Rebirth (John Taylor #1)

Chapter 12

I headed out of Ronny's house and back into the borrowed Jeep with a new destination. I drove a few minutes down the road before pulling over and rooting through the glove box, hoping for a map.

The map I had gotten when Renata and I had left Miami was with the rest of my stuff, abandoned in that motel room when Renata was grabbed.

I was happy to find this guy kept a map of Florida in his Jeep. With my face plastered on the news telling people I was a kidnapper and a murderer, I wasn't crazy about having to stop and ask for directions, or buy another map.

I found the address for the blandly named Florida Cargo Storage Company on the map, where Ronny said the Russians were holding the girls waiting for transportation out of Miami.

By this point I had a clear idea of the operation as it went in Florida. The Russians brought the girls in, and the Hernandez Cartel distributed those girls across the country for them; either on their own, or through smaller fish like Ronny.

It didn't seem like the Russians were selling the girls to the Cartel. Not only was that not the business the Cartel was in, but everything I had found to this point suggested they only handled transportation.

The thing that was still confusing me, was that nothing suggested that Yuri was part of some kind of larger system. The Bratva was loosely organized, with particular guys running a specific geographic area. There wasn't a central command coordinating all these different regions into a single unit.

From the way people talked, Yuri was at the top of the food chain for this particular group. But he was still a local guy. So where exactly were these girls ending up that the Cartel was moving?

For my goal of getting Renata back, it wasn't particularly important. This warehouse was just one more step in the path that would lead me to her.

But I liked to work out puzzles, and this was a big one. Also, it gave my brain something to turn over while I was driving into Miami.

It was getting late in the day, and the warehouse looked closed, with the front bay doors pulled down. I circled around the side of the building and climbed up on a stack of pallets to look in through a window near the front half of the building.

There were a couple of forklifts parked against one wall, and pallets of stuff were stacked in the middle. I wasn't an expert, but everything looked on the up and up, to me. My guess was the front half of this business did what the signs said they did. It was also clear that what looked like the back of the warehouse was not as far back in the building as it should be. By my estimation the back wall I could see through the window ended about thirty feet short of where the back of the warehouse seemed to end.

It wasn't obvious, and someone inside might not notice it right away. The only reason I did, was I knew they had been holding girls here and I was looking for something out of place.

I circled the entire warehouse. In the part that was visible from the inside there were a couple of windows and two fire doors, but nothing in that back thirty feet of warehouse.

At the front of the warehouse was a regular door on the far right side and a window that light was streaming through. As I approached it I could see someone sitting inside, talking on the phone. He saw me at about the same moment, so I improvised.

I walked to the door and pulled it open, quickly.

When the guy started to stand up, saying something to the person on the phone I said, "Is this Florida Cargo Storage Company?"

"Ostavaytes' na linii," he said on the phone before saying to me, "Yes. What do you want?"

"Sorry I'm late, but I had a hell of a time finding the place. I got a delivery that was supposed to be here, earlier today."