by Ray Daniel
It was the worst kind of programming mistake, the hidden assumption. You take your assumption as fact and don’t question it until it bites you in the ass. I had assumed that Margaret would have her own hotel room. After all, what CEO shared a room? But it was clear now that Dmitri had been extracting his payments from her all along. No wonder she’d been so eager to spend Saturday night with me.
I walked back into the front part of the suite, to the couch near the front door. The dress on the couch told the story. I picked it up. It was the dress Margaret had worn at Mooo. The zipper was torn where Dmitri had fumbled with it last night. Dmitri must have made Margaret help him work off his frustration about my escape.
I had to get out of there. Jael was following Margaret, not watching me, and Margaret wasn’t going to come back to this room. If Dmitri came back, I’d be alone with a man who had promised to skin me alive.
I reached for the door handle and remembered the laptop. It contained the evidence I needed. My plan had worked.
I ran back into the bedroom and flipped the laptop shut. I started for the front door, but the computer was almost ripped from my hands. The power cord was still attached to its European adapter. I pulled the power cord from the wall, wrapped it around the laptop, and headed back to the front door.
As I reached the door, I heard the electronic lock cycle. I stepped back as the door opened. Dmitri.
He was wearing a button-down shirt with vertical blue and yellow stripes. Blood spattered the shoulder of the shirt. He blinked in surprise, stepped into the room, then smiled.
Dmitri said, “Your protector is dead.”
Something smashed across my jaw, and the room swam into blackness.
fifty-six
Hangover. This was the first thought that wafted through my brain. My head was pounding, my mouth tasted of copper, it was dark. It had to be a hangover. I raised my hand to rub my face, but it was caught on the sheets. I flopped it around to free it, but it was still stuck. The other was stuck as well.
I felt my wrists and realized that the “sheets” were ropes.
I turned my head and felt rough cloth on my cheek. I tried to call out, but my mouth was taped shut. I stopped moving and took inventory.
My hands were tied. My ankles were tied. I had a bag on my head, and my mouth was taped. I was lying on a hard surface that smelled of gasoline and rubber. I felt a slight vibration, and my world bumped.
I was moving. I was in a car trunk, lying on my side, stuck between the front of the trunk … and a body that had been crammed behind me.
What had Dmitri said just before he hit me? “Your protector is dead?” Jael. Just add her to the list. Carol, Alice, Kevin, and now Jael. I started to breathe quickly and thrash at my ropes in panic. A lump formed in my throat as my rage and sorrow overtook me. I pushed it down. If I cried now, with my mouth taped, I’d suffocate.
I considered suffocation as an option. If I suffocated, it would certainly piss off Dmitri. He had told me his plans. He was going to skin me. It would be a long, slow death. Suffocation would be quick and easy.
I couldn’t make myself follow that path. As long as I was alive, I might be able to talk my way out of the worst. Perhaps I’d get him angry enough to fight me. That would give me a chance to run.
I searched the trunk for the sound of Carol’s voice. I’d even have welcomed her telling me that she told me so, but she was gone. I was alone and scared. I lay still and listened to the vibration of the tires on the road. My shoulder was wet. I knew what caused the wetness. I had smelled it before.
When I’d found Carol in our house, she was sprawled across the kitchen floor. Dmitri had cut her throat, severing both carotid arteries and her larynx. The room smelled of blood, and that same smell flooded my small world in the trunk of a moving car.
My time in the trunk allowed me to collect my thoughts and focus. The terror I’d felt faded as I accepted my situation and made a plan for the future. In the trunk jostling against Jael’s corpse and remembering Carol’s, I decided that one of us, Dmitri or I, would die today. I’ll get him for you, honey. I’ll try.
I tried to flip onto my back, but my hands were tied to ropes that led out of the trunk. They must be swinging outside, looking like an innocent packing mistake. The car bounced again, and its bouncing became constant. It was leaving the main road and driving over ruts and potholes.
The car stopped. The engine died, and I was left listening to the rain pelting on the roof. The trunk popped open. I turned toward the sound.
“Ah, Mr. Tucker,” said Dmitri’s voice. “You are awake.” He grabbed me by my right arm and leg, pulled me out of the trunk, and dropped me. The bag over my head scraped my cheek as I fell to the ground. My shoulder crunched, and I grunted from the impact. I scrabbled around and felt wet pine needles between my fingers.
Dmitri hooked a hand in my armpit and dragged me across the forest floor. The rain in the trees sounded like meat frying. Thunder rumbled. Wherever these woods were, Dmitri and I would be alone on a day like today.
Dmitri dropped me at the base of a tree. My tailbone hit the root, sending tingles down my legs. He worked at my hands and I realized that, while my wrists were still tied, they were not tied to my waist anymore. I blindly flung my fists up, hoping to catch Dmitri on the chin.
He laughed. “You still have some fight left, yes? I will enjoy this.” Dmitri grabbed my wrists, tied them to a rope, and started hauling. He must have rigged a pulley overhead, because my arms were yanked straight up.
Dmitri said, “Stand now or I will break your shoulders.”
I got my tied ankles under me, and Dmitri pulled the rope until I was stretched along the tree. I heard the ripping of duct tape, and he ran tape around the tree, trapping my knees against the trunk. Another rip, and my elbows were pinned as well.
Dmitri pulled the bag off my head. “Asshole,” I grunted into the tape on my mouth.
“What’s that? You would like to speak? Yes, I think you would. You like to talk, talk, talk. But you shall wear the tape. We are away from people, but not so far away that your screams would not be heard.” Dmitri tested the ropes and the tape that held me against the tree.
“Very good,” he said in his Russian accent. “It is good to get back to my roots. I once did only this. Killing idiots. That was a long time ago. Now, I am mostly counting money. Drug money, engineering money, video money, Internet money. I have counted a lot of money, but selling your software, that will make all my other money nothing.”
Dmitri reached into his back pocket and pulled out a long, black folding knife. He opened it, revealing a blade with a sharp tapering point, like the tip of a bat’s wing. He touched the tip of the blade to my forearm, which was held between the tape on the tree and the ropes on my wrists. The blade parted the cloth of my shirt easily, and I felt a pinch. I tensed as if I were in the dentist’s chair.
Lightning flashed and rain ran into my eyes and nose where I snorted it out in a mist. I was breathing hard, and skirting around the edge of panic. Adrenaline ran through my hands in twitchy waves.
“I am surprised you are here, Mr. Tucker. I know many engineers. They are smart, practical men. They would have left after the garrote.” He traced the sharp knife along the faint line that still marred my throat. I pulled back.
“I will not cut your throat, Mr. Tucker. This will not be that fast,” said Dmitri as he pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on. “The skinning will take some time. Your body would normally be left as a warning to others, but of course there is no one left to warn. I have already killed the FBI man, your friend, and your wife.” He paused. “Your wife was much smarter than you. I squeezed her real tits and told her what she must do. She did all that I asked.”
I screamed into the tape and pulled at the ropes. If had been possible for me to break them, I would have done it in that mom
ent. I would have given anything to break free and shove Dmitri’s sharp knife into his eye. At that moment I realized that I was helpless and weak, a foolish man who would not be able to fulfill his promise to his dead wife. I slumped against the ropes, and Dmitri laughed at me.
He used the knife to cut away my shirt below my elbow, ripping it away, leaving my chest exposed to the cold rain. The storms that had been rumbling past the woods moved overhead. Lightning and thunder smashed together in crackling waves. Dmitri leaned close, his hand on my chest, the index finger over my nipple. He breathed, “You are ready, yes?” into my face with his cigarette breath.
The Russian leaned the sharp knife at an angle against the inner skin of my elbow. He pushed harder into my chest with his free hand to maintain his balance. I panicked, pulling spasmodically at my arms and legs flailing my head.
Something caught my eye in the woods. I couldn’t be sure I had seen it, but I didn’t risk a second look. That would ruin it. I did as I had been trained to do. I avoided looking at it. I looked away, peering into the trees as if I saw something among them.
Dmitri caught my stare and followed my eyes, looking deep into the empty woods. “What do you see there, Mr. Tucker? Maybe it is an angel, eh?” He looked through the rain. Then he said, “Such a pity. It is nothing.”
Dmitri laughed again and his temple exploded. Shards of blood and bone splashed across my face. The knife nicked my arm and fell away as his body spasmed and pushed itself into my chest. I heard a rattle escape his throat as he fell on me. He slid to the ground as blood spurted onto my chest and down my pants.
I looked back to my right. Walking out of the rain, her hair plastered across her face, was Jael Navas, her gun glinting and smoking.
fifty-seven
Jael ripped the tape from my mouth. I gasped and sagged against the ropes.
“He said you were dead,” I babbled.
Jael picked something off my cheek. It was a bit of bone that had hit my face when she had shot Dmitri. She looked at it, grimaced, and flicked it onto the forest floor.
“He was wrong,” she said. She picked up Dmitri’s knife and cut the rope from my ankles and the tape from my legs. I was still on tiptoe. She cut the tape from my arms and finally she freed my wrists. I staggered away from the tree.
“He told me that my protector was dead,” I said.
“He could not have known that I was your protector. I had not allowed it. He was an amateur and a sadist. Perhaps he was trying to frighten you.”
“Then who’s in the car’s trunk?”
Jael looked down at Dmitri’s body and nudged it with her toe. Then she went through his pockets. He had no wallet. No ID. Only car keys and the card that unlocked his hotel room. A thumb drive was attached to the keys, probably full of my software. Jael opened the key chain and removed the thumb drive. She handed it to me and said, “This is your expertise.” I put the thumb drive in my pocket.
She turned and walked back down the path through the woods. I stumbled behind her in the hissing rain, walking over marks that showed where Dmitri had dragged me. I said, “How did you find me?”
“Margaret Bronte ate breakfast and left the hotel. Since she was not going to her room, I decided to watch over you. But I was too late. I saw the gangster come out of the room with Roland and a laundry hamper. It was clear there was something heavy in the hamper, and you had not come back to me. They took the service elevator. I followed them down to the back of the hotel and saw them put you into the trunk.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” I asked.
Jael walked on through the wet pine needles past an old fire. The air smelled of charcoal. She said, “It was unclear that I could do it safely before you were in the trunk, and after I had no way to stop his car. So I followed. He never suspected.”
“Because he thought my protector was dead.”
“Exactly.”
We had reached the car. It was the same black car that had chased me on Beacon Street and killed Kevin on the bridge. It sported a new windshield, the tags still stuck to the glass. The car looked squat and evil, as if it had been corrupted. We stood by the hood as Jael worked the key fob. The trunk unlocked at the other end with a clunking sound, but the trunk lid did not swing up. It rested against the car as if unwilling to give up its secret.
“You are sure there was someone in the trunk with you?” asked Jael.
“Yeah.”
“Dead?”
I looked at my shoulder and down at my body. I was covered in blood. Half of it was Dmitri’s. But I also had blood on my shoulder, older blood that had started to form a crust at its edges.
I pointed at my shoulder and said, “I think this came from the bottom of the trunk.”
“Let us look.”
I hesitated. Jael walked around the back of the car and threw open the lid. She didn’t react. Her gray eyes scanned back and forth as I stood by the car’s hood and examined my shoes.
“I recognize this person,” she said, “but I do not know the name.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. I focused on the first step that would bring me to the back of the car. The first step was the only one I’d need to get moving again. Images of Carol, lying in our Wellesley kitchen, flashed into my mind as I took that step. Moving, I walked quickly and looked into the trunk.
My mind snapped shut as I caught the emotions that filled me and stuffed them into a dark place. I breathed deeply and pulled my shit together.
Six months ago, Carol’s neck had been cut from ear to ear, leaving a gaping second mouth. This killing had been done the same way. It was bloody and brutal, efficient and cruel.
I said, “His name was Nate Russo.”
fifty-eight
“How?” I asked. I was sitting in the wet pine needles, my shirt cut, my arm bleeding, my knife wound throbbing. “How could he have thought that Nate was my protector?”
Jael stood behind the car, looking at the body. Her arms were crossed, and the rain bounced off her black cotton T-shirt as if she were made of stone. Her gun was gone, hidden away in her black leather handbag. She said, “Nate came to you in the park.”
“What?”
“He came to you in the park last night and the gangster was watching. The gangster assumed that the person who shot the windshield would come to check on your health, so he watched to learn who shot at his car. I knew the gangster would be watching, so I remained hidden. I called Detective Miller instead.”
“And Bobby called Nate?”
“Yes. It was a mistake.”
“A mistake. Nate is dead because Bobby Miller made a mistake?”
“No,” Jael said. “Nate is dead because the gangster killed him.”
I got up, stood next to Jael, and looked at Nate. He had been haphazardly thrown in the trunk. One arm was twisted behind him and the other had been flopped out of the way. Rage built in my gut, but it had no place to go. It banged against my throat, churned my stomach, and finally settled for squeezing my heart against my ribs. I had nothing to do. Jael had already exacted the ultimate revenge for this atrocity.
I sighed. “What now?”
“Go home,” said Jael. “You are safe now. The others pose no threat. They think you are dead. If you go home, you will have your normal life tomorrow.”
That couldn’t be it. This couldn’t just be over.
“What about that bastard Roland?” I asked. “What about Margaret? Shouldn’t I do something about them?”
Jael looked at me, her impassive eyes softening around the edges. She said, “You have done enough. The FBI knows about the scheme. They have an undercover agent. They will collect the evidence they need, and then they will arrest Margaret and Roland. It is inevitable.”
Jael produced a set of car keys and said, “Please, take my car. Go home and wash. Let others finish the job. This has been
a very bad day for you. You have earned a rest. I will wait here and answer questions from the police.”
I said, “Thank you.” The keys were warm in my hand as I walked back to Jael’s black Acura MDX. I took off my bloody shirt and threw it on the ground. I started the car. The GPS sprang to life. It told me that I was in North Andover. Dmitri hadn’t gone that far after all.
I drove Jael’s car down Route 93 to Boston and parked the car in the Prudential Center. I walked home shirtless. The rain continued to fall, but the wind was gone and the water was warm and cleansing.
Follen Street’s brick sidewalks shimmered in the rain as the sun began to break through the clouds. I entered my building, climbed the steps back to my apartment, and opened the door. I stepped inside and stood in the doorway. It seemed wrong that the apartment should be unchanged from the time that Jael was sitting at my kitchenette drinking Scotch. I had nearly died, and I had lost a father—again. I somehow expected that the apartment would reflect the changes inside me.
Though the rooms were unchanged, memories wandered them like ghosts. I looked to my right and remembered Jael and Dana struggling on the floor. I looked to my left and thought about Kevin’s visit and how Margaret had flashed from bedroom to bathroom. The broken Mr. Coffee carafe was still in the trash, and my BlackBerry lay on the counter.
I emptied my pockets onto the counter and put the battery back into the BlackBerry. The windows in my apartment glistened with emerging sunlight. I opened them all, inviting the world back into my fortress. The rain’s slowing patter provided background noise in my silent home. New air moved through the house. I returned to the kitchenette.
Dmitri’s thumb drive sat next to the BlackBerry and Jael’s keys. The BlackBerry continued to boot, its little hourglass telling me that it was working hard at coming to life.
