One Wrong Move

by Shannon McKenna

  Nina blinked. Her face was wet. The ambulance was pulling away, pushing its way through the crowd. It took Marya with it.

  Yellow crime scene tape fluttered and snapped in the gusty breeze. The images retreated as the ambulance did.

  She was Nina again, but she didn’t feel like herself. She felt like a year had gone by, a lifetime. Tears ran down her face, into her nose. She was sitting on the cracked, dirty sidewalk, on her butt. Second time she’d whacked it that day. It hurt, dully. “I’m OK,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Weak stomach. It’s so awful. Sorry.”

  She backed away. Don’t run. Stay calm. She spun, looking for . . .

  what? Shifty-eyed zombie ghouls, staring at her from a parked car?

  Tortured. That poor guy. Keep walking. Keep going. Slow and steady. Nobody here. Nobody here. She’d honed the vibe. Every item in her wardrobe was chosen to be unnoticeable.

  Her phone buzzed. She fished it out of her purse. It was Shira, a colleague at New Dawn. She held the phone to her ear. “Hey.”

  “Hey, you. Feeling better? Have you found someone to translate that audio file yet? Because I might have, if you haven’t.”

  “No, not yet.” She blurted it out. “He’s dead, Shira.”

  “What?” Shira’s voice sharpened. “Who’s dead?”

  “Yuri Marchuk, the cab driver. The one who dumped me and Helga at the hospital. Someone tortured him to death. There are cops everywhere.” She stumbled on a pavement crack, barely caught herself.

  “My God! Nina! Where are you? Are you out in the street somewhere? You left the hospital? What the hell were you thinking?”

  I wasn’t thinking. I was running for my life from zombie ghouls. She bit the words back. That would only confuse and terrify Shira, and her own personal terror and confusion was enough to deal with. She spun, in a slow, wobbly three-sixty, scanning the street for who the hell knew what. “Long story,” she said. “Tell you later. I’m in Manhattan.”

  Shira made a disapproving sound. “Well, that makes my call pointless, because I’m at your house right now. I used those spare keys you left for Derek last week. I was going to pick up some things for you. You know, a toothbrush, a book, some panties, whatever. But you’re not at the hospital anymore, so to hell with that.”

  Nina was touched. “Oh, Shira, that was sweet. Thank you.”

  “Oh, and a guy came looking for you today, right after I got back from visiting you at the hospital this morning,” Shira went on.

  “A guy?” Nina’s spine prickled nastily. “Who? What guy?”

  “He said he was Helga Kasyanov’s brother,” Shira said.

  “Sergei. Doesn’t look a thing like her, though. He said she’s a schizophrenic, dumping her meds, and that she thinks her family is trying to poison her. He can’t imagine how she’d have access to anything other than her own antipsychotics, which is toxic bad news for you, but not fatal.”

  “What? You just told him everything?” she burst out. “About me? Everything that happened with Helga? The syringe, and all that?”

  “Ah . . . ah . . . well, I, uh . . .” Shira stammered.

  “He was lying, Shira!” Her voice shook. “Helga didn’t have a brother! She was married, years ago, but she emigrated with her parents when she was fourteen. She had a daughter, but no brother!”

  “Oh. I . . . wow. Well, I told this guy about the recording—”

  Nina winced. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me, let me guess. He offered to translate it, right? I bet he’s just a prince of a guy.”

  “Nina. Back off. I don’t like what you’re insinuating.”

  “What did you tell him?” she demanded. “Did you tell him which hospital we were in?”

  “Well, ah.” Shira sounded confused. “No, not exactly. He just, ah, guessed it. In fact, he guessed a whole lot of stuff. It was weird. Like, I would find myself talking about stuff that I hadn’t known I told him.”

  “What did he look like?” Nina’s heart thudded.

  “Ah . . . Nina. You’re overreacting, and I don’t appreciate—”

  “Just tell me, goddamnit! What did he look like?”

  “OK, OK! He was tall, dark, pretty good looking, some acne scarring, forty, maybe. Nice clothes. Expensive. Flirtatious. Satisfied?”

  “Dark, you said? Not bald?”

  “No,” Shira said. “Lots of hair. Dark. He had a ponytail, a slick little playboy one.”

  “Was he with a woman? A blond, pretty one?”

  “No, he was alone. Stop snarling. I don’t know how I ended up telling the guy so much, but I was rattled by what happened to you too! I judged it to be more important to get a clue what might have been in that syringe. I made a judgment call. I screwed up. Sorry, OK?”

  “OK.” Nina peeked over her shoulder, scanning the stream of cars. “Did you tell him my name?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” Shira snapped. “He already knew your name.”

  Then how had he found her? Why was any of this about her at all? She tripped over a broken bit of sidewalk, as images came at her, horribly vivid. Sickening realization, along with it.

  They tortured him. Cut him to pieces.

  Papa. Oh, God. Your hands. Your ears. Your eyes.

  Yuri. Yuri was how they had found her. Oh, poor Yuri.

  She pressed her hand against her belly, sick and faint. Shira continued to talk, but Nina’s arm dropped. The thin, tinny chatter from the phone had lost all meaning. She thumbed it off as her mind spun, feeling for a pattern, a plan. A way through the maze.

  If the ghouls had tracked her to the hospital, they could certainly find her house. But why would they bother? Because of something Helga had said to her? And she hadn’t even understood it.

  Her phone beeped. A message from Shira. The number that the mysterious Sergei had left. Huh. Maybe she should just call the guy. Maybe he’d explain everything. Or make her an offer she couldn’t refuse. She could beg him to call off the monsters. She’d do anything they wanted, if they would just make it all go away.

  Her snort of laughter disintegrated into tears. She could see it now.

  Nina Christie, bargaining with zombies, torturers, and murderers, with some coin she didn’t even know she had. Yeah, that was bound to turn out real well.

  She had to go home, risk or no risk. She didn’t have anything to tell the police that wouldn’t get her locked in the psych ward.

  She didn’t have a close enough friend nearby to ask for help, not with something as scary as this. She needed clothes, a passport, her laptop.

  The subway ride was difficult. Survival instinct prodded her to study her surroundings, but every time she looked at a person directly, the weight of that person’s life crashed down on her. She tried staring at feet instead. Feet said less than faces. Still, it was better now. If she kept the nobody here pulsing out, the gray fuzz up and strong, she blocked most of it. But it took every ounce of her concentration.

  The subway stop was a long walk from her house. Her nervous, ragged trot soon turned into a hell-for-leather sprint, skirt flapping, sandals sliding. Phone in one hand, glasses in the other.

  She finally reached the narrow brick row house she’d grown up in. It didn’t feel like a safe haven, but it had a door that locked.

  She longed for a shower, but her crawlies were creeping worse every second that went by. She just wanted to move. She gathered stuff in feverish haste, scrabbling in the drawer for her passport. She hurried up to her bedroom to change, the small room at the back. Years after Stan’s death, she had not been able to use the master bedroom. She could not sleep in a room where Stan had slept.

  Stupid, she told herself as she yanked off clothes and pried her fuzzy coil of hair out of the scrunchie. She should sell this place, buy something smaller. It didn’t look like she was on track to have a family.

  And she heard it. Squeak-pop.

  She went still as death. The warped stair, the fifth one, made that sound when a foot was put on it. Her insides fro
ze. She listened ’til her ears ached. How the hell . . . ? The alarm should have gone off!

  There. A shush of fabric on fabric. The faint squeak of shoe soles against wood. Someone coming up the stairs. Slowly. Sneakily.

  Ghouls, chasing her. Helga, jabbing the needle into her arm, her eyes red dened, desperate. Yuri’s mutilated body. She stared around the room, stark staring naked, lungs clenched around a burning bubble of trapped air.

  No way out except for the window, but it was swollen shut, as warped as the squeaking stairs. The house was old and creaky, and she didn’t love it enough to take proper care of it. She’d never get that window open, not without a baseball bat.

  She grabbed her phone, her purse, and dove for the closet.

  She’d paid a considerable sum to a carpenter to design her closet when she’d moved in. It was the only change she’d made.

  She’d been reluctant to remodel the place until she was sure she could stand to live in it, but the closet was a must. The second bathroom that Stan had installed had created a recessed wall in the back bedroom. It made the closet space much deeper than a closet needed to be, so it had been a simple matter of having a false wall inserted there. A click, and a panel slid open, a space just wide enough for a terrified smallish person to slither into.

  Just a few feet deep. She’d been storing boxes of her mother’s old reference books in there, while she gathered the nerve to get rid of them, but there was space behind the stack of boxes. At eye level, to the side, a tiny knothole made a natural peephole.

  Nina pulled the outside closet door closed, and slid into the narrow aperture. Snick, the panel clicked into place.

  She shivered in the inky darkness. The challenge now was to keep her teeth from clacking. She fastened the manual latch from the inside, so that anyone touching the back panel wouldn’t accidently engage the opening device. The guy who built the closet had suggested a panic room, but that didn’t feel right to her. If the bad guy knew you were there, he could lay seige. You could be starved out, bullied out, burned out. She didn’t want to huddle in a bunker while her assailant banged and threatened.

  She wanted to be invisible.

  The door to her bedroom opened, with its shrill, dry creak.

  Nobody here. Nobody here. Nothing to see. Nothing to see.

  She kept her fear tucked in tight. Stayed very small. Her hand, clutching the phone, was wet. Sweat pooled on her forehead, dripped down her back. She felt faint. So small. No one here. So quiet.

  The inner directive seemed to come from so far away. Barely perceptible over the roaring of her ears, the thudding of her heart. Footsteps clumped around her room. Closet doors were flung open. A needle of light from the knothole pierced her darkness.

  She leaned as close as she dared to the hole. Saw a man’s sil-houette, then his face when he used the barrel of a big pistol to sweep her hanging clothes aside. Tall, dark, fortyish. Pouches under his eyes, cruel lines carved around his mouth, pockmarks from acne scarring. A ponytail, like Shira had described. He barked out orders, in what sounded like Russian. Heavy footsteps clomped out. She heard someone in the bathroom behind her. Crash, the shower box met its end. Muffled thuds sounded from the master bedroom, on the other side. At least three guys.

  Ping. A message arrived on the phone in her hand. Oh fuck!

  She muted the thing with a trembling thumb. It glowed in the dark.

  From Lily. The pockmarked guy had heard it. His head turned, his eyes slitted as he scanned for the origin of the sound.

  You didn’t hear anything, she told him silently. Random beeps and clicks and squeaks. Clocks, phones, appliances. Every house is full of them. She pulled in even tighter, smaller, and thumbed open Lily’s text. The part of her that read it was a tiny speck, miles deep, inside herself.

  Sorry about Aaro. We’ll work on him. With thumbscrews.

  She hit “reply,” texted feverishly.

  Thugsinmyhouse. Inclosetnow. 3+guys?

  Spk russian? Callcopsnowpls!!

  Send. Twenty hammer-blow heartbeats later, another message appeared, blessedly silent this time.

  On the way. Hang in there.

  She stuffed the relief down deep, kept herself tucked up. Tight and small. Tiny gray thing. She peered through the knothole. He stood in the middle of her room, eyes closed, nostrils wide. Feeling for her.

  With his mind. God. That guy was feeling for her with his mind.

  She clamped down on panic. Not here. Nothing to see. Small gray thing. Pebble, dry leaf, gum wrapper, bottle cap.

  But the pockmarked man persisted, his mind prodding for her like a rough, lascivious hand between her legs.

  Chapter 6

  “Look, I’m just saying,” Miles wheedled. “It’s not that much to ask. Listen to it while you’re driving to the hospice! You won’t miss a beat!”

  “Get off my back,” Aaro growled. “I have enough to deal with, fending off Bruno.”

  “Oh, come on. Just show them you care. Throw them a bone.”

  “Like Bruno would be happy with a bone? He won’t be happy until I spill a couple buckets of my heart’s blood.”

  “You could have said what’s going on with your aunt,” Miles scolded. “It’s like you want them to think you’re an icy-hearted asshole.”

  Aaro hung up, without comment. He’d never meant for Miles to know about Tonya at all, but he’d been in the room with Aaro when he got the call, and the guy was a goddamn walking antenna. He hadn’t stopped nagging until Aaro had spilled it. Out of sheer exhaustion.

  That was the price he paid for having a collaborator. Things had been simpler when it was just him, in sweet solitude. And the three-car accident that had hung him up for well over an hour on the Belt Parkway was divine punishment. Chastising him for not helping the sobbing social worker. Not that she’d been sobbing when she talked to him. Spitting, was more like it. Tough chick. Like boot leather.

  After the accident finally cleared, he’d been hanging out in the long line of cars bottlenecked for the exit onto Flatbush, contemplating his sins. The cars were finally starting to move. He’d been spending the dead time staring at his phone. The multi -

  media message from Nina Christie glowed reproachfully on the screen. He was bored stiff. Might as well amuse himself by listening to the recording. Then he could call her back, let her spit at him again. It had been stimulating, in a kinky, masochistic sort of way. She had a pretty voice. Low, husky. Feminine.

  Hell, after hours of staring at brake lights, he was actually getting curious about the damn thing. Desperate for something else to think about. Anything else. Even something suck-ass.

  He pulled Nina’s number up from the call log, on impulse, and hit “call.” Was alarmed at his own action. What, was he going to apologize? Yikes. Dangerous. He didn’t know the choreography of an apology.

  No problem, though. She’d blocked his number. She didn’t want no stinkin’ apology from him. She’d given him the digital finger. Ka-pow.

  Aww. He’d made a new little friend. His very special talent.

  He was vaguely surprised to find himself grinning. His facial muscles weren’t used to that kind of exercise. They were creaky.

  The last bit of resistance in him shifted into something like resignation. OK, already. He’d listen to the recording, then he’d call up Bruno, and give him the gist of it. Bruno could call the woman back. Safer that way, with a nice, thick Bruno buffer to protect him from random, pissed-off female wierdness.

  But Bruno called him, just as he was about to call. He hit

  “talk.”

  “I surrender,” he said. “I’ll listen to the fucking file, already, OK? Just leave me alone for a few while I do it.”

  “Never mind the tape!” Bruno yelled. “Go to Nina’s house!

  Now!”

  Aaro was confused. “House? Isn’t she at the hospital?”

  “She left the hospital! She’s at her house, and the bad guys are inside with her! Lily called the cops
, but you’re closer. Take Flatbush right now, and floor it!”

  Aaro gaped. “How do you know where I am? You sneaky son of a bitch, did you tag my phone?”

  “Take it up with Davy. He gave me the frequency. That’s not the point! Move it, Aaro! She’s hiding in an upstairs bedroom closet!”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Aaro moaned, muscling himself into the turn lane amid blaring horns. So the dismissal from Nina Christie was not the conclusion to this episode, but just a foretaste of pain and annoyance to come. To say nothing of the possible bullets.

  “You armed?” Bruno asked.

  Aaro grunted his assent. Understatement. Going anywhere within five hundred miles of the Arbatov family made him nervous.

  “Nina texted that there’s three, maybe more. Speaking Russian, she thinks. Go up Flatbush, left onto Avenue U, and then right on Ramsey. If you hit Quentin Road, you’ve gone too far, so don’t. Three blocks up, third house on the right, five fifty-four.

  Move your ass!”

  The car surged forward. Here was his chance to redeem himself for the colossal fuck-up six months ago, if he chose to accept it.

  Bedroom closet? How did this shit fall to him? Did he have a note pinned on his shirt that he didn’t know about? He’d spent a lifetime deliberately not giving a shit about anybody’s business but his own, unless he was paid big bucks to do so. Stone cold, out for himself. Taught by the best. And yet, here he was. Speeding down that exit ramp.

  He picked up inappropriate speed. Horns blared. Bruno yakked away at him from the phone that lay on the passenger seat. Aaro ignored him. He’d do this his way, whatever that way might be. He didn’t have a clue yet, but something would come to him. He hoped.

  In fewer than five minutes, he sped past Nina’s house. A bland brick row house among other unremarkable row houses. Unbroken line of cars parked in front. He jerked to a stop around the corner, snapped open the case for the folding stock Saiga. He’d considered himself a lunatic, bringing the shotgun along, to say nothing of the special loaded mags he’d prepared; sintered metal breaching round up top for blasting out a lock, then alternating buckshot shells and one-ounce slugs.