them for the death sentence they were.
“Stefan, we shall take a taxi.”
Implied was that the car was at my disposal for a disposal. With that he was gone, not a glance spared for the convulsively trembling man on the floor. In his mind, Vasily no longer existed except as a trunk accessory to be sandwiched between the spare tire and the jack. Trailing behind Gurov, Sevastian gave me a wink and a puckered smack of his lips. A bastard by any definition of the word, he was doing my customary job today, and he delighted in seeing me taking his. He and others thought I was overly fastidious about the wet work . . . that I didn’t like to get my hands dirty. Shaved head gleaming, thick lips curled in a gloat, he couldn’t wait to see my cherry popped because, frankly, he didn’t think I had the stomach for it.
I was beginning to think he was right.
The sharp smell of ammonia hit the air and I lifted my foot with a grimace. “Jesus, Vasily.” As I wiped the sole of my shoe on threadbare carpet, his hand moved to cover the now-wet crotch of his pants. Shame and despair had twisted his face into something primitive and unrecognizable. A Neanderthal watching a tornado form out of the sky above him would’ve worn a similar look: terror, disbelief, and a crushing realization of his own mortality.
“Don’t.” The incoherent prattling had stopped as Vasily’s face went putty gray. His chest hitched as the air whistled through his stiffened throat. His brain had locked down along with the rest of his body. He had one word and one word only left available to him, and he said it again with the voice of an aged and brittle rubber band stretched long past its breaking point. “Don’t.”
Goddamnit. I was fucked, and I was fucked but good. If I didn’t take out this embezzler, Konstantin would make sure I suffered what should’ve been Vasily’s fate and most likely before the sun went down. Only two more days and this shit storm had to come now. It was enough to make you believe in God, because random fate simply didn’t have the poisonous ingenuity for something this nasty.
Reaching down, I took a fistful of his shirt and pulled him upright. His legs gave out immediately, the muscle tone but a distant memory. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the white and staring face of the bartender. I ignored him; he was just another piece of the furniture. He belonged to Gurov the same as the restaurant did, and the possibility of his causing any trouble was nil. Giving Bormiriff a brisk shake in an effort to restart his engine, I ordered not unsympathetically, “Stand up, Vasily.” He tried; I have to give him that. He did try. Unsteady as a newborn foal, he did his best to straighten his traitorous limbs beneath him. After several seconds in which my grip was the only thing holding him up, he managed to stay up with only a little help.
“Good, Vasily. One foot in front of the other.” Heavy hand on his shoulder, I steered him toward the back exit. He nearly fell again as he realized we were headed toward the back alley, but I stabilized him and kept him moving. In the surrounding hush his choked wheezing was the only sound to be heard. He was walking to his death, staggering really, but the end result was the same. He knew it. I knew it. What could fill that silence? What the hell could you possibly say?
“I have a brother,” I stated in soft contemplation as his shoulder spasmed beneath my steadying grasp. “Did you know?” Of course the poor bastard didn’t know. All he knew of me was my role as Konstantin’s shadow. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t talking to him. “His name’s Lukas, after our grandfather.” I pushed at the exit, paying little attention to the buzzing alarm. Passing out of the gloom into a brilliantly sunny Miami morning, I continued with a numb tongue that was flying solo and out of control. “He needs me, Vasily. He needs me alive. Can you understand that?”
From the gasping sobs that vibrated his frame and had him dropping to his hands and knees on the asphalt, I had to assume he didn’t. I couldn’t blame him; I don’t think I would’ve understood either. He was crawling away from me now, the pathetic, terrified son of a bitch, over pavement littered with broken glass that tore at his palms. I could see the blood in a scarlet handprint on a discarded fast-food bag.
“Vasily.” I didn’t remember drawing my gun, but the crosshatched rubber of the grip filled my hand as cool plastic teased my trigger finger. It was the only thing I could feel. My arms, legs, even my face, felt numb and lifeless, but my palm felt the imprint of the gun as if it were a brand, red-hot and marking me for life. “Be still,” I said gently. “It’s over.”
And it was over. Once I put him down, it would be all over . . . for the both of us. But Lukas would live. Lukas would be free. Whether that made it worthwhile depended on your point of view. I raised the 9 mm. It was unfortunate for Vasily that his point of view no longer counted.
Chapter 8
Saul leaned loose and relaxed against the rear bumper and watched as I cleaned the trunk with Formula 409. He was the second person to watch me do it. The first had been Sevastian, who’d growled low in this thick throat when I’d shoved a handful of crimson-stained rags stuffed into a plastic grocery bag at him with the emotionless command to dump them. Profoundly disappointed that he couldn’t report back to Konstantin any news that would’ve permanently removed me from sight, he’d left me in the condo garage with a wad of spit beside my shoe. Less than five minutes later Saul showed up with take-out sweet and sour tofu that included a sauce the unhappy scarlet of fresh blood.
It was not one of my better days.
Raising curious eyebrows, Saul bounced a fortune cookie in his hand as I continued to scrub. “Should I even ask?”
“No,” I answered shortly in a tone that had made lesser men think twice. Saul, unfortunately, was not a lesser man.
“So much for scintillating conversation,” he said dryly. Cracking open the cookie, he extracted the small slip of paper and gave an audible growl. “Do you believe this shit? It’s a hard sell for some time-share scheme. It’s not bad enough we get this crap in bathroom stalls. Now they’re screwing with our cookies.” At any other time his outrage would’ve been amusing, but not too much was tickling my funny bone today.
“You want a fortune? Here’s your fortune.” I slammed down the lid of the trunk. “Life is short, so get to the goddamn point.”
His eyes dropped to the wad of paper towels clenched in my fist. I’d cleaned up most of the blood with the ones I’d pawned off on Sevastian, but there was still a faint splotch of red fading to wet pink on the one I held now. A ripple of unease passed through the mobile face before disappearing under a smooth mask. Saul had a definite nodding acquaintance with violence himself, but the implications here . . . a bloody trunk . . . might be more than even he cared to consider. “How about we go upstairs and eat while we talk? Having a picnic in an underground garage isn’t my idea of class.”
Giving his green, blue, and purple kaleidoscope silk shirt a disparaging glance, I drawled, “Yeah, you’re all about class.” I shrugged and led the way to the elevator. Upstairs I let us into my place, tossed the paper towels in the garbage, and washed my hands. As the warm water washed over my skin, I let it also carry the morning’s events with it. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. If that meant mentally burying the vision and consequences of what I’d done, that’s what I would do. It wasn’t as if they wouldn’t be in good company. I might have to look into a bigger box. It was getting tight in there.
“Bring me a beer, would you?” Saul called from the living room.
Seconds later I tossed him a cold bottle with a jaundiced growl. “Don’t you hate it when your ass gets superglued to the couch? Lazy bastard.”
He caught the bottle and disregarded the barb with aplomb. “Hope you can use chopsticks.”
He couldn’t have told me that while I was still in the kitchen with the forks. I had many skills, some of which involved pointed objects, but wielding chopsticks wasn’t one of them. It didn’t matter. Hunger was the last thing on my mind at the moment. “It’s all yours, Skoczinsky. Eat up.”
“Your loss.” He put his feet up on the coffee table and opened a carton of rice. “Don’t come crying to me that you didn’t get your daily dose of MSG.”
I knew better than to think I could go toe-to-toe with the perpetual motion machine that was Saul’s mouth. “Did you get all the equipment?” I didn’t sit, instead walking over to the window to take a look at a view with which I was already intimately familiar.
“Everything but the weapons. You said you would handle that.”
