Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) by Chad Huskins Read Free Book Online Page A

lips.  “ Shhhh .  I’m not here for the child, Comrade Ogorodnikov.”  A moment of indulged relief, which helped to calm him, gave him hope.  His fingertips were still on the gun’s grip.  “I don’t care about any o’ the people you’ve hurt, or the children you choose to diddle.  Honestly, that’s none o’ my beeswax.”  He sniffed.  “But I made a promise to Dmitry Ankundinov.  I told him I’d kill his daughters.  Only, they weren’t in Derbent like he said.  They’ve moved somewhere else, with some other family.  I learned this after a very considerable, and, uh… bloody interrogation.”
    “It was you?”  Zakhar still couldn’t believe it.  He had received warnings, from his people in Moscow and his relatives in Chelyabinsk.  They’d told him about a revenge killing, something they believed was associated with “bad blood” between their families and some other foreign families.  It’s not, though .  It’s just him .  “You burned them?”
    The gunman elected not to answer this directly.  “ It seems the Ankundinovs in Derbent heard about Dmitry’s downfall in the States, and they had a hunch to hide much of his close family—mainly from Interpol and other agencies, not from me.  Still, the results are the same.  They’re gone.  All I wanna know is, where did the vory move his family?”
    “You…want to kill his daughters?” he said, astonished.
    “Don’t sound so appalled.  What the fuck do you care?  You’ve got someone’s son or daughter locked up in your goddam basement.  Now, I can kill you where you stand, an’ this’ll be the last time you ever visit this lodge.  Or , you could give me Dmitry’s daughters, an’ you get to stay here with whomever you’ve got locked up down below.”  He shrugged.  “Whattaya say, comrade ?  A child for a child?”
    Was it really that simple?  Just give over Dmitry Ankundinov’s family and that would be the end of it?  Zakhar wasn’t truly conflicted on the decision—after all, he didn’t know Dmitry at all, and had only ever met the Ankundinovs during a few shareholder meetings here and there throughout the years—but would giving the family up really save him now?  “What if I told you that I don’t know where they are—”
    “Then I’d say you’re about as useless as an asshole on my face,” he said matter-of-factly, raising the gun.
    Zakhar held up his left hand, still keeping his right hand close to his Colt, inching more over the grip.  Has he noticed yet? he wondered.  “Wait, hold on!  Please!  Prastite!   I’m…I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, but I don’t know where they are, but I can tell you about the others!”
    “What others?”   There was a trick of the light in that moment.  Something from the fire, deepening shadows that carved hard lines in the gunman’s face.
    “Th-the others…” he said, beginning to stutter.  “ They m-might know where to find the rest of Ankundinov’s family.  They’re the ones…the ones that the vory worked with first, when the vory first came to my family with the business proposition.  That’s how my father always told it—”
    “All right, shut up.  I’m going to ask again, and slowly.  Who—are—the—others?  Names.  I function on names.”
    “ N-ni znaju …that is, I don’t know their names—”
    “Then how does this help me—”
    “—b-because I kn-know their faction!  Eh, how you say, their affiliation?”
    “What, like a club or group name?   A gang?”
    “ Da, da ,” he said hurriedly.  “A gang.”
    “What’s the name ?”
    Zakhar swallowed once more.  “ At-ta Biral.”
    The gunman reached into his left pocket, but never took his gun or his eyes off of Zakhar.  He produced an iPhone, one that looked familiar to Zakhar.  It took a second for him to realize it was his.  “What’s your code for gettin’ into this thing?”
    “Eh…eh…one-four-four-two.”
    The gunman punched it in, then tapped