Izzy stepped out of the car, his shoulder and neck screaming at him in pain, and lifted himself to his feet.
He said, “Why don’t you just die?”
Matveev grinned and flicked the smoke into the meadow grass.
“Almost there,” he said, with no trace of accent. “But you first.”
“God didn’t give you cancer,” Izzy said. “Neither did Cynthia Ramos, or Byron Twillig, or Teresa Montgomery.”
“Twillig,” Matveev said disdainfully. “Deacon just got in the fucking way.”
“Who else, then? Who else got in the way or had to die because you’re mad at your God, Russ?”
“Teresa,” he said, “isn’t dead.”
“Because she could bring you others,” Izzy said. It only occurred to him as he said it, and his mouth dropped open. “The counseling center, or maybe support groups, after you wore out whichever ones you gave up on when the cancer just got worse. She knew others on the edge. Easy pickings.”
“Some.”
“But she’d run out of use eventually.”
“Eventually,” Matveev agreed.
“You’re psychotic.”
Matveev shrugged and winced again.
“What about the rave?” Izzy said. “What’s that to you?”
“Like you said. Easy pickings.” He straightened up with considerable difficulty, rising to his full height and looking down his narrow nose at Izzy. “Everyone wants to live forever.”
Izzy snorted. He stepped forward, closing the gap between him and Matveev.
“Why Cynthia?” he spat. “She wasn’t easy. She didn’t want whatever mystical bullshit you’re selling, Russ. Why her?”
“She was not happy,” Matveev said simply. “Cynthia was not a girl who loved to be alive. I could have had you, too. Me and my brother. Easy. But you like life, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Izzy said in a low growl. “I like life.”
“There it is, then.”
Ruslan Matveev started chuckling. It began soft, deep in his throat, but his shoulders began to bounce as the laughter erupted out of him in a phlegmy peal. He grasped tight to the Mustang to keep balance. Tears formed in his eyes and spilled into the hollows of his skeletal face.
Somewhere in the distance a siren squealed. Noah slumped over onto the driver’s side seat and said, “Izzy, please.”
Izzy ignored him, and he lunged for Matveev.
His right hand shot out first, grabbing Matveev by the throat and tightening while his left curled into a fist and landed a solid punch at his sternum. Matveev groaned and his eyes bulged, but he resumed the laughter as soon as the air sucked back into his lungs.
“That’s it,” he rasped. “Beat a dying man.”
“No, Russ,” Izzy hissed. “I’m going to kill one.”
He threw Matveev back against the door, slamming it shut, and hit him hard on the chin. Matveev’s head snapped back and Izzy’s knuckles throbbed. Blood welled up at Matveev’s lips. He pursed them, moved his cheeks, and spat a red glob at Izzy. The bloody saliva sprayed Izzy’s left eye. He spun away, clawing at his face to wipe it out. Matveev chortled.
The last knuckle on his right hand aching, Izzy wiped the eye with his left, certain he’d managed a boxer’s break. He’d treated and cast dozens of them over the years, shattered second or third metacarpal bones from fighting—or just plain beatings. Privately he’d always harshly judged those patients for their brutality or abuse, and now he had one of his own to remember for the rest of his life when he’d look at the sunken flesh where a knuckle once protruded. Right now, he couldn’t have cared less.
He blinked his eye clear and turned to hit Matveev again.
Noah cried, “Stop it, Izzy!”
Matveev collapsed against the sideview mirror, gasping for air and still trying to snigger at Izzy.
And the Mustang’s passenger side door creaked open as someone pushed his way out of the car.
The brother, Izzy thought, squeezing his fist closed in spite of the pain. These were the men who came into his apartment to threaten him. Unarmed, and they left him alive—because Izzy Bishop liked being alive.
This man was neither deathly thin nor visibly ill. His jawline was red and beginning to swell on one side from the impact, and his right eye didn’t open all the way. His dark hair was shaved almost to the skin, his neck thick and corded. He looked like a man who used to lift a lot of weights with his muscle now going to fat, but he remained daunting.
Ruslan Matveev’s legs gave out and he dropped to the grass with a hard grunt. His brother cleared the Mustang and went round the back end, his shaggy brow lowered over small, black eyes. This was the man who threw Izzy up against his record shelf. Now he looked primed to do much worse.
“Don’t touch him,” the other Matveev shouted. “Don’t you touch him.”
“He’s a murderer,” Izzy said. “He’s crazy. Are you crazy, too?”
“Shut up. Don’t talk about him. He’s fucking sick.”
When the brother came around to Izzy’s side, he had a black steel baton in his hand. His scowl deepened and he raised the baton as he approached.
“He’s sick in the head,” Izzy said. “Don’t do this.”
“Fuck you. He’s my brother. You’re nothing.”
His bottom lip curled out and trembled, and his eyebrows twisted up into a tight wrinkle on his forehead. He looked like he was about to cry. Instead, he swung the baton at Izzy’s head. Izzy threw his arm up in defense, trying to sidestep the blow. He caught the baton at the wrist and felt the carpals crumble under the broken skin. Izzy cried out, spun away. Blind with tears and the sharp agony scorching in his brain, he screamed and staggered into the street.
“You are nothing,” Ruslan’s brother roared.
He lurched forward, favoring his left leg, and raised the baton above his head. Izzy reeled backward and his feet turned one over the other, sending him crashing to the asphalt. Slick with sweat and dazed with pain, he tried to push himself up with his ruined wrist, which snapped back, smashing the back of the hand flush against the top of his forearm. His throat swelled with a scream, but all he could do was wheeze and gag. Izzy lay on his side in the road, his consciousness waning.
The siren grew louder and split into two distinct cadences. Izzy closed his eyes. Matveev’s brother scraped his shoes over the pavement in his approach, then let loose a prolonged moan, followed by a muted thump. Izzy waited for the anguish sure to come from the baton’s last strike. But it never came.
The last he thing he thought before the darkness consumed him was to wonder where the man had struck the fatal blow.
Forty
“Baby. Baby, wake up.”
Izzy’s eyelids fluttered, then squeezed shut against the bright light. He thought someone was shining a flashlight in his face, but after another couple of attempts realized it was only the daylight.
Noah’s face was spattered with blood, most of it dry and starting to turn brown. His hair was wet with it. He lay on his side, facing Izzy, who strained to understand why it was so damn bright in the bedroom, and whose bedroom they were in. Did Noah open all the curtains and shades? Why couldn’t he just let him sleep in?
Izzy said, “What time is it.” His throat ached for the effort of it.
“I don’t know,” Noah said.
“Turn off the alarm.”
“It’s sirens. They’re almost here.”
“Sirens,” Izzy said, and he lifted his eyes over and beyond Noah’s prostrate body on the macadam, to the two crumpled vehicles behind him, still spewing smoke. Ruslan Matveev leaned against the Mustang, his legs splayed out and head slumped to his chest. Not far from him laid his brother, curled up in the meadow grass, grasping his head with both hands and squealing. One of his legs was twisted badly out of shape, the knee bending the wrong way. Izzy said, “The hell.”
“You missed it,” Noah said. “I was your knight in shining armor.”
“What,” Izzy said. The
rest got stuck in his throat and he struggled to swallow.
“If he’d seen me coming, we’d both be screwed.”
“You hurt?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
Noah snorted, then flinched. Izzy was laying on his badly broken wrist and hand, but was afraid to move. He tried his other arm, cautiously, and found it sore but workable. Slowly, he brought his hand to Noah’s face and gently touched his chin and cheek.
Noah said, “Your eyes are back to normal. I’m glad.”
“My eyes?”
“They changed. You changed. It was kind of scary.”
“I’m sorry,” Izzy said.
“They’re here,” Noah said.
The ambulance turned where Izzy had turned, right before Matveev rammed them, and came to a stop several yards away. Two police cruisers pulled up beside and behind it, lights flashing but sirens silent. Doors slammed and shoes scuffed pavement. Someone said, “What in the shit happened here?”
“We’re okay,” Izzy muttered. “I’m a nurse.”
And Noah laughed until it hurt too much to breathe.
It felt strange to receive treatment in an emergency room at all, but one he’d never seen and by people he’d never met made the experience that much more surreal for Izzy Bishop. He had been X-rayed, popped into the MRI, had the bones set and cast, and shot full of morphine. He dozed on and off in his own little curtained bay, and took notice of the light green color of the curtain. At Stoneridge, they were blue.
The staff was indifferent, if not exactly unfriendly, and asked few questions. One of the more apposite ones pertained to his emergency medical contact, something Izzy had never in his life set up. There had never been anyone he trusted enough for the job.
“Noah Flaherty,” he said without much thought. “He’s a patient somewhere in here, too.”
“Then would you be his?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
More interested in his circumstances were the deputies who responded to the scene on that erstwhile quiet, residential street up in Pflugerville. These came from the Travis County Sheriff’s Department rather than the APD, though Izzy suspected they’d had the same sensitivity training instructor as his pal Woorten downtown. They had all worn campaign hats and requisite mustaches at the scene. Izzy noted only the cookie-dusters remained inside the hospital.
The deputies wanted to know everything from the minutiae of the incident itself to Izzy’s most intimate personal details. They warned him that a background check was being performed, and that he would not be allowed to speak with Noah until he, too, had been questioned thoroughly. The eldest of the trio, a square-jawed deputy with a nametag identifying him as byers, advised Izzy he was permitted to contact an attorney at any time. Izzy requested only Detective Sergeant César Esperanza of the Austin Police Department Homicide Unit.
With that, he concluded the interview and took a brief nap.
Esperanza was there when he awoke. He’d brought a cup of coffee in a paper cup, which awaited Izzy on a small, stainless steel table beside his narrow ER bed.
“I tried to reach your boss,” Esperanza said. “Haven’t gotten through yet.”
“Jarvis?” Izzy asked, groggily. He reached for the coffee. It tasted like lead.
“No, Forbes.”
“Not my boss,” Izzy corrected him. “Not yet, anyway.”
Esperanza nodded, half-sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Matveev is dead,” he said.
“Ruslan?”
“Yeah, sorry. The other one is Gavril. He’s alive, but probably sorry for it. Your pal got him in the knee and the neck with that baton of his. He won’t do the barynya again any time soon.”
“I hadn’t pegged you for being so cultured, Sergeant.”
“I went to college too, smart guy.”
“Was he dead when the responders got there?”
Esperanza nodded.
“Heart stopped. A bit too much excitement for a guy with one foot in the grave, what with all that causing a car wreck and all. He and Gavril lived with their uncle from the Ukraine down in Buda in a couple of trailers in an RV park there. You’ll never guess what we found inside.”
“Homemade suicide bags,” Izzy said soberly. “Helium tanks, probably industrial grade. CPAP tubing and masks. Oven bags.”
“Black tar, too,” Esperanza added. “Nasty, cheap shit. It’s what they pumped into both Ramos and Twillig before asphyxiating them. Neither of the brothers seemed to be users themselves. But who do you suppose supplied them?”
Izzy lifted his brow.
Esperanza said, “A charming fellow named Mike Hyannis, current guest of the Travis County Jail. I think you know him, as well.”
“Squat house Mike?” Izzy said, astonished.
“Sold the Matveev brothers their dope, and introduced them to at least two of Ruslan’s future victims in the process.”
“Goddamnit,” groused Izzy. He turned his head away from the sergeant and sighed deeply. “How many?”
“Brothers?”
“Victims.”
“Oh,” Esperanza said. “That we don’t know yet. Teresa Montgomery is still alive, though. She ran off back home to Temple. It all got to be too much for her.”
“She had two girls with her at the tattoo parlor.”
“We’re working on it, Bishop.”
Izzy’s mouth tightened and turned down, along with his gaze. He set the coffee back on the little table and said, “He wanted her to go willingly, you know. The others you find, some of them will have. He convinced them to. But Cynthia wouldn’t. She fought him, Sergeant. Please don’t forget that. Ruslan Matveev murdered her, and she fought to save her life.”
“I won’t forget.”
“She wanted to live,” Izzy said. “Cynthia wanted to live.”
Twice Esperanza went to check on Noah’s condition, on Izzy’s behalf, and twice he was given less than sufficient answers by the charge nurse. Noah had been taken into one of the ER’s quiet rooms, a bank of three private spaces away from the regular bays with doors rather than curtains. Stoneridge had no such amenity, but Izzy was familiar with the concept. Normally they were used to afford privacy for sensitive cases like sexual assault examinations, but in this instance it was only the deputies keeping Noah and Izzy apart, lest they conspire to fleece the sheriff’s department.
As afternoon waned into evening, the Detective Sergeant promised to keep badgering the staff if Izzy wanted to get some rest. Izzy didn’t, but his body and mind had a differing opinion. He was out again soon thereafter, and slept fitfully in the narrow, uncomfortable bed until he wakened less than an hour into the nap. It was Esperanza and one of the deputies, the latter hovering a hand above the sidearm holstered at his belt.
“What,” Izzy barked, startled.
Esperanza hushed him, a finger to his lips.
“Lockdown,” he said low. “It’s goddamn Gavril.”
“The brother? What’s happened?”
The deputy’s radio crackled. He turned it down and stepped into a vacant bay to whisper into it.
Esperanza said, “They had to unshackle him for X-rays. He’d been docile as hell up ‘til then, but he took the technician.”
“What do you mean, took him?”
“I mean Gavril Matveev has a hostage.”
“Jesus Christ,” Izzy said, sitting up straight.
“The bastard’s knee is ruined, so he can’t get around easy. But the tech will help. He’s a big guy.”
“Where is he?” Izzy asked, moving his legs over the bed.
“Don’t get up,” the sergeant warned. “He’s probably heading this way.”
The radio crackled and murmured some more in the next bay. The deputy popped his head in and said, “West stairwell. Two deputies and security in there with him, but keeping a distance. The Russian’s got his arm around the technician’s throat, he’s threatening to kill him if they get too close.”
&
nbsp; “Shit,” Esperanza hissed. “Why the hell did they uncuff him?”
Izzy rose to his feet, cautious of his heavy cast.
“Can’t have metal for X-rays,” he said. “Gavril was just biding his time.”
“No,” the sergeant argued. “He’s just desperate. He took the opportunity. Sit back down, goddamnit. If he’s heading here, he’s after you, you idiot.”
“Am I in custody, Sergeant Esperanza?”
“I’m advising you as to your own best option, Bishop.”
Someone screamed. A clamor arouse, all clattering and shuffling feet. The deputy drew the sidearm and stiffened.
Izzy said, “I’ll take that into consideration.” And he yanked the curtain aside.
Gavril Matveev was in awful shape. The X-ray tech strained from the weight of him, his face beet-read and dripping sweat from the effort of holding the enormous Ukrainian upright. Gavril was red too, but more from rage than anything. His teeth were bared savagely. His left leg dragged loose like a broken tail. The knee was visible beneath the blue and green gown they’d gotten him into—it was a black, swollen, shapeless mass. His neck and face were badly bruised as well, but he maintained his arm-lock around the tech’s neck and shoulders. They lingered between the nurse’s station and the bank of quiet rooms, Gavril snorting like a bull.
The deputy shouted, “Let him go.”
Nurses scrambled in low crouches to the other patients in the ER, all of them wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“Where are they?” Gavril growled.
“I’m right here,” said Izzy, coming forward.
Esperanza hissed, “Get back, goddamn you!”
“I’m right here,” Izzy repeated. “Let him go and come get me, Gavril.”
Just behind and to the side of Izzy, the deputy had his pistol up and out, aimed directly at Gavril Matveev, who froze and deliberated.
At some length he said, “You killed my brother.”
“Cancer killed your brother,” Izzy said. “You and he were the murderers, no one else.”
“I was protecting him,” Gavril said.
“You can stop now,” Esperanza put in. “You’re the one who has to face up to all of this. Not him. Don’t make it any worse than it is.”
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 21
