As he plays pool alone in a corner of the Iron Monarch he notices the girl. Actually, he noticed her when she first came in, looking like a nice drink of water in the desert. But now he notices her noticing him.
She’s young. Twenty-one, maybe younger. She’s alone in a booth, and already there are vultures around the Monarch with their eyes on her. She has dark hair, tied tightly back. When she came in, he noticed how it fell all the way to her tailbone. Fretwell has a thing for girls with long hair.
She doesn’t just notice him, she makes eye contact with him now. There may be the hint of a smile on her face, but he can’t tell in the dim light of the bar.
There’s an ethnic look about her. Hispanic, or maybe even SlotMonger—hard to tell. Either way, there’s an untainted aura about her that makes it clear she doesn’t belong here. Or at least doesn’t belong here yet. Clearly she’s a good girl who’s “slumming it” and looking for low love. And it doesn’t get lower than Morton Fretwell.
He breaks eye contact first, and handily sinks his next ball—a tough bank shot. The attention from this somewhat pretty girl improves his mojo. Girls who are actually looking for a guy like him are few and far between, so he’s quick to make his move. He grabs a second cue stick, and saunters over to the booth where she sits.
“Name’s Morty,” he says “You play?”
“A little,” she answers, stirring the swizzle stick of a drink that she doesn’t seem to have touched.
He hands her the cue. “C’mon, I’ll rack them up.” She hasn’t told him her name yet. He’s confident that she will. He leads her back to the pool table. He lets her break. She takes the stroke with confidence, and the balls scatter at the far end of the table with a hearty crack. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they play pool. This is a girl who knows what she wants. Fretwell is determined to learn exactly what that is.
“New in town?” he asks.
“Just passing through.”
She smiles at him and he runs his tongue across his teeth, checking for pizza debris, before smiling back. Then he sinks the seven ball, claiming solids, but intentionally misses the next shot to give her a fighting chance.
“Where ya from?”
“Doesn’t matter as much as where I’m going,” she says playfully.
Fretwell willingly takes the bait. “And where might that be?”
She takes a shot and sinks the twelve ball. “Victory,” she answers.
“Nice,” he says with a grin. She misses her follow-up shot, and he puts her in her place by dropping three in a row. “Might have to work for it, though.”
Her long ponytail swishes past him as she slides by to take her next shot. It makes him shiver. She still hasn’t told him her name. Maybe that doesn’t matter.
“Anything in particular bring you to the Iron Monarch?”
“Business,” she says.
“What kind of business?”
She chalks her cue. “Your kind of business.”
He decides he doesn’t have to know her name. He puts his cue on the rack. “Wanna get out of here?”
“Lead the way.”
He tries to reign in his enthusiasm. Must be cool about this. Must play into whatever image of him she has set in her mind. Bad boy with bad intentions but a smooth way about him. Yeah. He can be that. “Car’s out back,” he tells her, and she doesn’t bat an eye, so he puts his arm around her and leads her out the back door, his mind already racing miles ahead.
Then just as the door swings shut behind them, everything changes so quickly his racing brain finds itself with neither road nor traction. Suddenly he’s thrown back against the jagged brick wall of the alley with more force than a girl this size should be capable of. She has a gun pressed painfully into his neck now, just below his right ear, aimed upward. It’s a small weapon, but when a pistol is aimed toward the center of your brain, size doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t dare move or resist. “Easy, there” is all he can offer up in the way of words. His mojo has abandoned him.
“Let’s be clear about this,” she says, in a voice far colder than she had in the bar. “When I said business, that’s exactly what I meant, so if you ever touch me again, I will shoot off each of your fingers one by one. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. He’d nod, but he’s afraid the motion would push her trigger finger.
“Good. Now, as it happens, I’ve caught myself a nice little prize, and I was told that you have the best black-market connections.”
He breathes a sigh of relief, realizing that he might actually survive this encounter. “Yeah, the best connections,” he says a little too agreeable. “European, South American—even the Burmese Dah Zey.”
“Good to know,” she says. “As long as you have a clear line to the people who pay real money for one-of-a-kind goods, we’ll have a very happy working relationship.” She backs off a little, but keeps the gun aimed at him in case he bolts, which he’s not planning on. For one, if he tries to run, she’ll probably shoot. And also because Morty Fretwell’s greed has begun to supplant his fear. What could she possible mean by “one-of-a-kind”?
He dares to ask the question, hoping it won’t solicit a bullet to any part of his anatomy. “So . . . whatcha got?”
“Not what, but who,” she says with a grin that’s a little bit scary.
He involuntarily begins to lick his lips. There are only a handful of people she could be talking about—a handful of kids whose parts would be worth a fortune. If she’s not bluffing, this could be the payday of paydays.
“So who is it?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Set up a meeting between you, me, and your earless friend.”
This nervy thing has done her homework! “He’s not earless,” Fretwell says. “He’s still got one left.”
“Call him.”
Fretwell pulls out his phone but hesitates, calculating himself important enough in this equation to have a little bit of bargaining power now.
“I won’t call him till you tell me who you got.”
She lets out a short exasperated huff. Then she says, “The clapper who didn’t clap.”
And suddenly Fretwell’s fingers can’t dial fast enough.
11 • Lev
It’s a standard freight container. Eight feet wide, eight-and-a-half feet high, and forty feet deep. During the day it’s a perpetual twilight inside, with pinpricks of light penetrating rust holes in the corners. It smells like sour milk with overtones of chemical waste. Lev thought there might be rats, but rats only frequent places where there’s something to scavenge. He’s far too alive to be a morsel for the resident rodentia of the freight yard.
Lev’s wrists are bound by sturdy cable ties to the far wall of the long container. Una had to buy hasps and attach them to the wall with epoxy because the wall had no inherent way to shackle him and make it look convincing. He had asked Una to give him a small cut with her pocketknife right at the base of his left thumb. Not deep enough to do any real damage, but enough to bloody up his wrist and the cable tie. He knows that small touches like that will lend authenticity and make their ruse seem real. They’ve also strategically placed various bits of junk they found in the freight yard around the container, to provide camouflage for Una’s rifle, which is propped up in deep shadow against a rusted filing cabinet.
The hasps are a bit too low to make him look torturously bound when he’s standing, but when he kneels, his hands are higher than his head in a position that looks painful, because it is. Little blond Jesus crucified in a big steel box. Letting his head fall completely slack completes the illusion.
“You look positively helpless,” Una said when she stood back to look at him, “but still a little clean, even with the blood on your wrist.”