t suck him off for food. I won’t. I ignore the growling of my stomach.

"Whatever," says the American. "So you’re going to stay?"

"
Da
. You may run off." Yury flicks his cigarette at the others. "I will call if I grow too bored. And until then, I will just play with my present."

The smile he gives the skinny woman makes me feel cold inside.

"All right, then," the American says. He looks at Vasily, nods, and begins to leave. The big blond man stays beside the front door, guarding it. Vasily isn’t leaving.

A moment later, it is just me, Yury, and the woman—Galina. Vasily remains by the front door, but he could be a statue for all the attention he gives to the situation.

Galina and Yury remain seated at the table, and Yury looks over at me, where I hover near the bathroom door, trembling and uncertain. He points at one of the metal folding chairs. "Sit."

Should I fight him? Disobey? My face throbs, and I can see no advantage. There was nothing I could use as a weapon in the bathroom, and the warehouse is equally empty. After a moment’s hesitation, I approach and sit across from Yury and the woman.

He nudges the bag of fast food toward me. "Eat."

I watch him to see if it’s a trick, and when he doesn’t move, I hesitantly reach for the bag with one bruised hand.

He gives me another thin smile and takes another puff from his cigarette.

There is a hamburger and fries in the bag and a napkin. I dig through the bag, hoping against hope that there is a plastic knife—something, anything—but there is not. After a moment’s disappointment, I grab the burger and unwrap it, taking a huge bite before they can snatch it away from me.

Yury watches me with amusement. "Americans have such disgusting manners."

I ignore him, wolfing down the food. There’s no drink, and I’m incredibly thirsty, but I don’t complain. After I eat the burger, I start on the fries.

Yury continues to watch me eat. The woman seated next to him seems to be rather out of it. Her expression is glazed and vacant, and she sniffs repeatedly as if she has a cold. As I eat, Yury cocks his head. "Give me your hand."

I still. This is the trap. I watch him, waiting.

He makes an impatient gesture. "Give me your hand."

Trembling, I extend my hand toward him. I expect anything out of this man except for what he does. He takes my hand in his and examines my fingernails. Then, he looks over at Galina and says something in Russian.

She obligingly sticks her hand out for him.

He pulls out his knife and grins at me.

My stomach churns.

Galina continues to sit there like a zombie.

"I think we will send Nikolai a little message. A little, how shall we say, ‘Hurry up.’ What do you think,
pizda
?"

I swallow hard. I want to know what he means, but I’m afraid. "What are you going to do?"

He examines Galina’s fingers and makes a face, angling her hand toward me. It is covered in dark spots, and in several places, it looks scaly and gangrenous. "She has much love for
krokodil
. It is a cheap fix when you are too broke to afford the good stuff." He puts her hand down and gestures that she should give him her other hand.

Galina does, just as easily and blankly as before. It’s like she doesn’t realize he has a knife in one hand. I wonder if she realizes anything.

He examines Galina’s new hand and then looks over at mine again. Then, he takes her ring finger and carefully pares the nail down with his knife. "The good thing is that Galina still has a decent finger or two,
da
? It makes our little message easier."

"What message?"

"Sergei says we cannot harm you. His buyer likes his packages whole. I understand this, but I think Nikolai needs a bit of incentive, yes? And what is more incentive than sending him his woman’s finger?"

My hands clench into fists and I hide them between my legs, horrified. "No!"

At the door, Vasily calls out a lazy warning in Russian.

Yury rolls his eyes and waves a hand at me, ignoring the other assassin. "Stupid
pizda
. Did you not hear me say that I cannot touch you?" He points the knife at Galina’s blank face. "But this one, she owes many, many dollars to the
Bratva
. And she has nothing left to pay with but her flesh." He sneers at the woman’s hand. "Her rotten, rotten
krokodil
flesh."

As I watch, he carefully places Galina’s hand on the table.

The woman could be a zombie for all the attention she pays. She stares blankly ahead, a hint of a smile curving her mouth.

When Yury lowers the knife toward her finger, I jerk to my feet. "No! Please don’t."

"Do not worry," Yury says with an evil smile. "She is so strung out she will not feel a thing. And this will make your Nikolai work faster, da? So is beneficial to all."

He poises the knife just above her knuckle.

I run out of the room and back to the safety of the bathroom, but not before I hear Galina begin to scream.

I throw up in the sink until I have nothing left.

NIKOLAI

I sit coach the next
flight out. It was the only seat I could get. I wouldn't arrive until tomorrow otherwise, and even that delay is too long. Despite the crowded conditions—the male next to me with the runny nose and the cough and the girl to my right who thought I might want to show her around when we arrived in Moscow—I sleep. I force myself. I ruthlessly push aside Daisy's screams of pain and her ugly tears. I refuse to replay the words of Sergei as he talked so casually of raping Daisy and of selling her to a syphilis-ridden pervert in Dubai.

None of those things matter. What matters is that she is alive. Until she no longer breathes, my sole concern is rescuing her. After that…

Well, after that I would enact a vengeance upon the house of Petrovich and anyone else who had touched Daisy. It would be known throughout the world from Hong Kong to New York, in all the dark spaces, that if you touched something of Nikolai's, vengeance would come to you and to your family and that it would not be in the form of death. It would be in the form of financial ruin, permanent maiming. It would be people returned to you with their limbs cut off and their bodies riddled with drugs. It would be so you could look every day upon the slow, wasted bodies of your loved ones and remember that all of this could have been avoided if you had just left me alone.

That is the message I would deliver to Sergei, to the
Bratva
, to everyone.

But to do this I must sleep. And I do.

But I am unprepared for the horror that awaits me at the airport. At the gate, a curvy flight attendant from Atlant-Soyuz Airlines approaches me. She is pretty from a distance but up close you can see the signs of
krokodil
use, green scale-like spots are evident around her chin and near her ears. Soon she will not be able to hide the marks, even with makeup. Soon the body tissue will grey and die and her skin will peel away, leaving only bone.

"Mr. Andrushko?"

"
Da
." I nod in acknowledgment.

"This is for you." She holds out a box but her hands are shaking. The pupils of her eyes are tiny pinpoints and tears threaten to spill at any moment. I don't want to take the box. I want to shove past her and get on with my mission, but I reach out for it anyway.

A stone settles in my stomach and each step toward the airport parking lot is like walking through cement. I choose a car from the back of the lot, pick the lock and start the engine. I drive a little ways and then pull over. Inside, I see a small electronic device with an LCD screen and a bloody tissue. My hands shake when I lift the tissue-wrapped package out of the box. And when I see the severed finger inside, I wrench open the door and heave. What little I have ingested splatters the frozen ground on the side of the road.
My god, Daisy. What have I done to you?

I lurch back to the car and pick up the video screen and watch as Yury forces his finger inside my Daisy's mouth; I watch as her tears and terror are captured by some laughing, cock-sucking, miserable human being who will be flayed by my knife as soon as I reach them.

I don't want to watch the rest of the video but I force myself to. The scene shifts from the plane to a concrete room. The sound cuts out, and I can't hear her scream as a knife is produced, but I cry out when a close up of Daisy's finger being cut off flashes across the screen. But tears and puking will not save her. She has nine fingers, so what? At least she is alive.

I force myself to watch the video ten more times, looking for any clues that I can find. The finger looks desiccated already, not like any of the fingers on Daisy's hand. But the death of a limb can change the appearance. I push it out of my head. None of that will help me now.

Finally I head west. Alexsandr has a safe house there. There will be weapons and gear, and it will give me a moment to plan. Storming Sergei's quarters would be near impossible. There are a dozen of mercenaries who guard the exterior and probably a dozen more loyalists inside. The GPS location of Daisy's phone is squarely inside the estate. It's possible that Sergei had the phone and that he has stashed Daisy somewhere else, but he has to know that I am coming, and so he has retreated inside his castle.

The hour-long trip takes me half the time. I am nearly out of gas when I arrive at the safe house. I take the precaution of circling the house to locate the underground cellar entrance at the back. Alexsandr and I dug this tunnel ourselves for five years. No one else knew of it. Creeping down inside, I walk lightly, stepping over three tripwires that are set. I wonder at the last time Alexsandr was here. The tunnel is musty and insects are crawling through the boards we had lined along the soil walls. At the end of the tunnel is a small dirt cellar with a generator. The generator is humming, indicating that electricity in the upstairs is being used.

Someone is there.

I have no gun, but I have the garrote on my belt. I pull that off and hold it in one hand and climb the cellar stairs with the other in order to loosen the lock. Then I push the ladder hard, and the trap door on the floor pops open. Quickly, I move back to the tunnel to avoid ricochet gun shots, but I hear nothing. I duck and roll over to the generator and flick it off, kick the ladder out of the trap, and then run back to the tunnel opening.

An image of Daisy as she found her first orgasm with my tongue pressed against her fluttering clit teases at the fringes of my mind. No. Not now. I've been cold-blooded all my life. Daisy has brought me to life, though, and should she die, there are not enough ways that I can make a man suffer like I will make Sergei and anyone else who harmed her suffer.

I want to roar out my anger but now, more than ever, I need to swallow my emotions.

A curse sounds from above. "Goddammit, Nikolai. Why can't you come through the fucking front door like a normal person?"

It is Daniel. Despite the lack of voice modulator, I recognize him somehow. Maybe it is the cadence of his words, something a modulator cannot change. Or perhaps it is because he sounds exactly as I imagined. Still, I wait. The video that was sent to me has the voices of men in the background over the soundtrack of Daisy's tears and cries.

One of those men could be Daniel. That he is here in my safe house makes me suspicious. I clench the wire tighter in my hand. I can take Daniel, not because I know I am stronger or faster than him, but because through him is Daisy. Daniel does not have the same incentive.

The sounds from the upstairs are now penetrating over the pounding of my heart. My body tightens at the memory of the video, and I want to place my hands around Daniel's neck until he is blue in his face. I close my eyes and inhale to regain control. I cannot afford any mistakes. I breathe deep. Once. Twice.

There. I can hear. There are more than one set of footsteps above. No matter. I can take up to five by myself. The first victim down will equip me with weapons. I have a way out and an advantage. Anyone wanting to get me will have to drop down into the cellar space. Their body mechanics will require them to land with their knees bent. From here, I can swipe my leg under theirs and they will be on their back. In one more move, I can disarm them and shoot them, lifting the dead weight of the body as my shield. I practice the moves in my head. Swipe, attack, shoot, and spin. Swipe, attack, shoot, and spin.