Read Online Stolen Souls by Stuart Neville - Free Book Online Page B

opened the contacts list. Her number was stored under Laima. He would never call her that to her face, of course, but it felt foolish to have “Mother” in one’s collection of phone numbers.
    Before he hit the dial button, he mopped up white powder from the glass desktop with his fingertip. He worked it across his gums, relishing the cool numbing sensation that followed.
    Now, dial.
    Strazdas listened to the tones as the mobile connected to the apartment in Brussels. His mind’s eye pictured the large, open living area, and the telephone on the elegant side table next to the plush couch he had bought for her. He saw her switch on lights in the darkened apartment, walk to the phone, reach for the handset, her eyes blurred by sleep and tears.
    “Hello?” she said.
    “It’s me.”
    Silence for a moment, then, “Tell me.”
    “Tomas is dead,” he said.
    A distorted clatter as the phone fell to the apartment floor. A strangled cry, like an animal caught in a trap. He listened for a minute or more, choked sobs and keening wails, until it stopped like a needle lifted from the groove of an old vinyl record. She lifted the phone again.
    “How?”
    Strazdas told her all of it. About the whore, how Tomas wanted to break her in, how she cut his throat with a shard of glass, how Darius and that idiot he ran with tried to dump the body in the water, and how the whore got away from them.
    When he was done, he listened to her steady breathing. Eventually, she said, “Kill her.”
    “I will,” Strazdas said.
    “Make sure the bitch suffers for what she did to my boy,” she said.
    He was a child again, shamed because he’d wet his bed, red imprints of her hard hand against the skin of his legs. “I will,” he said.
    “And anyone else who was responsible, anyone who gets in your way. Do you understand me?”
    Or a young teenager, caught with his fingers in his trousers, her mouth slashed wide in disgust. “Yes,” he said.
    “Kill them all.”
    His bladder ached. “Yes.”
    A hard click, and she was gone.
    He ran to the bathroom.

15
    A WHITE T OYOTA VAN approached, its headlights flooding the shadows beneath the bridge. Galya flattened her shivering body against the pillar, concrete icy cold on her cheek.
    The van slowed, the driver’s window lowered, showing the occupant’s moon face.
    Galya stepped away from the pillar, letting the light find her. The driver smiled. He reached for the passenger door, opened it, turned back to her.
    “Come on,” he said.
    * * *
    H E HAD COME to her in the afternoon. She had given him a glance as he entered the room, ushered in by Rasa, and turned her gaze downward.
    Rasa spoke to him in English, saying, “Enjoy her. She is new. Never been touched.”
    She closed the door, leaving him alone with Galya.
    He lingered at the other end of the bedroom, his eyes like points of black oil on his round face, his coarse dark hair swept back from his forehead, a thick beard surrounding the red slit of his mouth. A pink scar carved a line from the center of his forehead to the outer edge of his right eyebrow. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, maybe forty. Galya examined him in the corner of her vision.
    “Hello,” he said.
    Galya tried to reply, but only managed a thick murmur in her throat.
    “Can I sit down?” he asked.
    Galya moved closer to the bed’s headboard. She felt his weight on the mattress. It rocked her like a boat on a sickly wave. She did not look at him, but she sensed his attention on her bare skin. Without thinking, she placed one forearm across her breasts, the other down between her thighs so her hand cupped her knee.
    “My name’s Billy,” he said.
    Galya did not respond.
    “Am I really the first client?” he asked.
    Galya swallowed, her lips tight together.
    “So no one’s touched you yet?”
    Galya studied the patterns on the faded wallpaper.
    “Good,” he said. “Then it’s not too late.”
    He kneeled on the floor, facing her, like a suitor asking for her