He shook his head then stared around at us all. He’d never ID us, not with our black neutral clothing and bandanas. All but Phil had a cap on, and his brown hair was short and totally unremarkable.
“What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”
“No joke.” Andrew folded his arms. “Though we might be laughing, you certainly won’t be.”
“Let me go.”
“Perhaps, if you’re a good boy,” I said.
Cillian chuckled, so did Finn. They wouldn’t talk during this interrogation, their accents were too strong, too identifiable.
“Want me to take his feet off?” Phil swiped an axe through the air so that it made menacing swishing sounds.
It was a good bit of improvisation; he must have found it in the barn.
“Not yet,” Andrew said, “maybe later. It’s a rusty axe, right? Will take a few strikes to take a foot off.”
“Yeah, not that sharp.” Phil tossed it into the air, watched it spin once, then caught it by the handle.
Leo shook, a full-body tremble, then the familiar scent of piss wafted up toward me.
“Filthy fucking animal,” I said, slapping him hard around the head. “What you do that for? We all got to be in your stink now.” A puddle formed on the floor around him.
“I…I let me go. I ain’t done nothing to you.” His mouth was slack and his weak chin wobbling. “And I ain’t done nothing to no women.”
“Somehow we don’t believe you,” Phil said.
“So what…” Leo’s voice trembled. “Do you want?”
“We need some information,” Andrew said and paced in front of Leo winding his hands together as though preparing to strangle him. “Perhaps if you give it, you’ll get to keep one foot.”
“I don’t know nothing about nothing. Honest.” He looked at his feet as though deciding which one he wanted to keep.
“Honest isn’t in your vocabulary,” I said. “We already know that.”
“Let me go, please.” He sniffed.
These fucking assholes, who were all bravado bastards around their mates and vulnerable women, always folded the quickest. Pathetic creeps.
“You’ve just done time, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I have. Want to know about my asshole cellmates? I had a few. I’ll tell all. They’re nothing to me. What do you want to know?”
I kept my mouth closed. It was too soon to tell him he’d already been grassed up by a cellmate and they were of no interest to us.
Andrew nodded at me.
I drew the pliers from my pocket and held them in my fist. “You like Eastern European women?”
“Doesn’t everyone. They fuck like Easter bloody bunnies.”
The disgust I already had for him tightened into a painful coil in my belly. “Kosovo women are your flavor, so we hear.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I gestured to Cillian.
He smacked a fist onto Leo’s shoulder, a dead-arm strike. Fucking painful, and I knew ’cause he’d done it to me once when we’d been jerking around.
