“What day was this?”
“Well let me see.” Nina swallowed half her drink, and seemed to be counting some objects floating in the air in front of her. “Saturday.”
Raisa Petrova had called Jamal Krada on the day she died. Hannibal could imagine the scenario. After Nikita’s death, Boris gave her money, and later Dani Gana had set up regular payments to her from his African bank to impress her and please Viktoriya. But both those income streams had stopped. Raisa had a flair for blackmail, and she must have tried to put the screws to Krada. Hannibal’s breathing stepped up its pace and he could feel the hair on the back of his neck rise.
“And has Viktoriya called again?”
“She calls almost every day,” Nina said, waving the glass in his face. “She gets scared, she gets worried, she calls my husband to make sure he knows how to get to her.”
Which would explain how someone could find Dani Gana when he would not have told anyone his whereabouts. Money or no, Jamal would have wanted to eliminate the competition. And in Hannibal’s experience, once a man has killed, it gets easier to find an excuse to do it again.
“She called here again this morning,” Nina said, and the creepy feeling on the back of Hannibal’s neck grew more intense.
“Nina, does your husband own a gun?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, taking a sip from the glass she had poured for Hannibal. She looked startled when he grabbed her arm, making her spill the drink.
“Show me. Now.”
The fear returned to her eyes. She moved with haste, as she had been trained to do when a man spoke to her. She led him to the linen closet just outside the bedroom. Under a stack of towels lay a brightly colored cardboard box. Hannibal absorbed all of the copy. This was the original box for a Ruger Mark III pistol chambered for the Hornady. 17 Mach 2 rimfire cartridge. The gun had a stainless steel frame, an 8-inch stainless steel fluted heavy barrel and checkered cocobolo thumb rest grips. This was a target shooter’s toy. Only an idiot would buy such a thing for personal defense. But in an emergency, any concealable gun would do the job.
“Son of a bitch,” Hannibal said. “The murder weapon.” But when he pulled the lid off the box, he found only the empty impression of a pistol. The chill was back, walking his spine. He turned to Nina, almost panting as fear crept up on him.
“Where is Jamal Krada now?”
Austin Camacho
Russian Roulette
35
During the high-speed drive to Viktoriya’s motel, Hannibal was locked in a heated argument with himself. The smart money was on calling the police. Of course the smart money put Ivanovich in jeopardy and might scare Krada enough to drive him underground. Hannibal had to see that man in jail. Actually, if what he believed was true, he had to see that man in the electric chair.
The lot was almost empty at midday, but he knew three people who would be home. After shutting off the car he sat for a minute to center himself and bring his blood pressure down. It wouldn’t do to rush in, agitated and short-fused with a man like Ivanovich standing guard.
Cooler, his story clear in his mind, Hannibal got out of his Volvo. He took three steps toward the motel building before he realized that someone else might have already made the mistake of approaching the room in some unacceptable manner.
Hannibal could see a man on the second-level balcony, standing at the door to the apartment where Viktoriya and Dr. Sidorov were supposed to be hiding in safety. The man raised his hand as if to knock but before he could, Aleksandr Ivanovich popped out of the door to the left and in three long strides was beside the newcomer. He drove a fist into the man’s side, bounced the man’s forehead off the door, and shoved him inside.
Hannibal had a pretty good guess of who it was, and sprinted up the stairs to the second floor. When he reached the door he called out his own name before trying the knob. It was unlocked and he pushed in, to find himself staring into the barrel of Ivanovich’s pistol.
“Be cool, Aleksandr,” Hannibal said, raising his hands. He stepped back, using his shoulder to push the door closed, then paused to take in the situation. Yakov Sidorov was in the chair beside the round table, almost exactly where Hannibal had left him. But now his veined hands gripped the arms of the chair. Viktoriya crouched on the far side of the far bed, looking over the edge of it, half her face hidden from view. At the front of the room Ivanovich stood with his pistol thrust toward Hannibal and his left foot on Jamal Krada’s throat.
“It’s me, and I’m alone,” Hannibal said. Ivanovich relaxed a notch and lowered his gun so that it pointed at Krada’s face. The Algerian went pale and Hannibal saw a wet stain begin to spread on the front of his pants.
“You don’t want to kill him,” Hannibal said, slowly lowering his hands. “Well, maybe you do, but you shouldn’t. Do you know who you got there?”
“All I need to know is, he’s the man who came here to kill Viktoriya,” Ivanovich said. He reached into the back of his waistband and flipped a small handgun to Hannibal. It matched the picture on the box Hannibal saw at Krada’s house. “He killed her mother and her husband with that, and here he is to finish the family.”
“Not likely,” Hannibal said. “She’s the reason he killed the other three.”
“Three?” Viktoriya asked, standing and walking just far enough around the beds so she could see Krada. “Jamal, did you kill them all?”
“Wait a minute,” Ivanovich said, sitting on the bed. He kept his gun on Krada even though he was looking at Hannibal. “I thought Boris Tolstaya killed Nikita Petrova.”
Hannibal wondered why these people always used first and last names. “For a while so did I. Boris sure thought he killed Nikita, and Dani Gana held it over him to get what he wanted, a trip to North Africa. They both described a fight and a beating Nikita took. But nobody said anything about throwing him off a roof. I think he was still alive when they left. And when they left, they didn’t know that someone else was looking for him and had followed them to the building.”
“This is silly,” Viktoriya said, leaning back against Sidorov’s arm for support. “Why would he kill my daddy?”
“Because he found out that his wife told your father about your pregnancy,” Hannibal said. “She gets talky when she drinks. See, he couldn’t afford for the word to get out that he had gotten another student pregnant.”
“Another?” she whispered.
“He followed your father from the Russia House that night, hoping to persuade him to remain silent. What he didn’t know is that his wife never named him as the father. She just wanted you yanked out of school, and figured that letting your dad know you got knocked up would do the trick.”
Now Krada sat up. “He didn’t know it was me?”
“No, asshole,” Hannibal said. “Actually, he accused Boris. That’s what set off the fight they had before you got there. But you didn’t see any of that, did you? You just hid in the shadows like the coward you are until Boris and his boys were gone. Then you went up, expecting to talk to Nikita, maybe threaten him, I don’t know. But instead you found him beaten, battered, maybe unconscious. Your problem was 90 percent solved.”
“Nikita was helpless,” Ivanovich said, poking the side of Krada’s head with the muzzle of his pistol. “So you pitched him off the roof, you heartless bastard. You even took his watch off and took his wallet.”
“And you said he killed Mama too?” Viktoriya asked. “That’s impossible.”
“No, girl, it ain’t,” Hannibal said, pulling a chair over and dropping into it. “Aleksandr just took the murder weapon off him, an exotic caliber you don’t see much around here.”
“But there was no reason,” Sidorov said, holding Viktoriya’s arm as if she might faint and fall.
“You’ve got to understand,” Hannibal said. “When Nikita died he left far less than anyone expected, and the mob did nothing for her. Boris sent her money out of guilt, but had to stop when the half million disappeared and he had to go underground. Dani Gana sent her money from a bank back home, kind of a bribe to get her to keep other men away from Viktoriya here. But that stopped once he was certain the girl would marry him. So things were
