Russian Roulette dh-1 Read online

  If she remains calm she can blend in with the college kids. God, could she have been in the group I almost mowed down when we came around the corner? She sticks with the group or a group. Moves across campus then exits on the far side. She’s on foot. Would she carry any I.D.? Did she bring a purse in the car? Maybe, maybe not. She’s walking away from the campus but doesn’t want to attract attention so she might stay on busier streets where there’s pedestrian traffic. Without a purse she may not have money for a bus or taxi. So she’s going to walk away, steadily, just a woman out for exercise.

  It’s a lot of ‘maybes,’ but I had an idea. I skirt around the roughly six-block campus area, down to Marshall Avenue. It’s busy, lots of cars, people walking, there’s shops, a couple of restaurants, a lot of people on the street. I drive almost two miles, looking.

  “You’re taking your sweet time getting me to the damn hospital,” Hale groaned.

  I could see he was talking through clenched teeth.

  “Yeah, okay, let’s get you there,” I said, picking up speed.

  “I can hop on the interstate at Snelling and make up for lost time. I can see the stoplights for Snelling about three blocks ahead. I’ll take a left there and, and, and…”

  I focused on a figure up ahead walking on the sidewalk, not running, but making pretty good time.

  “Hale, look, up ahead, you see her, the red head? That our girl? The baseball cap, with the ponytail.”

  Hale took a deep breath, exhaled, attempted to override the pain.

  “Jesus, I don’t know.”

  “How may women do you know go out to walk a couple of miles in boots with a pointed toe and six-inch heels?”

  “Christ, go over the curb pull up alongside her. I’ll jump out,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? And what, hope you land on top of her and pin her to the ground? You can’t chase her with that leg. Christ, you can barely stand.”

  I pulled over to the curb.

  “Give me your cuffs,” I said holding out my hand. “She’s focused on just moving away from here. I can come up behind and get close to her. You just be ready to pull up as soon as I’m there.”

  He slapped the cuffs in my hand, and I was off walking quickly to catch up to her. Any sound I made moving along the sidewalk was drowned out by the constant flow of traffic. In short order I was no more than thirty yards behind her, Hale was creeping along behind me in the Hummer, a city bus coming up behind him. As the noise from the bus increased I began to run. It was an interesting experience. I don’t like to run, and I certainly hadn’t done it since the bomb blast last week. As the bus roared past I closed to within fifteen feet. More than one person on the bus was watching with a look on their face wondering exactly what in the hell I was going to do. I came up behind her, called out, “Nikki, Nikki.”

  She turned around, reflexively, just as I leapt. I landed on top of her and knocked her to the ground. She got a solid elbow into the bridge of my nose just as we hit the ground together. I heard something crack. Somehow I got one of the cuffs around her wrist, then felt the nails from her free hand scrape down the side of my face. The Hummer was over the curb, screeching to a stop on the sidewalk. A second car screeched from somewhere.

  She tried to knee me and I turned my thigh to block her. It still hurt. I was wrestling for her free hand, she gave me another elbow, this time to my mouth. God, that hurt.

  I caught another elbow with my lip, twisted her hand behind her back, clamped the handcuffs around her wrist. I sat up on top of her, took a deep breath, and felt an explosion on the side of my head.

  “The fuck you doing, buddy?” someone yelled. It wasn’t Hale. Another boot, this time to the back of my head partially knocking me off Nikki. I saw stars and things went black for a second or two.

  “Get the hell off her, man. Get off. Leave her alone ya pervert!”

  I was aware of two massive tree trunk legs stepping over Nikki and coming after me. I rolled a couple of times hoping to avoid the boots. It didn’t work. I caught a glimpse of Nikki up and running, then she was down on the ground again.

  “Police, police,” I screamed. Two or three well-aimed kicks arrived before he stopped.

  “You all cops?” followed by a pause that allowed the pain to begin to register. “Shit, sorry there, officer. I didn’t know. Honest.”

  He was overly large. Shaggy brown hair, full beard, dirty Budweiser T-shirt, jeans, what felt like steel-toed boots and a very worried look on his face.

  Hale had the MAC 10 pointed at the guy, his left foot had Nikki pinned to the ground by her ponytail.

  The big man bent down to help me up.

  “Shit, you all working undercover? I didn’t know, honest. I thought you were rapists or something, you know? Thought I was protecting that little gal is all. Man, you guys oughta wear a badge or something. Ain’t that the damn law?”

  Hale grimaced, lifted his shirt, and exposed the badge pinned to his belt.

  “Okay, there’s the damn badge, now beat it, before I charge you with interfering with an officer.”

  “Look, didn’t mean no harm by it, like I said…”

  “You wanna get charged or you wanna drive away and enjoy the rest of your day?”

  “Drive away, I reckon.”

  “Okay, good, right answer. So go, take off, get outta here.”

  Chapter 66

  Hale phoned the Mikes and Gary. The Mikes transported Nikki back to the bunk bed dungeon. Gary drove us to the hospital, five stitches for me, and a walking cast for Hale’s broken ankle. It was after five before we got back and were able to begin talking with Nikki.

  She was a little scuffed up from our grab. She wore no makeup and was even more beautiful in person than the photo of her standing naked on the beach. She was also more than a little suspicious, but then who could really blame her?

  We were sitting on the couches. Hale was asking the questions, his injured ankle encased in a gray walking cast with his leg extended and resting on a stack of pizza delivery boxes.

  I sat at the far end of the other couch, directly across from Nikki. I held a cold can of Coke wrapped in a T-shirt. I alternated pressing the can gingerly against the stitches on the broken bridge of my nose and then the stitches in my swollen bottom lip. It didn’t seem to be helping much.

  Nikki was sitting in the corner of the couch, knees together, feet flat on the floor, arms folded tightly across her chest. She was looking at Hale, almost glaring at him, mouth set firmly, lips clamped. I could see her chest rising and falling with each breath, and I could hear her exhale.

  “You knew Sergie Alekseeva?” Hale asked.

  She nodded ever so slightly.

  “Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “I can tell you he is dead,” she said almost spitting the words out. Her accent was much more pronounced than Kerri’s and when she made the statement she raised her chin ever so slightly, but defiantly.

  “Yeah, well, that was in all the papers, but can you tell me anything about him?”

  “What is there to tell? A pig, better off he is dead.” It was almost as though she was talking to herself. She didn’t look at either of us, just stared blankly at the wall behind me.

  “No argument from me,” Hale said. “But what we’re after, Nikki, is arresting Sergei’s father, Braco Alekseeva, and putting him in prison for good. We want to close down his organization. Understand?”

  She gave no indication she had even heard him.

  “We believe he’s involved in human trafficking. Transporting girls over here, forcing them to be prostitutes. Raping them, getting them hooked on drugs, ruining their lives, maybe even killing them. But we need more proof before we can arrest him.”

  “You can’t stop him,” she said quietly, almost offhandedly, like it was a given, akin to darkness falling every night.

  “We can’t stop him without help, and that’s where you come in. Look around you, you’re not in jail. I haven’t asked you what yo
u were doing before we found you walking along the street. Right now, I don’t really care. I just need your help in bringing down Braco Alekseeva. That’s all I care about. I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care if you don’t have a visa or you don’t have a passport. Stopping Braco is the only thing I care about. And, when I’m finished with Braco, we’re going to shut down Kumarin and his gang down in Chicago. Now, I think we can help each another here, but it’s up to you.”

  Nikki gave a slight scoff, shook her head ever so slightly, unconvinced.

  I moved the can of Coke to the side of my throbbing head where I’d been kicked. The welts and scrapes from Nikki’s scratch still felt raw and burned down the side of my face. Both my eyes were already purple and getting worse from the broken nose she gave me.

  Hale looked at her for a long moment, then called across the room, “Gary, bring some of those transcripts over here will you? Maybe that stuff concerning Miss Mathias and how Braco planned to deal with her.”

  It took a few minutes before Gary placed a pile of transcripts on the couch. Hale pushed the pile toward Nikki until it spilled toward her.

  “Go ahead, look at these, it makes for some interesting reading. You might even be aware of some of these conversations. One of our problems is, by the time we get these damn things translated, it’s after the fact, whatever was discussed has already happened. So they’re worthless as far as stopping Braco. But they do present a fairly complete picture of what’s going on. Maybe they’ll make some interesting reading for you. So go ahead, take your time, and read through them. And, while you’re reading, remember that as long as you stay silent the only person you’re helping is Braco, no one else. And, if you’re worried about family back home they would be a lot safer if Braco and Kumarin were locked up for the rest of their lives.”

  With that Hale grunted and groaned to his feet, hobbled over to the computers, and looked over Gary’s shoulder.

  I studied Nikki for a moment, she was biting her bottom lip, thinking, maybe. Then she focused on me and glared, her face an unreadable mask. I decided it might be safer standing over with Hale.

  Chapter 67

  At least it wasn’t pizza again for dinner. It was Chinese takeout, some sort of stir-fry with an awful lot of fried rice, which I love. One of the Mikes delivered a bowl to Nikki, along with a cup of tea and three or four small Butterfinger candy bars. The perfect balanced dinner.

  Nikki was still in the same corner of the couch but she had curled her feet up beneath her and was reading as she ate. She was maybe three-quarters of the way through the stack of transcripts when Hale pulled another pile of equal size and had one of the Mikes deliver it to her. She didn’t protest, just laid her unread portion on top of the new pile, pulled the whole thing a little closer to her and continued to read.

  At some point Hale talked to Aaron on the phone. It was a short conversation and I guessed he never quite got around to mentioning that we had Nikki. From what I could tell the conversation wasn’t heated. Hale had just checked in to eliminate one more thing from the laundry list Aaron was probably working on.

  A little after nine Nikki raised her arms over her head, stretched, and headed for the bathroom.

  “Is okay if I go to bathroom?”

  “Be my guest,” Hale said, “would you like a mug of tea? I’m putting some on.”

  “Please,” she nodded, then headed for the bathroom just behind the kitchen area.

  In lighter moods I might have offered to accompany her, but I was still smarting from the beating she gave me earlier in the day and wasn’t about to attempt surviving another.

  She was in the bathroom for about ten minutes. One of the Mikes had just asked if he should check when the door latch clicked open and Nikki came out.

  “Tea will be ready in a minute. Let’s sit on the couch and have a little chat,” Hale said. “I don’t get off this damn ankle soon I’m going to scream.”

  Nikki nodded and maybe smiled ever so slightly. I couldn’t be sure.

  Chapter 68

  We were all seated around the couches, Nikki in the same corner with her feet tucked comfortably beneath her. Hale at the other end, leg resting on the stack of pizza boxes. Gary and I sat on the opposite couch. The two Mikes wheeled their desk chairs over and nibbled on remnants of cold dim sum. Nikki and Hale were drinking tea, I held a mug but hated the stuff. Gary sipped a Coke.

  “So,” Hale slurped tea, “you see some of what we’re dealing with, what do you think?”

  Nikki looked very smug, smiled at Hale, and said, “I am a very big pain in the ass of Braco.”

  “Yes, you have been. And if you learned that much you must have also read that they want to put a stop to that.”

  Nikki smiled almost to herself. Sipped some tea, looked off somewhere, then said, “They plan to kill me, they will rape me for a few days maybe a week if I last. And when there is nothing left to rape, ‘The Butcher’ will be there and cut me into so many little pieces. No one will ever find me. And then the last lesson I will be the example to the others that you cannot win against Braco.”

  “You’re right, that is their plan,” said Hale. “Now what’s your plan?”

  “My plan?”

  “Yeah, do you want to end up in little pieces? Or would it be better to see Braco and Kumarin go to jail, for the rest of their lives.”

  “But I don’t know what…”

  “Look at it this way,” Hale interrupted. “On your own you have been a very big pain in the ass of Braco, as you said. If we work together, all of us, and some others, we’ll beat Braco. Beat Kerri Vucavitch. And, beat ‘The Butcher.’”

  “Humpf, Crvek, ‘The Butcher,’” she said absently staring at the floor, holding her mug tightly.

  Hale shot me a quick glance, then refocused on Nikki.

  “We can lock them all away, forever if you help us. Will you, help us?”

  Nikki seemed to stare at the floor for quite some time, then looked at Hale and nodded.

  “I will help you to put them all away or kill them. It makes no difference to me. Just so long that my family will be safe, finally.”

  “And you, you will be safe too, Nikki.”

  “We will see,” she answered.

  Chapter 69

  Nikki began in earnest the following morning over breakfast. Saying to Hale, “If you want to get to Braco it is important to cut him off from his money. Not only the girls who have to whore for him, but the drugs as well. Without those two, he will quickly go desperate.”

  She then proceeded to give a list of the girls she knew who were working for Braco, where they lived. The outcall services they worked through. She listed his lieutenants, the ones she knew, and where they could be found. Then she told what she knew of his drug operations, which didn’t seem to be all that much except for one important aspect.

  Braco had aligned himself with a small bank out in Valdem, Minnesota, almost on the South Dakota border. Nikki thought he might own part of the bank or even all it, she wasn’t sure. The important fact was the bank operated a number of Casas de Combio’s, in the banking industry known as CDC’s. These were currency-exchange houses where people could send funds to Mexico. With two large regional packing plants within twenty-five miles of Valdem there were plenty of individuals sending money back to their families in Mexico. It became the perfect money-laundering scheme.

  Using fake accounts, Braco transferred funds to purchase drugs in Mexico and then transported the drugs back up to Minnesota. It turned out the beach photo, with the Lee-Dee guys and little Mai, had been an excursion to set up the Mexico end of things. Once they were set up, Braco planned to kill everyone who knew the particulars. Nikki was the final loose end. That was why Kerri had hired me in the first place, to find Nikki so they could kill her. Charming.

  Nikki didn’t have account numbers but she had some of the false names under which funds had been transferred. She gave the names to Hale who passed them on to the Federal Crimes Enfor
cement Network and Peters at the FBI.

  Then Hale called Aaron and the two of us went down to his office to let him know we had Nikki and that she was working with us.

  Chapter 70

  Aaron had dark bags under his eyes and looked like he was operating on about three hours of sleep. He looked at the two of us as Hale hobbled in behind me.

  “What the hell happened to you two? You look like shit.”

  “Well, that’s a marked improvement over yesterday,” I said.

  Hale groaned into the chair, I stood against the door frame. After thirty seconds of pleasantries Hale gave me a nod and I decided to drop our bomb on Aaron.

  “Look, Aaron, we got Nikki Mathias,” I said, just throwing it out there. I felt relieved just getting it off my chest. I didn’t like keeping information from him.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured,” he said off handedly.

  “Hunh?”

  “I got a call from Peters earlier this morning, bragging about how they’d tracked down some bank in the middle of nowhere, had account names, and were going to descend on the place armed with federal warrants. I didn’t think the Feds could put that together, they’re too busy covering their asses to get their hands dirty. That info had to come from somewhere and when you clowns were conspicuously absent it wasn’t a long leap to put two and two together.”

  “Look, it’s not like we were trying to keep you out of anything, you just seemed to have your plate pretty full at the time and well, we…”

  Aaron raised his hand to quiet me.

  “What’s done is done. It took awhile but something good had to come from yesterday. You’ve seen the news?”