Watch Over Me

by Susan May Warren

  She chilled. No, they would forget the vacation Bible school, the children’s bell choir, the Sunday school classes she taught. Despite her two years serving as a short-term missionary in Far East Russia, as soon as her replacement flew in, they would erase Gracie Benson from their minds.

  Whereas she would cling to them forever.

  Maybe not all of them, but certainly Evelyn and Dr. Willie Young, her coworkers, and definitely Andrei Tallin, the sweet man with nearly palpable affection staring at her from the front row. She tried to ignore the ache in his chestnut-brown eyes. She’d turned down his proposal for marriage only a week ago and felt like a jerk. The guy had gone above and beyond his job as her chauffeur these past two years—translator, bodyguard, friend. She’d nearly given her heart to him.

  Nearly.

  It would be a long time before she trusted a man again. A lifetime, perhaps.

  Of all her friends, she would definitely remember Larissa. Larissa Tallina, with honey-sweet brown eyes, tawny hair cut like a man’s, a smile so warm it made Gracie reevaluate every friendship she’d had back in America. The woman had even been thrilled with the cross pendant Gracie had given her, despite Larissa’s atheism. Larissa may have been ten years her senior, but Gracie knew she’d never forget the woman who’d become as close as a sister.

  It was because of Larissa that Gracie wept into her pillow every night. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t even lead one of her best friends to salvation?

  Pastor Yuri finished his farewell speech and again reached for her hand, and Gracie thanked the Lord for making her from stoic Scandinavian stock. She managed a convincing smile.

  Why, oh why, did Russia have to obey their visa laws? It wasn’t like they took any other laws seriously.

  The clapping died as she found her seat next to Dr. Willie and Evelyn, career missionaries and the lucky ones who got to stay. The successful missionaries who changed lives and made a furrow in the eternal landscape of the soul.

  Gracie’s heart felt like it weighed a million pounds and sweat beaded her brow as she stood for Yuri’s pre-sermon prayer. The sun poured through the lace curtains of the log church, heating the room like a sauna, despite the lingering chill outside. Still, most babushkas huddled under three layers of wool and headscarves, relying on the masses of clothing as a bulwark against an early death. Gracie shifted in her denim dress, feeling rumpled, hot, and empty. She’d leave more than her emotions flopping and bleeding in the former Soviet Union. She’d leave her hopes for a new Gracie. Her dream for a fresh start.

  She sat, and Pastor Yuri began his sermon. Yuri’s venerable presence on the podium as he gripped the lectern and moved into his impassioned speech reminded her that he had been her champion. He’d stood up for her a year ago when her one-year visa expired, working some behind-the-scenes magic that allowed her to stay. He’d been encouraging, and, although she couldn’t understand everything he said, she felt as if he somehow appreciated her. His handshake and solemn eyes had to mean something.

  She might have impressed the pastor, but he didn’t know the truth. Unless over the next five days before her departure her ministry took a hundred-and-eighty-degree about-face and she turned into Billy Graham or D. L. Moody, she’d be returning to the States the same scarred failure she was when she left it. Only this time, she’d be out of second chances.

  The fact the militia had sent Chief Arkady Sturnin in response to Vicktor’s call meant two things. Either they’d forgiven Vicktor for the past or the chief was the only one in the office.

  Yeah, like Vicktor had to guess at the right answer.

  “He was a friend of yours?” Arkady’s cigarette bobbed between his lips as he talked. The ash dropped onto the linoleum and sizzled in a muddy puddle.

  Scowling, Vicktor waved the smoke away and watched the forensics team prepare Dr. Evgeny Lakarstin’s remains for the morgue. Although every door in the clinic had been propped open, the odor from the wreckage of medicines embedded the blue walls, the muddy wooden floor, the cracked plaster ceiling. Nausea dogged him as Vicktor watched the mortal remains of his friend manhandled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Funny no one found him before this.” Arkady’s bulldog face jiggled when he spoke. “Did you have an appointment?”

  Vicktor worked a nagging muscle in the back of his neck. “No, I just stopped by. My father said Alfred’s been a bit droopy.”

  “With a mug like that, doesn’t he always look droopy?” Arkady guffawed at his joke.

  Vicktor clenched his jaw.

  “Have you been to the kennels?” Arkady asked, his laughter dying.

  “Yeah. Right after I called you. It’s not pretty. Every animal has been gutted.”

  Arkady toyed with his Bond cigarette, squashing fuzzy eyebrows into one wide brush as he scanned the small clinic.

  “What do you suppose this is?” The older man bent over to finger a wad of soggy papers, grunting as he went down, sounding every bit of his nearly sixty years.

  Vicktor winced with remorse. Arkady had aged a century since the Wolf incident. Another residual casualty, another cop paying for Vicktor’s impulsiveness and reckless pride.

  “I don’t know,” Vicktor answered thinly as he stalked back to the lab.

  A fog of saline and alcohol hung low and heavy. Vicktor put a hand to his nose as he stood in the doorway watching technicians gather evidence from the black lab table and smearing it on glass slides. Every vial had been smashed, and a gooey amber liquid covered the table like syrup. What had Evgeny been cooking up in here?

  “Vicktor Nickolaiovich.” Thankfully, the technicians still gave him respect, using his full name to address him. The technician motioned to him, then crouched behind the lab door.

  Vicktor crossed the room and knelt beside him, arms hanging over his knees. The man peered into a thin metal bucket.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “Ashes.” The tech wiggled the can. The orange peels at the bottom shifted and Vicktor made out a thin layer of charred paper, curled as if peeled from a block of chocolate.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like the remnants of a tetrad, the kind professors use to record lab data.”

  A notebook. For experiments? Vicktor rubbed his chin and rose. Why would Evgeny burn his lab notes? Turning, he glimpsed another tech slip something into his pocket. “What are you doing?”

  The man whirled. Reed thin, with bloodshot eyes and scaly skin, he blanched. Vicktor grabbed him by the collar and shoved the tech against the sticky lab table. Glaring into his eyes an inch from his nose, Vicktor reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out an unbroken vial. Novocain.

  “Zdraztvootya? I believe that’s called stealing.”

  The tech’s Adam’s apple dipped twice in his neck. “He doesn’t need it anymore.”

  The room went quiet. Vicktor let the kid go and blew out a hot breath. The tech’s mottled face, glistening with a scrim of sweaty fear, told Vicktor he wore what Roman would call his “tiger” face. Great. Just when he thought he had a clamp on his emotions.

  Good thing Roman wasn’t here. Though perhaps if he were, Vicktor wouldn’t feel like the only uninvited guest at a birthday party. The militia stepped up and took notice whenever a COBRA walked into the room—the training the FSB received to become the special agents who fought the mafia guaranteed respect.

  Or better yet, the entrance of David Curtiss, Green Beret and Delta Force captain, would get their attention. Only, he couldn’t shout that little alliance across the room, could he? Sometimes Vicktor felt like David, better known as Preach, was in his head, his little voice of reason, and he would admit, only to himself, that he needed Preach’s words of wisdom way more than he’d thought ten years ago.

  Who knew that a pickup game of hockey, a fistfight, and an American-style pizza would lead to friendships that felt tethered to Vicktor’s very soul?

  Sometimes he wondered if Roman and David had planned it that way.


  Vicktor set the vial in a tray on the examining table and shot the tech a scalding look. “Get to work.”

  Stepping into the hall, he fielded a frown from the Bulldog.

  “Spequietsye, Vicktor. This isn’t America. Loosen up.”

  Arkady’s voice, although low, tightened Vicktor’s gut. He swallowed a retort, closed his eyes and sighed. “Sorry.”

  Arkady was right. He didn’t need a new generation of enemies in the militia, and another stunt like that could route his next urgent phone call straight to the morgue.

  Arkady tapped his cigarette. The ash died to gray before it hit the floor. “Your shirt is too tight, Vicktor. You’ve changed. Ever since you got back from that stint in America, nothing is good enough for you. You see everything through American eyes…American cop eyes. Black and white. Don’t forget you are Russian. The law has shades of gray here.”

  A muscle tensed in Vicktor’s jaw. Arkady was from the old school, the days of propaganda and the Cold War, the simpler days when the bad guys were easily identifiable—they wore red, white, and blue.

  It hadn’t helped his relationship with his former chief when he had accepted the six-month internship in America. The friendship had taken further serious hits when he defected to the FSB, aka the former KGB, six months ago. The chief just didn’t get it—after the Wolf incident, the blunder of Vicktor’s militia career, Vicktor had to rescue himself from early retirement. Besides, the FSB had been chasing him like a hound since his training in the States, and after Roman had smoothed over the incident, they’d practically thrown him a welcome bash.

  “We’re on the same side, you know,” Vicktor said.

  Arkady drew on his cigarette as if he didn’t hear him.

  Vicktor suddenly wanted to dump this entire thing in Arkady’s lap. A lifetime of chasing the scum of society had left an ugly pit in his stomach. He preferred the intellectual sparring of the international crimes unit where he now worked. But the memory of Evgeny, all smiles and jokes, stripped his anger, leaving only aching.

  He needed answers. He wasn’t about to disappoint another person he cared about, especially posthumously. He’d find Evgeny’s killer even if he had to wrestle his pride into hard little knots.

  Vicktor dredged up a respectful tone. “Yes, sir.”

  2

  Vicktor banged out of his apartment building and spied Roman leaning back against his building, arms akimbo, wearing a stocking cap, a running suit, and a smile.

  “Missed you last night.”

  “I had to work.” The last thing Vicktor wanted to remember was the fact he’d missed out on a group chat. Like he had friends to spare. Vicktor made a face at him and began stretching from side to side. “I found Evgeny Lakarstin dead in his lab yesterday.”

  Roman went silent at that, his mouth in an O.

  “I was up until midnight answering questions and writing reports.”

  “Fun. Well, then I hate to be the one to tell you Mae’s in town. She’s pulling transportation duty for some Army brass. She told me to say hi to ‘Stripes.’”

  Okay, that hurt more than he would have expected, even with Roman’s warning. “Oh, really?” Just what he needed to make his day—the memory of Mae Lund, her right hook against his chin, the fact that she was over him enough to say hello, and the knowledge that she probably looked better than he had a right to imagine. Only she knew how much he needed her opinion, how he’d relished the nickname she gave him.

  “She made captain, by the way. She’s flying DC-10s.”

  Good girl. Mae had earned her stripes through grit and spunk, and in the active, objective part of his brain, he couldn’t blame her for not falling for the first Russian to flex his muscles. Even if he had done it saving her life.

  “I thought she was on Search and Rescue.”

  “Not when she can speak Russian. They have her translating too. By the way, David was online, as well.”

  The rising sun peeked through gaps in the tall buildings. It turned crisp, slightly frozen street puddles bright platinum and hinted at a beautiful spring day.

  “Let’s run,” Vicktor snapped. He didn’t know what irritated him more. That he’d been up until all hours describing Evgeny’s death scene for his old militia cohorts, that he’d slept with one hundred thirty pounds of Great Dane on his face, or that he’d missed a chance to check in with the only people who knew the nightmares that haunted him.

  Especially after a day when those nightmares seemed particularly fresh and brutal.

  Roman scrambled to keep up as Vicktor shot down the sidewalk toward the wide greening boulevard between Karl Marx Street and Lenin Street. Roman, of course, wouldn’t think of asking him to slow down, and that fact kept Vicktor at a speed that pushed his heart rate into overdrive.

  He didn’t care. Two weeks into his summer running habit, he needed an intense workout to drive Evgeny’s corpse from his mind. Internal snapshots of Evgeny had pushed sleep into the folds of eternity.

  He hardly noticed Roman behind him the entire kilometer to the river.

  The Amur River pushed yellow foam and brown ice in thick currents north to its Pacific mouth. Vicktor let the snappy wind comb his hatless head and chill the sweat on his brow. Coming up next to him, Roman gripped his knees and gulped frosty breaths. Remorse speared Vicktor. He shouldn’t wrestle his grief during Roman’s workout time.

  “Sorry, Roma,” he muttered, stopping and leaning against a stone wall that separated the beach from the boardwalk.

  Roman straightened, his forgiveness written in his signature lopsided grin. “Kak Dela, Vita? I’d say from this morning’s sprint we aren’t simply stretching our muscles. You trying to exorcise some personal demons?”

  Vicktor looked away from Roman’s intuitive hazel-green eyes. “You’re starting to sound like Preach.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Tell me what’s up.”

  Vicktor turned, braced himself on the wall and leaned in, forcing screams up his calf muscles. “It’s nothing. I’m just tired.”

  Roman crossed his arms and propped a hip on the stone. Wind whistled down the boardwalk, sifting through Vicktor’s Seattle PD sweatshirt. He shivered.

  “Tired?” Roman echoed after a bit. “Tired of what? Grieving your mother? Trying to make things right with your pop?”

  Vicktor tossed him a frown. “You are definitely sounding like Preach, or maybe Mae. Stop psychoanalyzing my life. I’m just…tired.” He stared at the dirty Amur. “Sometimes I just wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if it had been me who’d been shot instead of my father.”

  “You gotta go forward, pal.”

  “Yeah. Well, Evgeny sure isn’t going forward. I’m going to find his killer.”

  Roman nodded. “I know. But when you do, you’re still going to be exhausted.”

  Vicktor shook his head. “I know where you’re going with this, and I’m telling you before you start, ditch the God-talk. I’m not interested. You know God and I have issues. The bottom line is God isn’t going to solve my problems. Ever.”

  “Calm down, Stripes.” Roman held up his hands in surrender. “As your friend, I get to say that you’re wrong, but I’m on your side anyway.”

  “Let’s run.” Vicktor jogged back to the boulevard. He heard Roman fall in beside him and set a reasonable pace. They ran in silence, listening to the wind rustle through the trees and traffic fill the streets.

  It was just like Roman to foist his religion into Vicktor’s problems. He and David had been systematically ambushing him for years.

  They just didn’t know how it felt to experience God’s cold shoulder. He’d tried the God route, once upon a time, and sorry, no thanks. Not that he’d ever mentioned his trial run with God to Roman or David. He’d rather have his tongue skewered slowly.

  He was going to find Evgeny’s killer without God’s help. It just mattered too much to trust to a fickle God who did…or didn’t…come through.

  They ran in rhythm, vault
ing in one accord the craters in the broken sidewalk and murky puddles of mud. Crumpled paper cups and refuse frozen by winter’s embrace edged the path. Vicktor wondered if their national disregard for cleanliness irked Roman as much as it did him. Roman, too, had been to America, and Europe and even Japan once, and had seen the swept streets, the manicured lawns and the lush gardens. Nevertheless, Roman was forever flinging an easygoing smile into his assessment of life in Russia. Vicktor wondered if anything ever stymied his optimistic friend. Roman and Yanna were always telling Vicktor to loosen up, as if, somehow, that would help him find a new life for his handicapped father. Or help him wrestle the guilt of knowing he’d condemned the man to his threadbare armchair.

  So maybe his run was about more than exorcising Evgeny’s ghost from his mind. “Tell me about your latest love, Roma.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s hot. I spent yesterday at the gym, arguing with the dead weights, and the night before having a long and personal chat with a bowl of ramen noodles. I’m the man.” He shook his head. “Sorry. My long run as a single guy is in no imminent danger of ending.”

  “You expect too much, Romeo.” Having stood on the sidelines watching Roman trot through numerous short-lived relationships, he knew his friend wouldn’t stay single long. The man was a sponge for women, with his tousled brown hair, thick muscles and easy laughter. It was Roman who couldn’t seem to figure out what he wanted.

  “All I expect is a woman who cares about honesty and living a life for God.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think there is a rule about nuns getting married.”

  Roman elbowed him, and Vicktor dodged a puddle, laughing.

  “I’m serious. Those types of women don’t exist. Sure, you might find a Godly woman—look at Mae. How about Sarai? You had a good thing going with her back in college. But even those women have their hidden agendas. In general, women can’t be trusted.”

  “Ouch. That’s a pretty cynical statement, considering two of your best friends are women.” Roman veered around a meteor-sized crater in the middle of the sidewalk. “Seriously, though, you don’t trust women? Mae, Yanna?”