James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

I give the ambassador his phone. Sweetness takes all the electronica from the table, to make sure we have time to get away. Whether we live through the night is still up in the air. He dumps all the junk into a gym bag one of the players must have brought to carry cash. He takes his half million euros and tosses it in the bag, too.

The ambassador makes a quick call and rings off. He gives me an address and tells me to be there in half an hour. I take his phone from him. Whoever he called knows where the abducted girls are kept. I can track that person through his dialed numbers.

Sweetness says, “Thanks, guys. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”

The painkillers are kicking in, I push myself to my feet and gimp out the door. Sweetness covers me until I’m out of the room and then follows. “Plug your ears,” he says, and tosses in two more flash-bangs behind him as a parting gesture. Even with my ears protected and eyes shut, it’s like a nuke went off in the room. We step over the two cuffed guards in the hall and walk away.

We get to the delivery entrance. The guards there remain as we left them. I point at Saukko’s personal bodyguard and ask Sweetness, “Would you cut the zip-lock cuffs off his legs and pull the tape off his mouth? I want to take him with us. Men with their mouths taped shut tend to draw attention on the street.”

“Why take him with us?”

I want to puke from anxiety. “This Shit List thing. He knows Saukko’s business. We have to interrogate him and find out if it’s true, and if so, how to nullify it.”

Sweetness cuts him loose. This guy is a trained killer. I’m a crip with guns I barely know how to use. I cock the hammers of the shotgun and keep him at arm’s length. “Don’t say a word. Don’t make sudden movements. Or you get both barrels. Walk in front of us out to the street.”

He nods.

When we get to the Wrangler, I order him to get in the rear of the vehicle, rebind his ankles, retape his mouth, and throw a tarp over him.

We drive away. The dashboard clock reads ten after three. We drive a short distance to the address supplied to us. I ring the buzzer. No answer. I smash the apartment building’s front-door window with my sap, an extendable steel baton, reach inside and let us in. We take the elevator to the fourth floor. I ring. Again, no answer. Burning up a clip from my silenced Colt works as a key on the bottom lock. The door swings open a fraction. The Gemtech silencer I’m using, courtesy of Milo, really is a gem. I hear little more than the slide cycling and the used casings pattering on the floor as I’m firing. No waking the neighbors. Sweetness picks up the spent brass for me. The top, heavy-duty lock is usually meant for extra security when leaving. It’s unlocked, which suggests someone is inside.

We enter, and I push the door closed behind us. The reason we weren’t buzzed in becomes apparent. A man has his knees on the floor, his head and torso on a couch, as if trying to push himself to his feet. The butcher knife in his back, planted deep between his shoulder blades, prevented it. He’s dead.

Sweetness looks at me. “Fuck,” he says.

I agree. “Yeah, fuck. We need to take our shoes off, and for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”

We don’t have any latex gloves to keep us from contaminating the crime scene with our own fingerprints. It’s a big apartment, with the doors to all the rooms shut. We both pull jacket sleeves down over one hand and use the cloth to turn door handles, hold pistols in the other, not easy with my cane. We split up and go through the place. It has three bedrooms, I suppose necessary for multiple girls turning tricks at the same time.

I hear Sweetness scream, “Jesus Fucking Christ!”

I would have come running if I could, but can only call out and ask if he’s hurt.

“No,” he answers, his voice calm now. “Come here.”

I follow his voice and enter a bedroom. He’s staring up into the shelf space over a closet. I look and see a waif of a girl. She’s folded herself into the tight space. Her eyes radiate terror. Loviise Tamm.

I doubt if she speaks anything but Russian. “Talk to her,” I say. “Tell her we’re police, here to help her, and ask her if she can get down from there.”

She seems to take our stated good intentions at face value. She pushes her hands against one wall, feet against the other, faceup, and shimmies down, spiderlike. It reminds me of a circus trick. “Can you make her feel comfortable and try to find out what happened here? Ask her to please not sit or touch anything, and tell her we’ll take her away from here very soon.”

They go back and forth for a few minutes. Some of it I understand, some of it I don’t.

When they’re done, Sweetness explains. “It’s like her mom said, she was promised a job in Helsinki. Then, when she got here, the men who brought her talked about her owing them money for arranging her work and the cost of the trip over, and took her passport. They locked her in this apartment. Other people, including some girls, came and went. They kept her fed, but wouldn’t talk to her. Just told her to wait and all would become clear. She was frightened the whole time. Then a man came just a little while ago. He was angry because she was going to leave, and he said he was going to get something from her first. He sat on the couch and told her to take out his ‘thingy.’ She said it was big and hard, she didn’t know what to do, and he told her to get on her knees and put it in her mouth. She froze, it seemed icky and wrong. He started to yell and he slapped her, but the doorbell rang. He answered it and a woman was at the door. She saw Loviise and looked furious. He told Loviise to get up, go to a bedroom and shut the door. She heard him talk to the woman, but their voices were low and she didn’t understand what they said. Then she heard him shout and everything went quiet. She was afraid of him and his anger and his ‘thingy,’ and crawled up into that space to hide. When I came in, she had a blanket pulled over her and I couldn’t see her, but I saw the blanket move from her breathing, I jerked it away and found her. That’s when I yelled. She scared the shit out of me.”

“Ask her what the woman looked like.”

He asks and translates. “She looked like a magazine.”

“What does that mean?”

She clarifies. “She was very beautiful, like a woman in a magazine.”

Her case of Down syndrome appears to be as mild as her mother claimed. She seems largely functional, but her naivete likely saved her from a worse fate than she suffered. If she didn’t even know how a penis functions, she needed to be broken in, accomplished by raping her on a regular basis until she gave up hope and just succumbed to it. No one had gotten around to that yet. “Thank her and ask her to wait right here.”

I go over the rest of the house quickly. There’s little to see. Cheap furniture. More IKEA stuff. Some microwavable food in the fridge. A case of Stolichnaya vodka and a crate of beer, I suppose for the clientele. I find some yellow latex cleaning gloves in a closet along with cleaning supplies, and a roll of masking tape in a kitchen drawer. I use it to hide the bullet holes in the front door.

I put on the gloves and rifle through the corpse’s pockets. I find two passports, Loviise’s and his own. If he had her passport, but no others besides his own, it indicates that he meant to turn her over to me. Something went wrong first, and he was murdered. I also take the corpse’s credit card. He was one of those dummies who keeps his bank codes on him with the user number sequence written on it. I take it, too. If he were alive, I couldn’t ask him for anything more.

He’s a Russian named Sasha Mikoyan and his passport is diplomatic. So he’s a spy or an attache or both, and the Harper brothers didn’t lie. People from the Russian embassy are taking part in the slave trade.