The Takers, стр. 38
‘Please. Please stop,’ Leon begged, his eyes full of tears, the skin of his thighs burnt clean off.
Any power the man had once held was gone.
Beaten.
Naked.
Begging for his life.
Sam had come to realise that every criminal, when pushed to their limit, when just dangled over the edge of their pain threshold, always begged. The odd few, like the Mitchell Brothers, he had faced in hand to hand combat six months before, were titans, willing to fight until the last of their life was forced from them.
But the ones sat in the thrones, they were the ones who begged once everything had been stripped away.
Leon was begging now.
Which meant he would talk.
Sam lowered his face so it was a few feet from Leon’s, his unblinking stare causing Leon to blink nervously. More tears slid down his face.
‘Leon, you need to tell me how I can find her, or this is really going to hurt.’
Sam held up the small receptacle that held the acid and motioned to pour it on his chest. Leon instantly squirmed and cried out through his tears.
‘We never meet them. Okay?’ he spoke through sharp, panicked breaths.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some Ukrainian family. Three of them. Two brothers and a mighty fine bitch. They came to me a few years back and since then we been doing jobs for them.’ Leon spoke hurriedly. ‘They want young English girls. Virgins go for more money. We collect and they pay.’
Sam turned away, his mouth curling into a snarl under his mask. His knuckles whitened around the acid container.
‘How do they pay?’
‘We get a bank transfer after every drop. We put the girls in a van that they park on one of three streets every week and on that Friday we get paid.’
‘How much?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re not sorry,’ Sam spat angrily. ‘How much do they pay you? Huh? How much is the life of an innocent girl worth?’
Leon looked away, the shame causing more tears to form. The burning had stopped and his thighs were now numb, the acid having eaten away at the layers of muscle like bacteria.
‘Answer me!’ Sam yelled.
‘Five grand,’ Leon said, shaking his head and choking back more tears. ‘It’s worth five grand.’
‘Which street was the van on?’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t do the drop…’
Leon was cut out as Sam reached back with his gloved hand and pushed two knuckles deep into the exposed muscle of his burnt leg. Leon howled in agony.
‘My boy, Curtis, he said it was by KFC. Down by the stadium.’
Sam made a note, the possible location of that vehicle could lead to an address. It was a door Sam very much wanted to knock on. He stood up once more, allowing Leon a moment to catch his breath. Beneath his boot, the feared and respected leader of the Acid Gang was a quivering, naked wreck who had cracked and begged.
‘Where does the money go?’
‘It goes into an account under the name of a shell company.’ Leon didn’t even try to hold back the information. ‘Burn Group Inc. That’s all I know, man.’
Sam shook his head, the man openly mocking the severity of his crimes with the name of his corporation. But he had an account and a possible vehicle location. He believed Leon knew little else and finally stepped back, relinquishing the gangster from under his boot. Still strapped to the chair, Leon looked on helplessly.
‘I helped you, right?’ Leon questioned. ‘We cool, yeah?’
Sam begged himself to walk away, to head out the door and spend every precious moment ripping the under belly of the city apart to find Jasmine and any of the other missing girls.
But this man made maiming people an entry fee to his crew. The willingness to ruin lives, be it through the acid attacks, the abduction of innocent girls to be sold into a life of sex slavery, or just the fear with which he had run his estate.
They were not cool.
He turned, his eyes burning deeper into Leon than the acid he had subjected him to earlier and he stepped forward. Leon squirmed, realising the imminent danger.
‘You have taken so much from so many people. You have snatched them from their lives all to make money. How many girls have you sent into the back streets of Europe? How many people have gone through hours of surgery in the faint hope of restructuring their face after you ordered an acid attack?’
Leon turned away, not wanting to meet the furious glare from Sam.
Not wanting to face the truth.
Eventually, he mustered up the courage to utter two words.
‘I’m sorry.’
Sam closed his eyes, sending a silent apology to Jamie. He thought of all the young girls being pushed into rooms in foreign countries, while hungry men subjected them to a horrifying awakening.
How they had no way out.
All thanks to the man lying before him.
He took one more breath before reply.
‘Me too.’
Sam overturned the cup of acid, dropping it all over Leon’s right arm. The instant sizzling of his skin caused him to scream, the pain shooting through his body and overwhelming his brain. As Leon passed out through shock, Sam watched, his fists clenched, knowing that extreme crimes call for extreme measures.
Within two minutes, the room was cleared and empty, with nothing but bloodstains and acid burns adorning the tiles like a sickening rug.
Time was running out.
Chapter Sixteen
The following morning was one of the worst days of Mark Harris’s career.
Since he burst onto the political scene as a twenty-three old prodigy in Croydon, he had been presented by the press as a new hope. The chiselled features, the well-groomed hair, the muscular physique. It all blended with his ‘voice of the people’ shtick that had been rehearsed and fine tuned into a tremendous symphony. In front of the cameras he was a natural, always ready with a tasty sound bite or a charming quip.
The smile was a mixture of