by Ninie Hammon
Crossing the wake of the big launch, the bow bouncing on the waves, he glanced at the passengers, snug inside the canvas awnings fitted on the boat for inclement weather. Who’d want to cross the lake to a casino on a cold winter night like tonight?
María was looking out the hotel window high up on the side of the casino/hotel complex when words formed in her mind.
Sparkling words. That made no sense, but that’s what they were. Words that sent out power, like a welding torch.
María, I’m coming.
Bailey.
It was uncanny how much it sounded like Bailey had spoken inside her head. That was crazy, but—
Soon. To set you free.
Without warning, María’s knees turned to jelly and she leaned against the window sill of the bay window overlooking the lake.
Bailey’s voice.
Like she was right here, whispering in María’s ear.
María stared sightlessly at the progress of one of the launches across the lake. A smaller, unlighted craft came out of the darkness into the spill of light from the launch for a moment, then disappeared again.
Bailey couldn’t possibly have—
Actually, she could have. She’d done it before!
That day Bailey had come to the train station to stop María from running away. María heard a voice that day, too. She’d dismissed it, wouldn’t listen.
Don’t leave, María, the voice had said. It had been like now, like someone was speaking in her ear. Not just someone — Bailey.
Don’t go.
María’d thought she’d imagined the voice. Of course, she had imagined it! But Bailey had shown up at the train station to stop her. Had known she was leaving. She didn’t imagine that part. How?
María had never had a chance to ask.
The door to María’s room burst open and a bald man came in. He’d been riding in the front seat of the van when María’d been hauled away. She thought the others called him Volo-da, or Volodya, something like that. He was carrying several bags and one large box, each embossed with the gold periscope logo of the Nautilus. Apparently, the casino had more than just a little gift shop, but high-end boutiques like those on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
“I was guessing the size. But I’m pretty good at judging how a woman’s body’s put together.”
He tossed the bags on the bed.
“Put these on. You’re going out to dinner.”
She didn’t move, merely looked at him like he had grown antenna or a third eye.
“Do I stutter, lady? The boss said you were to get dressed in these clothes. You can do that voluntarily, or the boys and I can strip you naked and dress you by force.”
He got an awful, lurid look on his face.
“If we get you naked, we’ll have a good time with you before we put that dress on. All three of us.”
She got up from the window seat, went to the bed, and picked up one of the packages with her left hand.
“The shoes were the only thing. Total guess. I got fancy high heels in a big size. If they’re too big, stuff tissue in them to make them fit.”
He smiled what felt like a very odd smile. A cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.
“Outfit comes with a fur cape. It’s mink or ermine, one or the other. Very expensive. It will cover up everything.”
He looked at his watch.
“You got half an hour to get ready.”
He turned and left the room. When he opened the door, she could see that several men had gathered in the sitting room portion of the hotel suite and were standing around, talking softly.
She opened the dress box first and drew out of it an amazing evening gown covered in sparkling sequins. It was her style, alright — a Cinderella-at-the-ball dress with a swishy satin floor-length skirt, topped with yards of taffeta, and poofy sleeves. With all that fabric in the skirt, the dress was heavy — as cumbersome and bulky as a wedding dress.
The motive was instantly clear, of course. The extravagant evening gown had a purpose. The dress was to hinder her motion, slow her down. She might have been tempted to make a break for it in a public place. But she wouldn’t make it three feet bundled up in this Marie Antoinette knockoff. All that fabric would make it easier for some guy standing next to her to conceal the weapon — gun, knife, dagger, icepick, whatever — he was using to hold her captive.
She went into the bathroom and tried to undress. It was an agony to do so with her mashed fingers. She could grasp the zipper on her jeans with her left hand, but had to pull the jeans down holding on with only her thumb, pinky and ring finger. They were skinny jeans and shimmying out of them one-handed took some doing.
Why was Mikhailov doing this? Why would he chance taking her out in public? How did he know she wouldn’t scream her head off? How could he be sure that nobody’d notice, oh by the way, that the man standing next to her had a gun jammed into her ribs? Would they actually shoot her if she tried to get away — with people watching? The way she’d heard it, the Russian mafia boss had a real aversion to witnesses.
She stood in her underwear in the bathroom with 360-degree mirrors and looked at the dress that’d been selected for her to wear. Might have been her style, but it was definitely not her color. Black made her look like her kidneys were failing.
The dress fastened with a full length, up-the-back zipper which she would not have been able to fasten by herself if she’d had full use of both hands. So what was she supposed to do, holler through the door that she needed somebody to zip her up? She shuddered at the thought.
Dragging the skirt of the heavy gown across the floor, she went to the door, put her ear to it to see if there was still a room full of men out there.
There were only a couple and they were talking quietly, but it was in English and she could understand. She stood, listened and tried to piece together the fragments of the conversation she managed to catch.
“… better work or it’ll be on us …”
“… the look in his eyes sometimes …”
From the vantage point of her own terror of Mikhailov, she could definitely spot it in others. His men were scared to death of him. No loyalty here. Only fear.
“… mouse coming to the cheese …”
“… both in the same trap …”
One of them made a sound, like something snapped, and the others chuckled with no real amusement.
All of a sudden, the door opened and one of the men in the sitting room — a man she’d seen before, maybe loading the airplane, found her standing beside it.
“You eavesdropping?” It was the man from the airplane, alright, dressed now in an expensive suit. He reached out and grabbed her right hand, the one with smashed fingers. “Want me to smash the rest of them?”
“No! I wasn’t listening.” She turned her back to him, shuddered at the indignity. “I just need somebody to zip me up.”
His fingers grazed her bare back as he pulled the zipper up and she only managed not to cringe with a huge physical effort.
“Do something with your hair. Brush it. Something. You look awful.” He looked at his watch. “You got fifteen minutes.” Then he closed the door.
María turned and dragged her skirts back into the bathroom, where the mirror did, indeed, reveal a woman who looked awful. Tangled hair and smeared eye makeup. Looked … oh, I don’t know … like she’d been kidnapped maybe?
She dumped out into the sink the sack of toiletries she’d been given. There was a hairbrush, but the best she could do with her makeup was to wash it all off. None at all was marginally better than smeared. Spotting what was obviously a makeup kit, she opened it and found all the usual suspects, purchased from some woman at a makeup counter bent on selling a bunch of expensive products to a man who obviously didn’t know what he was buying.
She scrubbed her face clean and applied the bare minimum. Base makeup, too dark. With the powder applied, she looked like she was wearing a death mask. As she struggled to make herself presentable,
using her left hand instead of her injured right, she struggled to figure out why Mikhailov would take her out to dinner. That was crazy. Why—?
The answer hit her with such force it staggered her and she smeared mascara on her cheek.
She was the cheese. They were planning somehow to use her to lure Bailey out of hiding. To kill her. To kill them both.
Chapter Forty-Six
Bailey stepped out of the launch onto the deck of the massive casino and remembered how impressed she’d been when she first saw it, delightfully surprised by how tasteful it was. Not garish.
But the Christmas decorations she saw now … not so much. They clashed so completely with the style and dignity of the establishment it was hard to countenance that the management had been talked into it.
The How the Grinch Stole Christmas theme was on display everywhere she looked, from the gigantic lighted display on the top of the building, showing a ridiculously overloaded sleigh, the bulging bag of stolen Christmas presents, pulled along by the pathetic little dog named Max whose antlers consisted of two single sticks.
And, of course, the Grinch himself sat grinning on top of the bag of gifts.
It was ridiculous, and she assumed that was the point — to be amusing. To add a little lighthearted Christmas cheer to the flash and glamour of a place that could only afford to pay for all those lights and shiny things with the money the people they were “entertaining” lost at the games inside. Some marketing team somewhere had come up with this whole affair, probably tried it out before half a dozen focus groups.
Those groups’ taste did not mirror Bailey’s.
A view of the launch slips made it clear that this was going to be a slow night at the gaming tables. Black Friday five days before had ignited the Christmas shopping mania. The crowds were out Christmas shopping, not gambling.
She looked at her watch. A quarter of six. She had plenty of time to slide into one of those amazing bathrooms in the casino and change out of her jeans, chambray shirt and running shoes into the slinky green dress. And to slip into the six-inch stiletto-heeled shoes with which she intended to take the life of the man who’d killed her husband.
Aaron reaches his hand across the seat and takes hers. He squeezes and smiles that smile that puts delicious butterflies in her belly.
“Honey, we need this, we need you-and-me time. It’s been too long. I miss you.”
Thunder rumbles as the rain that had been a light drizzle ratchets up to a downpour.
His smile broadens. “Sunny Caribbean, here we come!”
Five minutes later, Aaron was dead. Sergei Wassily Mikhailov had shot him down in the street, had sent her into hiding, fearing for her life, unable to love and cuddle her own baby daughter for two years.
“It ends tonight,” she said aloud, not meaning to, but not caring that she did, though the woman getting out of the launch beside her stepped sideways to put some distance between them.
Half an hour from now, one or the other of them would be dead — likely both. Mikhailov and Bailey. She had this single opportunity, one lone chance to save her sister’s life and the life of her precious Bethany.
“It ends tonight,” she said aloud again. She meant it that time.
She walked with purpose beneath the gold archway that now promised “Where your every desire is fulfilled … in Who-ville style.”
The night she had been here to celebrate her birthday, the music riding the warm October air had been a Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel medley, played so softly you weren’t even sure you were hearing it until you caught yourself singing along.
The music tonight was Christmas carols. The sanitized ones. The ones the Thought Police had deemed appropriate for the ears of absolutely anybody’s delicate sensibilities — which meant they were so totally bland and colorless they were unpalatable to everybody.
“Here Comes Santa Claus” was piped out onto the deck, but as she crossed the threshold beneath the archway promise, the creepy Grinch theme song took over.
She passed into the ring of casino games that encircled the restaurant, ever tempting you to plop just one more token into the slot machine before you ordered your salad. There were vintage slot machines against the wall, ones made to look like the first of their kind in Las Vegas. She’d watched a lovely girl put tokens into one of those machines a month ago and the girl had lived only a few hours after Bailey saw her there.
The people all around who glanced at Bailey were likely seeing the last few moments of her life, too.
She paused just inside the door to the bathroom, stood momentarily in the “parlor” adjacent to the facilities, as richly appointed as any luxury apartment she’d ever seen pictured in Better Homes and Gardens. Tasteful wingback chairs, loveseats, delicately carved tables with Tiffany lamps. There was a maid, whisking up imaginary trash off the immaculate carpet.
She’d paused because her mind had yanked her to a halt. It had been ping-ponging all over the map, going from Aaron to the Grinch to the music selection in a gambling casino.
Self-preservation, of course, she realized that. The true horror of her situation and the magnitude of the act she was about to perform were such that thinking about them might paralyze her with horror.
But the ping-pong match ended now. She’d lost.
It was time to put her game face on.
Every thought and act from now … actually, for the rest of her life … was about freeing her sister from the monster, and then — please, God! — getting an opportunity to kill him.
And then …?
Oh, she’d been herding her mind away from such considerations, but in reality she harbored no illusions about her own chances of surviving the evening. If she were granted an opportunity to pull off one of her shoes and bury the icepick stiletto heel into his neck, Mikhailov’s henchmen would gun her down on the spot. Why would they let her go free? The possibility that she could kill Mikhailov and somehow get away from his murderous henchmen … that was a fairytale. His bodyguards might even be the same men who’d been with him that day on a rainy street, who’d on his command pulled out guns and shot the homeless woman as she ran terrified up the street. Those weren’t the kind of men who’d let her continue to draw breath after she’d killed their boss. Even if the boss was certifiably psychotic and all his men hated and feared him. Even then … no, she would die soon.
T.J. had said that successful people made a decision, stuck to it and didn’t waste time looking back.
T.J. Dobbs.
And Brice.
She’d never see any of them again if this went south and it was definitely pointed toward Tennessee, not Ohio or Pennsylvania.
Brice.
She sucked in a little gasp as it occurred to her that … she loved the man. She did.
Well how about that.
Amazing what popped to the surface when you let down all your defenses and got real — for the last time. Bailey wasn’t surprised by the revelation … bemused, maybe. She’d never let herself go there. The list of reasons would stretch from here to tomorrow morning. None of them mattered now.
In fact, it felt good to admit it to herself — in a way she didn’t pick at.
Yeah. It felt good.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mikhailov stood in the shadows for a moment before he went all the way into the room, studying the man Dmitri and Volodya held at gunpoint.
The name tag on his shirt said he was Brice McGreggor. Mikhailov’s men swore this was the same man who’d gone upstairs to help María gather up the picture albums — the man they’d shot and killed. Except he wasn’t dead. The bullets they had fired at him had knocked him across the room but did no other apparent damage.
Some kind of law enforcement officer, a West Virginia county sheriff or some such, he must have been wearing a Kevlar vest yesterday afternoon — why? That was one of oh-so-many questions Mikhailov planned to ask him.
Then his mind began to fill with mist. Red mist. Differen
t this time, thicker.
The whole world around him began to turn red.
It was a genuinely odd sensation and he watched it with keen interest.
The ceiling was a bubbling, boiling red, like lava in a volcano. It wasn’t lava, though. It was not blood, either. It was red light. Boiling light. It flowed in every direction from the center of the ceiling until it reached the walls, then the light became liquid and flowed down them. Now, it was blood, a deep red with a delicious copper smell like wet pennies. If he stepped to the wall and wiped off some on his finger, it would taste gloriously salty.
His son’s blood had tasted salty. When he’d slit Ivan’s throat, blood had squirted into his face, into his mouth, and Mikhailov had tasted the salt in it. His men believed he had beaten the worthless drunk to death with a fireplace poker. Not so. He had beaten his lifeless body until it was unrecognizable after he was already dead, after he had choked and gurgled, spewed out drops of blood in a fine mist as the front of his white shirt turned crimson.
What would it be like to rip a man’s throat out … with your teeth?
Mikhailov began to breathe hard, gripped in an unnamable emotion, and it took every ounce of strength he possessed to keep from leaping forward and sinking his teeth into the throat of the man whose hair was the color of the boiling light and the dripping blood all around.
He backed up from the man, from the emotion. In his mind, he backed out of the room with boiling light and dripping blood, backed away into eternity.
