AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Fuck yes!” Kane cheers. As I watch he runs over to the stack of equipment on the table and grabs a hand-held tape recorder. “Turn it on speaker and put the volume up all the way,” he tells me.
I comply.
He turns the recorder on and speaks into it. “This is Detective Kane Rowe. Date: July tenth, two thousand and eight. Time: Eleven fifteen. Recording cellphone attached to Antoinette Rupetta’s…person. Location: The Mousetrap, Los Angeles Street. Subject of interest: Sascha Sokolov.”
We both stare out the window as Antoinette, Primrose, and Lyla approach the bouncer. He must knowToni—or appreciate what he sees—because he steps aside immediately, allowing them to skip the line and waltz inside.
“Just for one night I’d like to be a hot woman,” Kane whispers wistfully. “Think about the undercover cases I could take.”
The door opens behind us, and Mani walks in, carrying aStarbuckstray with three coffees in it. He sets the tray on the table at the same time the girls enter the club and music starts blaring through the speaker of my cellphone, the heavy bass drowning out all conversation.
“What did you do?” he asks, looking at my cell phone.
“Antoinette.”
“Jesus.”
We sit quietly and listen, each of us straining to pick up any words or snippets of conversation. But all we definitively hear is Primrose say, “I’m going to use the restroom.”
The girls move towards the bar, and the music decreases slightly in volume. We hear them order—a Negroni for Antoinette and aHeinekenfor Lyla. Antoinette says, “Nyet just saw us. It shouldn’t be long now.”
All I can think is that she knew his name the entire time and didn’t tell me. When this nightmare is over, Antoinette and I are going to have a long conversation about her and Nico and their involvement with Sascha Sokolov.
We sit for minutes, waiting for something,anything, to happen. But nobody comes for the girls.
“Okay,” I hear Primrose’s voice again, “there are three doors past the restroom. First left, stock room. Gold door, Sokolov’s office. Last right, marked as emergencyexit, goes down a second hallway with another two doors and an actual emergency exit at the end of it.”
We wait, hoping to hear what’s in the other two rooms, but Primrose stops talking suddenly.
Over the phone all we can hear is the loud, pulsing music.
Kane and I glance at each other.
The music starts getting louder, telling us that the girls are walking back, closer to the dance floor.
For a moment the world is drowned out as Avicii pulses through the phone’s small speaker.
A door opens.
The girls must step through and close it behind them, because the sound of the music becomes muffled, the electric pulsing and throbbing dying to a smothered lull.
“I’m here to see Sascha,” Antoinette says clearly.
Kane, Mani, and I are frozen, all three of us barely breathing as we listen.
“Come.”
I recognize the voice, the deep monosyllables, as belonging to the Giant, and my entire body tenses. “This is a terrible idea,” I whisper to Kane and Mani, hoping that they’ll argue.
But they both just nod.
Footsteps, one set heavy and sure, three sets light and spiked, echo. “They must be in the hallway.”
“They’ve passed the stockroom then,” Mani affirms.
Another door opens and closes, but the girls don’t stop walking. “They’re not in Sascha’s office,” I note. They would have stopped. “They have to have turned into the last hallway.”
When the sound of a third door opening and closing creaks over the line, Kane adds, “Sixteen steps. It took the big guy sixteen steps down the hallway.”
