Page 96 of Filthy Little Fix
"It's him," I say without thinking.
Dmitry frowns. "Who?"
"Sal," I say, pushing the tablet back to him. "It's Sal. All along."
Dmitry takes the tablet, scanning the machine names, and I see the moment he understands. "The initials..."
"All resources," I say. "Redirect everything to dig him up. Send the IT team to comb through everything again—emails, calls, cards, and logins. Check his car records, the history of all his credit cards, and security camera footage from every place he stepped in the last week."
Dmitry doesn't hesitate. He nods, already with his phone to his ear, while making parallel communications on the tablet.
I walk past him. Back to the entrance.
A name. A target.
I open the door.
"Call me when you have an address. I'll go get him myself."
The smellof gunpowder and clean gun oil clears my head. I load my Vektor. The metal is familiar, fitting in my hand like an ancient weight.
My target has a face. A face I see with every shot that echoes through the concrete firing range.
Where is he?
My cell phone vibrates on the bench beside me. Dmitry's name glows on the screen.Finally.
I answer on the first ring. "Speak."
"We found him. Sal," Dmitry says hurriedly. "He made a mistake. Used a burner phone to call his wife's number and kept the call too long. Our team triangulated it. A roadside motel in Jersey. Route 46."
He sends me the exact address. I hang up without another word.
Twenty minutes later, the Escalade slides off the main road. The roadside motel is about an hour outside the city, with a dimly lit, dilapidated parking lot. The neon sign flickers, dying and coming back to life.
Luca, who has been silent beside me the whole time, already knows what to do. He gets out of the car before me. I watch him walk to the small reception window, where a bored night clerk watches TV. The conversation is short. I don't see money changing hands. Just the sheer bulk of Luca's body and the look on his face. The clerk hands over a master key without asking questions.
"Room 2B" is all Luca says once he's back.
Room 2B is at the end of an open-air corridor that smells of mold and cheap disinfectant. We don't knock. Knocking gives time to think. To react.
Luca inserts the master key.
I push the door open and step inside.
The room is a coffin. Unmade bed, a half-eaten pizza in a box on the floor, the dusty smell of tobacco. And there he is. Sal. Thin, pale, with wrinkled clothes and messy hair.
He turns. He sees me standing in the doorway, with Luca behind me, and freezes. The blood drains from his already pale face. The cell phone he was holding shatters on the linoleum floor.
He opens his mouth, perhaps to scream, perhaps to beg. No sound comes out. He knows why I'm here. He knows what I've done to men for far less.
I step into the room. Luca closes the door behind me. The click of the lock is Sal's death sentence.
He scrambles backward, tripping over an empty pizza box. Panic disfigures his face. He starts to explain before I say anything.
"Mr. Volkov, please! They forced me!" he exclaims. "They were going to kill me, they showed me pictures of what they do... I had no choice!"
Pictures. His excuse is so weak it's an insult. I might have thought a little before disfiguring this bastard's face if the Malakovs had his family, but they didn't even need to. His cowardice was enough. He sold himself out to save his pathetic hide.
