Frostitute: A Twisted Tale of Extreme Horror Page 3

  "You should have killed him, that piece of shit!" She was becoming righteously angry now, her bruised face flushing hotly at the thought of how the john had abused her.

  "Calm yourself, Anya. Yes, he deserved it. But it would have been bad for business, and business is king."

  "Fuck business!"

  "Why yes, I suppose that it is." Piotr laughed. "I am sorry. It is just my little joke."

  "Well, I am not fucking amused! Look at me!" Royally pissed, Anya hadn't yet cottoned on to the fact that Piotr had stopped laughing. She knew that he didn't take being yelled at very well, but she had just been beaten and humiliated, for fuck's sake, and all she could think of was that the filthy priest should have been made to pay. "He beat me, Piotr. Treated me like a piece of meat."

  "You're a whore. They all treat you like a piece of meat."

  "This is different." The veins were standing out in Anya's neck. An artery pulsed and throbbed at her temple. She could feel her heart pounding like a jackhammer inside her chest, feeding the rage and hatred, nurturing it. "It is one thing for them to fuck me. That is what they pay me for, yes. But to choke me? To punch and kick me? Not fucking acceptable, Piotr!"

  "What would you have me do?" Piotr spread his hands and shrugged.

  "If you were a real man, you would go after him, and blow his fucking head off!"

  A good five seconds passed before Anya realized just what it was that she had said. Piotr had gone totally quiet, the expression frozen on his face totally unreadable. His eyes bored into her, unblinking.

  "Piotr, I..." She began to apologize, but it was too late. He grabbed her by the hair and punched her hard in the face. Anya felt more teeth break loose as her mouth filled with blood once more. Agony coursed through her squashed and broken nose. The pimp hit her again, this time slapping with an open hand. He let go of her hair, letting her fall backward onto the bed. She winced and clutched at her right side, convinced that some of the lower ribs had been broken during the fight with her abuser.

  But of far more immediate concern was her pimp. Piotr had that faraway look in his eyes...the one that he got when things were about to turn violent. Anya opened her mouth to speak again, to tell the vicious little snake that she was sorry, that she had meant no disrespect, even though she felt nothing but disrespect and contempt toward him.

  She never got the chance. Piotr smacked her in the face again, bringing tears to her already swollen eyes and blurring her vision. Then she couldn't see anything at all, could barely breathe as something dark and soft was pressed over her nose and held there. Anya started to struggle harder, knew just what it was: One of the ratty pillows. He was suffocating her, just as the priest had tried to do. The difference was that she was too weak to fight him off.

  Anya swatted at him, completely blind and barely able to breathe. Her fingernails brushed against the leather sleeve of his jacket. In response, the pressure intensified. The lights were going out now, and in a brief moment of clarity brought about by total desperation, Anya knew that she had the time and energy left for just one last effort.

  Tensing the muscles of her legs, she rammed her right knee up and outward like a piston. She made contact with something soft and vulnerable, heard a sharp intake of breath from the pimp and felt a welcome slackening of the pillow over her face.

  "Fucking bitch!" roared Piotr.

  Now, Anya thought to herself in desperation, now's your chance! Get up and run! GO!

  But it was too late. Her body was too badly beaten for her to move even remotely fast enough. The pillow was suddenly back over her face again, but she felt something hard in the center, something that hadn't been there before.

  Her world exploded for just a fraction of a second, before the lights went out for good.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He hadn't meant to kill her...at least, that's what Piotr kept telling himself as he looked down at the aftermath of the mess he'd just made.

  At first, all he had intended to do was to teach the dumb slut a lesson. Remind her of exactly who was the boss here. A minute without being able to breathe would have done the trick very nicely. He hadn't wanted to rough up the merchandise any more than that fucking john had already done, and suffocation wasn't going to leave any more marks on Anya's body.

  But then the whore had lashed out at him, kicked him in the balls. Piotr winced, absent-mindedly reaching down and cupping them with one hand. They ached in that special way that only a man would ever know, throbbing so hard that it sent waves of nausea rippling through him with every breath that he took. That had been where she'd crossed the line.

  He had reacted without even thinking about it, purely upon instinct. The .45 Smith & Wesson had been in his hand almost instantly, the cold iron of the barrel jammed squarely into the middle of the pillow. Try as she might, the hooker wasn't going to squirm her way out of this one.

  Kick ME in the God-damned balls, will you?

  It had felt good to pull the trigger, but it had been a completely involuntary act. Even with the pillow acting as a form of suppressor and muffling the sound, the gunshot had been startlingly loud inside the small room, the aftershocks reverberating from the walls and window. The sheer force of the pressure wave had startled him, making him drop the pistol in surprise. It had landed on Anya's puke-encrusted tits, and now it just lay there, silently taunting him.

  Piotr blinked the sweat from his eyes. The pillow had soaked up a lot of the blood, but he could see that a crimson pool was starting to spread out across the filthy mattress beneath Anya's head. Carefully, overtaken by a morbid and ghoulish fascination, he took hold of the pillow's edge and began to peel it slowly back and away from the dead woman's face.

  She wore a look of abject surprise, her mouth open and the dead eyes staring back at him in silent accusation.

  You killed me, you fucker, she seemed to say.

  "Yes, bitch, I did," Piotr answered out loud. Christ, but the needed a cigarette. Or some dope. Something to calm his fucking nerves. He'd killed before — after all, you didn't get to be a successful human trafficker without making enemies, and they were the sort of enemies that liked to settle scores with guns rather than just fists. But this one was different, somehow. Up close and a lot more personal.

  A neat entry hole had been drilled into Anya's forehead, almost exactly between the center of her eyes. There were no powder burns on her flesh, thanks to the pillow, but white cottony stuffing was floating all around him in a cloud. The pillow had done its job, and then some. A small through-and-through tear, star-shaped and ragged, now occupied the middle of it, and both sides were completely soaked through with blood. He let it drop to the floor without a second thought.

  "Shit." Piotr let out a long breath.

  What the fuck did you want to do THAT for?

  Now that his heart rate was starting to come down a little, the pimp began to think rationally once more. He'd let his anger take over...always one of his failings, he had to admit. Killing the john would have kept Anya happy, but the big difference was that he would probably have somebody waiting at home to miss him. Family. Co-workers. Some dumb unsuspecting wife, fooled into thinking that he was out drinking with the boys instead of trawling for whores on Colfax. If he were to disappear, questions were going to be asked. It was inevitable. Whereas Anya...

  There was nobody to miss Anya. Except for the other hookers, of course, but they weren't going to say shit. The girls Piotr ran would all fall into line with minimal effort on his part, if they knew what was good for them...which they usually did. Apart from that kid back home in Khabarovsk. He sneered.

  Children. About as useful as a tumor, the lot of them.

  Piotr stood over the corpse in silence for a moment, figuring out his next move. The sounds of party music were coming through the wall to his left, supplemented by the occasional loud drunken whoop. Sounded like whoever was in there was having a fine old time of it, which meant that they probably hadn't heard
the single muffled gunshot. As for the room on the right...he listened intently but couldn't hear shit from that side. Which meant that either the room was unoccupied, or whoever had been in there was keeping quiet and waiting for events to take their course.

  He finally shrugged. Fuck it. If the cops were coming, then they were coming. There was nothing he could do about it now, short of fleeing himself. But if he did that, without taking the corpse along with him, then they'd almost certainly be able to trace the dead girl back to him. No, Anya had to disappear. For good. That would take a little work on his part. Call it his stupidity tax, filed under 'costs of being angry.'

  Smiling at his little self-deprecating joke, Piotr took out his phone and dialed the contact named 'Marko.'

  "Yes?" Marko's accent was thicker than his own, reflecting the fact that he'd been Stateside for less than a year. As his business had expanded (and right now, the human trafficking business was fucking booming) Piotr’s boss had needed to bring in more muscle. He and Marko had grown up together on the streets of St. Petersburg. When Piotr had found himself looking for another enforcer, Marko's had been the first name that sprang to mind. His boss had taken little convincing, once Piotr had shown him a recent picture of Marko. The man was built like a fucking tank, thanks to a steroid habit and obsession with hitting the weights that had taken his frame to somewhere around three hundred pounds of raw muscle.

  "I need your help with a...disposal."

  "Where?"

  "Room 14. The Lucky Star."

  "How soon?" From the crunching sounds, Marko was eating potato chips.

  "Now. Bring the truck. Also the tools, a tarp, and gloves for us both. Just like before."

  "Da."

  The line went dead. Piotr returned his attention to the corpse. The fat red bloodstain had finally stopped spreading across the dirty white linen sheet. It had formed a shape that looked a lot like that of a pumpkin.

  Happy Halloween, my poor little Anya. If only you had not been so stupid...

  Lighting a cigarette, he stood over the dead girl's body and smoked it in quiet contemplation. Piotr felt no remorse, or anything even close to it. You didn't feel guilty if you dropped a steak on the floor and had to throw it in the trash instead of eating it; you'd feel mad at yourself for your own stupidity, sure, but the steak was just a hunk of useless meat at that point.

  Just like Anya.

  Which was just too damned bad, because the girl had curves on her, he'd give her that. Even bruised and covered in blood, the pimp could see why the johns had been willing to pay top dollar for a piece of ass like that.

  When the cigarette was done, Piotr went into the grimy bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, using the edge of his sleeve to avoid leaving any fingerprints. Then he smoked a second one, killing time as he scrolled through the football results on ESPN's website. Since coming to America he had taken to football like a fish to water, becoming a rabid Denver Broncos fan, so much so that underneath his leather jacket he wore a bright orange team shirt.

  His phone pinged with a text, one single word: HERE. Sending the second dead cigarette the way of the first, he went out of the bathroom to let Marko in. The big man had to both duck and angle himself sideways in order to get his bulky 6'6" frame through the narrow doorway.

  Tucked beneath one arm was a rolled-up blue tarpaulin.

  "And the tools?" Piotr asked.

  "In the truck," Marko rumbled, setting the tarp down at the side of the bed and unrolling it to the far wall. To his credit, the big man didn't bother asking what had happened, but somehow, Piotr felt the need to offer up an explanation anyway.

  "She...disrespected me." It sounded weak, even to his own ears. Marko simply nodded.

  "Da."

  This wasn't their first rodeo. Both men knew that the body would have to be disposed of. Before that, however, it would have to be rendered unidentifiable, which would require a little work on their part...but not here. Taking position at both the head and the foot of the bed, each Russian grabbed a fistful of linen and took up the dead weight slowly, making something similar to a hammock out of the blood-soaked bedsheets and comforter.

  "One...two...three!" They swung Anya's limp body sideways, lowering it onto the tarp carefully so as to avoid creating a loud thump when it hit the floor. One of the dead woman's arms flopped over the side of the blanket burrito that the two men had made, splattering tiny drops of blood on the blue plastic surface.

  Piotr paused for a moment, listening. The constant pounding bass music was still coming through the wall next door. The party was still going on. Satisfied, the pimp and his enforcer slowly bundled the corpse up in the tarp, rolling her up as tightly as the confined space of the motel room would allow. Marko had the foresight to throw Anya's clothes, purse, and the ruined pillow on top of Anya's bare chest beforehand. Once that was taken care of, each man took one end of the roll and stood up, hefting it to waist height. Piotr grunted, but Marko hardly seemed to exert himself at all.

  They took one last look around the room. Blood had soaked its way into the mattress where Anya's head had lain. With that one glaring exception, there was nothing else to suggest that murder had taken place in the room.

  "Good enough," Piotr muttered, giving Marko the nod. The big man opened the door and ducked his head outside, glancing left and right. Satisfied that nobody was coming, Marko shuffled out into the parking lot.

  It was still snowing, Piotr saw, though not as hard as it had been at sunset. Their boots crunched on the sidewalk, forcing them both to take it slow, lest they overbalance and dump a dead hooker on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. Apart from one lonely streetlight and the neon vacancy sign, the lot was dark. The two Russians stuck to the deepest pools of shadow, threading their way from one black spot to the next until they finally reached Marko's beige Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was an '03 model, and the former owner had customized it to the point of near-uselessness, putting in a leather cab and a hundred other trick-outs. Apart from the frankly awesome six-CD changer and the sound system, the only one that Marko gave a shit about right now was the camper top that was keeping the snow off the flatbed.

  "Put it down," Marko said. They laid the body down in the soft snow while the big man popped open the camper top and brought down the flatbed door. Apart from a spare tyre and some hand tools, the back of the truck was empty. On another three-count, they heaved the tarp inside head first, pushing until the corpse's feet were all the way inside. Slamming the door and camper top closed, Marko went around to the driver's side to fire up the truck.

  "Give me a minute," Piotr said. He was about to take a risk, he knew, but a justifiable one. If the cops were eventually coming, then he wanted to leave as few traces of their presence as was humanly possible. Backtracking to the motel room door, the pimp made his way back to the pickup truck once more, dragging and kicking with his feet as he went. By the time he climbed up into the passenger side of the cab, every single bootprint the two men had left had been obliterated. The falling snow would cover up what was left soon enough.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The pickup might have been a four-wheel drive model, but as Marko was fond of telling anybody who would listen, there was no such thing as a four wheel stop. Impatient, Piotr just rolled his eyes.

  He must have been watching those car shows on TV again...

  Nevertheless, he realized that he had vented more than enough anger for one night, so he didn't complain when Marko kept his speed down to just twenty. The snow plows had already been out, gritting the roads and getting rid of the worst build ups, but the driving conditions on Colfax were still treacherous.

  The dashboard clock gave the time as 1:23a.m., but there were still one or two girls working the streets. Piotr recognized a couple of his own, Katya and Svetlana, huddled together at one of the street corners as he passed by. The pimp smiled.

  Another good thing about the Russian girls...they do not feel the cold
like the American ones do.

  Even at this unholy hour of the morning there was still traffic on the roads, but it thinned out considerably when they hit the western edge of the city. When the traffic had lightened up, Marko felt confident enough to bring the speed up to thirty. He picked up the highway heading north, and the two men watched the snowfall in companionable silence for a good half hour or so as they made their way up into the foothills.

  "I'm assuming the usual place," Marko said conversationally.

  Looking up from the glowing screen of his cell phone, Piotr nodded and confirmed, "The usual place, da. It is unlikely that we will be disturbed on a night like this."

  The usual place was an isolated track not too far from Boulder Canyon. It took them the best part of another hour to get there, thanks to the shitty weather. Piotr considered the time invested to be well worth the cost. Even the Boulder County Sheriff patrol officers wouldn't be cruising the canyons on a night like this. They would stick to the major highways such as 119 and 36, he knew, keeping an eye out for drunk drivers.

  Marko pulled off onto the rutted side track that they had used three times before for this very same purpose. Shifting into four-speed low, he was able to get the truck a good hundred feed along the track before he put it into park. He didn't want to risk going any further along for fear of getting stuck in a snow drift; when he opened the door to get out, Marko saw that the wheels were already buried halfway in the stuff.

  As if reading his mind, Piotr said, "Is good. We are far enough from the road to not be seen, nyet?"

  Marko nodded. He rubbed his fingers together, blowing on them to stave off the cold. Then he remembered the gloves, two sets of extra large workmen's gloves that he had bought at Home Depot a while back. The XLs barely fit his massive hands, and they practically buried Piotr's, but they were better than nothing, and each man was grateful to have warm fingers on such a bitterly cold night.