The girl still stands with her face against the rain, her back against the car. She doesn’t look at the three men who now form a semi-circle around her.
“No. I am not lost,” she calmly replies with a strange, melodic accent and licks a thick raindrop off her lips as if it were the sweetest thing on earth.
“Then what are you doing in our street?” the first man demands, raising his tone. “Think you’ll grow tall if standing in the rain like that?”
The other two laugh and high-five each other.
“Don’t be too hard on her, mano,” says the third one, who is the shortest of the three and bears a long scar on his cheek. “She might just give us what we want if we ask her nicely.”
The tattooed man steps closer to her.
“We don’t like strangers here. This is our street. You can only stay for a price.”
“And what would price be?” she asks.
Now all three thugs laugh. “What do you think? On your knees, puta!”
Now she looks at them, but the hood is still covering most of her face. “Please, leave me alone. I want to enjoy rain.”
“I’ll give you such a rain on your face… ¡Una lluvia blanca!” The tattooed one laughs. “Esta es una jeva súper buena, manos!”
“There is not much rain where I come from,” the girl quietly says. “Please, let me just enjoy it.”
“Where do you come from, huh? Nevada?”
“I am from Tribe.”
The tattooed one looks at his companions. “Tribe? You ever heard about them?”
They shake their heads.
“Anyways, this crazy girl is beginning to annoy me,” he snorts. “No puta walks into a street owned by Florencia and leaves without paying a price… especially if she’s hot like this one!”
“You are right, tattooed man,” she says, “I might burn you.”
“We shouldn’t do this,” the short one interjects. “We are to stay put until Sancho is finished doing business with that junkie.”
But lust has overcome the tattooed one. He takes one step closer to the girl and unzips his pants, grinning.
“Mano, shut the fuck up and hold her down!”
A collapsible knife appears in his hand.
“Your last chance to keep your face pretty,” he says. “Kneel by yourself or we’ll make you.”
The two men step closer to grab her. The broken neon sign lights up for a second and casts a flickering blue light on the girl’s face. Aghast, the short man who was about grabbing her right arm takes a step back.
“¡Hija de su!” he yells. “Look at her face! What scar is that?”
“I don’t need no mamacita for a cogida,” the tattooed man says opening the knife. “¡El primer turno es mío, manos!”
“Your knife is very small,” the girl calmly says. She appears to smile under her hood.
“Ahora me estás encabronando,” the tattooed man snarls and stabs towards her chest.
The stab cuts into empty air as the girl ducks with lightning speed. The neon light flashes on a curved blade in her hand and her attacker falls to his knees with a yelp of pain. His knife falls to the ground as he grasps at his stomach. Blood is streaming between his fingers.
A drop of blood trickles from his mouth as he whispers, his eyes wide open from surprise and pain. “Maldita bestia… ¡Vete a la chingada…!”
A curse is the last that escapes his lips as the girl, still ducking, thrusts the blade upwards and slashes his throat in another quick, arched movement.
During the few seconds that it took for their leader to get killed, the two other thugs stand petrified, staring at the girl’s blade that now glimmers with a red glow.
Now they too move in. The one to her left draws a Beretta from his belt but not quickly enough to have time to fire the pistol. The girl swiftly steps aside and her glowing blade flashes once more in the neon light. The Beretta falls to the ground, together with the hand still holding it. Ducking once more, she evades the swing of a baseball bat. The short thug wielding it freezes and a heavy rattle comes from his mouth. Then blood begins to stream down his neck to his chest where the blade went in so deep that only the hilt stands out.
The girl removes the blade, leaving her last attacker to collapse. She kneels down to the body of the now handless man who still writhes on the ground in agonizing pain.
“Me duele demasiado,” he yelps. “¡Me quema!”
She replies with a smile. “Sorry, but I don’t speak that language.”
“It burns, burns! It hurts too much!”
“Of course it burns,” she replies, tenderly closing his eyelids. She keeps her hand over the thug’s closed eyes while slowly pushing the blade into his heart. “I told you so.”
The girl waits a few minutes until the body’s hands and legs stop jolting, then pulls the glowing blade from the dead man’s chest and wipes it clean in his leather jacket. Hiding the weapon under her coat, she stays and holds her open palms forward to let the rain wash the blood off her hands.
A faint whizz comes from the car as the driver’s window goes down. A hand reaches out and tosses the wrapper of a double quarter pounder with cheese to the ground.
“Damned LA, crawling with all this cholo street gang scum,” says a hoarse male voice inside. “The big man should’ve sent Lieutenant Ramirez here, not me. You all right, Nooria?”
“No need to worry, Top.”
“If I’d been worried about you for a second, those whackos would’ve been dead before crossing the street,” the man inside the car says. Then he adds in a fatherly fashion, “Don’t catch a cold out there!”
“We have to wait long?”
“Hope not. By now Mikhailo should have found the house where the big man’s son is supposed to be.”
6
The evening before, the pair of silk stockings, the short dress and the black lingerie might have been a woman’s deadly arsenal of sex appeal. Now, strewn around the floor of a shabby apartment in a drab, Stalin-era house, they are just an untidy mess. Even so, they tell of an owner who might be a well-paid young woman with a more sophisticated taste than most of the girls filling Kiev’s night clubs on a Saturday night. Even the obviously fake Luis Vuitton bag that lies next to the bed looks stylish and well-chosen to the rest of the outfit. All this looks as if a better-off but very intoxicated girl had ended up in a place way below the standards what she had gone for if sober.
The twenty-something girl in the bed, who is resting her head on the chest of a rugged-faced man, doesn’t seem to care. She lies there with eyes half-closed, her face telling of her being satisfied in every possible way, enjoying how the man caresses her head, playing with her long, red-brown hair, though his wrinkles and baggy eyes tell of an exhaustion other than bodily.
The girl stirs. She reaches for the blanket and pulls it over herself, covering her pierced belly and stunning breasts where the early morning chill has hardened the nipples. Then she cuddles closer to him, stroking his robust chest with her long fingernails.
He looks at his wristwatch which is the only thing he’s wearing and yawns. He reaches for a small vial, opens it and lets half dozen pills to his tongue. Then he gets a half-empty bottle of vodka from under his pillow and draws a long swig. He sighs; a minute later, his face becomes more relaxed.
“What does this mean?” she asks, letting her fingers run up to a tattooed word on his right forearm, made up from seven letters with periods in between.