Page 21 of Inked in Devotion

I exited the van and opened the back door. Wilson was tied in a way that facilitated his transport by tossing him over my shoulder, and I gagged him so I wouldn’t hear his whiny voice.

I tossed the key to Ivan. “Can you unlock the entrance?” A chain and a padlock held the split opening together.

“I thought we were going for a walk,” Ivan huffed.

“Aren’t you nostalgic for wet work?”

“I’ve paid my dues,” he responded.

I instructed him to turn on the lights. The warehouse was used for interrogation and disposal. I didn’t know what was in most of the boxes. I recently stocked up on cleaning supplies and body-dissolving acids. Cleaner and less possibility of identification.

I stalked into a room where a sole metal chair sat in the middle, dumped Wilson on the floor, and dropped my duffel of tools beside a stainless-steel table positioned against the wall.

A single light bulb hung from a wire attached to the ceiling. The faint scent of bleach permeated the air.

“You know, if you give him a concussion, you won’t get information out of him,” Ivan said.

“We’ll see, shall we?” Wilson was fine. I made sure his hip hit the floor first, but it didn’t mean his skull didn’t receive a banging. And I was prepared to dose him with drugs to keep him lucid.

I dragged his body up and sat him on the chair, uncuffing his wrists before re-cuffing him with his hands behind his back.

He appeared dazed, but he inhaled sharply when I yanked the duct tape from his mouth. Duct tape—the basic arsenal of any hit man. I kept rolls of it in my bag of things.

For good measure, I broke a vial of smelling salts beneath his nose.

“What the fuck?” He glared at me, eyes tearing.

“Come on, Wilson.” I slapped his cheek. “I don’t have all night.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway, so why should I tell you anything?”

I chuckled darkly. “I can make it easy or hard.” Wilson was no soldier; he was a number-pusher. He didn’t have a high tolerance for pain. Washed out of basketball in high school. Graduated in accounting from Dartmoor. He liked cheeseburgers and fries, buffalo wings, and beer. His high metabolism kept him skinny, but genetics didn’t bless him with thick hair, given his ridiculous comb-over. Wilson cheated on his wife with a series of one-night stands. Sometimes he kept a mistress. He didn’t, however, partake in the goods he transported. Didn’t mean he didn’t deserve torture. Human trafficking was human trafficking. His wife was banging the gardener. A Russian mail-order bride whom he had turned into a trophy wife.

They’d become a rich couple cliché.

Ivan sighed. “Stop playing with your food. I thought you needed to get a location.”

“Do you want to stay outside and wait?”

At seventy, Ivan had been out of the game too long. He’d also become grumpier and impatient. He’d forgotten the game of interrogation. He recently stepped down as pakhan, but he hadn’t gotten his hands bloody in years.

The anticipation of pain was mostly what made these fuckers crumble.

The woodchipper at the back of the warehouse was broken. Probably a good thing because I wasn’t in the mood to clean up the mess it produced. It was cathartic when I had time and the mark had pissed me off.

But Wilson was an easy catch. He didn’t have bodyguards around him, and I parked beside his car in his building’s basement and threw him in the van.

I walked over to my duffel of torture and donned an apron and gloves. Since I wasn’t sawing or hacking tonight, I didn’t need a face shield. I picked out my pliers for tooth extraction and shears for his fingers.

Wilson gulped. “What?”

I returned to stand in front of him like a snake slithering to taunt a hapless rat. Incidentally, I heard the rats on the shelves. I need to call a real pest controller so they wouldn’t chew up my plastic rolls and use them for bedding.

“Where are the children, Wilson?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice trembled. He was lying. I didn’t blame him. He feared the people he worked for, and hadn’t wrapped his mind around the fact that he wasn’t getting out of here to do business with them again. “Who are you delivering them to?”

“I’m just a businessman,” he yelled, but tears started streaming down his cheeks as he yanked on his bindings.