by M. C. Grant
“And Lebed was jealous?” I ask. “Of your bond?”
Joe shakes his head again. “Not jealous, but nervous that maybe Mr. Izmaylovsky was spilling secrets or confidences that weren’t for an outsider’s ears.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Never. Not once. But it didn’t matter; Lebed didn’t believe me.”
“So Lebed told you to kill the boss,” I say.
Joe’s eyes go wide in surprise before he nods. “He gave me the poison to slip into the old man’s drink and promised me a quarter-million payday.” He glances over at his daughters. “I thought we could all disappear. Your mom, me, all of us. Live like royalty in San Diego or Seattle or Texas, even—anywhere but here.”
“But he double-crossed you,” I press.
Joe nods again. “He sent two goons to finish me off. I may be stupid, but I’m not naïve. When I saw they didn’t bring the cash, I ran … I’ve been running ever since.”
“So why is he scared of you?” I ask. “You can’t have any evidence.”
“Just the poison,” he says. “I kept the vial. Mr. Izmaylovsky’s death was ruled as natural causes, which allowed the Red Swan to assume the throne. But if the old guard back in Russia knew it was an assassination, they’d demand Lebed’s head on a platter. Respect and honor is huge with these monsters, they don’t want anyone getting the idea that it’s okay to bump off their elders.”
“So why have you never come forward?” I ask.
“Because it would mean my head, too. And Lebed’s men wouldn’t stop at me. They practice scorched-earth revenge, I had no choice but to hide.”
Roxanne exhales sharply and says, “Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen, father. Did you ever see our mother at the end? Riddled with disease and crawling on her knees for another hit. Did you ever hear my screams, or Bailey’s? If your head could have stopped that, then I wish to God you’d served it up.”
“It wouldn’t have been just me,” Joe protests. “That’s what I’m—”
“But you’re the only one who got away,” argues Roxanne. “Your scars are barely skin deep compared to ours.”
The dam behind Joe’s eyes finally cracks and a lone tear trickles down his cheek. “I missed you all so much. I just … just didn’t know how to help.”
Roxanne snorts and glares out the window while Bailey crosses the room to give her father a hug.
“Is it okay if I take a picture?” I ask, knowing my timing sucks but wanting it over with. “For the paper.”
Joe frowns and Bailey sniffles.
“It gives added weight to the story,” I explain. “We need the photos to make the cover and get everybody reading.”
Reluctantly, Joe nods.
“Can you join them?” I ask Roxanne. “Please.”
With a world-weary sigh, Roxanne peels herself away from the window and walks to the desk, where she sits with her back to her father and her arms folded tight across her chest. She practically sneers at the camera.
I quickly snap off a couple of frames before any of them change their mind.
“So what now?” I ask, dropping the camera back in my pocket.
“I need to get back,” says Joe. “My skin is crawling being this close to it all again.” He turns to his daughters. “I wish you’d think about joining me.”
“Not gonna happen,” says Roxanne. “My life may be shit, but it’s the only one I know.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” says Bailey. “You could live with me. We could rebuild.” She looks over at me. “If the Red Swan will let us?”
“I think we can make a bargain with him,” I say. “He leaves us all alone and I don’t mention the assassination of his boss.”
Joe’s eyes go wide. “But you promised.”
I shake my head and show my teeth. “I promised your daughters first. If Lebed doesn’t want to play ball, I’ll publish everything and send it directly to Moscow. But I want to get back to my normal life, and your girls want to make a new one.”
“You bitch,” he hisses. “You tricked me.”
“No,” I snap back. “I’m just being the parent you never were and putting the lives of your daughters first.”
Joe rocks back but then springs forward again and bares his own teeth. “I want that camera,” he growls. “If you’re not bringing Lebed down, you can’t use my photo.”
“Not gonna happen,” I say. “The camera’s mine. Let’s go girls. We’ve outstayed our welcome.”
As I step forward, my Samaritan bars the door and holds out one of his gloved hands in a gimme-gimme gesture.
I peer up into his face.
“You know I’m not giving it to you,” I say. “And you should also know that you’re not taking it. Don’t even try.”
I feel the bearded man moving in behind me. I snake my hand beneath my trenchcoat to the small of my back and spin, my arm whipping out at top speed.
The Governor collides with the side of his skull in a bone-crunching crack that makes his eyes roll and his knees buckle. Roxanne laughs as the bearded man topples sideways to the floor with blood spurting from his head. Before the Samaritan can react, I’ve spun back so that he finds himself staring down the abyss of the Governor’s barrel.
“I’ve loaded this with .410 shotgun shells,” I tell him. “Your skull will explode like a fucking watermelon. Now stand aside.”
As a former journalist, he’s intelligent enough to hold up his hands and retreat away from the door.
Keeping my gun trained on him, I glance over at the two sisters. “You coming?”
Roxanne grins as she steps onto and over the groaning form of the yard owner to join me at the door. Bailey hesitates only slightly, gazing into her father’s eyes before kissing him gently on the cheek and sliding off the desk.
Together, we exit the trailer.
Forty-Four
Outside, we feel most vulnerable within the circle of light. The looming cliffs around us take on the shapes of frozen monsters, as though a futuristic battle took place in a bygone age, and the air tastes of copper.
“Are they just going to let us walk out of here?” Roxanne whispers.
“What choice do they have?” I counter.
A voice yells from the trailer behind us: “Wait!” Joe cries. “Please. Just one minute.”
I stop and the three of us turn.
Joe descends from the trailer alone, his hands raised to show they’re empty, and walks out to meet us. “This plan of yours,” he says when he reaches us. “What makes you think Lebed will believe you?”
I remove the digital tape recorder from my pocket and hold it up for him to see.
“I recorded everything. Your confession makes a compelling story and the only thing Lebed can do is deny it, but by that time the damage is done. There are already people within his own organization who don’t trust him. This would give them the nudge they need to stage a coup of their own.”
“How do you know that?” Joe asks.
“One of them tried to shoot me,” I say. “But I shot him instead.”
Joe pales. “Will you tell Lebed about the farm? Tim and Eileen shouldn’t suffer after all the work they’ve done.”
My eyes soften. “As far as I’m concerned, I have no idea where you go after you leave here. Tim saved my life, more than once. His secret will never leave my lips.”
Joe sighs with relief. “OK. I’ll have to trust you.” He opens his arms to his girls. “One last hug?”
Roxanne doesn’t move, but Bailey breaks ranks in the same instant that a supersonic crack renders the air.
I feel a sharp heat passing above me, so close that wisps of loose hair snap and curl. But the bullet isn’t meant for me.
Joe’s left eye implodes and is forced out the back of his skull. There’s no need for a second shot. Jo
e is dead before he hits the ground.
I spin around as Bailey screams and Roxanne drops to her knees in shock. The watchers from the shadows are rushing toward us, but not one of them is carrying a gun.
I peer deeper, rending the shadows apart, searching for movement in a broken landscape of sharp angles and dented curves. Near the fence, I see the shape of a man with a rifle over his shoulder. He isn’t tall and his silhouette is far too familiar.
“No!” I cry out. “No, no, no!”
I take off running, heading for the fence, desperate to have my own eyes proved wrong.
The silhouette turns, freezes in place for a second, and then vanishes.
“Wait!” I scream. “You fucking wait!”
I take the corner at blind speed, several yards from the front gate, and run into an iron bar that nearly removes my head from my shoulders.
With an anguished cry, my feet fly into the air and my back thumps to the ground, knocking the air from my lungs.
“Son of a bitch,” I wheeze airlessly.
Attempting to scramble back to my feet, I discover the iron bar is actually attached to an iron man.
“I have been looking for you,” says a thick Russian accent.
Glaring down at me is a stone-faced killer with a bandaged right hand where a bullet recently took his trigger finger.
“Shit! Is Lebed here?” I ask.
The killer moves his massive, stone-like skull. “We come to collect the man’s head. You are a bonus.”
I try to sit up, but the killer leans forward and knocks me back down with the intensity of his stare.
“Look, I’m sorry about your finger. Maybe it backfired.”
The killer growls. “You cost me my profession and you make joke?”
“Maybe you’re lucky,” I say. “You guys don’t actually have a retirement plan, do you? Now you can spend your days fishing or drowning puppies for orphans or something.”
“I want to know who shot me.”
“He told me he actually missed. He was aiming for the window.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“His name?”
“Even though I’m super pissed at him right now, it ain’t gonna happen.”
“Then I hurt you.”
“Let’s face it,” I say. “You were planning to hurt me anyway.”
The killer grins. “That is true.”
“Bring it, nine fingers.”
With a snarl, the killer reaches down with his good hand to grab my hair, but he isn’t expecting me to fight dirty. I use his own momentum to jerk forward and slam my forehead into his groin, which loosens his grip. I loosen it the rest of the way by slicing his wrist open with Lily.
As he reels back in shock at the slippery depth of the cut, I clamber to my knees and give him one last warning. “Back away now or I finish it.”
“I eat little girls like you for breakfast.”
“No,” I answer. “Not like me.”
When he reaches for me again, I stab the knife into his thigh just beneath the groin and slice upward. Blood drains from his face and gushes over my hand. He freezes in place, sensing the seriousness of the wound. His bleeding left hand thumps onto my chest, but there’s no power left in it to push me away.
My voice is cold and edged in steel. “I’m told you can survive this if you don’t remove the knife … but it’s my knife.”
I pull Lily free and watch the killer drop to his knees, a pool of warm, thick blood widening around him.
“Put pressure on it and call for your friend. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
A scream shatters the darkness behind me.
Bailey.
It’s followed by a banshee’s howl.
Roxanne.
I glance once at the gate where my assassin’s silhouette vanished and turn back toward the light.
When I reach the circle of light, Bailey and Roxanne are clutching each other tight. Roxanne’s face is cut and turning purple where something hard and sharp has cracked her cheekbone and eye socket, while Bailey appears to have aged a hundred years.
The second Russian killer is kneeling beside Joe’s body and holding the sisters at gunpoint. None of the other watchers have stuck around, not even my Samaritan.
“You!” the Russian calls when he sees me approach. “Give me his head and I leave.”
Bailey and Roxanne stare at me in horror, but it’s not until I walk farther into the light that I realize why. My clothes are spattered in fresh blood, and while it’s not exactly Carrie at the prom, it’s a lot.
“It’s OK,” I assure them, “it’s not mine.” I point at the second killer. “I ran into his partner.”
The Russian turns his gun on me in confusion.
“Serge?” he asks.
“If you get him help, he may live, but you’ll have to be damn quick. He’s bleeding out.”
The killer glances down at Joe’s corpse.
“Don’t worry,” I add. “I’ll take a photo. Lebed will get all the proof of death he needs.”
“Are you bullshitting me?” he asks.
“Hey, you’re the one with the gun and the dying friend. I’m doing you a favor.”
“I should kill you all.”
“That’s one way.” I stab my thumb at Bailey and wrinkle my nose. “But start with her.”
As Bailey gasps in shock, the killer’s eyes flicker toward her; in that instant I have the Governor in my hand and the hammer cocked.
“I tried to play this nice,” I say. “But know that I will shoot you unless you leave.”
“I am faster.”
I don’t blink. “Maybe.”
The killer studies my eyes for a moment and says, “Pity you are not Russian.”
“Yeah?” I sneer. “Pity you’re not handsome.”
He laughs and slides his gun into a shoulder holster beneath his jacket before rising to his feet and disappearing back into the shadows.
When he’s gone, I shove the Governor into my waistband and cross to the two sisters.
“You guys OK?”
Bailey moans. “He was going to cut off dad’s head. He actually had a knife and he … he—”
“It’s okay,” I say soothingly. “He’s gone now.”
“But how did they know we were here?” Bailey asks. “We were so careful.” She looks over at her father’s corpse. “All this time searching and now … now he’s really gone.”
Roxanne fixes me with a weary, one-eyed glare, but I can’t meet it.
This time, I know she isn’t the one to blame.
Forty-Five
“Please,” says Mr. French. “Indulge me.”
I accept the cigars and the large snifter of brandy with gratitude before heading out to the front steps. It’s late, very late, but Mr. French’s light was still on and I was too amped up to sleep. He also loaned me a soft fleece blanket to wrap around my shoulders, which makes me feel like a young girl again, camping out under the stars.
I take a sip of brandy and snip the end off the six-and-a-half-inch, caramel-skinned Cohiba. It lights with just a few puffs and tastes of white sand, blue sea, rich soil, and a simpler time.
The brandy is smooth, rich, and luxurious, like something you just know you can’t really afford.
“Are you celebrating?” asks a voice in the darkness.
“No,” I answer and hold up an unlit cigar. “I’m waiting for you.”
Pinch climbs the stairs to sit beside me. “We could just share,” he suggests.
“No,” I answer. “Not this time.”
With a shrug, Pinch accepts the cigar, snips off the end, and lights it. “Did you bring me a brandy, too?” he asks.
I shake my head. “That’s my indulgence.”
<
br /> “Ahh.”
We sit in silence, smoking our cigars, until I ask, “Why did you do it?”
“Lebed made me an offer.”
“A hundred grand?”
He takes a deep puff and exhales. “Your life.”
I bristle. “I had that under control.”
He takes another puff. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” I protest. “I had Joe’s confession on tape. Lebed hired him to kill Alimzhan Izmaylovsky.”
“Lebed knows what Joe would say, and he’s already rounding up everyone he thinks would take action against him. His lawyers are also ready to march into your offices if you even try to mention his name. It’ll never make print.”
“My editor would never—”
“Lebed would buy the paper if he had to. Everything is for sale. Your editor would either toe the line or be replaced. As would you.”
“Son of a bitch.”
He smirks. “That’s being too kind.”
“So if he has it all worked out, why kill Joe?”
“Unfinished business.”
“And the sisters?”
“They’re part of the deal. He’ll leave them alone.”
“So you’re my white knight, is that it?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
Pinch goes to flick his ash, but I touch his hand to stop him.
“The ash helps to reduce the temperature of the burning tobacco,” I tell him. “It creates an air-block, cooling the smoke and slowing the burn. It improves the taste.”
Pinch smiles. “Mr. French tell you that?”
I try to resist but end up smiling back. “He did. He’s very wise, is Mr. French.”
We smoke some more until I ask, “How did you know where to find us?”
“Trade secret.”
“You couldn’t have tailed us,” I say. “Nobody could. I didn’t even know where we were half the time.” I blow a cloud of smoke and watch it change shapes. “You knew the address, didn’t you?”
