The Paper Factory (Michael Berg Book 1) (20 page)

Chapter 65

  The scent of pine surrounded her, momentarily transporting her back to another time. She hadn’t been here since she was a young girl, but flashbacks of her childhood stole back into her consciousness from deep, forgotten places within. The entrance to the lumberyard had been left to rot. The giant steel gates that used to tower over her as a child had disappeared, probably pilfered for scrap many years before. The dusty track that wove its way through the Scots Pines was covered with tufts of weed and grass. She doubted if anyone had been along this track since the yard had closed, with the possible exception of the occasional hunter. It suited her purpose perfectly.

 
Five minutes after passing through the heavy wooden posts from where the gates had once hung, she could make out the first of the outbuildings, through the edge of the dense forest. As the car rounded the corner, she could see the timber yard ahead of her. The roof, twenty meters from the ground, had half collapsed in on itself, rotten wooden beams haphazardly splayed across the yard floor.

 
The place must have closed down at least three years before, maybe more. Her father brought her here in the summer, with Natasha, when the schools closed. They would run around the forest, build dens with off-cuts of wood lying discarded in the wastage pile and generally amuse themselves in the warm summer sun while their father worked the machines with the other men.

  Serge
y Sergeyevich Barshai had been one of the best in the business. Until a bad fall, the result of a faulty harness, had crippled one of his legs. Given her father’s excellent coordination and skill with a chainsaw, the mill foreman had put him on the band saw. But the injury and the fact that he couldn’t do what he loved anymore induced depression. He turned to alcohol and beating his wife to placate his frustrations with life. One early afternoon, he had been sleeping off his usual lunchtime half liter of cheap vodka when twenty tons of log fell from a loading bay. He was crushed to death. Not before exhaling most of his gut.

  A tear dropped
from the tip of her nose. She rubbed her eyes with her sleeve and wondered whether the reminiscence had been deliberate, helping to emotionally prepare her for the task ahead. She decided that she didn’t care either way. The only thing that mattered to her now was finding her sister’s killer. She needed to find out what had happened. The worst part was not knowing, grisly scenarios churning incessantly though her mind.

 
Tatianna drove to the back of the main building where off-cuts were shoveled from the warehouse into two large bins. They were then tipped onto a gently sloping conveyor belt that fed an industrial wood chipping machine. The pieces were chewed into nothing significantly bigger than sawdust at approximately twelve hundred revs per minute. The one-time familiar tang of fresh pine resin that would have once assailed her within a ten-meter radius of the machine, long gone.

 
It had been tough dragging him from the car with one hand, the other holding the gun. She’d had to drag him across the dirt, hauling on the chain that joined his wrists.

  Dmitri
realized that she wanted him on the conveyor belt. Its end ran to the maw of a rust brown, steel drum lined with inch long, serrated metal teeth. He fell over in his rush to try and get away. On the ground, on his back, hands painfully cuffed behind him, brown packing tape covering his mouth, his manic cursing came out as the babblings of a lunatic.

 
The gun pointed straight between his eyes.

  “
Get up. Now. I’ll shoot.” Tatianna shifted her aim to his left eye.

  He moved only as she
pulled the trigger. Luckily for him, by that time she’d swung the barrel two centimeters to the left. It wasn’t enough to save his left ear though. The ear was obliterated in a splash of red and a shower of sand as the 9mm magnum powered into the ground. His grunts turned to squeals of pain accompanied by a look of unbridled fear. Finally it had dawned on Dmitri that this day might indeed be his last.

 
He lurched unsteadily to the conveyor, sat on the edge, lay back and swiveled his legs onto its steel surface.

  “
Did you kill my sister?” she said evenly.

 
She waited. He remained silent.

 
Tatianna, the gun trained on Dmitri’s torso, edged backwards to a coiled length of baled wire sitting on top of the loading bay. The wire was about five meters in length, rusted. She moved parallel to Dmitri, took one end of the wire and fed it across the outer rail of the conveyor belt and down through one of the gaps between the slats adjacent to Dmitri’s head. She led the wire back on itself and then, before he knew what was happening, flung the remainder of the coil across Dmitri’s steroid enhanced neck, reached underneath and pulled what remained through on her side. He winced in pain as the joints in his upper arm were stretched to dislocation point in their sockets.

  “
What do you think you’re doing? If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make sure you pay for this. And I’ll make sure I take my time. Bitch.”

 
She had enough free wire to take one more turn across Dmitri and then under the conveyor. When it was through, she pulled tight, not tight enough to choke him. She twisted the end of the wire through on itself, then over the rail and through the slats for good measure.

 
Tatianna went to the trunk of the car, removed a five-gallon jerry can of diesel and carried it across to the machine. The refueling cap was caked with dust and hard to remove. She reached down and picked up a rock, flat, the size of her palm. She pressed it firmly against the nozzle cover, levering it upwards until it sprang off.

 
She emptied the diesel into the tank, replaced the cover and searched for the long black cable that ran from the engine and fed into a grey rectangular box, two buttons protruding from its upper side. Having located the cable, Tatianna reached out for the starter button to the left of the revolving drum. The engine spluttered into action on the fifth attempt. She made her way along the side of the conveyor belt, stopping parallel to Dmitri. His head lay at a point below her shoulders.

 
When she looked into his eyes, even when she thought about what he had probably done to her beautiful sister, Tatianna did not feel red hot with anger. Her fury and hatred, although emotions that she was ashamed to say she was not always a stranger to, had escalated to another level. Her loathing of this man was controlled, deliberate. Her feelings towards him cold to the degree that she felt numb, strangely distant from him, although only inches apart.

  “
Look at me.” His head swiveled until his reddened, swollen eyes met hers. Tatianna took a knife from her pocket, cupped the hilt in her fist and drew the blade across his mouth, separating the tape enough for the man to breath relatively freely and speak, albeit awkwardly.

  “This is
the last time. Did you kill Natasha?”

 
Dmitri didn’t answer. Tatianna reached for the grey box which lay at her feet and firmly pressed her thumb down on the green button. The idling engine of the wood-chipper kicked into life. Simultaneously, the steel drum whirled round with startling speed as the conveyor lurched into action. His face went sheet white.

  “
Stop. Stop. Stop. I’ll tell you. I’LL TELL YOU.”

 
Tatianna waited until Dmitri’s feet were about a meter and a half from the spinning teeth before she hit red.

  “
The banker. The fat pervert. August Goodfriend. He gave her bad drugs. He hurt her and gave her drugs to kill the pain. He enjoyed it, part of his game. He gave her too many and she overdosed. It was over in seconds. We couldn’t help her.”

She put the gun to his left temple.
  “You think I’m some kind of cretin, Dmitri? I’m a police sergeant. I know how you people operate. You wouldn’t let a trick give an aspirin to one of your girls without your knowing about it. Besides, why put up with this shit for a lousy banker? You’re not telling me something.” She hit it again. In under three seconds, Dmitri was half a meter away from spending the rest of his life in prosthetics.
  “Don’t. Don’t. STOP.”

  “
Dmitri, I’m a policewoman. I don’t kill people unless I have no choice. I only want to find out what happened and why. If it was you, I need you to tell me. You’ll go to jail. Better than ending up as a slushy pile of bird food, no?”

 
Dmitri opened his mouth to speak then chose to nod his head.

  “
Speak. I need to hear you say it.”

  “
I gave the drugs to the banker. Horse tranquilizer. Enough to knock out a stable.”

  “
Why?”’

 
He held up his right arm, opened his hand and showed her the gap where his finger should have been.

  “
Who?” she said.

  “
They’ll kill me.”

 
Tatianna lifted the box and lowered her thumb.
  “Okay, okay, they were blackmailing the banker. Videos, photographs, usual stuff. But they needed something special, something big. It’s on tape.”

  “
Who?” she shouted. “This is the last time I ask.” Part of Tatianna wanted him to say no. Part of her wanted to hear him scream as his body was ripped into a million bloody pieces.

  “
I only know the messenger. His name is Konstantin Rykov. Not Moscow. St. Petersburg, somewhere near Ladoga. I don’t know where exactly. He works for someone powerful, who has a lot of money. Rykov’s ex-Spetznaz, not just a killer, a psychopath.” Dmitri gestured with his eyes towards his incomplete hand.

  “
Where’s her body?”

 
Dmitri said nothing. His blue, puffy eyes stared straight into hers and Tatianna knew immediately that her sister’s body would never be found in one piece.

 
But she had a name now. She knew where to look for him, the man who had ordered Natasha to be killed. She would need to take the bastard beside her into the station to be questioned and charged. There was no way he’d confess. His friends would ensure his freedom with a few favors here, a few rubles there. It could be done in forty-eight hours.

 
She switched the box to her left hand and drew the gun. If she didn’t stop this here she’d be consigning dozens of other young girls, some who’d probably not even been born yet, to lives of drugged-up misery and, in some cases, death. She took the barrel of the gun and placed it against Dmitri’s temple.

  “
You fucking bitch. I hope you and your whore of a sister rot in hell.”

  He closed his eyes. H
is jaw tensed up, lips pressed together in expectation and fear. Tatianna pulled on the trigger. The barrel shook. She released. She couldn’t do it. Not even to an animal like this. He knew it too. The gun dropped to her side. She placed the box on the ground. Killing him would solve nothing. Another would take his place. She would be scarred forever, become an animal like him. Tatianna trudged towards the car. Defeated. She would drive back into the city and arrange for someone to pick him up. She needed a drink and a long hot shower.

  “
She squealed like a pig.”

 
Tatianna stood stock still, barely taking in what she’d just heard.

  “
She died like a whore. Spineless. No guts, your sister.” Dmitri’s voice was hoarse, but this just added to the menace and hatred with which he said his words.

  “
We took her out to the lake, your sister the whore, and carved her up. By the time we’d finished with her, there was barely a piece bigger than a ten ruble note. Probably about the most useful thing she ever did. Feed the fish.”

  She reached him as the venom ceased to pour from his lips. T
ears streamed from her eyes.
  “You don’t have the balls to kill me, you bitch. Look at you, sniveling there like some pathetic child. I’m going to come after you, and when I do, you’ll think your slag sister was the lucky one.”

  The tears that flowed freely from her eyes were
for her sister, for the way in which she had died. But not only that. She shed tears for herself. For what she was about to become. Tainted forever. For the second time, the blood drained from Dmitri’s face. The box lay in her hand. She raised it, thumb poised in readiness.
  With something to chew on, the drum revolved with less ferocity than before. Not that this would mean much to Dmitri. Even over the noise of the diesel engine and with hands pressed painfully hard against her ears, the visceral scream still reached her. A high-pitched keening sound, an edge of disbelief. The stomach churning, high octave howling would ring in her ears for a great deal longer than the twenty seconds that it took for Dmitri to be fed into the rotating blades of the machine.

 
She got into the car, without looking back. If they found his remains, if they took a DNA sample, almost certainly identifying him as minor league Moscow mafia, her colleagues would merely assume that he had done something to upset his bastard friends.
  Tatianna drove back down the dusty trail and took a left, back onto the main road. The M10 was thirty minutes away, then another nine hours to St. Petersburg. She would make the city before midnight.