Chapter 12

I headed out of Ronny’s house and back into the borrowed Jeep with a new destination. I drove a few minutes down the road before pulling over and rooting through the glove box, hoping for a map.

The map I had gotten when Renata and I had left Miami was with the rest of my stuff, abandoned in that motel room when Renata was grabbed.

I was happy to find this guy kept a map of Florida in his Jeep. With my face plastered on the news telling people I was a kidnapper and a murderer, I wasn’t crazy about having to stop and ask for directions, or buy another map.

I found the address for the blandly named Florida Cargo Storage Company on the map, where Ronny said the Russians were holding the girls waiting for transportation out of Miami.

By this point I had a clear idea of the operation as it went in Florida. The Russians brought the girls in, and the Hernandez Cartel distributed those girls across the country for them; either on their own, or through smaller fish like Ronny.

It didn’t seem like the Russians were selling the girls to the Cartel. Not only was that not the business the Cartel was in, but everything I had found to this point suggested they only handled transportation.

The thing that was still confusing me, was that nothing suggested that Yuri was part of some kind of larger system. The Bratva was loosely organized, with particular guys running a specific geographic area. There wasn’t a central command coordinating all these different regions into a single unit.

From the way people talked, Yuri was at the top of the food chain for this particular group. But he was still a local guy. So where exactly were these girls ending up that the Cartel was moving?

For my goal of getting Renata back, it wasn’t particularly important. This warehouse was just one more step in the path that would lead me to her.

But I liked to work out puzzles, and this was a big one. Also, it gave my brain something to turn over while I was driving into Miami.

It was getting late in the day, and the warehouse looked closed, with the front bay doors pulled down. I circled around the side of the building and climbed up on a stack of pallets to look in through a window near the front half of the building.

There were a couple of forklifts parked against one wall, and pallets of stuff were stacked in the middle. I wasn’t an expert, but everything looked on the up and up, to me. My guess was the front half of this business did what the signs said they did. It was also clear that what looked like the back of the warehouse was not as far back in the building as it should be. By my estimation the back wall I could see through the window ended about thirty feet short of where the back of the warehouse seemed to end.

It wasn’t obvious, and someone inside might not notice it right away. The only reason I did, was I knew they had been holding girls here and I was looking for something out of place.

I circled the entire warehouse. In the part that was visible from the inside there were a couple of windows and two fire doors, but nothing in that back thirty feet of warehouse.

At the front of the warehouse was a regular door on the far right side and a window that light was streaming through. As I approached it I could see someone sitting inside, talking on the phone. He saw me at about the same moment, so I improvised.

I walked to the door and pulled it open, quickly.

When the guy started to stand up, saying something to the person on the phone I said, “Is this Florida Cargo Storage Company?”

“Ostavaytes’ na linii,” he said on the phone before saying to me, “Yes. What do you want?”

“Sorry I’m late, but I had a hell of a time finding the place. I got a delivery that was supposed to be here, earlier today.”

“I know nothing about delivery. Come back tomorrow.”

“Ok, but I gotta drive this back to the port now, and put it back in the holding area. What’s your name so I can tell the customs people what’s going on?”

I had no idea if that was what happened with rejected shipments. My best guess was once a shipment passed Customs, they could care less where it went.

But I was also betting this guy didn’t know that, and didn’t want his name to show up in some government file.

He said something in Russian I didn’t understand in the phone, listened for a minute, and replied, “Ya, budu idti iskat’.”

He clicked off his phone and stood up, saying, “Show me shipment.”

I stood aside and gestured for him to walk past me. When he did, I pulled my gun out and smacked him in the back of the head. He dropped in a lump by the front door.

I went out into the warehouse and found some zip ties used for securing loose items and a dirty white towel. Coming back into the small office, I knelt down to start tying the guy’s feet and noticed blood starting to pool under his head, more that should have been there for just a whack.

I felt around his neck but couldn’t get a pulse and, rolling him over, I found his eyes dead and lifeless. I didn’t think I’d hit him hard enough to kill him, but clearly that’s what happened.

Now I was in trouble. Unless there were some records with more information on them than these guys would probably have, there was no way I was finding out where they took Renata. It had been a long shot, but that is better than having no shot, which is where I was sitting at the moment.

I stood up and started going through the office, looking for anything that might be helpful, starting with the computers. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for finding anything. I had to rely on these guys being stupid and putting something on paper that would point me in the direction of some of other aspect of their illegal businesses.

Unfortunately for me, these guys were anything but stupid. Sure the low level muscle might make a lot of errors, but the guys who run their front operations had worked their way up to get here. And organizations like the Bratva were not very tolerant of mistakes. People who made the kind of errors that could hurt their business, errors like leaving incriminating documents lying around, tended to get removed from the organization pretty damn fast.

I was just starting on another stack of documents when I heard a single loud sound in the warehouse proper. It was a metal on metal bang, that comes from either something metal being dropped or one metal object whacking into another.

I pulled my gun and eased open the door that separated the offices from the warehouse. Seeing nothing right away, I slipped through the door and started moving through the large pallets, trying to get a better view of obscured areas of the warehouse while still maintaining some cover.

Finally, I saw what had made the noise. What looked like a sheet metal wall paneling had been thrown open, revealing it to be a door. A man wearing a button up shirt opened to the abdomen and tattoos on his arms was standing in the concealed door way holding the arm of a fairly young blond girl. If she was older than nineteen, I would eat my shoe.

His other hand was unfastening his belt buckle and he was pulling her through the door and she was resisting mightily. From the purple bruises on her arms, this wasn’t the first time she had been pulled around by these guys.

It was pretty obvious what was about to happen, and my first instinct was to put a bullet into this guy. But with the guy in the office dead I needed someone alive to answer my questions.

The second best option was to come around and surprise him from behind, subduing him before he could react. But there was too much open floor between me and him, and he was headed along the wall, away from me.

If I was a real bastard, I would wait until he was distracted with the girl, and then take him. But as much as mad as I was at the world, I couldn’t do that to another person. This girl had already been through hell and I didn’t want her suffering on my conscious.

So I went with plan C, which both sucked and had the least chance of working.

“Freeze,” I shouted coming around a pallet and pointing my gun at him.

He actually did freeze for a second, but that was mostly to get his bearings. From his point of view, I had literally come out of nowhere.

His paralysis didn’t last long. He released the girl and pulled out a gun of his own. I ducked behind a pallet just as bullets tore through the spot where I had been standing.

I circled around the pallet and saw the girl scuttle back through the concealed doorway while the guy had started to move further into the warehouse.

I was in a quandary. I couldn’t start putting holes in the guy. There was just too much risk that I would kill him, and I really needed him alive. I fired twice at head level into the metal wall in front of his direction of travel, trying to reverse his movement.

My best hope was to corral him somewhere with enough cover that I could get to him and disarm him. When my rounds impacted against the wall with a metallic ping sound, he reversed himself and followed the girl through the opened doorway they had come through, disappearing into the blackness on the other side.

I feinted out for a moment, and then ducked back under cover. I was trying to draw out any fire from within the doorway, just in case he turned and tried to pick me off if I followed him.

When nothing happened I left the cover of the pallets and crossed the open expanse of the warehouse. If he had been smart, he would have waited until I was part way across before picking me off.

Thankfully he didn’t do that, and I got to the metal wall without getting shot up. I moved to the side of the door and peeked around the corner.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkened interior. There was a dirty skylight at each end of the room. The dim light let in by them showed me a horrifying sight.