Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller)

BLANK SLATE

A Novel By

Zack Hamric

Copyright Zack Hamric 2010

I understood this place-this abyss, this overwhelming blackness that seemed somehow familiar, almost comforting. Like the time I was just a kid wading in a bayou in Louisiana and stepped into a gator hole-that feeling of being dragged down into the warm sucking Delta mud that ended as my father jumped in and dragged me back to the surface.

I knew none of this-this blackness was complete and formless with no shape or hard edges to grab hold of. Coming back is the hard part; random flashes as brain synapses begin to fire. The smell permeated my brain first; a raw mix of long dead fish, stale beer, and other unspeakable ingredients mixed into a putrid miasma of decay.

Confusion, too many unanswered questions that I couldn’t even bring to thought. Then the pain began to penetrate the depths of my unconsciousness like jabbing an ice pick into a block of ice-I welcomed it, embraced it, a sure sign that I wasn’t dead from whatever the hell had just happened.

I started the slow self-inventory of what parts of my body were broken or damaged. The focus helped me fight through the confusion and narrowed the pain to a searing intensity as I slowly began to move one joint at a time. The news wasn’t all bad-the grated meat that resulted from my left cheekbone bouncing off the pavement hurt worse than the pinkie finger pointing in a direction that God had never intended.

I finally worked up the energy to crack open the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Not good-my hair was matted in a puddle of drying blood. A green iguana as long as my arm was slowly licking at the tastier bits of the mixed blood and garbage in the alley. His eyes slowly blinked as his reptile brain tried to determine if I was actually edible or if he had to wait until I stopped moving before dining.

I rolled over to my back and slowly struggled to a sitting position. Another bad idea-the wave of pain rolled over me like a tsunami and it was a question of whether I would pass out or puke from the pain. Within a couple of minutes, the wave of nausea passed and I actually was able to shift my attention to my surroundings.

Not enough information-just another nondescript alley with the usual collection of rusted dumpsters, garbage, and the occasional used condom scattered like wilted dead jellyfish on the beach at high tide. Palm trees overhanging the alley burdened with their dead fronds contributing to the general air of air of decay and neglect.

I was struggling to piece it all together when the cop showed up.

“Hey buddy, you OK?” he asked, while trying to figure out what he was dealing with. He was pretty sure that the blood covering me meant I had been the victim of some crime, but still hedged his bets by keeping one hand firmly clasped on the butt of his Taser.

“Not sure, hurts too damn much for me to be dead,” I said while trying to cradle my head between my knees.

“I’ll get an ambulance on the way,” the cop said as he keyed the radio mike clipped to his lapel. “You just hang in there, they’ll be here in a minute. Got some ID? I’ll call your relatives and have them meet you at the hospital.”

I reached for my wallet and came up with nothing but air. I started to explain that to the cop, but the effort was too much. My last thought as I fell over sideways into unconsciousness was I didn’t have the slightest idea who I was.

Victoria ran for her life. She had no real hope of living, only a deep-seated fear of dying at the hands of men she knew were capable of unlimited depravity. Midnight in Naples-no one out on the streets except predators and their prey. She could hear them coming quickly behind her, three or four men running over the irregular cobblestones.

A louder crash and muffled curses as one of them slipped on the trash piled high in the narrow twisting alleyways. She saw a familiar sight ahead in the darkness-the twenty-foot high ancient wooden doors leading to an old convent. She took a moment, banged on the rough wooden door until the flesh of her hands tore. No answer. If they heard her, they knew better than to become involved in someone else’s troubles.

She cursed herself for her impetuousness-she had reacted instinctively tonight when she saw the opportunity for escape. It had been yet another mind-numbing night sitting in the basement of a ‘piano bar’ in Naples.

The first surprise to anyone coming off the street and walking into the establishment was the lack of anything resembling a piano. The second was the vino rosso served at the exorbitant rate of fifteen Euros per glass. Usually the visitors, almost exclusively male tourists, quickly forgot that detail as they choked back the cheap red wine and ogled the lineup of Ukranian women sitting on the overstuffed leather couches. Before the first glass of wine was gone, the tourist would find himself surrounded by one or more girls who would offer to fulfill his wildest fantasies for his tour of Italy for no more than two hundred Euros for two hours.

It could have been much worse. She knew of some girls from Albania who spent their days locked in one-bedroom apartments servicing dozens of men a day. At least Allessandro, her pimp for the past five months seemed to treat her with some degree of kindness as long as she complied with his sexual demands, flirted with the foreign tourists in the piano bar, and regularly delivered on the six hundred Euros she could make on a good night. He was always there in the background-making sure that the clients paid their money in advance and that the local Polizia Municipale didn’t interfere with business.

It seemed like a lifetime ago, but had actually only been six months since she left her home on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk. She and her older sister had been the prettiest girls in her village. Not that it mattered in that tiny backwater town-every day, she could feel the hope slowly draining out of her. She saw the jobs disappear and the town gradually fall into an economic slump that ended with a grinding poverty crushing the dreams of everyone she knew. Her sister had managed to escape to a better life a few years before, but her leaving only intensified Victoria’s determination to leave and make her own way in the world.

Small wonder that when she saw the glossy ad for a modeling agency audition in the port city of Oblask, she had leaped at it. It was her dream of a lifetime. The man she met at her interview was charming, well dressed in a suit that suggested he was someone of great importance and possessed the whitest teeth she had ever seen as he showed her brochures of all the beautiful places she would travel while she was on contract with his agency. She was a beautiful woman he told her as he gently touched her hand-he could make her famous like so many Russian women before her.

Within days, she was on her way to Italy aboard a small coastal steamer. Her dream turned to a nightmare almost as soon as she arrived in the port of Naples. Her first sight on arriving was the Castel Nuovo, a brooding 13
^th
century fortress overlooking a bay littered with the floating detritus of human life. The man who met her and several other girls at the dock loaded them into a crowded microbus and took them deep into the Qatieri Spagnolia.

Within minutes of arriving at their small apartment in the top floor of a crowded tenement, she discovered the harsh, uncompromising nature of the man she was dealing with-he took the passport from her and the other girls and explained that they would get them back only after having repayed the ten thousand Euros that it cost to bring them to Italy.

Her choice to repay him was simple-work as a hostess for five Euros a day in one of the clubs or go on ‘dates’ with important visitors for fifty Euros a day. That was the first time she tried to run. She had been beaten and locked in a tiny room for a week for her impertinence. Over the next couple of weeks she was moved from one tiny apartment to another with several other girls who had been smuggled into Italy.

When she was finally allowed out of her room, there were several men waiting in the living room to bid on her contract. The high bidder was her current pimp Allessandro. He was a member of the Anatoli clan of the Camorra in Naples. They were but one of several hundred small, fiercely independent groups loosely affiliated with the Camorra Mafia who had ruled Naples with an iron fist for one hundred years.

There had been a rising undercurrent of tension over the past few weeks that she could see in Allessandro. After years of hiding from the Italian authorities, his boss had finally been arrested in the Quatieri Spagnolia a few weeks before.

There was a period of a couple of weeks where it was business as usual, when no one really seemed to know where the new leadership would come from. Since then, there had been new men coming to speak with Allessandro, at first with conciliatory messages, but lately with increasingly threatening tones as they began to consolidate their grip on territories formerly controlled by his boss.

Last Sunday night, Allessandro had left her locked in the windowless room in the back of his apartment. She watched the grainy television stations that were available in Italian and fell asleep after trying in vain to stay awake until he returned. Finally, just after three in the morning, she heard the sound of the lock being opened in the front room. A moment later her door opened to reveal Allessandro standing in the doorway sweating profusely and wearing a heavily stained shirt. He stared at her for a moment and without a word stripped off his shirt and threw it to her to wash. Victoria tried not to cringe as she wrung out the shirt in the sink and observed the blood coursing in a dark whirlpool down the drain. Allessandro silently watched her work as he sat on the couch and cleaned the dried blood from his knife.

Tonight had started out normally enough; just another typical night at the club. The girls were bored, no real prospects so far-just a couple of drunk tourists who wandered in from the street looking for a place to dance. A couple of stragglers after they left; the worst kind-men in Italy for business for a few days trying to live out their fantasies as they escaped their boring lives back home. They talked a good game-until it came time to hand over the two hundred Euros.

Just before midnight, five men stepped through the front door. The two larger ones closed the door and locked it from the inside. The instant Allessandro saw them walk in, she could see the blood drain from his face. Without a word, he bolted frantically for the back door. He made it almost halfway, scattering tables and chairs in his panicked flight, before one the men intercepted him, casually smashing him in the side of the head with a club as if he were swatting a fly. As he collapsed, she screamed and ran for the door. The others made a headlong rush for her, but Allessandro’s body lying in the narrow walkway slowed them enough for her to make good her escape for the moment.

She was slowing now, exhausted, unable to keep up the pace that had allowed her to elude her pursuers until now. A quick turn into a narrow alley off the main road, hoping that in the near total darkness they would miss seeing the move. Another hundred yards through the alley and nothing in front of her but a craggy brick wall built centuries before to keep brigands at bay during the long nights; it was too high for her to scale.

She turned and…with no need for them to hurry now, saw the gleaming teeth of the men reflected in the moonlight as they closed in on her. She was roughly thrown in the back of a car and minutes later hustled through a doorway near the medieval convent that she had begged for help at earlier. The doorway opened to an ancient carpentry shop smelling of sawdust and old varnish with dozens of ornate wooden doors in various states of repair or construction stacked against the plaster walls.

Her attention was drawn to an enormous vertical bandsaw dominating the space in the rear of the shop. It had been used for almost a century to cut heavy oak timbers used in the restoration of historic buildings in the area. There was a cluster of men-four of them busy tying a fifth man spread-eagle to the oversize moveable table used to slide the massive timbers through the saw. Two more men were observing and joking in a language she recognized as Russian while their hapless victim squirmed helplessly against his rope restraints.

The man on the table turned his head toward her and through the blood almost obscuring his features, she recognized Allessandro. She could see the abject fear in his eyes change to raw animal terror when the lights of the shop dimmed as the power was turned on to the big saw. The blade slowly began to whine in a sound that rose to a deafening pitch and the wicked raked teeth blurred to invisibility as it rotated to full speed. Victoria closed her eyes as she realized the teeth of the saw would taste the flesh of two victims tonight.

She was bruised-a little. That was the way he liked it. A guy had to blow off a little steam sometimes. His job was stressful, his employer notoriously unforgiving of mistakes, so when he had the chance to get out of town for a few days he jumped at it.

Key West was a place that might as well have been a million miles away from the insanity of Miami. A little more laid back. He would have killed somebody if he had to spend more than a week here, but it was a nice change of pace from the usual grind.