The Killing Kind Read Online Free PDF Page B

flash-bang grenade off one of the SWAT guy’s belts and lobbed it through the narrow aperture of the jammed sidewalk door. Thompson barely had a chance to shield her ears and turn away before the thing went off, loud as a firework and bright as the goddamn sun. Even though she’d closed her eyes, a ghostly green afterglow danced in Thompson’s field of vision for a good five minutes afterward.
    “Garfield, the fuck was that? ”
    Garfield grinned. “It stopped him shooting, didn’t it?”
    Thompson strained to listen over the ringing in her ears. I’ll be damned, she thought. The crazy bastard’s right.
    Moments later, SWAT breached the inside basement door to find Petrela lying unconscious in the middle of the concrete floor, both ears bleeding, his eardrums blown.
    Turned out the shots they’d heard hadn’t been directed at the teenaged girls held captive there, but at the padlock fixed through the walk-in freezer’s latch. In his haste to get downstairs, Petrela’d forgotten to grab the key; it hung on a hook just outside the basement door. Once SWAT popped the lock, they found the freezer wasn’t so much a freezer as a holding pen—sweltering and smelling of human waste— full of very frightened and very loud teenaged girls. They were destined for the sex trade, or white slavery. But with time, Thompson hoped, they’d be all right. The human mind and body were more resilient than they were given credit for.
    What a sight it must have been for them, these goggled, helmeted, armed men streaming into the walk-in after weeks of cramped captivity and ushering them upstairs, where ambulances waited to take them to St. Joseph’s for treatment.
    It was no wonder they wouldn’t stop screaming.
    Thompson stood in Little Louie’s squalid kitchen, massaging the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger to soothe her aching head as one by one the girls came up the stairs. Garfield was inspecting the pots bubbling away on the massive cooktop, seemingly oblivious to the filth and the girls’ racket.
    He removed a lid, dipped a spoon into a stockpot, and fished out a meatball covered in red sauce. Though it was piping hot, he stuffed the whole thing into his mouth, sauce dribbling down his chin.
    “The hell you think you’re doing?” snapped Thompson.
    Garfield chewed and made a face. “Hey, gimme a break—ain’t like a meatball’s evidence . Besides, I’m starving; we’ve been in that van all goddamn day, and I ain’t had so much as a bite to eat since dinner last night. Which—no disrespect to Petrela here, ’cause he seems like a real good guy and all—is the only reason I could even choke that fucking thing down. No wonder the poor bastard turned to a life of crime—his meatballs taste like ass.”
    “Bold play back there with the flash-bang,” was all she could think to say.
    Garfield shrugged. “It worked.”
    “This time,” Thompson amended. As far as she was concerned, Garfield was dangerous, stupid, and too cocky for his own good. His swagger no doubt served him well going up against street thugs, but it could prove a liability chasing down the more established crime families their unit covered. Those families didn’t survive on guts and brutality alone—they were businesses, and they ran like multinational corporations. They had deep pockets and long reaches, patience and subtlety. Going up against them required patience and subtlety, too. “But what if the girls hadn’t been locked up?”
    Garfield nodded toward the storefront windows, through which Thompson could see Petrela—strapped unconscious to a gurney and flanked by armed agents—being loaded into one of the waiting ambulances. The girls were loaded into the others in twos and threes. “Guess then they would’ve been easier to carry out.”
    “Hey, boss?” It was Littlefield, the equipment tech from the van. In his hand was Thompson’s phone. “This thing’s been going nuts for twenty minutes straight.”
    “It’s