Peter didn’t answer. My guess is at that moment he didn’t know who he feared more, this punk street rat or me. “Ok, tip boy,” I said, turning my full attention back to my prey, “that day you knew was coming since you squirmed out of your mother’s womb is here. You believe in god?”
He moved his head up and down against the revolver.
“That’s good, but I doubt you’ll be meeting him. You haven’t been a good boy, have you? No, you’ll be headed the other direction. Now you have one, and only one shot at delaying an early retirement. Would you like not to die?”
Again he nodded.
“Then don’t lie to me. One chance, that’s it, no do overs, no I’m sorry. Lie and I pop a cap. Got it?” Slowly I lifted my hand from his mouth. As he started to speak, I clamped it back down. “No, the truth.” It was an easy guess that he would lie, I had to override any tricky thoughts running in his brain with fear.
“I don’t know their name, swear to god,” he said when I finally let him speak. “They gave me a hundred dollars to deliver you to them.”
“Goodbye.” I shoved up on the revolver with sudden force, snapping his head back into the brick alley wall. From the wild look on his face, I was sure he thought he had been shot. When his eyes refocused, all slyness was gone.
“I don’t know their names, these Russians, they want whoever has been looking for them. They say they pay big for you. I swear I didn’t think they would hurt you, you’re my amigo, I not let them hurt you.”
“What, you think they may want to ask me to dance? They seem gay to you?”
“They want to talk, that’s all, talk.”
“Good. Take me to them and we’ll talk.” I pulled the barrel from his neck and slipped it back into my pocket. “Come on, let’s get to it.”
CHAPTER 12
We stepped out of the alley into a small courtyard formed by low apartment buildings. A dead oak stood in the center with its leafless branches reaching like skeleton arms into the night sky. No life showed in any of the apartments, the windows broken and boarded over. Trash mixed with discarded furniture and rotting garbage littered the ground.
“Fuck this, man,” Peter said, backing toward the alley. “I’m out of here.” A stocky man stepped from the shadow of a rusted refrigerator, blocking our exit. At the same moment, two others stood out of the rubble. They surrounded us, even in the dark I could make out the shape of pistols in their hands.
Shoving Teyo to the ground, I dropped and rolled left. The flash and roar of their guns filled the courtyard. But they couldn’t see me any better than I saw them. Crawling on my belly, I got twenty feet left of where they had last seen me. Feeling around, I found a discarded beer bottle. Hurling the bottle over my head, I kneeled into a firing stance. The smashing glass was followed by their muzzle flashes. I snapped off two quick shots and dropped down. Someone was yelling painful Russian curses. As I crawled behind a molting sofa, I heard a girlish shriek that I knew could only be Peter.
“Hey dolboy’eb, we have your droog,” a voice called out. “Maybe I should cut him?”
“Moses!” Peter was crying like the bitch he was. “He has a knife…” His voice was cut off by a gurgling wet yell. Jumping up, I dove over the sofa, several shots flamed, illuminating a man standing by the trunk of the dead tree. Bullets ripped into the debris around me. I fired three quick shots while running toward the oak.
I didn’t need light to know the man was dead. Two of my shots had caught him in the face. Somewhere across the courtyard, the first man I’d shot was moaning. Slipping five new slugs into my.38, I wrist-flicked the cylinder closed and ran at a crouch to the last place I’d seen Peter. To my happy surprise, no bullets followed my movement.
Above us, the clouds moved away from the moon, casting silver light down on the courtyard. Two bodies lay folded onto the ground, both bathed in blood. A dark haired, bearded man I’d never seen before had a slit almost like a second smile cut into his neck. He was quite dead. Peter lay beside him, his eyes glued to the dead man. His lips were trembling but no sound came out.
“You do this?” I asked, sure he hadn’t. Peter’s eyes slid up at me and tried to focus.
“He’s dead,” Peter mumbled.
“No shit.” A scream of Russian spun me around. Across the courtyard, someone was crouched over a second figure. Whatever was happening didn’t sound like much fun for the fellow on the bottom.
Moving toward them, I kept a bead on the crouching figure. Your enemy’s enemy isn’t always your friend. Getting within ten feet, I could see a slight young man with military cropped blonde hair, he was kneeling on the chest of a wounded Russian. Blood shone on the blade of a straight razor as it arced down, flicking a chunk off the down man’s ear. He let out a string of Russian words, but apparently not the ones his captor wanted to hear. Again the blade struck, opening the man’s nostril.
I snapped the hammer back on my.38. The sound turned the young man with the blade to face me. He had soft delicate features and cold heartless eyes. He was covered in blood. There was no doubt what had happened to Peter’s assailant.
“This is none of your concern. Go home, forget you were here.” His voice was higher than I would have guessed.
“Before you fillet this Puke, I need to know where he’s holding a friend of mine.” I kept the revolver aimed at the lad’s head. The bleeding man glanced from the lad to me. He spoke to me in pleading Russian.
“He thinks you can save him,” the lad laughed.
“Tell me where the girls are,” I yelled at the bleeding man, hoping he understood English. He answered, pleading in Russian.
“What did he say?”
“He wants you to kill me.”
“Think he’ll take me to my friend if I do?”
“Maybe.” His young eyes held no fear.
“Climb off him, slowly.” I took a step back, and kept the barrel on his head. Gracefully, the lad rose, wiping the blood off his razor, he slipped it into the pocket of his military coat.
“Where are the girls? Translate.” The lad did as told. Russian words flew between them.
“He wants to know if you will let him live if he tells you,” the lad told me.
“Talk and I won’t kill you, don’t and I’ll leave now.” This brought on an onslaught from the bleeding man. The lad nodded taking it in. In a move so fluid and quick that I barely had time to register it, the youth whipped out the razor, swung down and opened the Russian thug’s carotid artery. Dark red spray spewed into the air.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” I yelled at the youth.
“Calle Ruiz, a dirt road twenty meters past the Tecate cut off, they’re holding four girls there,” he said, slipping the blade away. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“You didn’t need to kill him.”
“Yes, I did.” He dropped a tarot card onto the man as he bled out, turning the dirt below into red mud.
“Where the fuck are you going?” I asked the lad as he started to fade into the shadows.
“To work.”
“Calle Ruiz?”
“Yes.”
“You have a car?”
“Not yet.”
“You’re covered in blood, how far do you think you’ll get before someone spots you and calls the cops?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Look, whoever the fuck you are, you bailed out my shit here, let me help you get cleaned up. Least I can do.”
“And I should trust you, why?”
“You know I’m not working with these punks, and if I wanted to kill you, I’d just pull the trigger and be done with it.”
“Fine,” the lad said after a long thought.
Teyo had faded sometime during the battle. The little sneak might warn the Russians we were coming, but hopefully his fear had driven him underground until this war blew over. Peter was a trembling mess, but other than his nerves, he was unharmed. The lad dropped a tarot card on the dead man at our feet.