Final Stand

by Helen R. Myers

  “It could have been taken from her.”

  “Never.”

  Gray glanced down at his bare left hand that gently stroked her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

  “They shot her in the face,” she continued, her voice flat, devoid of emotion. “Her beautiful face.”

  “Don’t. Sasha, you can’t know for certain. The fire—”

  “Didn’t you see? It didn’t burn long enough to hide the truth. A single bullet. Large caliber. I saw the exit wound at the b—oh God. Oh God.”

  “What’s she saying?” As Sasha buried her face against Gray’s chest, Frank moved in again. Already recovered, he was eager to take advantage of weakness wherever he saw it. “What’s going on?”

  Knowing it was still up to him to reason and think defensively, Gray urged Sasha toward his truck. “I’m taking her back to my place.”

  “The hell you are. This is a murder scene now and—”

  At the touch of his hand on his back, Gray spun so fast Frank backed hard into the fire truck. “That’s her mother,” he growled, pointing to the carnage. “And after you’ve wrapped your self-absorbed mind around that, consider that, at this moment, your murderer or murderers could be hiding in any number of these gullies or thicker brush drawing a bead on Sasha or on any of us.”

  Tim Pike glanced around and stepped closer to the fire truck.

  Frank looked as if he wanted to leave himself. “All the more reason for you to stay. You’ve got training, you can’t leave us out here.”

  “You’ve always claimed you were cut out for life on the edge. Well, have at it, pal.”

  Dazed, Frank scanned the area, his gaze lingering on the lengthening shadows, and as he swallowed yet again, his right hand edged up the side of his holster. Then a dawning transformed his face. “What did you call her? Slaughter? Slaughter!”

  As Gray ushered Sasha to his truck, he heard the growing commotion behind them.

  “Damn it all to hell. Cox, get that carload of gawkers out of here…and get hold of Kenny. Tell him we need him. Move! Pike, where do you think you’re going?”

  “My job is done here.”

  “Your ass stays until I get EMS personnel over from Sonora.”

  Frank was still threatening, cursing and ordering as Gray got Sasha inside the truck. In her shell-shocked state, she didn’t need much urging to lie flat on the seat again for the drive back to town.

  As he feared, too many people lingered there, and from the way a few tried to flag him down, he suspected that somehow someone had already heard about a death. One pounded on the side of the truck, but he shook his head and continued in to his place.

  He helped a dry-eyed, too quiet Sasha inside. Jessie lifted her head and wagged her tail, inviting a pat, but they went straight to the kitchen sink where he washed Sasha’s face and then gave her a cup of water to rinse out her mouth.

  He had her seated at the kitchen table and was pouring her a stiff drink when he heard another vehicle tearing into the yard. Moments later, emerging from the cloud of dust, Frank stormed in.

  Her hair rising, Jessie curled her upper lip back and growled.

  “Shut up,” Frank snapped as he passed her. His real anger he directed at Gray and Sasha. “I should arrest both of you. Who do you think you are? Nobody walks away from me. Do you know what that looked like back there? I’ve got a town to control, and I don’t need Pike blabbing his mouth about how you tried to make me look bad.”

  “Believe it or not, Frank, you managed that all by yourself. And I told you why I was getting Sasha away from there.” Having failed initially, Gray tried to ease the drink into her hands. “Take a swallow. Do it.”

  This time she did…but then she shuddered.

  “Another.”

  “I’ll throw up again.”

  “Only if you were a scientific phenomenon. Take a deep breath. Another. Now try that swallow.”

  She did, but her hands began to tremble and she set the glass down. Gray saw that she understood what was happening, what he was trying to do. He watched with growing admiration as she retreated from her psychological abyss, and thought with no small satisfaction that Frank was about to witness what the word professional meant.

  “If we’re finished stalling,” Frank chided, “could we get to it? Who are you and what’s going on?”

  Accepting that he needed to stand back now, Gray positioned himself where he could control Frank if needed. He saw by her brief glance that Sasha understood and was grateful.

  “My name is Sasha Mills,” she began, her voice hollow. “My mother was Tatiana Ivanova Mills.”

  “Say what?”

  At Frank’s startled reaction, she nodded. “Yes, she was Russian. She met my father, Sean Mills, when he was a marine assigned to the American consul in Moscow. I won’t bore you with the details of their courtship. Suffice it to say it was difficult, and as dangerous as their relationship was special.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m not interested in hearing about your personal fairy tales or your family tree.”

  “You’d better be,” Sasha replied. “Because without understanding that, you can’t possibly comprehend the rest.”

  “In that case I need some staying power, too,” Frank said, snatching up her glass.

  “You’re on duty.” Gray focused on Sasha’s clenched hands, seeing how she hated the thought of his mouth touching where her lips had rested. For his part, so did Gray.

  A spiteful Frank swallowed the rest of the contents in one long gulp, then set the glass in front of her. “Now get to the point.”

  She complied, but refused to look at him, instead staring at the center of the table. “When my mother became pregnant with me, my father knew he had to get her to America.”

  “That had to have been difficult,” Gray said, intrigued because he remembered the times. Such liaisons would have been frowned upon, considering the cold war going on between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

  “I’m sure. My mother wouldn’t talk about it much. That’s no big surprise, considering the government pressures and social patterns she grew up under. My father only admitted that he broke one rule short of being arrested and court-martialed. I suspect, though, that he managed to sneak her out much the same way that Svetlana Stalin escaped. As it was, once the furor died down, his military career was quietly but completely over, and even though they didn’t deny him his honorable discharge, he lost the fourteen years he’d already invested in his career. By then my mother was settled in Minnesota at my father’s family home, and he believed that was a fair tradeoff.”

  “How romantic,” Frank drawled.

  Sasha lifted her chin. “I agree. It was a rare relationship, and they were devoted to each other. She always felt she owed him more, and so she worked hard to become an American citizen.” She turned to Gray. “Those were good years…until we lost my father shortly before I graduated from college. There was a situation at the bank where he was the executive vice president. It’s almost a common incident these days, however back then hostage-taking was terrifyingly new, and was triggered by the estranged husband of a woman who worked there. My father tried to intervene. Unfortunately, the chief of police was the man accused of being the woman’s lover and he had his own ideas about resolving things, one of which I suspect was to make her an instant widow. The plan backfired and all three of them were killed.”

  Sasha paused to draw and purge a deep breath. “I’d intended to enter law school later that year, but I put that off in order to spend more time with my mother. She couldn’t seem to get over what happened, and since there was just the two of us left at that point, I convinced her that we should move, try a whole new change of scenery.”

  “Las Vegas is a helluva change,” Gray said.

  Frank glared at him. “You knew about that, too?”

  “Heat,” Sasha told Gray with a sad smile. “Imagine a Russian who couldn’t take the cold anymore. And yet how understandable.”

  “To you maybe
,” Frank muttered.

  “Her soul was frozen,” Sasha explained. “She couldn’t get warm no matter how warmly she dressed.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “I’m sure for you it is.” She shifted her gaze back to Gray. “And so when I asked her to choose somewhere, she chose Vegas. She threw herself into our new life, going to school by day and working as a cocktail waitress by night, while I went back to school and became a member of the LVMPD.”

  Frank burst into laughter and pulled at his hair. “Oh, no. No, no, no. You’re a cop?” But upon noting Gray’s calm demeanor, he gave up the theatrics. “You bastard! What don’t you know?”

  “More than you think.”

  “I think you’re full of it. Are you going to tell me that little bomb didn’t bother you, or did you see her as a replacement for Mo from the start?”

  Gray had always hated that nickname, almost as much as he resented the question. “You’re drawing the wrong conclusions, as usual.”

  “Sure. And you haven’t been jumping her bones the whole time she’s been here, either.”

  Gray straightened from the counter. “Watch your mouth. That’s the last time I’m going to warn you.”

  As if to show he wasn’t intimidated, Frank said to Sasha, “Are you anywhere near the part about how your personal soap opera brought you here?”

  “My mother’s choice of employers,” she replied, “inevitably earned her the attention of the man who’s responsible for her death. Once she graduated, she went to work at a brokerage firm called Joseph, Bains and Sorenson, where she worked her way up to being the assistant and office manager to Arne Sorenson, the senior partner. That’s when she was targeted.”

  “By whom?” Gray asked.

  “Melor Borodin.”

  “Great. Another Commie,” Frank muttered.

  Sasha shook her head. “He may be Russian by birth, but he’s never been Soviet anything.”

  “And that means?”

  “He’s nothing like what his name stands for.” She recited the etymology of Borodin’s first name.

  “Who the hell does something like that to their kid?”

  “People trying to make the system work for them. But Borodin himself didn’t begin really thriving until glasnost, and like so many other opportunists and scavengers, he became a dangerous player in the Russian mafia.”

  As she spoke, Gray heard more and more of her ancestry emerging in her choice of words as much as in her careful enunciation. She understood her mother’s heritage as well as she knew the Ten Code.

  “Your mother got involved with the guy knowing what he was?” Frank scoffed.

  “Of course not. By the time he appeared in the U.S., Borodin had gained considerable polish, as he had power and wealth. To the average observer, he appeared one of so many international businessmen taking advantage of NAFTA and the new world market. To the public, his presence in Las Vegas was to open a restaurant, not unlike New York’s Russian Tea Room.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she replied coolly.

  His coloring deepened, but he plodded onward. “So I don’t pay a week’s salary for finger food. I also never illegally assumed someone’s identity or got my mama turned into a well-done fajita.”

  “That’s it.”

  Fed up, Gray pushed away from the counter. However, before he could get at Frank, Sasha stepped into his path. She laid her palms against his chest, and rested her forehead there, too. There was no missing the exhaustion behind the gesture.

  “He didn’t say anything that isn’t true, even if he did say it crudely,” she said.

  Crude didn’t begin to describe the insensitive jerk, but what bothered Gray more was her assuming guilt for this. However, he wasn’t about to say anything in front of Frank that could be used against them later. “Don’t do this to yourself,” was all he told her, adding a discreet pressure of his fingers as he clasped her shoulders. And to Frank he added, “Any more cracks and you’re going to answer to me for them, with or without you wearing that badge.”

  Before Frank could respond, Sasha interceded again. “As best I could determine in the little time I had to look into his past, Melor Borodin is a man of flexibility. He’s involved in a number of illegal activities partly of his own design, and partly on behalf of associates. I think a good deal of his success is due to his willingness to be a conduit to others, and though the restaurant on the surface is legal, I was given to understand that it allows him to launder money for drug trafficking and other illegal operations. But being that he’s more ambitious than many, he was also venturing into the insider trading business. That’s where my mother became useful to him.”

  Gray couldn’t figure how. “Isn’t the definition of insider trading using confidential information provided by a corporate officer or other employee for financial profit? You said she worked for a brokerage house?”

  “Her location, her knowledge of the market and privileged position in the firm…he used that and her to cull information on companies and people, then he or others went after them, initiating relationships to get what they wanted. By the time she saw a pattern between his stock purchases and what was happening in the news, she knew she was culpable, as well.”

  “Didn’t anyone else at her firm notice?” Gray asked.

  “Brokerage firms operate like NASCAR workshops, everything is deadline orientated. If someone suspected something, they undoubtedly thought it was just another good business decision. You have to remember, they weren’t privy to seeing him outside of the office as my mother was. If you’re not looking for or expecting deception, you rarely notice it until well after the fact.”

  “Why’d she continue the relationship after she knew what he was?” Frank demanded.

  Sasha bowed her head. “The most common and least respected of reasons. You see, she was flattered by his attention. Grateful for it, she wanted to help him succeed with his business—not that she understood at that point all that he was involved in.”

  “Love.” Frank said the word as though it left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “I refuse to believe it went that deep, but agree there was no excuse.” She shrugged. “At the same time, you’d need to meet your subject to understand. Melor Borodin is like the most pampered of thoroughbreds—polished, disciplined and formidable at his sport. He made my fifty-year-old mother not even care that he was fifteen years her junior.”

  Frank erupted in a shout of laughter. “Fifteen, dang. Mama must’ve been a looker…but I’ll bet he liked you better.”

  “You’d lose,” Sasha replied coldly. “We despised each other on sight. But I did try to be happy for my mother’s sake. And she…I can’t deny that she blossomed, and appeared happy for the first time since losing my father. Then things began to change. She seemed more and more preoccupied and nervous. When she started losing weight and I saw a bruise where there shouldn’t be one, I couldn’t hold back any longer. When she confessed, I knew I should go to the FBI right away. Understandably that made her all but hysterical. He’d succeeded in totally intimidating her.”

  “So you decided running like a pair of scared bunnies was the best solution,” Frank taunted.

  “The situation evolved to where we didn’t have any choice. As luck would have it, the moment I tried to get help, we found ourselves targets.”

  “What did you do?” Gray asked.

  “I believed in the system I represent. I tried to contact the deputy chief at my division. He wasn’t in, so I told his aide, a desk officer, that it was imperative that I speak with him. We weren’t friends, nevertheless, I knew her well enough to feel comfortable around her, and confided I was concerned for my mother’s safety. She…well, I don’t think my DC got the message.”

  “Are you suggesting this Borodin got another cop to turn on you?” Frank’s expression suggested that he would believe in psychics first.

  For his part, Gray could imagine se
veral reasons for the critical omission, anything from innocent though costly forgetfulness, to professional or personal jealousy, to outright revenge for some real or imagined past incident. But from the way Sasha had described this Borodin character, he knew her hunch was that the snake had gotten to more than Tatiana Mills.

  “Let’s put it this way,” she replied, “when my DC didn’t return the call, I phoned him again, and this time I got through to him. He didn’t know what I was talking about…or pretended he didn’t. That’s when I knew I had to get my mother out of there.”

  “Yeah, leave room to finger the DC in case your other theory falls flat on you,” Frank drawled.

  “No. Understanding Borodin’s charisma, particularly his influence with women, I do think it was Gloria Carney’s doing, but until I know for sure, I’m assuming nothing.”

  “Okay, so when you got hold of your chief, did you tell him?” Frank asked.

  Sasha shook her head. “There wasn’t time. What I’d said to Gloria was enough for Borodin to know my mother had talked, and it was more important to get her out of danger. I went to her place and convinced her to grab what she could and run. I planned to do the same and join her out of town. As luck would have it, by the time I got to my place, Borodin was waiting for me. The only thing that saved me was his arrogance—he only brought one bodyguard with him.”

  “Show him your side,” Gray told her.

  “I’m not interested in show-and-tell.”

  “Sasha, he needs to understand what this guy was willing to do to you.”

  “Isn’t what happened to my mother proof enough?”

  Her voice shook, and Gray squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “Please.”

  She slowly lifted the left edge of her shirt, exposing the bandaged area.

  Frank pursed his lips. “Why didn’t I hit that spot yesterday?”

  “You did. Why do you think I punched you?”

  “And here I thought you were just playing hard to get. So what shape are the Russians in?”

  “The bodyguard needs to learn to shoot with a new hand, if he isn’t varmint chow in the desert somewhere, and Borodin isn’t quite as photogenic as he used to be.”