He gave me an address and told me I was working security at nine that evening. I hung up and finished my cereal. Nine wasn’t so bad. Of course, if Mr. Black told me nine, he expected me there by eight thirty. But I at least had the day. I went back to bed.
At six I climbed out of bed and slowly got ready after wolfing down a sandwich. By eight twenty I was parking across from the address I had been given. It was a place downtown, in a seedy-looking neighborhood. The building was squat and wide, just one story, with no windows that I could see. It was all gray and closed off. The door was large and metal, and a man in a suit was loitering outside it.
I locked my car and made my way across the street. I realized I knew the man standing by the heavy door, and he nodded to me as I got closer. His name was Marco, and he worked for David Zinga, a Mexican arms dealer Mr. Black was friendly with.
“Marco,” I said, stopping for a minute to chat with the guy. He was smoking, and he took a long drag on the cigarette he held between two fingers before answering.
“How goes it, Peter?” he asked, his voice low, like a tiger’s growl. He was a big guy, muscles upon muscles, with a scar running down one cheek.
“All right. It was my day off,” I complained, and Marco laughed, but his eyes were sympathetic.
“What’s a day off?” he asked, and it was my turn to laugh. I slapped him on the back and stepped inside. I expected the building to be dark, but it was well lit. There was a small hallway right at the entrance, a door propped open at the end, and beyond that was a large open room. Lights hung from the ceiling, buzzing softly as I passed underneath them. At the far end of the room was a small stage of sorts, a raised section of flooring that came up to my waist. There was a door there, built into the wall on the rear of the stage. A friend of mine stood there, another guy who worked for my boss, someone I had pulled a few jobs with. His name was Vlad, and he was about ten years older than my twenty-five. His last name was Nikitin, and he was like Mr. Black, right from the mother country. His accent wasn’t as pronounced, however. He had apparently moved to America with his family when he was only three. He was tall and angular, with a long crooked nose that had been broken more than once.
“Hey, kid,” he said to me as I found the steps to the stage and moved up to greet my friend. He always called me kid.
“Hey, Vlad,” I said. “Mr. Black coming?”
Vlad shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows,” he said. “I think a lot of big hitters will be here, though.”
“What is this?” I asked. “Arms deal?”
Vlad laughed and shook his head. “Not quite, kid,” he said. Then he nodded to the door that stood off to the side, leading from the stage. “Go check it out.”
I looked at him, wondering if he was trying to get me in trouble. I was just working security. Mr. Black, and the others like him, they didn’t like us small-timers getting our noses where they didn’t belong. I was muscle, plain and simple, with my gun in a shoulder holster under my suit jacket. Mr. Black always had us in shirts and ties.
I made my way to the door at the back of the stage and then looked over my shoulder, back at Vlad. He laughed and waved me on. “It’s fine; just us grunts here so far.”
I nodded and opened the door. It was dark in the back room, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. There were fewer lights here, their bulbs orange and slight instead of bright and yellow. In front of me was a cage, big enough for a man, but it was empty. I moved on.
I found another cage, but this one wasn’t empty. It was six feet high and four feet wide, and two women stood in it, holding one another and crying. They looked young, both of them no older than twenty. They had fair skin and dark hair, and their eyes were dark and hard to see in the low light. They looked at me and shrank away. It made me feel terrible. I was a bad guy—I did bad things, I knew that—but these two women, as scared as they obviously were, seeing me and reacting physically like that, it made my head swim with shame.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said as I walked by. Beyond that cage were others, each with one or two or sometimes three young women inside. I felt nauseous, and I hurriedly turned back to the door, rushing out onto the stage.
Vlad saw me and laughed. I felt a wave of anger roll through me. “First rodeo?” he asked.
“What is this?”
“What do you think, kid? Come on, you’ve done too many bad things to be naive.”