Knox and Mer were at the barn. Charlie was out with a woman. Clifton was at the house. Dixon was down at the club. I was at the hospital. Alina Popov wasn’t there – her night to volunteer – and everything was quiet. With the hospital in chaos due to a salmonella outbreak at a local high school, it would have been a perfect opportunity to end Gavriil’s life. I didn’t though. Not for any reason I’d like to think about.
I left instead and headed straight for the house. Something was off. The past week I’d spent canvassing what I knew of Loredo’s other known hideouts: an apartment up North where he kept his mistress had been abandoned in a rush – cardboard boxes, pallets, and moving equipment left alongside piles of perfectly good clothes and plastic-covered furniture. His house in town was much the same. Another apartment out of state took much longer to find. When I broke in, I found rotting food still in the fridge and a bottle of wine on the counter, uncorked and festering with fruit flies. I scoured the place, found nothing, and when I’d gone back three days later to search again, the apartment had been ransacked.
The Russians were closing in, but I was still a step ahead of them. There must have been something we missed. I knew Mer’s needed to be canvassed that night.
Telling Dixon we needed Mer was the easy part. Not sure I really intended to kill her in the first place. Not worth it. Because if the Russians didn’t, the Mexicans would find ways to end her before I ever could. When they kill the rest of us. Canvassing the house was where the real work began. The thing was massive and ancient. A slave ship with no sails, full of tiny rooms and half a dozen hidden corridors. Most were easy to spot but two were tricky. Trompe d’oeil as Marguerite would’ve said. Woman’s linguistic talents however, were wasted on me. By the time she got me, I was fully cooked. Numb. Broken. Hollow. Better this way than to feel for anything. It made my job easier to do.
The other brothers didn’t want to spend time in Mer’s bedroom. The blood-stained sheets put them off. So did the fishing line still attached to the bed’s four corners. Glass covered the floor, so did bits of wood from broken furniture. Couldn’t imagine what the room might have looked like before. Probably hardly more livable. Mer got ripped up in here and the brothers all knew it. Mer didn’t seem to notice the shit, but Clifton had to take Knox out for a walk. Soft ass bastard.
Alone in that room with Mer, it was easier to spot the floorboard. She had been blindfolded only twice during her time with Spade, but during those moments recalled the sound of creaking hardwood. We looked together – scouring every wall and floor panel, the ceiling too – until I finally saw blood congealed around one floorboard’s loose edge.
I placed the dresser on one end, using the leverage to lift the opposite edge and slide my hands into the space. I tore the floor and my palms apart trying to break through. When I did, I found a key. I found the bag it belonged to buried out in the back underneath a pile of rocks that Knox had mistaken for a burial mound. I didn’t bury any bodies though. I burned them.
And here we are. A bag of heroin and five nearly dead men and one woman who died a long time ago.
Too restless to sleep, I get up at six and head to the hospital. I slip my surgical gear on in the car before heading into the building. I know the routes. I know where everyone will be and when, so I’m surprised when I don’t see the surgeon with the hard-on for Alina at the nurse’s station, and I’m even more surprised when I glance into Gavriil’s room and Alina isn’t in it.
The nurses are talking, wondering about her. Wondering about a group of men that arrived just minutes ago – about half an hour after she left. Her brother had been agitated and she’d been crying as she ran to her car. As the hard-on said, she’d looked panicked. And then the Russian goons had been upset to find Gavriil alone.
The pulse flicking through my wrists picks up its pace. I don’t like this. The attention should have been on us, not on Gavriil or his sister. Why waste time on them when they could have been looking for their drugs? For Spade’s killer? For me, the one hunting them? I’d meet them head on and revel in it, but Alina? She’s not a part of their world. No. She’s not of this world. They get a hold of her and she’s dead instantly.
Nurses congregate around the nurse’s station, and the hard-on keeps them entertained. Gavriil’s door opens up beneath my palm and I slip silently into his room. He’s got a sheet pulled up to his waist and his hospital gown on backwards so I can see his mafia tattoos. The coat of arms on his left pectoral means he’s part of the royal family, so to speak. The symbols on the right mean he’s killed something. I disregard the sigils in blue and red and walk instead to his IV. I touch the device that could end his life if I were to insert a single bead of air, but I don’t intend to. I want to know what he’s saying into his cell, and more importantly, what the female voice is telling him on the other end of the line.
“Alina…” That’s the only word I make out in the ceaseless Russian stream. He says it many times, as if he’s trying to convince her of something.
I can’t take it anymore. I draw the blinds first, then go to lean against the room’s only door. As his steel gaze flicks to mine, I withdraw the Ruger tucked in the waistband of my scrubs. He jerks forward, but when I raise a finger to my lips he quiets. I lift both palms and he shows me his own before pressing the speaker button.
“Alina,” he says and the moment he so much as whispers a word of Russian I cock the Ruger’s hammer. His face twitches but he switches to English, biting back a visible irritation. “I must go. Will you be okay for the next few minutes?”
Russian words rasped quickly are flung back at him. She sounds as if she’s crying and my intestines flicker in my gut like water snakes.
“Hang up,” I grunt, taking a step towards the plastic edge of the bed.
“Alina, I will call you back.”
No he won’t.
He hangs up as she continues to speak and I lower my weapon as he lowers his phone. “I thought it would be you,” he says. It’s strange, because he is right and because at the same time, I don’t plan on giving him the release he speaks of. I’m distracted by his accent. It reminds me of her. Her voice. The sound of it – that stilted, sibilant brogue. “The doctor with no medicine…”
I pull myself back into the present. “Why were the Russians here?”
He laughs, leaning back against the pillows with his arms crossed. Like he doesn’t care. Like survival or the nurse’s call button is the furthest thing from his mind. “You’re going to kill me. Why say more?”
“I’m not going to kill you.” A lie, and then the truth. “I want to know who was on the phone.”
His smile dips. He spares a glance at the cell in his lap, a brick of black against mint green sheets. “No one.”
“Alina is no one?”
His eyes narrow and his body tenses up. “She is my sister. What you want with her?”
“To help her.”
“You lie.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
I inhale, exhale, glance at his cell. That one act undoubtedly gives him more information on me than what I’d harvested from him. I don’t care. “Is she safe?” I say, because that’s the only answer I want. He doesn’t speak for a moment and I advance on him, close enough to place the butt of my silencer to his temple. “Is. She. Safe?”
He’s not a man easily disturbed, but he glances again at his phone in a way that makes me salivate. I’d kill him just for the wrath his delayed response makes me feel, but then I’d still be as I am now: answerless and angry. “You will not hurt her?”
“I will not.”
A brief moment of silence, then: “They take her to convince me that I know what I do not.”
“Take her to do what with?”
“What mafia does with pretty girls.” His voice would come off as a threat if it didn’t catch at the end. He loves his sister, and he’s ready to die for the girl.
“Where
is she? Where are they?”
The words come out of him like teeth, but he still says, “Third and Connecticut.” That’s all I need to know. I stow my gun where I’d retrieved it and as I turn, Gavriil calls out, “You will save her?”
Save her. “Yes. I will.”
“Why you do this?” I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have to give that to him. I turn and as I meet his gaze he shudders visibly and glances again at his phone. “I will owe you debt. Forever.”
I know this, but I don’t want what he has to offer. All I wanted was the address. I leave the room and arrive at my car and am driving for ten minutes before I realize that I left Gavriil alive. Perhaps that’s what I intended from the beginning. Hard to say. Hard to know anything that will happen or their consequences as I arrive at the address I was given.
Pulling over by the curb, I sit facing a dilapidated brick building. I don’t know what would bring her out here. A safe house maybe? A car with clean plates? Both are worthy of a guess, but I have no information except for the little that I requested and that now, I’m starting to believe, may be worthless. Did the bastard lie to me?
My right hand twitches as I imagine ripping his tongue out through his neck, but in the next moment, I hear a voice shouting. A woman’s voice. Revving my engine, I peel away from the curb in a blaze of rubber. Two blocks down, one over, I pull up onto the sidewalk and exit the car in my surgeon’s outfit. There is one man that carries her. You wouldn’t need more than that. She is tall, but light and delicate. The other two men stalk towards the black Bentley wordlessly, though the girl they are prepared to abduct is crying.
Her lean limbs are thrashing, pushing out and vying for anything she can catch, but she doesn’t. With one hand, a man takes her wrists and uses his other to lock her knees together. She’s wearing black jeans with tears at the knees and a white sweater. Her hair is the color of violence as it swings around her face.
A face that turns to me as she whimpers. “Please,” she says.
I don’t know if she’s speaking to me or someone else, or if it would have mattered. I draw my gun and pull the trigger. The first man falls. The second turns at the same time the third does. Seeing me, he throws the girl to the concrete and her head cracks against the brick wall before bouncing on the sidewalk. She doesn’t move after that.
My sternum opens and my lips tighten against one another. I feel that they’re dry as the two men reach for the guns at their hips. Neither of them have time to draw before they hit the ground. Lights out. Successfully, I’ve killed three Russians in a day. Not the three that were on my list.
Instead, I turn towards the Popov that should have died the moment I saw her. She lies still, subtle rise and fall of her chest the only indication of life. I crouch at her side and I can smell the perfume she wears. Christian whatever. Cardamom. Lily. Something else sweet. There are three dead bodies. I need to get out of there and I need to take her with me.
I don’t think. I slide my arms beneath her delicate form and lift her from the ground. I don’t like the way her body feels on mine. It’s too soft. Too breakable. So I hold her away from me until I reach my car. The beat up Volvo creaks as I collapse into it though it barely whispers when I slide her into the passenger’s side. The seat is all the way down and she’s sprawled over it. Her face tilts towards me and her hands fold in her lap.
Her breath is even and though her hair covers her lips and her right cheek, I am calmed by her face’s perfect symmetry. I am calm as I pull away from the bodies and drive out towards the thoroughfare. I am calm as she exhales and inhales and exhales. My eyes drift closed, but by gripping the steering wheel harder, I revive them. Twenty minutes later and we are in front of my home. I don’t know how we arrived there. I must have been on autopilot.
It takes me another half an hour to arrive at her townhouse. It’s here that I don’t know what to do. There’s always a plan. Always a next step. But I glance over at her as the stench of her perfume clouds my entire car. As subtle as it is, I can’t breathe through it. She’s not awake. I reach over and check her pulse. It’s even. Like her breath. As my skin grazes her skin, I notice that hers is very smooth. Her cheek. Her throat. Her hands. Her hands are cold.
I pull off a block away from her place. There are people out here, but the windows are dark and bullet proof. No way to see in so we are alone. I turn on the heat and shrug out of my coat. I lay it over her and watch how the black material completely engulfs her from chin to knees. Black coat. Black upholstery. Black windows. Black night rising. And inside her hair blazes like a standing flame. It’s thick and full. The kind of hair a man would run his fingers through when fucking her. But she’s not the kind of girl that’s fucked, to be sure. She’s the kind that’s worshipped.
Her eyelashes are long… My hand stretches forward to touch one, but then I remember that she’s the kind of thing I’d break simply by touching it. I fold my arms over my chest and lean back in my seat, edging away from her as far as the confines of the car will allow. I won’t touch her, no. But I still watch.
Nineteen minutes later I’m interrupted from my gargoylish staring by the sound of a phone ringing. It isn’t mine. I let it go to voicemail once, but pick it up the second time. It’s in the bottom of the purse I collected, now lying on the floor of my car between her feet. Through a pile of cloth and bags and things, I reach the hard, curved edge of the device. The face of the screen is a photo of the Popovs. Timur on the left, Alina in the center, the man I’d just left in his hospital bed on the right. I hit talk, and lift the phone to my ear.
“Alina,” he says the moment the line goes live. He says her name again and again. Russian flows from his lips, but then fades slowly. “Alina?”
“No.”
“Doctor with no medicine,” he says, voice ice.
“Yes.”
Quiet.
“You have Alina?”
“Yes.”
“She is safe?”
“Yes.” I glance over at her and she hasn’t so much as stirred. Her chin, rather, is drooped down. I reach over and, against the seat, lift it. Her face tilts so that it looks up towards mine and my rib cage clenches. I stare forward.
“Can I speak to her?”
“She’s unconscious.” When the man doesn’t say anything for a moment I bite down, then spit through my teeth, “She hit her head when the Russians tossed her aside.” I don’t want this man to think that I hurt her. A strange compulsion. That’s the first that I notice that I’m behaving strangely. I glance again to the girl.
His unsteady pitch rises. “You said she was okay…”
“She doesn’t have a concussion. The fall was soft but Alina is…delicate.”
He pauses and I can hear his anxiety crackle through the receiver. He says, “I want to hear her.”
“She’s unconscious.”
“I want to hear her breath.” An inkling of respect for the man surfaces like a match struck but like a struck match, it quickly dies. Fleeting, like everything. Like life. I lower the phone from my ear, turn it on speaker and place it close to the girl’s face. “Alina?” Gavriil says.
As if the sound of her brother’s voice animates her, she stirs and releases a small, fragile whimper.
“Alina,” he repeats, but her eyelids are peaceful and the girl doesn’t move.
I lift the phone to my ear again. “She can’t hear you. She’s unconscious, like I said.”
“But she is alive.” The man rasps something in Russian. It sounds like a prayer. “And…” I can hear him lick his lips and then fumble with something. A second later, I hear the crack of a bottle being opened. “And the others?”
“Dead.”
Silence reigns once more and is eventually broken up by the last thing I expect. He thanks me, first in English before he says, “Spasiba.”
“They were your men.”
“My men. Not good men. She is my sister.” He lingers with a silen
ce that I don’t breach. “They rape her?”
I look at her again and lift my coat, then her sweater so I see the flat of her speckled stomach up to the belly button. “Pants still buttoned. No bruising.”
He mutters another whispered prayer. “She is virgin.” Of course she is. “My sister is virgin,” he repeats, this time with an emphasis I don’t understand until he says, “I give you lots of money to take her to her house. She lives on Magnolia by the university. You take her to her house, you put her inside and you don’t touch her.”
“Okay.”
He guards his breath. I’d be surprised if he believed me. “Where are you now?”
“213 Magnolia Drive. Parked across the street from her place.”
Silence. Lots of it. I’d bet that the man would appear stunned if I could see his face. Nothing stunning about it though. “Why you help her?”
My right hand reaches over and smoothes her sweater down and I lay my jacket back over her. It’s enough and I draw away from her. “Because she looks like something pure,” I say in hushed breath.
“You don’t want her like other men want her,” he states, but I can tell he means to ask me a question.
I exhale, sounding exhausted to myself. Sleeplessness catching up to me. “I don’t take things that can’t fight back. Asleep or awake she couldn’t against me.”
“No. She could not.”
Something moves in my body and I shift in my seat. “So what I want is irrelevant.” Want. Another foreign sensation grips me. Wanting is weakness. I want nothing. Never have.
I wait as long as I have to for the man on the other end of the line to make up his mind. Gavriil. This is the longest conversation I’ve ever had on a phone and it’s with a man I meant to kill. “Will you take her?”
“Take her?” Confusion. I grip the wheel hard and I know I am a strong man because I manage not to look over at the girl sitting next to me.
Gavriil clears his throat. “Take her with you. She is not safe on her own and I cannot protect her with the Russians suspicious of me.”
The Hunting Town (Brothers Book 1) Page 19
