Page 59 of Vasily the Hammer

“Is there anything you know?” I ask. “Anything you thought of?”

“Nothing I didn’t already tell Janson. It wasn’t late. Not even seven. Kseniya got a phone call. It sounded urgent but nothing toworry about. I didn’t know what it was about. She was talking in Russian the whole time. I didn’t think anything of it. She’s got a new mom group, girls from the church. Some of them don’t speak a lot of English. She got off the phone and said she was going to meet someone at the café around the corner. Didn’t say who, but she didn’t look worried.” With a weak laugh, he adds, “I was more worried. Been a lot of vandalism, some purse snatching. Stupid stuff, but I told her not to stay out too late. She said she’d be back in an hour and... that was last night.”

Fuck. I hate this so much. Not just that Kseniya’s missing either, although I have a feeling that’s because I’m also feeling some shock. I hate that Flagstaff is no longer safe. It never was for me, but for Kseniya? It was a sleepy little town, perfect to raise kids and have a normal life. To have a quirky aesthetic without getting hassled and to feel safe walking to a café after dark.

I kept it safe. I contained the black underworld. I buried the chaos. Artyom did that, and when he died, I inherited it, and I fucked it up because I was so worried about my own life.

I never even fucking lived it. I hid in Los Angeles while my life, my actual life, was happening in Florida. In Flagstaff.

“I’m going to find her,” I promise again. “We had a shop ransacked last night; Janson thinks it’s the same guys. I’m going over there now, I’ll see if there’s any trails to follow. But if you think of anything else, you call me, okay?”

He nods, but his brows furrow. “Yeah, of course, but listen. I did try calling you. It rang through. Didn’t even go to voicemail.”

“Fuck,” I snarl, moving Maribel to my hip to fish out my phone. Nothing in missed calls. “I got some new app, supposed to be more secure. But this shit keeps happening.”

Miguel tries calling it, puts it on speakerphone for me to hear it ring twice, then get answered by voicemail, except the typical feminine voice says, “Goodbye,” and then it disconnects.

With a nervous laugh, he says, “I kind of thought you blocked my number.”

“No, I don’t even know how to block numbers.” I want to see every single call I get. I need to know who’s calling me, even if I don’t answer.

“May I?” Miguel takes my phone from me, flips through it, scowls, and turns it back to face me. It’s his page in the address book, and there it is, plain as day, blocked.

“Shit, I don’t know how that happened. Gotta be this app. If nothing else, you know Kseniya would slaughter me if I blocked you.”

He nods and fixes it, making a test call and text, and everything works. I make one last promise to both him and Maribel that I will return with Kseniya, and head to the door.

I pause there. I don’t want to lay anything too heavy on him or give him any reason to doubt, but I can’t ignore the fact that I am in Flagstaff.

“Hey, I just found out about Artom yesterday, and I haven’t been able to do anything. Anything official,” I tell him. “Anything with my will. Kseniya’s officially my next of kin, and I want to take care of her and you and Maribel and any other kids you have, but I need to make sure Artom is taken care of. Safe. His mom, too. I’m going to be back, but...”

“But I know what you’re going to go do,” he finishes. “I’ll take care of them. That’s my promise to you.”

The shop was ransacked in the early morning. According to the security feed, they arrived on a box truck at 5:37am, too early for most nine-to-five commuters to notice the odd truck and the crew loading it up, too late for the element who actually kept goods at the shop to still be on the streets. Crime does have hours. Gang members have hours. Drug addicts have hours. 5:37 is miserable to most people on both sides of the law.

The security feed doesn’t show much. No video evidence of the security guards’ murders, the thefts, or the vandalism. All five outdoor cameras got tagged the moment the unmarked box truck pulled up with the same spray paint they graffitied the interior with. They chopped the power lines, took the generator out with the crow bar, smashed most of the interior cameras. They missed a couple, but those cameras were in odd corners and the men are masked in what footage we get.

But we get five seconds of footage that shows one of the men is wearing a biker cut with its gang affiliation emblazoned all over it. It’s a flaming skull with a mohawk.

“It’s Blazing Hell who’s been causing all the problems?” I ask, ready to lose my shit. They’ve always straddled the line with us, as likely as not to sidle with the IRA. When shit went down six years ago in Flagstaff, they played neutral, and I’m sure it was only because they knew the IRA had been obliterated, and they’d be next. I’ve always questioned my decision to let them go, but I know them. Personally. My girlfriend throughout high school was the best friend of one of their top members’ daughters. I thought we were good.

“We’ll find out,” Janson says as we load up one of the bulletproof SUVs we stocked up on to move guns around with.

Nothing is getting moved anytime soon. They took everything they could in the seven minutes they were inside the shop, accordingto a nearby traffic cam. Four things are needed for a ghost gun: the legal, mass-produced upper construction of the gun, the printer, the file for the printed lower register of the gun, and the filament. They took all the constructed ghost guns and the pieces still in the manufacturing process as well as the drives that had the files on them. The computers themselves were all bashed in. Only the 3D printers remained, graffitied but salvageable. The guys who work with them are already busy cleaning them off with acetone, a delicate process, but they’ll be back in service soon.

But some of those files are gone forever, just like the prototype I lost in Santa Clarita. And those guns and components? Hundreds of thousands of dollars in property. Millions in retail. It’s not even the money I care about. We distribute to some major channels who don’t like delays or excuses. The sort of people who shoot first and only negotiate once.

This is going to fuck up everything I’ve done to feed power back into the Bratva, to turn our little outpost of exiles into a powerhouse that’s the envy of everyavtoritet,everypakhanin Russia who thought they could ruin the Baranov family. If I die saving my sister and my family’s honor, it will be a worthwhile death.

It’s mid-afternoon when we drive through the streets of Flagstaff. We have to battle a school pick-up lane. Buses have us stopping at every block. The elderly are already on their way to get their early bird specials at the local diners. For all the world, it looks like a pretty normal day.

We all have our guns out, loaded, and cocked as we cruise by the Blazing Hell’s old clubhouse.

Nothing looks out of the ordinary there either. According to Vlad, who still spends a lot of time in Flagstaff, the row of bikeslined up out front is about half what he’d expect on his usual nighttime drive-bys. He thinks that’s about right, that a fair number of the guys have families or day jobs, so what we’re seeing is a headcount of the guys who live there and spend their time on one-percenter activities. Vlad even identifies a couple of their old ladies outside, unloading a sedan that’s parked around the side of the building, where the cars are hidden. They’re not looking particularly hidden, though; one of them has about a dozen pastel helium balloons, several of which announce HAPPY BIRTHDAY, tethered to her wrist.

“Anyone thinking we were right about this being an IRA hit?” Janson mutters.

Yeah, the bikers are a low-key pain in the ass, but they’re not stupid or reckless with their old ladies. I doubt they’d be around to host a birthday party at the clubhouse just hours after they stole millions of dollars of goods from the Bratva. The other lady has a cake carrier, and through the translucent plastic, I can see princess decorations and the number 15.

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