“Now,” Erica said, her voice loud but controlled, refusing to feed into his hysterics, “let’s try this again, because we don’t have all night, but I do have plenty of bullets and you’re full of soft targets.” To emphasize her point, she pressed the barrel of her gun against his inner thigh, about two inches below the softest nonlethal target on his or any male body. “What’s your name?”
“David,” he said, the word coming out in little hitches, like a kid trying not to cry. A stark contrast to the attitude he’d taken as we pulled away from the crash scene, when he was full of the kind of bravado born not from an inherent disposition but from a sense of security that he couldn’t be touched. That someone—in this case, Trish and her people—would protect him. Judging by the look on his face, that sense of security had leaked out along with a good amount of blood from the ragged hole in his hand. “David Wheeler.”
“Okay David, my friend’s going to ask you some of his questions again, only this time you’re going to give him straight answers, right? None of that macho, cowboy bullshit like you tried before.”
David shook his head vigorously from side to side, his eyes flicking toward the gun in his crotch.
“Rick,” Erica said, inviting me to re-open the interrogation.
“Who do you work for?” I asked for the second time since we’d forced him into the back of Joey’s car.
“Patricia Baum,” he said, snapping his head toward me, and then quickly back to Erica. Probably to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind about squeezing the trigger a second time.
“And what about the people above her, do you know who they are?”
“Only . . . only one of them,” he stammered. My heart rate ticked up a notch. “Willem. Willem Van de Berg.”
Well shit, that’s interesting.
“The guy who got kicked out of Parliament?” I said.
David nodded.
“How do you know him?”
“I used to work for him, back when he was in the Senate. Made connections to people he couldn’t be seen with in public. I know lots of people. Maybe I can help you out—”
“I know enough people already, Dave. Besides, you clearly aren’t very good at your job. Otherwise, Van de Berg would still have a seat in the Palace, wouldn’t he?”
“That wasn’t my fault!” David said, forgetting about the location of Erica’s gun for the first time. “He got greedy. I told him there were too many people I didn’t know involved in that deal. If he’d have listened to me, he never would have gotten caught.”
“Is that why he brought you along to his new venture with Trish, because he trusts you?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“What is it you do for him now?”
“Same thing. Make connections. Set up deals.”
“What kind of deals?”
“Turn here,” Erica said. Joey obliged and we disappeared down an unpaved road cutting through an open field. It was more dirt and rocks than flowers and grass. With every bump the pain in my left shoulder flared, sending a million daggers through every nerve ending in the area. It was definitely dislocated, but that was a problem for later. We were miles away from any hospital. The city lights faded behind us, but there was a dull glow coming from somewhere up ahead. Not man-made, though. Almost like the moon, nearly full, was reflecting off of something.
“Everything,” David said. “They’re into everything.”
“Details, Dave,” I said. “I need details.” To help jog his memory, Erica pushed the gun harder against his thigh.
“I don’t know! It’s not just the two of them. There are others, but I don’t know who they are. I’ve never met them and Willem never talks about them. Tells me not to ask. The only jobs he ever gives me involve girls.”
“You mean like the ones Leon gets for you?”
He nodded. “But not just Leon. We deal with many other distributors.”
Distributors. Jesus Christ.
I thought of Maggie and Denise again, of someone treating them like a product to be sold, of referring to the human dogshit that would profit off their abject slavery as a distributor, a word far too banal for that type of evil.
My fist broke his nose before I realized it was happening. A backhand, crisp but deliberate. The snap as the bone cracked just above the cartilage was so satisfying I hit it again.
Then again.
Then a fourth time.
I wanted to keep hitting him until he realized how poorly he’d chosen his words, but his face—painted red—and his demolished nose, a great, purple gob of blood-soaked snot hanging from one bulging nostril, stayed my hand.
It was too easy. Shooting Leon’s guards, nearly killing Leon himself, beating David Wheeler into a pulpy mess—all too easy, even if I tried to justify it in the name of protecting my family. Ten years spent recruiting people who did this kind of thing for a living and in just under a few hours I’d discovered I had far more in common with them than I had ever believed. If the similarities ran any deeper, I didn’t want to know.
“Was it your job to make sure Leon and I were connected?” I asked, my hand and voice both shaking.
“Yes,” he said, although it came out muddy and thick. His head bobbed up and down, but it was hard to tell if he was nodding or just trying to keep from passing out.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They just said to make sure I got you two working together without making it obvious.”
“Not good enough,” I said, then I slapped him across the cheek. It wasn’t hard, but with his damaged nose, it must have hurt like hell. “Why did they need us together?” I slapped him again, harder this time, barely giving him time to answer. “Why!”
“I don’t know,” he said again, only now he was sobbing. It was an ugly, congested sound. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
