The Devil's Beauty (Crime Lord Interconnected Standalone Book 2) (18 page)

The earlier scents of flowers and garlic bread had been replaced by the sharp stench of vinegar, the familiar tang of heated metal and burnt rubber and sweat. The place smelled like a drug den, something Dimitri had walked through too many times in his life. The foul odor was unmistakable.

“Ava?”

In the dark, he pushed his way into the sitting area. He vaguely recalled the path from doorway to the first sofa and the lamp on the end table. He flooded the room with its dim glow.

He found Robby slumped to the floor, half under the coffee table littered with charred spoons, a syringe, bits of tinfoil, a lighter, strips of rubber, and a small, empty baggie.

“Shit!”

He dragged the man out and scrambled for a pulse. Finding one, faint, but present, Dimitri drew back. He shot to his feet and ran to the backroom.

“Ava!”

The sheets were in disarray, flung back carelessly, but no Ava.

He turned on his heel and bolted into the bathroom, then the kitchen, screaming her name and getting only silence in response.

He returned to Robby’s side, grabbed him by the shirt front and shook him.

“Get up, you son of a bitch! Where’s Ava? Where is she?  Get up!”

Robby’s head lulled uselessly on his shoulders. A fine trickle of drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes rolled into the back of his skull. But he remained lost in his drug induced haze.

Dimitri dropped him heartlessly and lunged to his feet. He stayed there, mind in tatters.

Ava wouldn’t leave. She wouldn’t abandon her friend in this state. She wouldn’t. That was the thing he was certain of with glaring certainty. It left only one possibility; someone had taken her. Possibly the same people chasing them.

He ripped out his phone, but had no one to call. No one he trusted with this.

Panic swirled up around him in a black shroud. It pushed against his vision, blurring them. He tried to focus, but all he could think was how he’d failed her. Again.

The phone rang. Its vibration tickled the palm of his hand. He almost dropped it before a spark of hope had him shoving the thing to his ear.

“Ava?”

Silence strained for two full heartbeats, then,
“No.”

The devastation nearly sent him to his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and struggled to regulate his breathing.

“I called to see how the meeting went,”
Erik said quietly.
“What happened?”

He didn’t trust Erik, but he trusted him more than he trusted his mother. He was a man of integrity and had always been a support in Dimitri’s life.

“I need a crew.”

Ava woke to the metallic clang of pipes, the rumbling growl of an engine, the shuffle of someone weeping. It was all there, tangled with the stench of human excrement, sweat, rust, sewage, and something she couldn’t put a name to until she opened her eyes.

The ceilings were slabs of cut metal bolted from corner to corner in a dull, rusted gray highlighted by the three bulbs swinging from frayed cords.

Ava groaned as she struggled to roll onto her side. Her muscles protested the movement, her spine screamed as it was lifted off the sheet of ice. There was a pang in her lungs from being on her back for too long and her arm with the bandage screamed. But she sat up and squinted into the thick cloud of gloom stretching the length of her prison.

It was a metal box, stuffed to the max with … women. Women of various sizes, ages, and ethnicities. Women huddled in corners, curled up on the floor, standing against the walls. She had never seen so many women in a single place, except the bathroom at the mall during Christmas. But this wasn’t the bathroom at the mall. This wasn’t even a room. There was one door stamped into one wall and nothing else. There were no beds, not even blankets, and despite all the bodies, the air was frigid. There were no windows or vents to regulate air so the swirling stench of too many unwashed bodies in a single bit of space and the buckets in the corners kept shifting through the place like the ocean lapping and receding off the sand. Each one washed over Ava with an intensity that boiled her stomach up into her throat. But it was the terror. God, the terror was beyond elucidation. Hers rose off her and wove with all the others tangled overhead in a thick cloud. It crept along her spine with cold, serrated fingers and latched into something just behind her navel. It wrenched and she nearly cried out. She would have if she could find the voice.

“Where are we?” The question was aimed at no one and everyone. It rang out of her in a desperate breath she couldn’t regain. “Where are we?” she said again, louder, her voice shriller.

“A boat,” said a girl a foot away.

She couldn’t have been older than thirteen with a face smudged with dirt and tears. She wore jeans torn at the knees and a clumpy, knitted sweater that may have once been pink. It was a strange orange now. Blonde locks had escaped a flimsy braid and hung in matted, tangled clumps around stooped shoulders and there was a strange odor coming from the strands that Ava could smell, despite the distance between them.

“What boat? Where are we going? How did we—?”

A loud squeal echoed through the room, the distinct sound of hinges being pried open. Bodies shifted as the door opened and two men emerged. The sniffling increased. The girls scuffled back from the intruders, which seemed to amuse them as they set two woven baskets and a bucket with a ladle down.

From her place, Ava couldn’t see the contents, but it had several of the girls lunging forward, fears forgotten as their need for the items within became overwhelming. Even the girl next to Ava scrambled forward.

Ava watched as they returned to their seats with hunks of crusty bread. Some ate like they hadn’t in days. Others hugged theirs to their chests and wept. Ava didn’t move, no matter how much her stomach whimpered.

She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t naive enough not to recognize her situation. She knew the likelihood of surviving were about a hundred to one. Those were not great odds. They were barely comforting odds. The reality of the situation was that she was completely alone, trapped, and somewhere no one knew where. She had no cellphone and no way to make contact with the outside world, and the girls there would be useless. Even if she could convince them to rise up and fight the assholes holding them captive, she knew it wouldn’t realistically happen. All she could do was wait for the perfect opportunity to think of something better.

The baskets of bread and the bucket of water were the only rations they got that day. Ava watched the comings and goings and noted that no one ever came or went. The doors remained shut. Hours passed. Possibly days. The weeping girls had stopped, but the sniffling continued as background noise. Ava tried to sleep, knowing she would need her rest, but it was impossible to do on a cold ground surrounded by feet, heads, arms that were always nudging.

But it was also harder to keep the other thoughts at bay when she let her mind relax. She couldn’t help wondering what if she didn’t escape? She knew what happened to girls in her situation. She may never have thought it would happen to her, but she had heard the stories. She had seen the articles, the banners trying to raise awareness. All the things she’d ignored because … it wasn’t supposed to happen to her. She wasn’t like the girls who went missing, the ones that lived on the streets. She had a home and a family. She had people who would miss her. She wasn’t ready to face what would happen. She didn’t want to.

The men returned, possibly the next day, with another two baskets of bread and a bucket of water. This time, Ava fought her way for a drink and a torn piece of bread. The water tasted of rust and the bread was rock hard and smelled faintly of mildew, but she returned to her corner with it clutched to her chest. A couple of girls got into a fight over the last chunk and the guards laughed. It stopped when the bit they held tore in half and each took off in their own corners to eat.

It was only afterwards, as she sat there nibbling on the stale crust, that she felt the stab of mortification. It burned beneath her skin and welled up in her eyes as she stared at the scrap she’d been thrown. It was so degrading, scavenging like some rat for a bit of bread that would probably make her sick anyway. And it had only been the second day.

The next day was the same. Lots of sitting. Lots of waiting. No one spoke. She wasn’t sure if it was because they weren’t allowed or because no one had anything to say. The girl next to her had become a tiny ball against the wall. She hadn’t said a word since Ava’s arrival and only moved when food was brought in. Then she was gone and back before Ava could blink.

During the one meal break, the buckets were emptied and returned, unwashed. Ava had to force herself to use one and she’d almost cried. She returned to her corner, feeling humiliated and small, and unable to meet any of the other eyes in passing.

“It’ll get easier,” said a tiny voice once Ava had properly mashed herself into the steel walls. The girl was studying her filthy sneakers, but she spoke again, softer. “No one watches.”

“How long have you been here?” Ava asked.

Tiny shoulders lifted and then dropped. “I don’t know.”

Of course she didn’t. None of them did.

“What’s your name? I’m Ava,” she said when the girl remained unresponsive.

Green eyes lifted a notch. “Ilsa.”

“Where is Ava?”

Even in text, John Paul’s annoyance was palpable. It buzzed in a relentless hum in Dimitri’s pocket until there was no choice but to shut the blasted thing off. It was probably the wrong time to be checking his messages, anyway. There was a time and place for everything and this wasn’t the place to get distracted.

He stood on a square cut of pale moonbeam that had found its way through a crack in the blinds. He’d meant to shut them entirely over the open terrace doors; light fucked with the accuracy of his night vision goggles, but it still somehow came through, leaving a long slash across the marble floors of some asshole’s downtown loft. It illuminated the darkness that he required to remain hidden and he kept contemplating whether or not to make the walk back to shut them or continue onward.

Onwards won. The alarms would reset in ten minutes and it would take most of that time to break into the vault.

Ignoring the distracting stick of light, he crept the rest of the way around warped bits of glass and steel that may have been a table and some bit of cushion he assumed was a sofa. The place was thankfully sparsely furnished, but the pieces of art the man did have made Dimitri question his taste.

The man was a modern style architect. Most of his funding came from condominiums and downtown business buildings. Dimitri had never heard of him until recently when his name became synonymous with senior fraud. He’d conned hundreds of elderly out of their retirement checks in exchange for an updated retirement home. Dimitri had nearly passed on the opportunity; his days and nights were already preoccupied with finding Ava, but even he couldn’t turn away from this. It took a real lowlife to steal from people weaker than them. Stealing that money back was an almost pleasure.

He moved quickly across the room, treading carefully on the balls of his feet. His gun sat pressed into the palm of one hand while he followed the blipping dot of his scanner with the other. The screen was set to work with his goggles and he could see the dot-him moving forward with every step he took. The area the safe was located in was highlighted red and he knew he was getting close when the red began to glow.

The layout was fairly unimpressive with most of the space dominated by a sitting area, a thin cut of kitchen, and two bedrooms at the back. It was all in the blueprints he’d lifted from the building manager. But there was one wall his scanner picked up that wasn’t on the prints. It was put up after the loft had been sold to Neil Halle and it was thicker than was necessary to separate the sitting area from the bedrooms.

A painting in a gilded frame hung from the very center, a mishmash of colors against a sea of white. Like the rest of the room, it was placed aimlessly, an awkward attempt at artistic modernization that Dimitri found ridiculous. He liked clutter and warmth. Homey. None of this made sense to him. But it didn’t need to.

He stowed away his gun in its holster against his ribs and tucked the sensor into his pocket before reaching for the painting. He pulled it back and peered at the smooth plaster underneath. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected to find a safe there, but he was almost relieved when it wasn’t; nothing was more disappointing than a cliché.

Setting the painting gingerly aside, he reached for a spindly contraption of crudely fused bits of piping resting in the corner, tossed out the single blade of fake fern jutting from it, and hoisted it high. He brought it down with a sweeping blow. Plaster rained to the floor. More followed with every assault. The hole grew until he had a clear view of the solid sheet of metal on the other side.

He paused and thought faintly how absurd it was to hide a safe behind a wall. It just seemed like so much work having to get to every time it was needed. Most criminals, the smart ones, kept them easily accessible, hidden, but still close enough to reach if needed. The only time a safe was buried was if the person wanted the contents to remain hidden for a long length of time, which could very well be Halle’s motives. It was easier to deny participation if there was no money to pin him to the crime.

Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he seemed, Dimitri mused, returning the pipe sculpture to its original place.

It was a
Titan UL TL-15
safe with a digital bad and lever. Average height with a reinforced bolt chamber. Not the best in the world, but certainly a challenge with all the foolproof mechanisms and antitheft precautions. He’d only ever broken into one before and it had nearly taken him five hours.

Accepting a long night ahead, he set to work. He tore his pack off his back and was about reach for his tools when the light from behind him caught a series of numbers carved in pencil along the side of the dial pad. The sight of them momentarily stilled him. His fingers froze on the tongue of his pack’s zipper. He had to blink to make sure it wasn’t his goggles screwing around on him. But sure enough…

“No … way,” he mumbled, reaching up to tear off the goggles.

He dropped it and his pack to the ground and rolled up his mask to get a better look.

The moron had written down the fucking passcode right on the door. It was right there, clear as day, just glaring back at him

He considered ignoring it, in case it was a trap that got the safe to lock down on itself. It was definitely a possibility, because no one was that stupid. It wasn’t possible, especially when this guy was apparently some criminal mastermind.

But Dimitri couldn’t help wondering … what if…? Being able to scam the elderly out of their money didn’t take brains. It just took a fast talker.

Muscles tight, he reached for the pad. His gloves gave a faint squeak with the flex of his fingers before he hit the first number. Then the second. Each one beeped piercingly loud over the sound of his own breathing. He held it, growing increasingly annoyed by the hiss of it between his ears as the last digit was punched in.

He froze, hand hovering inches off the circular disk. His heart drummed against his ribs, the unsteady cracks making his chest hurt. He drew back his hand an inch, paused, and then reached for the lever.

It opened.

The heavy door swung open with an ease he wasn’t prepared for. He just stood there, staring at his own luck and wondering if that was some kind of record. Did it even count as a proper burglary?

Deciding not to look a gifted horse in the mouth, he reached for his flashlight. He unhooked it from his belt and flicked it on. The sharp beam pierced through semi darkness, capturing bits of dust as it sliced into the safe.

Empty.

The light skirted over the clean layers, glinting off the metal and nothing else.

“What—”

“Not so smart, are you?”

The slow, lazy drawl had Dimitri reaching for his mask. He tore it down over his face before whirling to face the tiny man standing behind him.

He was Asian, short and thin with neatly cropped hair and a smug grin on his face. He stood in his silk pajamas in the center of the room, his hands behind his back like a bratty child. Dimitri glanced past him, scanning the room for others, but it was just them.

He faced the stranger. “Who are you?”

It had taken him years to learn how to conceal his accent. He still had to be careful when he said certain words with R’s in them, but he was better now than he had been before, unless he got the shit scared out of him.

The man continued to smirk. “Didn’t you think it weird how easy I make it?” He chuckled what sounded more like a giggle. “I been waiting for you.”

“What do you want?”

“I am Chan Lee. I live here.”

Dimitri’s eyes narrowed behind his mask. “Neil Halle lives here,” he corrected.

Chan Lee shrugged. “They lied.”

Dimitri straightened as it all began to make sense; he’d been tricked. This pint-sized brat of a man had set a trap and Dimitri had walked right into it.

“There were no elderly people getting scammed, were there?”

Chan Lee rolled his shoulders up around his ears. “Could be. Somewhere.”

Accepting that he’d been played, Dimitri bent, keeping his movements slow as he gathered up his pack and slung it on. He picked up his goggles as well and gripped them close. Once he had everything, he faced the man once more.

“Was there something you needed?” he asked, not caring if he sounded annoyed.

“I like your work,” Chan Lee said breezily. “I am a fan.” He snickered at his own joke. “I want you to work with me.”

It took him all of a minute to realize the man was honestly offering him a job. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but none of the others had gone through the efforts of actually trapping him. That almost made him respect the guy, while at the same time, smack him upside the head.

“I work alone.”

Chan Lee clicked his tongue. “You not even consider?”

Dimitri shook his head slowly. “Don’t need to. I’m not interested.”

“Is too bad,” the man said with a sad little shake of his head. “I pay good money.”

“I’m not interested in money.”

Chan Lee’s thin chest lifted and dropped with his sigh. “Then maybe something else I can do for you, hmm?” He raised his eyebrows. “I am very powerful man.”

Ava’s face flashed through his mind. Just as quickly, he dismissed it; what were the odds of this man having any knowledge of her whereabouts? Getting random criminals involved would only insure he never saw Ava again.

“No.” He tightened his grip on his goggles. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

Chan Lee said nothing for several long heartbeats. He stared at the terrace doors where the light continued to slice through, where a slight breeze was toying with the ends of the blinds, making them sway and flutter. Dimitri calculated his distance while the man was distracted in thought. He glanced down at the goggles and the flashlight still clutched in his hands and tried to mentally prep himself for his escape plan.

“I am saddened by your decision,” Chan Lee said at last. “I am reasonable man, very good employer. Together, we can have everything—Chan Lee and The Devil. We could take whole city for ourself.”

Something in the air had shifted. There was a lingering tension vibrating around them that had all the hairs along the back of Dimitri’s neck prickling. He judged his chances of going for his gun, but abandoned the idea. There was no way to do that without letting go of the light or the goggles and he knew he’d never make it.

The gun Chan Lee lifted from behind his back didn’t surprise Dimitri. Its predictableness only offered comfort to an unpredictable situation. He stared at the long barrel of the silencer attached to the head of a .45, then at the man wielding it.

“You’re going to kill me because I refuse to work for you?”

Chan Lee jerked up one shoulder. “Yes, I am not so good with rejection.”

Dimitri nodded slowly. He glanced down to where the flashlight had spilled a pool of gold across his scarred boots. He tapped his hands against his thigh thoughtfully and watched the flicker, the shimmer reflecting off the smooth marble beneath his feet. It was a stalling tactic he knew he needed to utilize carefully.

He exhaled grudgingly and lifted his head. “What is it you want me to do?”

The gun wavered. It visibly lowered a notch from Dimitri’s head to mid chest.

“You are reconsidering my offer!” Chan Lee cheered, beaming. “I knew you would.”

Dimitri frowned, though the man couldn’t see it, but he heard it when Dimitri spoke. “Well?”

The nozzle of the silencer lowered to the ground, and that was all Dimitri needed.

He swung up his own arm. The beam from his flashlight slashed through the dark in a glowing arc and slammed into Chan Lee’s face with deadly accuracy. The man cried out and flung up both arms to shield his wide, brown eyes. He stumbled, hit the glass table behind him and the two crashed to the floor.

Dimitri didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He jammed on his goggles and, as an afterthought, dug out his signature rose from the side compartment of his pack and tossed it down next to the debris before bolting.

In exactly fifteen steps, he was across the room to the terrace doors and out into the crisp night. The rope he’d used to propel himself down swayed in the breeze just inches from the top of his head. He grabbed it and hoisted himself up the side of the building towards the roof, one hand over the other.

Below, he heard the shout of voices, the tinkle of breaking glass, then Chan Lee was there, face a pale ghost in the darkness. He screamed something the wind and distance caught and distorted. Dimitri reached the roof ledge and hauled himself over just as the first bullet whizzed past his left leg. He hit the gravel and rolled, taking the rope with him and blocking Chan Lee’s attempts at following him.

The pops continued, spraying into the night in useless frustration. Dimitri had already cleared the roof to the other side and the second length of rope propelling him down into the alleyway and his escape. 

Going down was always easier than climbing up. He practically slid to the bottom, grateful for his gloves and knowing he would need new ones before the night was over.

He hit the pavement with both feet, the sound muffled. He threw glances in all directions, searching through the tint of green for signs of life and finding none. Certain he wasn’t followed, he ripped off the goggles, stuffed them into his pack and raced to the edge between the two buildings. The concrete glistened like an oil slick despite the lack of rain. His boots crunched on broken glass and grit as he reached his parked bike and jumped on. The sound of its engine revving to life splintered the darkness.