Kissing the Killer(15)

* * *

I met up with Dante and a few others back in the deli not long later. From there we took two large black SUVs out toward the edge of the city, out toward the old industrial park. We stopped outside a large abandoned warehouse.

Our footsteps echoed as we got out of the cars and walked inside. The place was full of men already, mostly muscle just standing around, smoking or checking their weapons.

I knew about half the guys in there, most of them hired goons. There weren’t any other hit men like me, which was surprising. I guessed Gian only specifically requested me for this, which meant I had to be on top of my game.

“Ready for this?” Dante asked me.

I turned and looked at him. He grinned at me, wearing his bulletproof vest. He had an oversized gun with a silver inlay handle tucked into his track pants, and he looked totally ridiculous. The man had probably never fired that toy gun in his life.

“Sure,” I grunted. “Ready as I can be. What’s the plan?”

“We meet the girls here soon. Then we transport them to the club. Easy.”

“If it’s so easy, why do you have so much muscle? I mean, shit, Dante, there’s like fifteen guys here.”

He laughed. “It’s overkill, but we lost a shipment last month, and the boss wasn’t happy about that.”

When he said “shipment,” the fucker meant a bunch of women escaped slavery. He said it like it was a bad thing.

To men like Dante, these women were nothing but money. They weren’t human at all. They were just the potential to make money. These girls came from mostly Eastern European counties and were incredibly poor. Sometimes their families sold them into slavery and sometimes they sold themselves. Sometimes they were simply stolen off the streets, though.

But once they were taken, there was nothing they could do about it. Nobody gave a fuck how they ended up in the slave trade, only that they shut their fucking mouths and did as they were told.

They were trained like fucking dogs from the moment they were captured. More often than not, they were also forced to get hooked on drugs just to have something else hanging over them. They were transported illegally into America on cargo ships in horrible conditions only to get shoved into some sex club, fucking hundreds of guys a week.

Needless to say, their lives were short and miserable. Very few of them ever earned their freedom, and the ones who did were so scarred and broken from their experiences that they ended up dead or arrested soon after.

I wasn’t a fucking saint. I killed and I killed often, and sometimes I fucking enjoyed killing. I liked putting a bullet in some dirtbag’s skull, and I even liked hunting down those dumb fools who decided to run or fight back.

But at least I had a code. I didn’t hurt women, and that was it. The fucking shitheads that worked in the brothels and in the flesh trade were heartless monsters, the sort of bottom-dwelling scum I despised the most.

Unfortunately, we worked for the same bosses. I didn’t like it, but I shut my fucking mouth and dealt with it like everyone else did. I wasn’t some hero, some dumbass cowboy who was going to ride off and save all the poor hookers who got caught up in this nasty business.

I put my head down and concentrated on keeping myself alert as we waited. Nobody was talking, and there was a strange, heady sense of anticipation hanging over the group, like everyone there knew something was going to happen.

Dante smoked cigarette after cigarette, staring off into the distance. I sat down on an empty barrel near him. “Anything else I should know about this?” I asked him.

“What? No. Why?”

“Just that everyone here seems on edge,” I said. “We have big numbers, so it’s a little curious.”

He sighed. “Fuck. Well, there’s one small detail. See, every time the Spiders attack, they don’t leave survivors.”

“What?”

“Yeah. They kill everyone, except for the girls. They steal the girls for themselves.”

“Shit man. No wonder everyone is on edge. They think there’s a chance we all might get slaughtered.”

“See? That’s why we need people like you.”

I shook my head, annoyed. “You should have told me sooner.”

“Why? Risk you not coming?”

“No, you dumb fuck. I would have brought a bigger gun.”

He laughed and stubbed out his cigarette. “Too late for that. Here they come.”

I followed his gaze and saw a semitruck pulling down along the road and angling toward us. The container on its back was big and white with no markings at all.

The other men all reacted. Some went to open up the doors of the trucks we had with us and some got their weapons out. A few were sent to scout out the perimeter, make sure nobody was out there watching.