Read Katja from the Punk Band for Free Online Page B

he thinks that he knows her from somewhere, somewhere completely out of context.
    He looks at the phone again. Kohl.
    Where was the vial?
    What had she done with it?
    Had she already slipped it to the other waitress? Was she just one part in a chain of transfers? Phone. The phone.
    Kohl.
    He chews his nails. Fuck.
    He hasn’t asked for any of this.
    And he’s just about to get up and phone Kohl when the girl, she comes up to him and she says, “I need your help.”
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    So he’s sitting in the car, engine running, in some part of the city that he’s not familiar with, waiting for the girl, Katja, to come back out. His fingers rattle against the steering wheel and one more time he’s certain that she’s fucking him over somehow.
    He is trusting that her story about getting off the island is for real and he’s trying not to think about why she might have picked him to help her. He thinks about her when she was up on stage the previous week, glittering with sweat, not so much playing her guitar as physically abusing it, the little tube in her neck like a piece of strangely decadent jewellery.
    He hears something farther down the street, looks in the rearview mirror and wonders if he is expecting to find Kohl standing there. He could still just take the vial from Katja, he wouldn’t need to hurt her. He doesn’t want to hurt her. But then what? Take it to Kohl, get the money for another hit and a few days later he will be back to where he is now.
    Then what?
    He’s never put as much thought as most into getting off the island because there was no reason to think that things would be any different on the mainland. It would just be another dealer, another type of drug. Another hit, another comedown. His life was cyclical anyway, what did it matter whether he couldn’t get off the island?
    But now, apparently, something matters. Something is giving him enough reason to want to break the pattern.
    Katja.
    What the fuck was she doing in that building anyway? he’s just about to get out and go find out when he sees her coming out of the building, her guitar slung across her back like a Kalashnikov.
    And there’s someone with her.
    Nikolai’s heart rate begins to increase, he brushes his hair from his eye and touches the gun just to make sure it’s there. Something is going on. This is it, this is the betrayal.
    Kohl had set him up or she’d fed him the line about getting off the island just so he would bring her there and leave him outside waiting for her while she called on the man who would be his assassin, and now they were going to kill him and that would be that and . . .
    They’re walking away from him.
    Toward another parked car farther up the street and it is black but patched with white blocks as if someone has vandalized it and the words have been painted over.
    He notices Katja glance back at him surreptitiously. She’s cuffed.
    She’s fucking cuffed.
    Hands clenching on the wheel, on the gun. The engine still running.
    Get out. Get out.
    He’s lost track of what was going on, become consumed by the night’s events. Kohl and Katja and the vial and Januscz the courier. The dead courier. The gun, the guitar, the man in black that leads her to his car. Rain and soggy liberty spikes, punk music echoing in his head.
    He finds himself unable to move as the man’s car is started and Katja is still in the back, still cuffed. Were there others after the vial? Where were they taking her? Or was this just another part of some elaborate show designed to torment and punish him? His thoughts blossomed at the idea of some extensive plot involving the chemical gangs and their couriers and girlfriends and waitresses and just about everybody on the island, all knowing what was going on, playing with him, toying with him.
    He ducks into his seat as the car sweeps past him and doesn’t catch another glimpse of Katja though he tries to, wants to see the expression on her face, if she is still playing a