by Tom Straw
There was a demo kitchen area for culinary classes off to the side. Gunnar pointed. “Get down behind the counter and stay there.” Then he scooped a marble mortar and pestle off a shelf and pegged them at the wall display, shattering it. In seconds, he crunched over the broken shards and crouched next to her behind the granite counter. He gripped a mezzaluna in each fist, demonstrating how to hold them like brass knuckles, only with cutting blades. “Just in case I don’t stop him, fight like hell.” For good measure, he left her a ten-inch cook’s knife. Gunnar darted away just as a blast from the Anaconda sent the doorknob pinballing the length of the showroom and the basement door flew open. It shuddered as it smacked the wall.
Luka Fyodor Borodin was in.
C H A P T E R • 35
* * *
Macie held her breath and listened to get a sense of his movement, but the Russian must have been standing still, taking stock of things. She wished she could text 911 and cursed herself for leaving her bag in the van. Wild was looking around for a landline when they heard scraping and exertion grunts. An angled mirror hung above the kitchen area so that customers could see the range top when guest chefs taught classes, and, from below the counter, Macie and Gunnar tilted their heads upward to the reflection and saw what was making all the noise. Borodin was wrestling a heavy butcher block table against the cellar door to prevent their escape.
Keeping low, Gunnar stole a quick foray to the shelves around them, gathering potential weapons. She joined in, and they quickly had accumulated a pile of everything from rolling pins to meat tenderizers to sharpening steels. Ducking into a squat next to the fondue pots and accessories, they watched the mirror. As soon as Borodin started to round the end of the aisle, Gunnar rose and chucked a marble rolling pin at him. He missed, but their attacker retreated. Only briefly. When he came around again, they both launched more cook tools, and he backed up again. But everybody in that store knew this holding action wouldn’t last.
Gunnar started ripping the cellophane off a jar of pie weights sitting on a shelf beside cheesecloth and a spindle of dish towels. He whispered, “On my sign, you throw everything you can at once. Make it rain.” She nodded. He scooched to the far end of their counter, snagged a chef’s tunic off a hook, then pointed at her. Macie turned herself into a ball machine at the batting cage, lobbing everything she could get her hands on. Gunnar used her cover to sprint across the open space and shelter himself at the endcap of the aisle. After wadding the chef’s tunic, he flung it in an arc up and behind Borodin. The gunman’s shoes squeaked when he pivoted and got off a round at the flash of white cloth behind him. During the blink that his back was turned, Gunnar sprung across his aisle, bowling the open jar of pie weights toward him. The tiny ceramic peas skittered, spreading across the floor. Borodin whirled back and took a wild shot, but Gunnar had made cover behind the display shelves on the far side. The slug exploded a case of crystal stemware. Just two steps into his pursuit, Borodin slipped on the loose pie weights, lost his footing, and landed face-first with a sharp groan.
While he was down, Gunnar extended both arms and threw himself full force into the gondola shelving that separated him from Borodin’s aisle. The metal display was heavy. It rocked but didn’t tip; he only succeeded in showering egg beaters and kitchen twine down on the other side. Gunnar could hear the other man scrambling to get up and gave it an all-or-nothing push. The six-foot-tall rack teetered then tumbled over with a satisfying crash. A pained “Fuck me” came from under the rubble. But the top of the overturned display had landed wedged against the lower lip of the cashier’s island. Borodin wasn’t squashed, he was only pinned in a constricting tunnel. Gunnar could hear him struggling to crawl free as he hurried back to Macie.
“Basement,” he said as she sprung to her feet. They’d get out the way they came in. But to reach that door they had to give up cover and cross Borodin’s aisle. Gunnar had pictured him squeezed head-first the opposite way but signaled her to keep back behind the aisle display while he moved the butcher block.
The table was massive and heavy. Its top alone was sixteen inches deep of solid walnut, but Gunnar threw himself into it. Finding the right grip on the turned legs, he managed to hump it a few inches from the door. The noise of his effort drew attention. A muzzle flash lit up the black crawl space under the toppled display. The .44 magnum slug hit the thick block with a smack. Gunnar flinched, but this was their only chance. He grasped the table again and resumed his effort. Macie couldn’t bear to stand there watching him be a target. She dashed out to push beside him. With both of them shoving, they scraped the thing a foot and a half from the door, just enough to get through. Macie yanked the door open and had one foot on the stairs when the next shot came. Gunnar cried out and went down. She turned from the basement and came back in. He was on the floor with blood streaming from his calf.
Wild helped him to his feet, but he slipped in his own blood and fell again. Gunnar shouted, “Just go. Get out, go!” But she didn’t. Instead Macie hooked Gunnar by the armpits and dragged him back behind the demo counter. “OK, fine, now run.” Still she stayed. “Idiot,” he muttered. Blood flowed from his wound, a deep graze across the meaty part of his calf. Macie handed him a dish towel to press over it. She found cheesecloth on the rack beside the towels and she looped some around his calf to make a tourniquet.
“Think you can make the door?” she asked. Before he could answer, the sound of metal gouging linoleum and spatulas clanging told them what was happening on the next aisle. They both slumped down behind their barrier, not to wait, but to figure out what to do. She looked to Gunnar for an idea and saw eyes glazed by shock. Macie’s training as an attorney had not prepared her for this. But a lifetime of drive had.
She reached into the litter of cook tools around them and picked up an ice pick. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try to stab him with that,” Gunnar muttered. Too busy to reply, Wild crawled to the crème brûlée torch display behind them and came back with a six-pack of butane refills bound in cellophane. Just yards away on the next aisle, they heard a heavy sigh and feet kicking pie weights aside.
“Open one of those cheesecloths,” she said to Gunnar. Then she darted to the end of the aisle where Borodin had approached them before. Using the ice pick, she poked a hole in each of the butane canisters and left them there on the floor, leaking slowly.
When she returned, Gunnar had extracted a wad of cheesecloth from its packaging and handed it to her. “What now?” It was a curious reversal for her to be in charge of this sort of thing instead of him.
“Pray,” she said. Displayed with the fondue pots she found a plastic bottle of Swissmar Fire Gel. Basically gourmet Sterno used for heating chafing dishes. Wild had another use in mind. She squeezed the gel onto the ball of cheesecloth and had almost saturated it with the entire bottle when they heard groans and heavy exhales around the corner. After that, an ominous beat of silence broken by the spinning of the Anaconda’s cylinder. Their gunman was filling his loads.
Macie lit the gas burner on the range and set it to low. In the dim light, they made out the shadowy top of a head about to round the display to their left. Wild hauled herself up, steadied, waited, lit her gel-soaked wad, and let it fly. The flaming ethanol packet smacked Borodin high on the chest just as he came around the corner and it plopped on the floor at his feet. Immediately there came a loud whoooomph as the burning gel met the butane leak.
The lightning-bright flash of fire that followed engulfed the entire front of his body. The Russian screamed a native curse that mixed with the popping of the six cans as the remnants of their compressed gas exploded the cylinders. The shelving crash must have messed up his left arm because it hung limp at his side. In his frenzied dance to beat out the flames on his chest with his right, he dropped his revolver. Macie bolted for the gun, but he dove on top of it.
Wild delivered a hard kick to the side of his head. He hollered but went fetal, smothering the gun under him. As he brought his good h
and up to grab it, she delivered another goal kick, this one to his injured arm. He howled so she gave it another and another. The Colt came out from his chest, a gleam of silver catching the blue tint of the dying flames licking his shirt. Just short of Gunnar’s arrival Borodin used his leg to sweep at his wounded calf. It took Gunnar down hard. Macie rolled on the thug, trying to get the gun away but, injured though he was, this man possessed massive strength. All she could manage was to keep the Anaconda pointed away, and just barely. So she stiff-armed his gun wrist with one hand and used the elbow of her free arm to deliver blows to his face. Powered by pure survival instinct, Macie hammered his nose in a rapid succession of back jabs. Yet Borodin’s hand, rough as a cinder block, began gradually to force the muzzle of the Colt toward her. Wild dug deep, fracking adrenaline from her life’s pent-up rage—primal fury over the violation this animal had brought to her, the TENS torture, the murder of her brother, the failure of the DA to nail his killer, the estrangement of her parents, her ex’s abuse in Paris—all of it. Octane fueled, she delivered harsh blow after blow. Soon came the wet crunch of bone, then a spray of blood peppered the nearby wall. His grip slacked. She brought both hands together with all her force and snatched away the revolver. Soon as she had it, Wild rolled off and stood above him, pointing the gun at him, panting.
“Stay down,” said Cody, sliding on his butt back toward Borodin.
The killer stayed on the floor but not flat. He sat up, hanging his head between his raised knees, plucking at the bloody tatters of his shirt, then dropping his good hand to his side. “Too bad I didn’t get you in my trunk that night,” he said in a drooly slur.
“Shut up,” she said, still gasping coarse breaths.
Gunnar leaned back against the counter. “Macie, this is your shot. You want to take it, I’m all-in.”
“If I did, pizda, I’d still be fucking you.”
“I said shut up.” Macie’s voice broke in a choking sob and she brandished the Anaconda at his face.
“Taking you up the ass, and you’d like it. Ach! Ow. Oo-oo-oo!” He smiled a devil’s grin, blood coating every tooth.
Quietly, evenly, Gunnar said, “Just us, Mace.”
Wild blew an audible exhale. “No. Not how it works. Not for me.” She looked at Gunnar to finish the thought, to find the way to say what lived in her heart without sounding corny. The instant she turned, Borodin went for his ankle and drew a back-up gun.
It never got as high as his shin. Macie caught the movement and fired. The Anaconda’s recoil nearly launched the gun right out of her hand. Luka Fyodor Borodin’s left eye took the slug. He sat there, upright, a full two seconds, even though the exit wound had taken off the back of his skull. The pocket pistol fell from his hand and hit the deck right before he pitched backward on the linoleum, spilling brain.
C H A P T E R • 36
* * *
It was just after four thirty the next morning when Gunnar’s cell phone came alive with insistent text messages from Channel 2 dispatching him to Edie’s Gourmet on East Seventh where an unidentified body had been found in the culinary store. He texted back to decline and handed his iPhone to Macie. “Hold still, Mr. Cody, would you please,” said Dr. Patel. “It is difficult to suture unless you remain still.”
Wild sunk into the chair at the foot of the exam table and closed her eyes. They stung from tears and fatigue, and the fluorescents didn’t help. What she needed was a month in a tropical all-inclusive to beach-veg and to let the emotional toxins evaporate. After the death match with Borodin, she should have felt relief, even requital, but there was no satisfaction in killing the man who had likely murdered Rúben Pinto and, more likely, a score of others over time. Macie felt only numbness. If she tried for anything beyond that the bile would rise and the sobbing would return. And the guilt.
Guilt over the taking of a life. Guilt over what came after.
Macie had wanted to look for a phone in the back office of the store to call the police. Gunnar wanted to get out of there before the gunshots brought the police to them. The crisis had taken them to their essential poles. Wild told him that, for the same reason she couldn’t shoot Borodin in payback, she had to stay and report. She not only had a moral obligation, but had a sworn duty as an officer of the court to—
Gunnar yaddah-yaddah-ed her. Actually interrupted with, “Yaddah yaddah.” He told her, fine, reporting might clear her conscience but not the books. There were still numerous dicey questions upstream. Questions about having knowledge of Jackson Hall’s hideout and not sharing that with the DA. Removing material evidence of a crime from Hall’s secret storage locker instead of calling in the crime scene unit. Illegally having, then losing, custody of her defendant. By then, he had gotten under her skin and it flared into a full-blown shouting match. “Yeah, Hall’s out there again,” she snapped, “only now he’s armed. And whose fault is that?”
“Right, glad you brought that up. Because guess what? Your sanctimony is going to pull me into the shitter with you.”
They didn’t have time for this. Not standing over a fresh corpse.
But Gunnar had gotten to her enough, and when he calmed and offered a way out, she took it. He convinced her that he was in bad shape and that they should get him medical help immediately as her plausible reason to depart the crime scene, then they could reassess. “You can always opt to report this in the morning. And drag in my sorry ass.”
His need for immediate emergency medical aid was all the rationale she needed, even though he was sufficiently nonemergent to delay their exit until he completed some tasks. He put Borodin’s Anaconda in his Timbuk2. Her prints were on it. Then he searched the dead man’s pockets, taking his wallet and his cell phone. “This will buy some time before they can ID him. No sense getting word out about his shitty luck too quickly.”
Macie helped Gunnar back to the van where they found their phones and his Sig Sauer, which was wedged under the driver’s seat. After grinding the E-350 on three tires into a loading zone, Gunnar woke up his mechanic to come tow it before the police detectives started to work the block for clues, tossed his NYPD courtesy placard on the dash, and got in the Uber Macie had gotten them. She told the driver Bellevue. Gunnar scotched that and gave an address in Queens. An ER visit for a gunshot would mean mandatory notification of NYPD. “But you need a doctor.”
“I know a guy.”
“Of course you do.” Which was how they ended up in the finished basement of Raj Patel, an MD who was part of the New York subculture of foreign-trained, but unlicensed, immigrant physicians. Legions of these docs from the block made ends meet delivering dry cleaning or hack driving, but serviced their communities with off-the-books medical help, including the occasional criminal who didn’t want an emergency room visit to light up the radar.
♢ ♢ ♢
Macie unslung Gunnar’s bag and looped it on the hook inside the door as she helped him into his apartment. The .44 hadn’t broken any bone so he was able to bear weight, but the local was wearing off, and he steadied himself on her to ease the pain as he hobbled in. Dr. Patel said he was fortunate the slug hadn’t struck an artery, or he’d be in the OCME’s basement instead of his. Even so the wound took a lot of stitches and would leave a trench of scar tissue after it healed. Gunnar bore up without complaint; he was just wasted and on the weak side. Wild delivered him to his bed and lifted his wounded leg up by the heel to help him swing it on the blanket where he stretched out with a deep sigh.
In the kitchen she found a sleeve of English muffins and spread a half with peanut butter to boost his protein. But when she came back to the bedroom, he was drawing guttural lion breaths, just this side of snoring. From the great room, she texted Tiger to let him know that she would be working out of the office that day, and not to expect her. A scan of her e-mails showed nothing pressing. Since a resort getaway was nowhere in the foreseeable, Macie did the next best thing and tiptoed through the bedroom to take a shower.
The cascading wat
er felt luxuriously hot. Wild became an environmentalist’s nightmare, standing a quarter of an hour under the jet, washing off the night. As it lost temp, she kicked it up a notch and let the heat loosen the aching muscles in her back and neck. The tops of her toes stung where skin had chafed in the ferocious kicking she had delivered to Borodin. Borodin. A wave of deep sobs started to erupt again. Wild angled her face to the shower head and let it come.
Languid but refreshed, she opened the bathroom door to peek out at Gunnar. He was still asleep. Macie turned back to dry her hair some more, but without a thought—or ceremony—she dropped the towel and got on the bed to lie down naked beside him. She nestled against his body, feeling natural and warm. She tried to doze, too, but instead got up on one elbow to study Gunnar’s face in its relaxed innocence. Impulsively, but, in the end, deliberately, she lowered her head and lightly kissed his stubbled cheek. His lids drifted open and she withdrew, but only inches. They remained like that, sharing a long minute of silent eye contact. What had happened? Something unspoken had either bonded them or made the obstacles not matter. Macie couldn’t articulate it and didn’t want to try. Not right then. Enough thinking and examination. A feeling drove her, as strong and unbidden as the emotional wave in the shower. The warmth she felt beside him spread inside her. Still holding his gaze, she let her hand cradle his jaw, then traced her fingertips down his neck to his chest and across the hard flat of his stomach to his belt buckle. Wild lingered but not for long. She gently cupped him through his jeans. He responded and Macie firmed her grip as he grew. Gunnar shifted toward her and winced. “Sh, sh,” she whispered. “Stay just like that.” He reached for his protection in the nightstand and settled back, lifting his hips as she undid his belt and slid down his pants, careful to keep them above where the doctor had slit them to get at his wound. Wild swung a leg over him and hovered above him on her knees, balancing herself with a palm beside each of his shoulders. They stared into each other some more. There was a moment of teasing but not of decision. Wild lowered her mouth onto his as he rose to meet it.
