Page 19 of Dirty Quinn
In the end, they shot my father in the head and left me to die. I will forever hope that my father’s last thoughts were of what a coward he was. Conversely, my mother fought her attacker until the bitter end when he plunged the knife in her stomach, ripping it up and outward savagely. Leaving her naked body open and bare for anyone to see.
They shipped me off to live with an aunt and uncle just outside Moscow shortly after. They soon tired of my “anger issues” and sent me to my maternal grandmother, who was elderly. She was patient and kind, and my life may have been extraordinarily different had I stayed with her, but she passed away when I was twelve. I spent the next four years in the Russian equivalent of the foster care system before running away for good.
I’m sure I do have “anger issues,” but that’s only for me to say. No one else. The one thing I learned unequivocally is that therapy is for pussies. All a person needs is the ability for self-reflection—honest self-reflection—to fix any emotionality that may be wired wrong.
I head up the stairs to the main floor of the home I’m staying in. One that I’mborrowingfrom a friend of a friend. I have a few homes in the United States, but I would be easy enough to track if I stayed in any of those. For the purposes of this trip, I need to make sure I’m as invisible as possible.
I settle myself in the study with a chilled glass of vodka to wait for Andrei and a few of the other men to join me. We have a lot to go over, especially with this attempt at anarchy that I know is coming along with using my name to traffic women. Inexcusable, plain and simple. Death to the traitor(s) being the only way to amend the problems that have been created.
My problem is, I’m relatively sure Andrei is my rat.
9
Daria
Quinn is missing. I’m not sure which I feel more of fear or fury. There’s only one person who is stupid enough to take her from me, and that’s Ronan Sinclair. I suppose it could be my father, but he would have no reason for doing so. Especially since he thinks he’s taken over everything at this point.
What my father doesn’t realize is that I still plan to move forward with my own plans regardless of the fact that he’s here. I’m not stopping now just because he thinks he’s able to step in and assume control. I’ve got a list of places I’m checking to look for Quinn. Any place that she’s not at, I’m taking out. Plain and simple.
Explosives aren’t my forte, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them. Al keeps an assortment of bomb-making compounds on site. It’s been a while since I’ve used anything like Semtex or Pentolite, and we’ve got quite a bit of both on hand just waiting to be put to use. As Alyssa is fond of saying, “Explosives want to blow up. It’s what they were born to do.”
The way I see it, a small homemade bomb is the easiest way to take out a nice section of a house or building. Especially if that section is populated with men I’d like to get rid of. The smaller concentrations of people in a room, the better it will be. I plan to handle this alone, not taking any of my girls with me, not telling them where I’m going.
I know that goes against everything I tell them all to do, but I don’t mind being a hypocrite once in a while. Quinn’s safety is my responsibility, and I’m the one who blew it. Plus, I’m almost positive I’m the reason they took her.
My first stop is Andrei’s warehouse hangout. It’s where he hosts high stakes poker games, sex slave trades, and other assorted debauchery. It’s the same place I was at the other night when I first saw my father. They won’t have Quinn here, I know that for sure, but it will still please me greatly to bring part of it down. Even if no one is there.
I pull up to the small clearing I’d watched from before. But I canvas the entire building on foot before doing anything else. It’s empty. I break a window anyway and check the inside just to make sure.
No one has been here since the auction. Not even to clean up if the trash littered about is any sign. Used condoms, alcohol bottles, bidding paddles, frayed rope, tangled tape, ripped articles of clothing. I don’t even want to think about what happened that night. What I could have stopped but didn’t.
I head back outside and toward my car to collect what I need from the trunk. It’s not the smartest move to carry raw explosives around in the trunk of your car, but I wasn’t sure how much damage I wanted to do and where. So, I figure if need be, I add a little extra hexogen, or what is known as RDX in America, near my blast point and sit back to watch the show.
Al likes to use remote detonators and timers with anything she makes. I’m okay with that, but I also prefer a good old fashion fuse that I can light and watch burn. It’s the way I first learned as a child, and the way I’m still most comfortable using now. Roxie says the longer fuses are reminiscent of cartoons from her childhood, where one character would light it, and another would blow it out. It never fails to make me laugh, mostly because I’d like to see that happen in real life.
The explosion is loud, but not nearly as damaging as I’d hope. So, I set a second, smaller device along the opposite wall and wait for the entire thing to implode. Which doesn’t take long. Once the primary supports of a building are down, the rest just sort of crumbles into itself.
Pleased enough with that, I move on to stop number two. Because the goal today is to destroy as much of Andrei and what he treasures as I can.
* * *
I pull around the corner Andrei’s strip club and preferred meeting place, parking my car just over a block away. Then pick a discreet corner to watch the club for a while, making sure there aren’t any women in residence right now. At this hour of the afternoon, it’s rare since the dancers don’t even start their shifts until seven o’clock at night usually.
But the men seem to always there: drinking, plotting, planning, meeting, accepting deliveries. Like now, the beer distributor has pulled into the lot and is loading assorted cases onto his hand truck to bring inside. He has to wait a good minute at the back door before someone comes to open it for him. Lucky for me, he props it open with a wooden block so it’s ready for his second load.
As near as I can tell from the parked cars, at least five of Andrei’s guys are inside. I’m mostly certain they won’t have Quinn here either, mostly because there’s no place to keep her without someone seeing her. Unless she’s already been put to work. But I’m hoping that’s not why she was taken. That it was more to hurt me and get my attention than it was to gain another girl. I do some quick surveillance anyway, just in case.
As is true with most strip clubs, they’ve heavily curtained or completely blacked out any windows to the outside. But the open back door makes it easy for me to sneak inside to check things out. I duck into the small entryway leading to the dressing rooms and wait for the vendor to leave and reload.
On silent feet, I make my way down the darkened hall toward the main room. As suspected, four guys sit at the bar with one standing behind it, all speaking in hushed voices but definitely in Russian. Andrei is not one of them. I’m surprised no one has heard about the warehouse yet. I mean, maybe they have, but I would think there would be more activity going on if that were the case.
It’s easy to tell who is here and who isn’t. Four rooms make up the entire place, if you don’t count the restrooms: the dressing room, the kitchen, Andrei’s office, and the main room with all the stages and the bar. Besides, I’m not really about taking out bodies right now so much as I am letting Andrei know that I’m after him. And using Andrei to pass along the same message to Ronan.
I wait for the delivery man to pass through the hall one more time, then make my way back to my car and grab what I need. This doesn’t have to be a large explosion, just enough to ruin the back of the building and shut the club down for a while; hurt Andrei’s pocketbook with the loss of income. I plant a small explosive at each end of the building and use a remote detonator this time. I’m already getting in my car by the time it goes off. I can’t afford to stick around to see the results. There are too many people inside, and the potential of being seen is too great.
I’ve only got one more location on my list today—Andrei’s house—the only logical place where they might hold Quinn. Even though I fear they’ve got her somewhere else, somewhere less obvious. Like, a place of Ronan’s that isn’t used much, that I wouldn’t necessarily know about. But with Alyssa’s help, I will soon.
Speaking of, my phone rings and I look down to see its Al calling.
