“I said to get back, asshole!” he snarled.
The room was silent, but for the blip and whirr of machines, and the steady beep of Sveti’s heart on the monitor. Still beating. Still inside her. Seth came up behind him, cool and grim.
“Which of you pieces of shit is Richard Mathes?” he asked.
The others shrank away from the table, leaving the one who held the scalpel standing all alone. The one who had not scurried at his first two warnings. The one who had held his ground.
The arrogant prick yanked his mask away, cursing. His handsome face was full of righteous indignation. “Who the hell are you? And how dare you burst in on us in this way? We are performing an extremely delicate life-saving surgery, and you have just—”
“Shut up, you lying butcher,” Nick said. “I know exactly what you’re doing. Step back. Right now. Or I will blow your head off.”
Light flashed on the scalpel as Mathes’s hands went slowly up, his mouth twisting in impotent rage. The urge to jump on the guy and kill him with his bare hands almost overwhelmed Nick.
He blinked back angry tears. Sveti’s face was so white, so hollow. There was a fresh bruise under one eye, an old greenish-yellow one under the other. What had they done to her?
“Which of you dirtbags is the anesthesiologist?” he demanded.
The shrinking, not-me demeanor of the others singled out by elimination a pudgy woman with close-set eyes. He pointed. “You?”
She shrugged. Her eyes were sullen and dead above her mask.
“How long will she be out?” he demanded.
“Ten minutes. Unless I give her more.” Her voice was flat.
There was a flurry of movement behind him, a terrified gabble. A shriek. Nick jerked around. Mathes was holding a pistol on him.
Bam. Mathes shrieked at the gunshot. His pistol flew in a lazy arc over the operating table. It crashed, slid into the corner.
Mathes fell to his knees, cradling his right hand. If you could still call it a hand. It was now a mangled mass of blood, splintered bone and tendons.
None of the crowd of doctors made any move to help him.
Seth gave Nick an apologetic shrug. “I probably should have just wasted him, but I wanted to zap the hand that did the dirty work. And besides, I liked the idea of the fun he’ll have in prison, once the inmates find out that he gets off on gutting little kids.”
“Fair enough,” Nick said. “Thanks.” He turned back to the anesthesiologist. “Where are the rest of the kids?”
“What kids?” The sulky bitch was holding out on him.
He gestured with his gun at the moaning Mathes, blood dripping down onto the floor. “Do you see that fuckhead? Do you see his hand?”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly.
“Do you want to be next?” he asked. She shook her head. “Good,” he said. “Then let’s try this question again. The kids?”
She blinked, staring at the gun. “Downstairs somewhere. Never been down there. None of us have. They brought her up in the elevator.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“The ones who take care of the kids,” she snapped.
Take care, his ass. He thought of how thin Sveti was, of the bruises on her face. “How many of them are there?”
“Two that I’ve seen,” she said. “A man and a woman.”
Nick glanced at Seth. “I’m going on down.”
Seth looked troubled. “Alone?”
“You stay with Sveti,” Nick said. No way was he leaving her alone with a roomful of people who’d been about to cut out her heart.
“Problem solved,” Tam said coolly from the doorway.
All eyes cut to her. They could hardly help it. She strutted into the room on four-inch silver heels, shimmering, gleaming, violently blond, an elegant silver Walther PPK in her hand.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “The cops are on their way to pick up the rest of this garbage.” Her narrowed eyes swept the huddled doctors.
“Good,” Seth said. “Go on down, then. I’ll just make sure none of these guys decides to leave before that.”
The elevator functioned without a key. Evidently, once you got this deep in the guts of this killing factory, they were no longer worried about security. Five levels of sub-basements. He glanced at Tam, who gave him a your-call shrug.
He hit the bottom floor. It seemed symbolically appropriate.
The door ground open onto another corridor, but this one was less finished, with snakelike tubes running along the ceiling and a gray concrete floor. On the left, the corridor dead-ended after twenty yards. On the right, there was an L turn after fifty.
They turned right.
The sound of frantically slapping feet froze them in their tracks. Rasping, panicked breaths. A man careened around the L-turn, wild-eyed, knees pumping high, gun in hand. A maniacal goblin of a man with greasy blond locks straggling from his oily pate.
He screamed shrilly at the sight of them, reeled back, and jackrabbited off the way he came.
Nick and Tam gave chase. A door slammed. They peered around the corner. They were blocked by heavy duty doors, with a small window of wire reinforced glass. They sprinted for it. Locked and barred.
Beyond the window there appeared to be nothing other than still more of that endless fucking corridor. Nick smashed the glass with the butt of his gun. There were kids wailing, far away down the corridor.
Nick slammed the door with his fists. “We’ve got to get in there! He’ll kill them so that they can’t testify!”
Tam yanked his elbow. “Get back around the corner.” She lifted the gem studded grenade necklace off her neck. “It will blow the door, but that’s all. The kids are far enough away to risk using this.”
She pulled out the jeweled pin as they turned the corner, and bowled it on the fly with graceful skill. It slid to the end of the corridor and came to rest against the door.
Tam sank down next to him. “Five…four…three…ears, Nikolai!” He stuck his fingers in his ears as she mouthed one.
Just in time. The sound slammed every molecule of his body against every other molecule. They looked around the corner. There was a jagged, twisted hole where the door had been. Cinder-block rubble, a cloud of choking dust. They sprinted through it. The yellow-haired man lay on his face about thirty feet from the door, screaming hoarsely in Ukrainian.
“My ears! My ears!” he howled.
Blood ran out of both his ears and down his neck. He pawed at the air like a maddened animal and stared at his bloody hands, trying to grab them as they passed. “My ears!”
“Where are the children?” Nick yelled in Ukrainian.
The guy just reared up onto his knees, howling and gabbling and sobbing. Tam made a disgusted sound, plucked out one of her earrings, gave it a brisk twist. She stabbed it into his shoulder.
He groaned, toppled slowly to the ground and lay still.
They ran on, slowing to listen as a new sound became audible. A baby, wailing behind a door. More than one. The closer they came, the stronger it got.
The door with the screaming behind it was locked and bolted. They threw the bolt, but the lock was a good one that would take an expert hours to pick. He couldn’t shoot it out with kids behind it.
Movement, flashing in the corner of his eye. He and Tam turned, and took off after a big, bulky blond woman who was sneaking out a door and sprinting towards the hole they’d blasted.
Panic made the woman fast, but she was heavy and stubby-legged, no match for the infuriated Nick and a thoroughbred racehorse like Tam, even when the chick was sporting four-inch silver heels.
They caught up with her at the stairwell. Nick took her down with a flying tackle. She grunted as he landed on top of her. She was soaked with sweat. “Not so fast, lady. I want the key to that door,” he told her.
“No understand,” she said. “No speak English.”
A garnet-handled knife suddenly appeared in Tam’s fist. She grabbed the woman’s coarse blond hair and wrenched her head back, and screamed in Ukrainian. “The key, bitch!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
The tip dug in. Blood welled up, trickled down the woman’s neck. “I suggest you figure it out, before I cut off your ear,” Tam hissed.
“No! No cut. I give you keys,” the woman gasped out in English. She struggled under Nick’s weight to get her hand into one of her pockets, dragged out a small bunch of keys. “Here. Keys. Take. Take.”
Nick and Tam glanced at each other.
“We’ll let you open the door, you donkey-faced hell-witch,” Tam said. “If you gave us the wrong key, we can renegotiate, no? Maybe I’ll go for an eye. God knows you can’t get any uglier.”
They hauled the woman to her feet and frog-marched her back to the door with the screaming kids behind it.
“I did nothing wrong,” the woman protested, sounding put upon. “I take care of children, I feed, I wipe bottoms, I no hurt!”
“Shut up,” Nick snarled.
They shoved her up to the door. As soon as the locks gave way and the door handle turned, Tam pulled out her hair clip, twisted a small nozzle, and squirted the woman’s face.
She fell sideways against the wall, eyes rolled to the whites, and slid down. Good. Two down, ready for custody.
Nick blew out a sharp breath, and pushed the door open.
The first impression he got was that there was a single malformed organism, with multiple staring eyes, multiple clutching limbs. Then the mutant being resolved into a tight knot of dirty, terrified-looking kids.
They were scared into silence except for the smallest one, who squalled lustily in the arms of a tall young man. The guy was naked but for boxer shorts, his face battered and bloody.
The heavy fog of piss, vomit, unwashed bodies and rotten food made it hard to breathe. Nick let his gun hand drop to his side.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said quietly in Ukrainian.
A scrawny little kid who looked about ten tried to speak, and coughed. He tried again. His voice was hoarse and scratchy. “Where are Marina and Yuri?” he replied, in the same language.
“Outside,” Tam said from behind him. “The police will take them away and punish them. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
They stared at each other, at a loss. The children were paralyzed with shock. Nick was struck dumb by the squalor of the room.
The toddler wiggled in the guy’s arms. He put her gently down, and she toddled forward on dirty little legs, huge eyes locked onto Tam, who glittered under the fluorescent lights with supernatural brightness.
“Pretty,” the toddler lisped in Ukrainian. “Mama.”
Tam shrank back. “Oh, no. Not me,” she told the kid. “I’m not your mama, little one.”
The kid lifted up her thin arms. “Mama? Mama?”
Tam backed up. Nick had never seen Tam intimidated, or even at a disadvantage since he’d known her, but this two-year-old seemed to terrify her. “No,” she said, shaking her finger. “Not me. Not your mama.”
The tiny girl’s face crumpled with woe. She started to wail.
Tam began to swear viciously, in some thick, obscure language that Nick could not immediately place. “Hell,” she muttered. “Come here, then.” She picked the kid up.
Nick went in and looked them all over. Half-starved and pale but they were all on their feet. Except for one older girl slumped against the wall dressed in her underwear, who looked very weak and ill. The rest of the lot were smaller than the ten-year-old.
“Is Sveti all right?” asked the kid who’d spoken before.
“We got to her just in time,” Nick told him. “She’ll be fine.”
The kid put his hands over his eyes. His shoulders began to shake. From behind, he heard snippets of Tam’s conversation with the kid. “Stop that! Oh, God, don’t touch that, it’s filled with sulfuric acid!”
“Pretty,” the little girl gurgled. “Pretty.”
He looked at the stained mattresses, the wall lined with plastic bags stuffed with rotting trash that no one had bothered to haul out. “Holy shit,” he murmured softly. “Those filthy assholes.”
The tall young guy stepped forward. “Hey! You speak English, mister?”
Nick swung around, startled. “You’re an American?”
“Hell, yeah! Me and my sister Carrie. The rest of these kids are Ukrainian, I think. They dumped us in this room today. And there was this other girl, too, Sveti. They took her away a couple hours ago. Look, man, have you seen my sister Becca around here?”
Nick’s chest flash-froze. The world fell away, whirling and shifting, everything changing around that phrase. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Josh Cattrell,” the guy said. “That fat guy, the mobster dude, I think he’s got my big sister Becca locked up someplace too. Maybe she’s here. You haven’t seen her around, have you?”
Nick stared at the kid’s wide-set green eyes. Just like Becca’s. So were the reddened eyes of the girl hugging her knees on the floor. Josh and Carrie. Holy fucking shit. What had he done?
He swallowed hard. “She’s not here.” His throat closed tight around the words, strangling them so they were barely audible.
“How do you know, if you don’t—hey.” The kids’s eyes narrowed to wary slits. “Wait a sec. You know Becca. Don’t you?”