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Luckily for Magdela and me, Sergei’s hired muscle weren’t enthusiastic about stopping us from leaving once I flashed the steel in my hand. A few shouted curses and threats were all that assailed us as we made our way out of the club and around to the old sedan.
Magdela was shaken at first, her steps hesitant and her glance lingering over her shoulder even after the office doors were closed. But the further we got towards freedom, the more confident her steps became. By the time we were walking under the moonlight, she was practically leading the way. For her, Dreamworks probably felt like a cage—and now the lioness was free.
“What now?” she asked as we climbed into the car.
I fired up the engine and pulled out onto the road while I spoke. “First, I take you somewhere they won’t come looking for you. Do you have relatives in the city? Friends?”
“I’m not hiding. They killed my best friend because of what she knew about those missing girls, and I’m going to find out why.” There was a fire in her words which surprised me even after the catty walk to the car.
Firelight flashed across my face as I lit up a cigarette, and smoke curled under the brim of the old ball cap as I glanced over at her and arched an eyebrow. “You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re asking for. Let me take you somewhere.”
She grabbed the cigarette from between my lips, took a long drag, and leaned back as the smoke coiled around stray curls of hair at her temples. Darkly shadowed eyes narrowed, and ruby-red lips pursed in condemnation. “What, you think I’m some sort of lady-child you have to take care of now? My friend is dead, and you just shot my boss in the leg. I’d say I’m fully aware of what kind of mess we’re in.” She took another drag from the cigarette, and I couldn’t help but glance down as her chest raised and lowered with the deep breath.
I cleared my throat and pulled my attention back to the road. “Things didn’t end well for my last partner, you know.”
“Yeah. I saw the news, remember? Now, what’s the plan?”
I sighed and dug out another cigarette as I turned the car onto the highway, headed back towards downtown. “Well, the plan had been to follow the money. I know—we know what the commodity being traded is now, but we still need to find out where these girls are going and who the buyer is. Talbot might be running things, or his company might just be laundering the money. Most likely, the buyer is the Bratva. But we need to connect the dots if we want to prove why Evie was murdered. I also need evidence tying Kristoff and Boris to this if I want to clear my name.”
“So, we go to Talbot Construction and dig through their records?”
“Mm hmm,” I mumbled. “Not sure how much help you’ll be there, though.”
Magdela tapped the metal implant in the back of her skull with a long, crimson fingernail shaped to a fine point. “You want to get into their computers, you need somebody who knows the inside of computers; and I doubt you have anybody who knows them like I do.”
The rest of the drive downtown passed in relative silence. We were both lost in our own thoughts, brooding over our own issues. The image of Frank’s face coming apart as Boris put a slug through it kept playing in my mind on a loop. I should have been trying to piece together the puzzle of how I was going to tie Kristoff into things, but thoughts of revenge consumed me.
Before I could shake them, the steel and glass towers of the business district had risen around us and I was pulling the car into an underground garage beneath the Vander Building.
The structure towered over the rest of the city, soaring a hundred stories into the night sky. Elements of Gothic architecture covered every surface which wasn’t a window. Gargoyles crouched on the corners, looking out in every direction, would have been more at home on a French cathedral than an American office building. Even in the basement garage, misshapen figures of creatures from various legends adorned support columns and walls. An angel and a demon flanked the elevator doors, staring down at us as I hit the call button as if judging which of them our souls most resembled.
I didn’t hesitate to escape their gaze as the elevator chimed and the doors slid open. A touchscreen on the wall offered access to the various floors of the building, but in exchange demanded security clearance in the form of biometric scans.
“I’ve got this,” Magdela said. The fabric of her dress squeezed her hips as she crouched before the interface. A sharp nail pulled a panel loose below it, and she set about plucking wires and swapping circuit breakers until a green light flashed on the screen. She typed in the name ‘Talbot’, and soon we were being whisked to the appropriate floor of the building.
I was expecting security guards, but it looked like the electronic gatekeeping was all that stood between us and our objective. I led the way through the darkened office, dim fire safety lights along the edges of the floor the only thing illuminating our path. At the end of the hall, we came to a large door with James Talbot’s name on it. Again, there was a biometric security lock, but Magdela made quick work of it. She had been right; I would have been kicking in doors and probably setting off alarms if she weren’t with me.
Inside, we found what one would expect from a corporate office. A modest bar sat off to one side and a seating area filled the other, resting before floor to ceiling windows looking out over the city like this was the grand tower of some king’s castle. Talbot had helped build much of this city, so he probably felt like he had a right to lord over it. A massive, cherry wood desk dominated the center of the room, and the wall behind it was covered by bookshelves holding more curiosities than books. Even the latter, I suspected, were there more for gravitas than reference.
Magdela sidled around the desk and sat down in the over-sized leather chair. Her fingers flew across a glass touch display set into the desk itself, and soon a holographic monitor was beaming information back at us from a few inches above it. She sailed through menus faster than I could read them and bypassed security checks as if she were solving a set of children’s riddles.
“Anything?” I asked, impatient despite her swift progress.
“Just about... Aha!” She placed her fingers around a square of information and pulled them apart, bringing it up larger than life floating over the desk. “Here, it looks like whenever Talbot sent money to Sergei, there was a specific ship scheduled to depart with less than a day’s notice: the Beverly. Looks like a freighter. And on the surface, it’s running manufactured steel construction components to a buyer in Vladivostok.”
Things just got even more troubling. Were they shipping these girls overseas? I was worried they were getting buried in some local cyber dens where they’d be jacked in full-time and kept under with a cocktail of drugs and intravenous nutrients. But if they were sending them to Russia, it would be almost impossible to track them down. I rubbed the stubble on my face with a calloused hand. I was a glorified beat cop, not some kind of international spy. I was in way over my head, and the more I tried to reach the surface, the deeper the abyss grew.
“Why do you look like I just stepped on your puppy’s neck?” Magdela asked as she rummaged around the desk drawers. She found what she had been looking for, a data chip, and slid it into a slot on the desk. “With this, we can tie Talbot to Dreamworks. We just take this to the police, and you’re in the clear.”
“Not that easy, sweetheart,” I muttered as I lit up a smoke and plopped onto the couch. “That’s all circumstantial. He could have been paying Sergei for anything, and the timing of the shipments could be a coincidence. And this still doesn’t help us fit Kristoff into the puzzle.”
“Oh, but this does,” Magdela said as she pulled up another file. “Looks like Kristoff was getting paid at the same time as Sergei. Maybe a founder’s fee? He had been bragging about helping to recruit the girls for Sergei.”
“It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still a bunch of scattered pieces with nothing to glue them together. Your statement as a witness is really the only connecting factor, and that will not convince the D.A. there’s a criminal conspiracy going on.”
“Well,” Magdela said as she pulled the data chip from the desk and made it disappear below the neckline of her dress. “The Beverly is in port right now, and the most recent payment to Sergei was made today. I guess we’ll have to go to the docks and see what’s on this ship.”
* * *
THE DRIVE TO THE DOCKS brought us back through The Dale, but it was over in minutes by car; a stark contrast to spending nearly a day on foot to get through there yesterday. The docks themselves weren’t anything to write home about: warehouses, cranes, stacks of shipping containers, and wharves with an assortment of large and small craft moored. For all the innovation which went into rebuilding New Angeles after the big quake hit, the docks looked like they might have in the past. The only difference was the harbor now sat where old downtown Los Angeles used to be, and out there beneath the waves Santa Monica and Long Beach were now the two largest man-made reefs on the west coast.
I switched the lights of the car off and drifted between the metal warehouses and shipping containers. Magdela and I both craned our necks looking for any sign of trouble, but the harbor seemed to be as deserted as one would expect it to be at two in the morning. Rain was patting down; the gentle drops might have lulled a younger me to sleep, but now only echoed my malaise.
“We’re looking for bay sixty-five,” Magdela said as we drew close to the main dockyard. Looming behemoths rocked in their berths as the breeze picked up and the still waters of the harbor churned under the weight of an oncoming storm.
We turned a corner and knew we had found our quarry. Ahead was a flurry of activity as cranes loaded rows of the hollow steel bricks onto the deck of a freighter. Flood lights illuminated a scene of organized chaos as workers ran back and forth, readying the next load for its short flight. Several cars and trucks were parked in a row facing the ship, their headlights all adding to the illumination of the mid-night loading party.
The wet brakes of the old car squeaked slightly as I brought it to a stop behind a stack of coiled crane cables. I winced and waited for the shouts of alarm from the clandestine gathering ahead, but the slight noise must have been lost in the night. I looked at Magdela and said, “Stay here.”
She shook her head, those few loose curls around her temples bobbing as if they were also disagreeing with me. “No, you might need me. Let’s go.” Without another word, she was out of the car and drifting through the shadows.
Despite the high heels and a dress more suited to a cocktail party than espionage, she danced from shadow to shadow with impressive ease. I followed behind clumsily, realizing if they caught us, it would more than likely be my fault. We made our way to the rows of cargo containers being readied for loading and took shelter in the shadows behind them.
Magdela pulled a phone out—where she had been keeping it was beyond me—and started taking pics of the gathered workers. Somebody called out a few words in Russian, and one of the SUVs parked alongside the wharf opened and disgorged its contents. Five women, all young and beautiful, were led towards the containers. Their faces were bruised, clothes torn, and any makeup had long since run down their cheeks in rivers of tears. I made sure Magdela was getting images of them, then held a hand out for her to stay put and crept around the side of the container.
Workers pulled the front open as some goons in suits led the girls towards it. They were all armed, some of them with military grade assault rifles. I peered through the growing haze as the rain fell even harder. Thunder crashed in the distance and a flash of lightning illuminated the face of one of the men: Boris.
My heart pounded as the image of Frank’s face coming apart again flooded my mind. Boris’s ugly mug was right next to mine, his breath hot on my neck as he held the gun in my hand and squeezed my finger over the trigger.
Before I knew what I was doing, cold steel was in my hand once again. I jumped out from my hiding spot with the pistol in my hand and screamed, “Boris!”
Then all hell broke loose.
I don’t know what I had expected to happen in that moment. Maybe something out of an action hero movie, where the underdog cop and his criminal nemesis faced off in single combat while all the goons stood there and watched. Instead, Boris yelled orders in Russian and a dozen goons opened fire. I ducked back around the corner of the container as bullets ricocheted from it and the damp concrete beneath my feet. Magdela screamed something at me, but it was lost in the chaos of the moment.
I ran to her, grabbed her by the arm, and made a beeline towards the crane cables hiding our car.
“You’re an idiot!”
I heard her that time. I couldn’t disagree with her, either. The fervent desire for revenge had boiled over and taken place of any rational thought for just a moment, and that moment had been all it took to turn our little spy game upside down.
We were almost there. A few more yards and we’d be ducking around the spools and climbing into the car. I looked back over my shoulder. Several men were giving chase, but most of them were content to either shoot from a distance or stay out of the way. The girls were gone, probably herded into one of those cargo boxes. How many of them were already loaded? How many more were waiting?
Concern for the kidnapped girls quickly faded from my mind as a sharp pain tore through my side. I called out in agony as I spun and fell, splashing through growing puddles into the shadow of a warehouse. Magdela kneeled over me, grabbing my shoulders. Rough concrete scraped over my thighs as she dragged me deeper into the night. Gunfire and shouts faded as steel slammed on steel and a monster growled in my ears. The world rumbled, and the odor of blood filled my nose. Something squealed and I could tell we were moving. Then a sudden stop, and acceleration in the other direction. Lights flashed overhead, filtered into a rainbow of colors through rainwater beading on glass. Magdela looked back at me, her face a mask of worry. I locked in on those ruby red lips and almond-shaped eyes as darkness crept into the edges of my vision, slowly closing me off from her.