Chapter 9

 

“Ah, our guest no sleep now,” a deep, accented male voice said, over the incessant barking of dogs.

Nick was pulled from his recent memories and looked out through the wire mesh fence.

A bare-chested man slowly came into view, standing out in the corridor. His head was shaved. His scalp, neck, shoulders, and torso were covered in tattoos, the story of his criminal past told in crudely formed pictures and symbols. He had thick, greasy looking lips. He was eating some sort of nuts or seeds, cracking the tiny shells with his teeth.

Sunflower seeds.

“Who the fuck are you?” Nick said, as the man peered into the cage.

“Who the fock am I?” A couple of the little black shells were stuck to his lower lip, and he spit them out onto the concrete. “I am man you have no respect for, that’s who the fock I am. You think you can break my boy’s hand?”

Nick recognized the accent—he was Ukrainian, like the other thugs.

“My boy, he ask you very nicely, you want come to my dog fight? And you break his hand?” The man was apparently the leader here. “Nyet, nyet, nyet. Now you must pay.”

He turned and shouted “Igor! Sasha!”

Two men appeared in the hallway.

One of them unlocked the gate to the cage, and Nick recognized him—it was the young blond thug from the bar, who now had a cast on his wrist.

I guess I did break it, Nick thought uneasily.

The other one was huge, a hulking beast who looked like his IQ was about the same as his neck size.

Isabella gave a hoarse scream as the two men manhandled Nick to the concrete floor, his nose nearly pressed into a pile of dog crap.

The leader shouted out instructions to them. Sasha, the one with the cast, unlocked the cuff from Nick’s left wrist. Igor, the hulk, grabbed his arm and firmly pulled it behind his back.

“Do it slowly, Igor, so he can enjoy it,” their bald leader chuckled.

“No!” Nick grunted.

“Stop it!” Isabella screamed.

Nick let out a yelp as his wrist was bent backwards and more pressure was applied. He felt the first bone snap and screamed again.

“Eye for an eye, da?” The leader said, snickering.

Igor finally let go.

Sasha brutally kicked Nick into the corner.

The cuffs were still attached to his right wrist. As he moaned in pain, Igor fastened the free shackle into the wire mesh of the fence.

Then the two gangsters grabbed hold of Isabella.

“We have more fun with your whore,” the leader said.

“No!” Nick yelled, and tried to stop them, but they dragged her out of the cage, biting and kicking and screaming.

 

* * *

The long, agonizing minutes ticked by. Nick wasn’t sure which hurt more—the pain in his shattered wrist, or the faint screams he heard coming from somewhere above the dingy, dog-infested catacombs. Isabella’s screams.

He desperately tried to free the handcuffs from the wire mesh, but the wire was too thick. It would take wire cutters to sever them.

After what seemed more than an hour, the two younger men finally returned Isabella to the cage. She was shaking, her clothes tattered.

They shoved her into the corner and locked the gate again.

Nick tried to crawl towards her, but his shackled wrist prevented him from reaching her.

Then Nick saw the bald, tattooed man sauntering down the hallway towards them.

He stopped and peered inside the cage, his mouth twisted into a grimace-like smile, as if observing two of his kept pets.

“Let us go,” Nick said, his voice wavering from the pain. His broken wrist was swollen to what seemed like twice its normal size, and his hand was completely numb. “We’re even now.”

“Nyet, we are no ‘even.’ Hospital bill for my man very expensive.” He smiled and raised a credit card in the air.

Nick recognized it—it was his own card. It was issued from a French bank under a fake name, one of several that Brian had arranged for him so that he could receive his extraction payments tax-free.

“You must give PIN code,” the Ukrainian said.

“Take us to a cash machine and I’ll give you all the money you want.”

“Nyet, you must give PIN code.”

Nick hesitated. Before he could respond, the man said, “You think about this,” he said, “and I think whether feed you and your bitch-whore to my dogs.”