Psycho Save Us (40 page)

“Hang on a
minute, sorry,” he said.  He touched the send button on his radio and spoke
into it.  “Go ahead for Hulsey.”

“An update,
Detective.  Units have already arrived at the Tidov residence.  They’ve knocked
and there’s no answer.  Waiting on a warrant now to enter.”

Waiting around
holding their dicks
,
he thought. 
Do they need reminding how to walk around the house and find an
excuse for probable cause?
  “Has anybody called Judge Hodgins yet?  That
man’s pretty liberal with a pen.”

“I don’t know,
Detective.  I’ll pass that along.”

“Ten-four,” he
sighed.  To Porter, he said, “Go ahead.  You were saying he’s a
vor
?”

“Well, Tidov’s
certainly got a red bear tattoo on his arm, according to Evans.  But he didn’t
have that going into the joint, apparently.”

“Who are these
vory
,
exactly?  They’ve been in Atlanta for a couple of years now, but I don’t know
much about them, and I didn’t know they were that organized.  We’d heard rumors
about them abducting people off the streets, but it was pretty vague.  They’re
not standard Russian Mafia, are they?”

“No,” Porter
said.  He then pointed to the GPS and gestured for Mortimer to hang a right at
the next light.  “No, the
vory v zakone
are an old group.  Started in
the old country, in Stalin’s
Gulag
.  Bunch o’ prisoners were getting
beat down for a time, and got pretty tired of it.  So they banded together,
made a tight-knit gang of thieves, sneaking in a little o’ this, a little o’
that, and generally just meant to buck the guards of the
Gulag
to
survive that hellhole.  The highest a person could ascend to was the rank of
vor
,
a high-ranking thief respected for his skill and commitment to the group.

“
Vory v
zakone
translates to ‘thieves-in-law.’  They live by a strict code.” 
Porter used his fingers to tick off the rules.  “No gambling without being able
to cover losses.  Thieves must be willing to teach the trade to young
beginners, and make good on promises, but only those promises given to other
thieves.  They should also never drink so much alcohol that they lose their
reasoning ability.  They must take the blame for a theft if it will create
confusion and enough time for another thief to make a break for freedom.  They must
also keep secret all knowledge of hideouts, lairs, dens and safe houses.  A
thief must never join the military, or take weapons from the hands of
authorities.  A thief must have good command of
Fenya
, the thieves’
jargon or cant language, which is always evolving so that they make wiretaps
almost pointless for feds.  The cant language they use on the phone sounds like
complete gibberish, almost no identifiable Russian in it at all.  I forget the
other rules.”

“A thief must
never, under
any
circumstances, work,” Agent Mortimer supplied, “no
matter how much difficulty this brings; a thief must live
exclusively
off of the profits of his thefts.” 

Porter paused. 
“Yeah, I forgot that one.  There’s also to be no molesting of minors, and sex
crimes in general are frowned upon.  They’re usually pretty strict about all of
these rules.”  He thought for a moment.  “If they’re involved with the Rainbow
Room somehow, then these
vory
we’re dealing with are probably outcasts,
a few rogues doing the job that the other
vory
would never do.”

Leon said, “But
you said they’re all thieves.  Which means, outcasts or not, they’ve got the
theft thing down.”

Porter nodded.

“Which means
that before they got booted from the
vory v zakone
, they all probably
received pretty good instruction in how to steal and kill without getting
caught.”  This held far-reaching implications.  How long had these men been
“stealing” people right off the streets?  How long had they gotten away with
it?  How efficient had they gotten, exactly?  How many missing persons could be
attributed to them?

Leon would get
his answer in about five minutes, when he showed up at the house of Yevgeny
Tidov and had his warrant from Judge Hodgins.

Some might’ve
left the Russian his pants, and therefore his dignity, which might’ve made him
more pliable.  Others might’ve cut his balls off right then and there.  Spencer
Pelletier had never suffered any such vainglorious rectitude, and wasn’t like
to start.

The smelling
salts worked quickly.  He waved the bottle underneath the Russian’s nose and he
jolted and thrashed for a second before he realized where he was.  Or, rather,
where he wasn’t.

Spencer thought Yevgeny
Tidov looked as dumb as a retard stepping off the short bus and having a look
around at an aquarium.  It must have been very confusing for him.  He was in a
dark, damp tunnel with scarcely a sliver of moonlight.  He sat slumped, his
hands cuffed to the rung of a solid steel ladder that was embedded in the stone
wall and went up to the manhole above him, through which he’d plummeted when
Spencer shoved him through.  His head had smacked hard, and he was bleeding
from the right side of his face.

Spencer’s
stomach growled.  He was still hungry.

Nearby, a Droid
phone splashed white light against Spencer’s face like a flashlight on a kid
gathered round a campfire to tell a spooky story.  “You’re in a sewer,” Spencer
announced.  He sat on his haunches in front of the Russian.  Tidov looked
about, blinking, no doubt recalling the dream he’d had where a man named Blake
Madison had duped him.  “And you’re in trouble.”

Tidov did not
respond to that.  Instead, he looked down at his legs and feet, all bare.  In
fact he wore nothing now besides a pair of boxer shorts.

You
, a thought
said. 
I need you
.

Those words had
been hopping around inside Spencer’s head for about five minutes.  The first
had occurred with Tidov still unconscious.  At first, he thought he was hearing
things, but they weren’t exactly words.  It was like a song looping through his
mind again and again.  He couldn’t get the lyrics out of his head.  What was so
strange was that it was just those four words:
You
. 
I need you
. 
They were light but emphatic, and they had no familiarity to them whatsoever. 
He wrote it off as merely a line from a movie he’d seen, perhaps from a
Scorsese flick that had a scene just like this one—some Mafioso about to get
offed in a sewer.  Yeah, those were the good ones.

I’m talking to
you
. 
Do you hear me?

Different lyrics
this time.  Different words.

Spencer shook
off the feeling and aimed the gun at Tidov.  “I’ve been goin’ through your
phone.  Got a lotta names here.  A lotta numbers, too.  You also go to
Tripple-X-Bitches-and-Hoes-dot-com a lot.  Looks filthy.  Also looks like some
suspiciously underage girls floatin’ around in these vids.  This one o’ those
YouPorn type o’ sites, yeah?  Where you do all your recruiting?”

“Fuck…off…” 
Tidov’s head lolled.  He almost went back to sleep before Spencer put the
smelling salts back underneath his nose.  Tidov gagged and jerked his head
back, hitting it on a ladder rung.

“Shit’s strong,
ain’t it?”

“Fuck you.”

Spencer felt his
temper flare, the same flare that had gotten him in trouble with the AB back in
Leavenworth, the same flare that brought down their wraith in Baton Rouge. 
“Fuck
me
?” he laughed.  “Oh, homeboy.  No, no, no, no, no.  Fuck
you
. 
See, right about now cops are swarming all over your humble abode, an’ it won’t
take long for them to find all your secrets.  Probably got shit there
I
didn’t even have time to find, am I right?  Yeah, I’m right.”

“Fuck you,” the
Russian repeated stubbornly.  He jerked once to try and free himself, and lunged
his face at Spencer.  Once he was done with this minor rebellion, he met eyes
with Spencer.

“Man, you know
what they do to child molesters in prison?” he went on, chuckling.  “You know
what they do to assholes like you, Vladimir Putin?  I was in the pen with one. 
His name was Martin Horowitz.  Bet he could tell ya what happens to your kind
there.  Heh!  Rape and child molesting is bad enough.  But the body? 
Sheeeeeyyyyyiiiit
,
son.  That dead body in that black bag?  That’s life without parole right
there, probably lethal injection.  The long sleep, ya feel me?”

“Fuck you,”
Tidov persisted.

On his haunches
like this, his legs started to hurt.  Spencer shifted his weight to alleviate
the pressure on one side.  He also had shifted his weight to fidget, because
the Russian’s resistance was exciting him—

You!  I need
you!

Spencer looked
away from the Russian, glanced up and down the long, dark tunnel. 
What the
fuck’s wrong with me?
he thought.

Then, quite
inexplicably, he received an answer. 
Where do you want me to start, monster?

Spencer paused. 
That time, it hadn’t just been like a song looping inside his mind, it was
like…like…like hearing the rest of the lyrics to a song that he’d been fighting
to find.  Or, rather, having someone
give
him the rest of the lyrics.

The previous
loop returned. 
I need you
.

He turned his
attention back to Tidov.  “Let’s talk about the
vory v zakone
.”

“Fuck you.”

“Hm.  You’re far
more resilient than you were back in your home.  Don’t let the fact that you’re
still alive embolden you.  I’m a dog with a chew toy, an’ I’m only entertained
as long as my toy keeps makin’ that funny squeaking sound.  You know the sound
I mean?”  Tidov was apparently smart enough to know a rhetorical, and insane,
question when he heard it.  “I used to have a Pekingese—you know, the little
pug-nosed shits—an’ he’d bite the shit outta his chew toy.  And the more it
didn’t make the noise, the harder he’d chew.”

“Fuck you,” he
threw back.

Spencer raised
the gun and fired into Tidov’s shoulder.  The bang of the gun was deafening in
the confines of the sewer.  Flesh exploded and blood splattered against Spencer’s
face as much as Tidov’s.  Fragments of bone and muscle were exposed in that
hole, opened right about where the rotator cuff was.  Tidov screamed and kicked
out.  He tried to stand but couldn’t.

“That’s—not—the—squeaky—sound.”

The Russian
tried to stand again, then cried out in fury and pain.  The language that came
out was total gibberish.  “
Drivet v horavatt gosha pitmurun alba albabarro!
”

“What is that?”
Spencer said.  “Is that Russian or is that your secret language?  It’s called
Fenya
,
right?  I looked it up on Wikipedia on your phone here while you were out.  You
guys have like a secret language, right?  Was that it?  Or was that pure
Russian?”

“
FUCK YOU!
” 
His body went through spasms, and he growled like a wild animal through
grinding teeth.

Spencer raised
the gun to point directly at his head.  Tidov squirmed and kicked pitifully,
but could go nowhere.  “Is that the sound squeaky toys make in the Motherland?”

Tidov glared at
him.  He did not answer Spencer’s question, but he also knew better now than to
say
fuck you
.  Spencer sat there for a minute watching the Russian
writhe.  He did this with the same detached curiosity that he had once done to
a moth whose wings he’d removed, and a cat whose paws he’d chopped off.  The
literature said that many serial killers mutilated animals in their youth. 
That was how they started.  As they grew up, their needs grew, just like how a
man enjoyed a good blowjob only for so long, then he wanted
two
girls,
one for his cock and one for his balls.  Then he wanted three.  Then he wanted
to be dominated, or to dominate, while roleplaying.  The needs grew and grew.

You sick fuck
, said the Voice. 
Again, familiar, yet not familiar. 
I still need you
.

For the first
time, Spencer entertained this rogue thought. 
If you need me, why call me a
sick fuck?

Because you are
one!
came the swift response.

“We ready to
talk yet?  Hm, big guy?”

Tidov said
nothing.  He looked straight up at the manhole cover above his head, no doubt
hoping that someone would have heard the gunshot.

Spencer smiled. 
“Sorry, but it’s just you an’ me, pal.”

Tidov looked at
him, and Spencer saw the look in his eyes. 
He’s about to
—

—
shift
tactics
, came the Voice from the other thinker. 
Yes, I feel that, too
.

“Feel what?” he
asked aloud.  This marked the beginning of his belief that he was actually
talking to someone else.  It wasn’t such a strange thing.  Spencer was
agnostic, but not because he believed it was truly impossible to know the truth
of spirits or demons or gods or angels, but because he honestly didn’t give
shit.