Nightfire (20 page)

“There’s—there’s a man. He comes for her almost every day she’s there. He’s like her shadow.” She coughed, a paroxysm that lasted several minutes.

Yes! Nikitin didn’t move a muscle. Merely asked, quietly, “Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” she wheezed. “But he’s a big man. Not tall, but big. Like a weightlifter.”

“What did he drive?”

A frown appeared between her eyebrows. She coughed again. “I don’t know. One of those big gringo cars.”

“An SUV?”

She nodded. “Tell me the model.”

She shook her head. Nikitin restrained himself from slapping her hard. It wouldn’t help. She didn’t know. The whores didn’t drive. Weren’t allowed to learn. A driver’s license in the hands of a whore could be very dangerous.

“And where does this Chloe live?”

She shook her head but her eyes flickered. She knew. The bitch knew. Nikitin leaned right over her, gazing directly into her eyes. Out of her line of sight, he signaled to Dmitri. He dropped a cloth over her face and started pouring. She didn’t have time to prepare herself and breathed in sharply. The only effect was to tighten the grip of the cloth over her face. She started choking immediately, kicking madly against the restraints, mewling sounds coming from under the cloth.

If he took a blood sample right now, the carbon dioxide level would be extremely high.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
He looked at Dmitri, who lifted the cloth.

Her eyes were wild, unfocused. She’d been convinced that she was going to die. Nikitin had once seen a Special Forces soldier, an
Amerikanski,
resist hours of waterboarding, but he’d been trained. He hadn’t talked but he had been reduced to an animal and had been shot later, almost as an act of pity.

Her eyes were rolling around in her head like an animal’s. Nikitin clasped her jaw tightly, painfully, and turned her head to him. “Listen to me.” He waited until her eyes focused on him. She was breathing in short, ragged breaths, her entire body shuddering.

Good.

“Where. Does. Chloe. Live.”

Nikitin deliberately looked up at Dmitri, who stood ready. She saw that and shuddered. The whore’s body would be telling her she wouldn’t survive another round. She would, but she wouldn’t understand that. There would be very little reasoning bouncing around in her head, just dark primal fears.

The whore opened her mouth but only wheezing sounds came out of her throat, the sounds of sheer terror. Nikitin waited. No use punishing her when her body wouldn’t let her talk. He waited, watching her eyes carefully. He recognized the exact moment in which she came back into herself.

“Where?” he repeated.

There was no resistance in her. None. Her body had almost died and had come back, the most primal experience a living being can have. Next to that, there was nothing she could do.

“Coronado Shores,” the whore gasped. “That’s what I heard some of the other girls say. La Torre.” She wheezed, her body trying to pull in air.

Nikitin didn’t press. He had a vague idea of where—and above all what—Coronado Shores was. A place for the rich.
La Torre
. He tucked that name away for later. He merely nodded, as if confirming what he already knew.

“What else?” he asked, keeping his tone low and bored. As if what she was saying were of little significance. “What else do you know about her?”

Now she was looking confused. She gazed right into his eyes, something a
chernye,
a whore, should never do. And they didn’t. The women at the club were trained not to look a man in the eyes until they were having sex.

This one was looking straight at him, training forgotten, terrified. “Nothing. I know nothing else.” Her voice was low, shock still in the tones. And truth in every syllable.

Nikitin knew truth and he knew lies. He’d broken enough men to know the difference. The woman had no more information to give. She didn’t know where his men were. If she had any information at all, she’d have given it. She was useless to him.

“Three more times,” he growled to Dmitri in Russian.

Three more would break her. The bitch deserved it. If she hadn’t started acting up, he would never have had to send his men on a mission that had inexplicably swallowed them whole, leaving him with one man in a foreign country, with the
vory
back home expecting everything to be ready for the arrival of the first shipment very soon.

He stood and looked down at the woman who was so much trouble. If she hadn’t been worth money to his backers, he’d have had her killed, and not slowly.

“Three more,” he said again, and left the room, closing the soundproofed door behind him.

C
onsuelo came to her senses slowly. She was cold. Terribly cold, down to her bones, in a way she’d never been before. Born in Tijuana, living in San Diego, she’d never experienced true cold, had never seen snow. Now, it was as if she were encased in ice.

She opened her eyes, at first not recognizing what she was seeing. A flat expanse, a reflecting surface. She stared for a long time until she finally understood. Water. Water all over and her own vomit.

She blinked and things started to come into focus. She was lying on the floor, naked, in a pool of water. She shivered convulsively, mind blank.

She had no idea how long she lay there, shivering and shaking on the cold tile floor, moving only her eyes. Nothing made sense. She was used to being naked—that was how she worked, after all—but not like this. She felt more than naked, she felt stripped bare of everything, even her humanity.

It was coming back in slow, painful stages. The cruelty of the Russian’s eyes, the endless questions, the near-drownings.

She couldn’t remember how many times that horrible cloth had been put over her face but she did remember that desperate shock of knowing that she was drowning, being on the verge of death, then brought back to life at the last possible second, gasping and shaking, numb with fear.

And the Russian, carefully watching her, with no expression on his face. It was almost worse than some of her customers who secretly liked inflicting pain. They had a sly smile as they sneaked in a hard pinch, pulled her hair too hard. There was always a secretive smile, because they were doing what they liked best—hurting.

This was nothing like that. The Russian didn’t like what he was doing to her. He didn’t dislike it, either. He was totally indifferent. There was no doubt that if he felt it helped him in any way, he’d have ordered his man to keep pouring water over the cloth until she drowned for real. But she still earned the Meteor Club good money, so she wasn’t killed.

None of it meant anything to him.

Of course, Consuelo had never meant anything to the men who bought her, she knew that. But this was one level down from the horror of the Meteor Club. And they were all going to stay deep down at this level, since the Russians were here to stay. Word had it that they were pumping so much money into the club, they could kill her and her friends and use the skins for coats, for all Sands could care.

She rose shakily, hand slipping in the water, landing facedown on the floor again. Getting up seemed impossible, something beyond her.

She was broken inside.

Often after sex sessions, she was left hurting in some way. Most men went to prostitutes because they could treat a woman exactly as they pleased. A wife, a girlfriend expected certain attentions, which some men found difficult to give. Something built up inside them they had to release during sex for pay.

Consuelo was used to feeling used and thrown away, brought low by lust and coldness. But this was something else again. This was a level of darkness and cruelty she’d never even suspected existed. She knew she’d touched rock bottom. Any further down and she would die.

Consuelo had felt the dark wings of death brush her. The long-forgotten teachings of the nuns in the Tijuana slums when she was a tiny child, before her mother abandoned her, suddenly rose in her mind. She had a soul, and it had just been touched by the Devil himself.

Consuelo knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she had to get out. For her life. For her soul.

She couldn’t stay one second longer.

The ground was slippery and she was shaking, weak. She had to get up,
get up now
. She had to get away from this place as fast as she could.

Sands treated the girls relatively well. Consuelo knew that. When he’d found her, an abandoned girl living on the streets, he’d saved her life. God knows he’d told her often enough.

And he’d waited until she was fifteen to turn her over to the life. She recognized now that it wasn’t his goodness of heart, but a cold-eyed business decision. First had come intensive English lessons, deportment, long talks with the older women. He’d turned her into an upscale prostitute who earned him much more money than she would have on the street.

She’d been so
grateful
. It shamed her to realize that she’d been a little in love with Sands all these years. She’d wake up having dreamed that they got married and had children. The dreams left a lingering warmth that lasted until the first trick of the day.

Fool. She was a fool. And if she didn’t want to be a dead fool, she was going to have to move fast.

The core of chill was still there but her muscles felt stronger now. Able to bear her weight. Fear and dread and determination fueled her as she placed the palms of her hands on the slick floor.

She looked around for a second to see what she could cling to if her legs wouldn’t bear her up, and that’s when she saw it. A small metal object on the floor behind an armchair. If you weren’t lying with your face on the floor you wouldn’t see it. It belonged to
him,
to the
ruso
. She had an almost tactile memory of him carelessly flinging a dark leather jacket over the chair back, not paying attention because there was work to be done. A woman to torture.

She slithered through the water, pulling herself along by her elbows, reached out and picked it up. A small object with a removable cap. A thumb drive.

Nothing about the outside of the small metallic object gave any indication of what it was, what was contained within it. Consuelo only hoped it would be something that could harm the
ruso.

She lay on the cold, wet floor for a while, panting, clutching the thumb drive in her fist until it warmed up, the only source of warmth in the entire world.

Finally, she pushed with her hands and sat up, head swimming, nauseous. After another minute she pulled herself to her feet with the help of the chair.

She looked down at herself, naked and shivering. There were faint red marks across her chest, her shins, wrists and ankles where the restraints had bitten her skin. Other than that her skin looked pale and colorless, with an underlying gray, like that of a dead person. As a child, she’d seen lots of dead people, shot in the streets like animals by the
narcotraficantes
. As a child, she’d thought death to be the most horrible thing that could happen to a person.

She’d been wrong.

She dressed. Just the bare minimum, panties and the linen shift dress she’d had on. The bra and shoes were beyond her. As she made her way to the door, she glanced at a mirror and stopped, shocked.

She looked like the living dead.

Consuelo brought a hand to her mouth and watched the woman in the mirror do the same thing. It was like watching someone else. Consuelo as she knew herself was dead. She peeked out the door, saw no one and slipped out.

The corridors were mainly empty. Life at the Meteor Club didn’t really start until 10
P.M
.

Consuelo knew she looked like a ghost as she made her way to her room, a wild-eyed ghost with messy hair and ruined makeup. The few girls she met looked downward as she passed and Consuelo realized how many times she’d seen the women of the Meteor looking abused since the arrival of
los rusos.
They’d all learned to let it go, avert their gaze, pretend nothing was wrong.

This was the beginning of a road that shot straight to hell.

In her room, Consuelo went to the closet and took out her one pair of jeans and a white shirt.

She stared for a moment with loathing at the clothes in her closet. Bright colors, plunging necklines, clothes meant to entice men, clothes easy to get out of so the men wouldn’t have to work for their sex.

Her hand fisted in a blue satin gown that looked good on her. Made her skin glow, highlighted her breasts. She hated it. There was at least $50,000 worth of evening gowns and fine lingerie in her room and her hands shook with the desire to rip all that satin and silk and lace to ribbons. Slash it all, then burn it.

But she didn’t dare. If she had any chance at all, it would be because nobody would sound the alarm until tomorrow evening. Her first client was at 9
P.M
.

She would be far far away by the time the client, a famous attorney who had gotten out of control a few times lately, showed up.