“Carrie?” he said loudly. He looked around at the other kids. “Becca? Are my sisters here? Have you seen my sisters?”
The oldest girl frowned. “Sister?” she repeated slowly.
“My sisters! Have you seen them?”
The girl looked around at the others. The kids shuffled back. His vista opened up. Cinder-block walls, painted white. Concrete floor. Very cold. He was lying on it. There was a series of small mattresses. Each had a dirty blanket.
Holy shit. These kids lived here, in this freaky white limbo.
Carrie lay on the mattress nearest him. Her eyes were closed. She wore only underwear. Her hair was draped over her face.
Josh jerked up, tried to move, but he was trussed like a bird for the oven. “Carrie,” he yelled. “Carrie? You OK?”
The girl tapped him on the cheek, a brisk pat-pat. Then she held up a white plastic knife, leaned behind him, and began to saw.
It took a long time, but finally his hands came loose. They burned as blood flowed back into them. He reached up, prodded his head. Found a big, blood-encrusted lump on his temple. Then the rag, knotted around his neck. The corners of his mouth were chafed and sore.
He twisted round to look at the dark-haired girl, who was now working on his ankles. She mimed a gag in his mouth and nodded.
“You took it out,” he said. “Thanks.”
She gave him a cautious, fleeting smile. His legs came free, and he pulled himself up to his knees, wobbling like a baby who had never walked. Still wearing nothing but those stupid silk boxers.
He crawled to Carrie, brushed her hair away. Her face was white, with dark smudges under purplish eyelids. She didn’t respond when he shook her. Her pulse was faint and rapid. She felt clammy. She made a raspy sound with each shallow breath. He couldn’t stop shaking her, begging her to wake up. He realized after a while that he was sobbing.
He felt that pat-pat on his shoulder again, so he wiped his face and turned to look into the girl’s big somber eyes. She mimed the injection of a hypodermic in her arm, and gestured towards Carrie.
Drugged, then. Those pricks had drugged his little sister. He tried to comfort himself with the fact that she was breathing.
He snorted back the tears, wiped his nose. “What’s your name?”
She looked confused, so he pointed to himself. “I’m Josh.” He stroked Carrie’s hair. “This is my sister. Carrie.”
She gave him that fleeting, beautiful smile again. “Sveti.” She started in on the others, rattling off a list of foreign names, too fast for his battered brain to take in. She finished with the littlest one, a toddler who was clinging to her arm, ruffling the child’s snarled black curls tenderly. “Rachel,” she said.
Rachel held up her arms to be picked up. Two years old, maybe less. Scratchy little voice. The kid’s face was so thin, she looked like a wizened little monkey. Sveti picked her up and settled the child on her slender hip. Skinny arms wound around the girl’s neck; dirty little legs with black-soled feet wrapped around her waist like a strangling vine. The toddler wore a tunic made from an adult’s white T-shirt, artfully knotted so that it would stay on her tiny body.
Sveti cuddled Rachel and gazed at Josh. Her calm, steady regard made him feel nervous. He was scared shitless, but she looked like she’d been afraid and miserable for so long, she’d made some strange peace with it. Her eyes looked old. A hundred-year-old woman, in the body of a thirteen-year-old. Twelve, maybe. Hard to tell.
He looked around. A tide of dread rose inside him as the children stared at him hungrily. Jesus, how could people do this to little kids? No tables, chairs, books, toys, music, pictures. No windows, even. The place smelled of piss, dirty diapers, rotted food. Big, overflowing plastic bags of garbage bulged along the wall. This place was like a holding pen for animals, doomed to be put down whenever someone got around to it. “Where are you from?” he asked Sveti.
She considered the question carefully. “Ukraina,” she replied.
The Ukraine. It was coming together. Becca’s mobster was Ukrainian. Nadia had been Moldovan, or so she said. But what the fuck was a mobster doing with a cage full of sad, dirty little kids?
Christ. That was a question he was afraid to consider. Especially since being penned in with them might mean that he and Carrie were now slated to share their fate. And looking around himself, he couldn’t imagine it was anything but bad.
His own fault. Falling for a lying whore. Reeled in like a fish on a hook, and the hook was his own stupid dick.
It made him cringe. He’d been such a butthead. Becca had tried so hard to warn him, and he’d given her nothing but attitude.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Sveti bit her lip, looked doubtful, and shook her head.
“Why? What the fuck is this place? What are they going to do to you?” He was shouting now, even though he knew it wasn’t fair.
She didn’t look offended. “First, Ukraina,” she said, in a low, halting voice. “Apartment. Many month. Then truck, boat, many days.” She made a face, a gagging gesture with her finger. “Bad, truck, bad, boat. Then, here.” She held up the hand that wasn’t supporting Rachel. Five fingers, a closed fist, four more fingers. “Days. Many days.”
“Nine days?” he said.
“Many,” she repeated. She sounded exhausted.
Josh pointed at the bruises on her face. “Who hit you?” God, how could anybody hit a face that looked that fragile?
Her face went blank and she turned away, putting the baby down. The kid started to whimper. He knew just how she felt. But it was time for him to man up. Do something. Anything.
He staggered towards the door, supporting himself against the wall. Seemed less energy consuming than asking complicated questions. The littler kids all followed him, in a straggling file. He was probably the first new thing they’d had to look at in months. He must be a hell of a spectacle, beat all to shit and streaked with blood. He tried the door. Locked, bolted. The one other door proved to be a bathroom. One filthy toilet, no toilet seat. A dirty sink. A cracked bar of yellow soap. An industrial-sized toilet paper dispenser. The stench of piss. That was all.
He crept slowly back, along the wall, to the spot next to Carrie, and sank down next to her. He felt queasy and terrified. He covered his eyes to block out the light and the penetrating gaze of all those thumb-sucking kids who were hunkered down to watch him.
A few moments later, he felt a tap on his knee. Sveti was holding out a little plastic tray, sort of like the meal you got in a plane. A shred of dry-looking meat, a dried, cracked glop of gluey mashed potatoes smeared with congealed gravy, gray vegetables, a half pint container of milk. A small bottle of filtered water.
It looked and smelled like a frozen meal that had been thawed and refrozen several times before the final insult of being micro-waved.
She patted her own belly. “Me, no eat. No hungry. You eat?”
That was it. His stomach was already roiling from the concussion, and the sight of that disgusting little meal slammed into him like a fist right into his gut.
He twisted to the side and vomited everything inside him, then hung over the foul mess he’d made, weeping for shame at his own weakness and for the pounding, crashing pain in his head.
Pat-pat, this time on his shoulder. Sveti shoved a handful of wet paper napkins into his hand and the bottle of filtered water into the other. She pushed at him, nudging until he understood that he was supposed to scoot closer to Carrie. Then she started cleaning up the vomit, like she was used to it.
He wiped his eyes, his mouth with the napkin. “Please don’t,” he forced out, through shaking lips. “I’ll…I’ll do it.”
She shot him a sidelong look. He could read it. You can’t even walk without falling on your face, and if I don’t, who will?
So you wake up in a completely white room. How do you feel?
He almost laughed at the random thought, but he stopped himself. It would hurt too much. How did he feel? He felt like he was already dead. So was Carrie, and Sveti, and the rest of these poor kids. All that was left was the actual, bloody separation from his body.
He let her clean up his stinking mess, trying hard not to cry.
This was not possible. It had to be some kind of bizarre joke.
But Nick didn’t joke at the best of times. He could not possibly be joking now. Becca’s mouth worked, stuttering out words that made no sense. “But I—but you—Nick, what on earth? T-t-take these off me, for God’s sake! We don’t have time for this!”
“You have time for it now.” He had that hateful cool tone that had been bothering her since he’d gotten back to the hotel that day. “You’ve got all the time in the world for the next couple of days.”
“But why are you doing this? Carrie and Josh are—”
“Figments of your imagination,” he said. “And as such, I’m not inclined to worry about them.”
She gaped at him until she found her voice again. “But that’s nuts! You know they exist! You talked to my brother on the phone!”
“Yeah, that call from Josh really had me going. For a long time. But we’ve reached the end of the line.”
“Why?” she demanded, frantically. “When? What happened?”
“It happened today,” he said. “At 1:16, when you got out of a taxi and went into Zhoglo’s town house.”
She floundered for a moment, bewildered. “Zhoglo’s—what? But I didn’t…oh, Nick. My God.” She clutched his arm with her free hand. “You mean, the Gavin Street house? That’s where I went to see Josh! Now it makes sense! Josh said Nadia was here on a student visa, but that place was way too nice to be foreign student housing. I knew there was something off. That’s how Zhoglo entrapped Josh! With Nadia! And Carrie was in that house the whole time!”
She could no longer make out his eyes, it was so dark, but she could actually feel the cold emanating from him. “Nice recovery,” he said. “But you really think I’m that stupid? Why should I believe you now when you lied to me before? You didn’t say anything about visiting a Gavin Street town house to see your brother. You lied, Becca. Why?”
“No.” She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, “I, ah, I thought that stop to see Josh was no big deal—”
“No big deal? Really. Your thought processes fascinate me.”
His grating, ironic tone was chilling. “OK, I thought you would be angry,” she blurted. “It just came up. He called me, and you’d been so intense about safety, and so I just—”
“I am angry,” he said. “You cannot imagine how angry I am.”
She rattled her cuffed hand against the scaffolding. “This is a pretty emphatic message,” she said tartly. “Nick, get real. Wake up. You can’t leave me here. You are wrong about me. I’m not with Zhoglo.”
“What’s this, then?” He retrieved her purse, which had fallen to the floor and rummaged inside, pulling out an envelope. “Explain this to me, sweetheart.”
She stared at it, utterly perplexed. “My new purse—I bought a replacement. But that? Never seen that before in my life. What is it?”
He pulled out a fantastically thick wad of bills. “Fifteen thousand bucks,” he said. “For services rendered.”
She stared at it, shaking her head. She felt hemmed in, on every side, like the walls of a box were closing in on her. “No,” she whispered.
“You must have shown Zhoglo one hell of a good time for that kind of money. Were you as passionate with him as you are with me?”
“No. Never. They must have planted it while I was talking to Josh,” she said, but she could feel the wall that blocked her words from him. They bounced back, sounding even to her own ears like the meaningless babble of a liar, caught out.
“Or was that money you took for fucking me?” Nick went on. “When I see the guy tonight, I’ll have to thank him. I have never been worked over like you worked me over. I’m not even the same man.”
That was literally true. He was transformed, and she hated the transformation. “No, you’re not,” she said. “And I would never do what you are accusing me of, Nick. Never in a million years.”
He groped around inside her purse again, took out a small, flat black device. “And this, too. I’ll get rid of it when I leave.”
“What is that?” She peered at it, trying to make it out in the dimness, but he’d already slipped it into his pocket.
“Don’t play dumb. It’s boring.” He took out her cell phone, pocketed that. “Here. You take this.” He reached inside her jacket, feeling for the inside pocket, and slipped the thick wad of cash carefully inside. She could feel its weight tugging on her shoulder like a brick. “Keep it safe, beautiful. God knows, you’ve earned it.”
She shrank away from his touch. “Don’t touch me.”
“No?” His hands slid down and fastened around her waist. “Aw, come on. It’s how you’ve been managing me all along, babe. Don’t you want to give your sexual wiles one more try? I’m up for it.” He grabbed her free hand and pressed it against his erection. “Amazing, isn’t it? How the body and the mind just don’t connect. My dick doesn’t care about this convoluted bullshit. It just wants to have at that pussy one last time—”
“Nick, stop it. I can’t stand this.”
“Besides, you know how you go wild for extreme.” His voice was a deep, ticklish growl against her ear that made shivers of conflicting emotions race down her spine. “Remember how turned on you got for Zhoglo’s live sex show? What could be more extreme than being handcuffed and fucked in an abandoned warehouse? Talk about illicit sex. You’ve been paid, and I’ve been betrayed…and fifteen K should be good for one last whack, right?”