Hollow's End Read online

  Vincent shook her off. “Trust me; these assholes got more than a few of these coming.”

  Leatherface rubbed his jaw and waved the other agents off.

  “You’ve got a lot of stones digging up my past, Kosinski,” Vincent said. “You pulled my old file? Where the hell do you get off pulling a stunt like that?”

  Leatherface/Kosinski seemed only slightly fazed by the punch. “Desperate times, slick,” he said with a Southern twang. “I wouldn’t be callin’ you if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

  Vincent pointed a finger, ready to pop the guy again. “What we did together was never supposed to be brought up again.”

  Kosinski looked over Vincent’s shoulder at the door. “Let’s talk outside, yeah? This is sensitive information you’re spilling on the floor.”

  “Hell if I care. You had the nerve to use it to get me here in the first place.”

  Kosinski leaned in. “Then you know damn well you shouldn’t say another word unless you want us both to land up on the other side of the visitor's glass. You catching my drift, ace?”

  Vincent looked away, perturbed. “Lead the way.”

  Kosinski opened the door and walked out into the hallway, Vincent and Stone following him.

  “Look,” Stone said, “I don’t care about whatever qualms you two have with one another. Whatever it is you two are talking about needs to be squashed for now.”

  “What did you tell her, Kosinski?” Vincent asked. “How much does she know about that case? The one you recruited me for.”

  “Nothing,” Kosinski responded. “I only mentioned you for this job; that’s it. Agent Stone here was more than inclined when I dropped your name, being that you two are already acquainted.”

  “And I don’t need to know any more than that. All of us are aware of what’s at stake here,” Stone said. “Lives are on the line, gentleman.”

  Kosinski looked at Vincent. “And you need to decide if you’re on board or not. We don’t have time to be diggin’ through the past like this.”

  Vincent shook his head, still hung up on his negative feelings toward Kosinski. “Working for the DEA has really scrambled your circuits, Kosinski. You jeopardized my life with that case.”

  “We caught the bad guy, didn’t we?”

  “At the cost of my sanity and my marriage, you prick.”

  “That’s enough!” Stone said, wedging herself between both men. “Vincent, you need to decide here and now if you’re doing this. Whatever this rift is with you guys can be dealt with after those girls are brought back alive. After that, you can have a knife fight in a dark and seedy alley for all I care.”

  Time passed, and cooler heads prevailed.

  Finally.

  Vincent gestured to the room, and the trio headed back inside. “You’re trying to take down Viktor and his gang. And rescue these missing girls. Am I tracking everything so far?”

  “So far, yeah,” Kosinski said.

  “And there’s three days on the clock.”

  “You got it, ace.”

  “So where’s Viktor? How do I find him? What’s my angle?”

  Kosinski produced a book of matches and tossed it to Vincent. Vincent caught it with one hand and looked at the black booklet.

  The Comrade.

  Vincent was two steps shy of losing it again. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Kosinski nodded. “Viktor still owns that bar. Fifty percent of his business is conducted from the back room.”

  Vincent held the matches up to Stone. “This is where my undercover gig with Kosinski here started.”

  “I can’t tell you much about it,” Kosinski said to Stone, “but Vincent was sent in for a joint operation with Chicago PD and my people to take down Viktor’s gang. And it worked.”

  “Yeah,” Vincent added. “Save for the part where we were supposed to take down Viktor.”

  “He dodged the charges.” Kosinski looked at Stone again. “But we did nail ninety percent of his crew. Teaming up with the FBI the past few months has been attempt number two at taking Viktor himself down, which you well know by now.”

  Vincent tossed the matches back to Kosinski. “And you want to use my old alias to get on the inside with Viktor.”

  Kosinski smirked and flipped the matchbook like a coin. “You got it, buster.”

  “What was your alias?” Stone asked Vincent. “What were you doing for Viktor?”

  “Running guns,” Vincent said. “I got out from being undercover a month before Viktor’s crew got busted. Kosinski made it look like I had been arrested.”

  “Which makes Vincent’s cover airtight,” Kosinski said. “And that’s exactly what we need right now.”

  Vincent walked toward one of the agents at the computer who had pulled up a dossier on Viktor. “How do you know Viktor will even let me in the front door?”

  “Because he killed the guy who was running guns for him last week,” Stone said. “We just can’t prove it.”

  Vincent smirked. “Viktor does have a knack for that.” He skimmed Viktor’s dossier on the monitor and saw that the guy had nearly doubled his body count since their last encounter, along with a litany of kidnappings and a list of suspected rapes. “Sick bastard,” Vincent remembered everything about the man in far too many vivid and horrid details.

  “Our first thought,” Stone said, “was to get you wired and see if you could get Viktor to admit to doing any one of those crimes you’re looking at in his jacket there. After that, we were going to bring him in and sweat him for the location of the missing girls.”

  Vincent shook his head. “No dice. Viktor wouldn’t play ball when he knows you have no hard evidence on him. And we have to account for the likelihood that he would probably sniff out I’m wearing a wire within two seconds of us getting reacquainted.”

  “I told her that,” Kosinski said. “Which means that you have to go in deep and try to get Viktor to buy a significant number of guns from you. We get him to make a deal; we got him perfectly lined up in our sights.”

  “Unless you manage to get a line on the missing girls before then,” Stone said. “Either way, we get what we want.”

  Vincent took a breath. “It won’t be easy. Viktor will test me at every turn. The only way he’ll confess is if we get him on particularly nasty charges. The guy will flip. No question. He had one too many trips to prison to risk going back. He’s got too many enemies back there that will stick a fork in his eye the second he shows back up. No, he’ll try to cut a deal with anything he has if we get him on this, so yeah, it could work.”

  Kosinski patted Vincent on the back. “See? That’s what you’re good at, ace. That’s why we called you.”

  Vincent looked at Kosinski’s meaty hand on his shoulder. “Touch me again, and I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  Kosinski chuckled but slowly backed away. “Simmer down there, cowboy.”

  Vincent ran his hands through his hair and dwelled on the insanity of it all. “How many guns can I sell him?”

  “DEA has enough to front for the deal,” Kosinski said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “How many exactly?”

  “One hundred modified AR-15s.”

  “But you need to move fast,” Stone said. “The timetable of three days is at play here.”

  “Which means I gotta move in tonight,” Vincent said. “Right now.”

  Silence fell around the room as everyone waited and looked at each other for a moment.

  “What do you say, Brody?” Kosinski said. “You ready to go back under?”

  Stone squinted at Vincent. “Brody?”

  Vincent sighed. “Brody’s my alias… Ethan Brody.”

  Kosinski reached into his back pocket, produced an ID, and passed it to Vincent. Vincent flipped the ID over in his hand. The ID had Vincent’s face, but with the name, Ethan Brody printed in the center near the Illinois seal. “How long have you been holding on to this?” Vincent said.

  “Not long—fresh of
f the presses as of two hours ago.” Kosinski moved to pat Vincent on the shoulder out of habit then stopped short and reconsidered. “Well, Ethan, my boy.” He nodded instead. “Welcome back to the world.”

  Vincent ran a thumb over the ID like he was sealing his thumbprint on the plastic, thoughts of Claire and that cabin in Big Bear running through his mind as he pocketed the ID and donned the mask of gunrunner Ethan Brody.

  4

  “The mission is simple.” Stone looked to Vincent, who was wearing a ten-year-old leather jacket Kosinski had snatched for him out of only God knew where. “Get in with Viktor, get him to make a deal, then we take him down.”

  “Something like this would usually take a week to put together,” Vincent said. He removed a flask from his jacket pocket and unscrewed the cap. “And Ethan Brody tends to be sauced most of the time.”

  He took a swig. Swished. Swallowed. It went down hard, along with his fears and hesitations.

  “I can’t have anyone following me,” he said. “No tails, no wire, nothing. Viktor will know who I am in a heartbeat.”

  “How do you plan on checking in with us?” Stone asked.

  “Burner phones. Whenever I can, I know I’m stuck on a timeline, but I’ll touch base with you guys when I can.”

  “Make sure you do. We can’t be too in the dark on what’s going down.”

  Vincent grabbed the loaner Beretta Kosinski had given him and racked back the slide. “I’ll make it happen.”

  He holstered the weapon in the small of his back and took a moment to soak in his reflection in the mirror.

  “You got this,” Stone said. “We all know that. Just stick to your cover and nail this guy. We’re counting on you. A slain FBI agent is counting on you.”

  “Who was he?” Vincent asked.

  “The agent?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stone looked toward the floor. “His name was Mike,” she said. “And he was a damn fine agent. A damn fine man.”

  “Any family? Kids?”

  Stone nodded solemnly.

  Vincent shook his head. He didn’t need to hear the rest.

  “He’s counting on you, Vincent,” Stone said, then quickly caught her mistake. “I mean Brody. We’re all counting on you with this one.”

  “Yeah,” Vincent said, then grabbed a dash of pomade and ran it through his hair to give himself a more greased and “criminal” appearance. “I’ve heard that a lot lately.”

  He splashed water on his face then took a deep breath.

  Moments later, he was calling with a burner phone out on the corner, the Windy City chill licking his skin as he dialed a number still burned into the recesses of his memory.

  “Da?”

  “It’s Brody,” Vincent said, adopting more of an East Coast accent. “Romy in tonight?”

  “You said Brody?”

  “Yeah. Did I stutter? Is he fucking there or not?”

  “Yeah. He’s here. I’ll tell him you called.”

  The line went dead.

  Vincent smiled and hung up—one step closer to the big man himself.

  The Comrade was a one-story building a block from the L-train; far enough away that you couldn’t feel it but close enough that you could hear it.

  It was dimly lit and made of brick faded from time, with a big, thick wooden door that’d had countless coats of paint.

  Edgar, a.k.a. Ethan Brody, a cigarette hanging from his mouth and his lungs trying to readjust to an old, disgusting habit, blew smoke out of his nose as he motioned to a doorman sitting on a stool near the door.

  “Closed,” the doorman said, not moving his eyes from the Russian newspaper he was reading.

  “I’m Brody. I need to talk to Romy.”

  The doorman flipped the page. “Go fuck yourself.”

  Vincent grinned, lifted his foot, and pushed the stool out from underneath the doorman.

  The guy fell and smacked his head on the pavement as Vincent walked around him and headed inside.

  “Motherfucker!” the doorman yelled as he pushed off the pavement and ran for the door.

  Vincent passed a bar lit with red lights on his right and quickly laid eyes on the soccer game on the television on the wall, the screen covered with a thick veneer of smoke from the several dozen patrons that were lighting up inside.

  Vincent walked up to the bartender, a balding guy with a gut and a mustache. “Where’s Viktor?” he said.

  “Who’s asking?” the bartender replied without looking away from the match.

  “Tell him Brody is here,” Vincent said. “And that it’s urgent.”

  The bartender looked at Vincent, a familiar glint in his eye, coupled with a toothy grin. “He’s in back. He said to come see him when you showed up.”

  There was a commotion of footsteps from the right. “Piece of shit!” the doorman screamed as he stormed toward Vincent, who didn’t even flinch when the guy raised his fists. “I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

  “Enough!”

  Everyone froze.

  The doorman stood his ground like his soles had taken root in the floor. He remained frozen in place as booted footsteps closed in on the bar area, and everyone turned their heads and watched on in wide-eyed anticipation.

  Vincent turned his head to the left, focusing on a man six feet tall, with a patterned silk shirt, a gold tooth, and tattoos peeking out of the sleeves of what had to be a two-thousand-dollar leather jacket.

  Viktor.

  “Vik,” Vincent said. “Long time, no see.”

  Viktor looked at the doorman, huffing, and puffing and still eager to tear Vincent to pieces.

  “What the hell is all this all about?” Viktor asked a strand of his soot-black hair slick and dangling in front of his face.

  “The prick knocked me down!” the doorman said, gesturing at Vincent.

  “You damn right.” Vincent glared at the guy with the clenched fists. “Because you wouldn’t let me in, you dumb bastard.”

  The doorman shook his head, giving Viktor a look: Give me the go-ahead.

  “Is this true?” Viktor asked.

  “No one sees you,” the doorman said confidently. “I know the rules.”

  Viktor planted a firm hand on Vincent’s shoulder. “And did this man happen to give you his name?”

  “He did…”

  Viktor shook his head. Then he punched the doorman in the nose.

  The doorman screamed, clutching his hand to his face as he fell on his ass, blood spewing out through his fingers.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Viktor said, pointing a meaty and tattooed finger toward the door. “No one disrespects my friend Brody. Go. Now. I ever see you again, you’re a fucking dead man.” He looked at Vincent with a jovial expression and outstretched arms as the doorman fled the bar. “Get in here, you son of a bitch! I go ten years without seeing that sorry face of yours!”

  Vincent and Viktor embraced, Vincent selling himself completely as he held on to Viktor as tightly as he could, feeling Viktor’s evil emanating in the form of vodka, cigarettes, and hate.

  “Good to see you, Vik,” Vincent said.

  Viktor straightened the lapels on Vincent’s jacket. “Same to you, Mr. Brody. It’s been too long since you’ve graced this bar with your presence.”

  Vincent removed the pack of smokes from his jacket pocket. “Had some time to kill.” He lit the cigarette. “About a nickel and change.”

  “Heard about that. My buddy over in Joliet said you got busted not long after our deal.”

  “You heard right. I got caught with a crate of AK-47s from Ukraine. Turns out the dockworker prick I had on it was a snitch for Chicago PD. Can you fucking believe that shit?”

  Vincent hadn’t cursed this much in a long time. Ethan Brody brought out the worst in him.

  Viktor tsked and grabbed a bottle of vodka from behind the counter. Vincent couldn’t see the label, but he knew that Viktor wasn’t the type to drink piss. “Too bad. You always had good merchandise.�
�� Viktor thrust the bottle of vodka into Vincent’s hands. “Come,” he said. “We go in back. Enjoy that bottle. It’s on the house. Belvedere Vodka. I know it’s not whiskey, and you were a whiskey guy if I remember correctly.” Viktor hooked his arm around Vincent and led him toward the back.

  “And you still drink vodka until you fall over? I can smell it on you, you big Russian ape.”

  Viktor cackled and slapped a hand on his chest. “You are one funny bastard, Brody. A very funny bastard. Come. We talk in the office. Let’s go.”

  They arrived at a door that led into a windowless room. Viktor held the door open for Vincent, and they walked inside, followed closely behind by two Russian guys in tracksuits, complete with gun-shaped bulges in their waistbands, who shut and locked the door behind them.

  “You should have called me while you were away,” Viktor said as he slipped into a battered leather chair behind a cheap wooden desk. “I could have sent a care package.”

  Vincent waved him off and took the chair across from Viktor. “I had plenty of people helping me out. And I didn’t want anyone sniffing out that you and I had arrangements. I protect the people I work with. You know that.”

  Viktor nodded as Vincent popped the cap on the vodka and took a good, long swig that only Ethan Brody would take. “I always appreciated your discretion,” Viktor said, his tone more business-oriented now. “You were a careful man.”

  Vincent took a long pull from his cigarette and blew smoke out of his nostrils. “Not careful enough.”

  “We all do time. It comes with being in this business.”

  Vincent perched forward. “Which is why I’m here to talk to you tonight, Romy.”

  “For business?”

  “Da.”

  Viktor smirked. Then he rapped his knuckles on the desk, milking every second for all that it was worth before he continued speaking. “I always liked you, Brody,” he said. “And I don’t like that I have to do this.”

  Vincent squinted, his heart racing but his composure still holding together as he waited for Viktor to continue.

  Viktor opened the top drawer of the desk, produced a suppressed silver Walther PPK, and cocked back the hammer before laying it down gently; the barrel pointed right at Vincent.