‘Where are you?’ She could barely contain her rage.
‘I was headed to the second address. I’m on the San Mateo Bridge. Nearly in Hayward, across the bay. But then I thought, what’s the fucking point of that? I think this bitch took one of their phones. Either Maxim’s or Gennady’s. I’m going to give her a call. I’m going to give her somewhere to meet. Because that’s what she wants, right? She wants me finished, wants the whole crew wiped out.’
‘So do it.’
‘You’re going to be there. I’m going to take her alive and I’m going to let you punish her. Make it slow. Make her scream, beg, cry. All of it.’
‘Sounds like you’re playing with fire.’
‘I’ll play with fire and you’ll give me a million dollars for it.’
‘I—’
‘All my brothers, Heidi. And I know what she’s done to you. You want to hear her squeal, yes?’
Heidi thought about it. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘And I want to be compensated. I know about your little problem with the papers, with your company. I know you’re on borrowed time. So you hurt this woman, I get my money, and we both disappear before any of this makes it to the pigs.’
Heidi thought, Can I run with Petr?
Do I have the genetic makeup for that?
For retreat?
Yes.
Yes, she did.
All this conflict was for the sake of her own ego. She saw that now, and clearly. She couldn’t comprehend facing her failure, owning up to her mistakes, mostly because of the recent publicity she’d received. She was a minor celebrity now and she’d always known that her downfall, if it ever came, would fuel the tabloids for months.
But it was better to kill the ego than to die, so yes, she could start afresh. She’d need to adopt better habits, find a way to detach herself from the news stories that would mock and deride the downfall and sudden disappearance of Heidi Waters. She didn’t have to be Heidi Waters forever, though. A quick name change, a few falsified documents, and she was someone else, someone who hadn’t plummeted from the heights of fame and fortune.
There was work to do before that, though.
No matter what, she wouldn’t disappear without getting revenge.
So she said, ‘I know a place in Hayward. Along the San Lorenzo Creek. It’s one of those manmade flood control channels. Big concrete slopes. Gravel at the bottom. Lots of room for privacy.’
Petr came alive. ‘Like in “Terminator 2.” The truck chase.’
Definitely coked, she thought.
‘Yes, Petr,’ she said. ‘Like in “Terminator 2.”’
‘How you know about this place?’
‘You’re not the first gangsters I’ve needed to use. I’ve buried bodies before.’
‘Gangster,’ Petr corrected. ‘Just me now.’
She sighed. ‘Yeah.’
‘We will make this bitch pay for what she did.’
‘We will.’
Petr whooped and hung up.
Heidi was almost grateful. There’s nothing more dangerous than a man with psychopathic tendencies who’s uncontrollably high on drugs. She’d dealt with a couple of those types before. And she knew what coke did to her. That wasn’t a version of herself she ever wanted to bring back.
She didn’t look back as she got into one of her less attention-grabbing vehicles and drove it out of the garage.
She knew it was the last time she’d see her home, and her husband.
Ruminating on that was so far down her list of priorities that she couldn’t even see it.
She gunned it for the San Mateo Bridge, grinning in the dark.
56
Alexis thought about calling Slater, or King, but figured they were neck-deep in their own problems.
So she drove aimlessly through San Mateo, eyes peeled for any sign of Petr, frustrated beyond measure that he’d slipped from her grasp.
She’d almost done it. Almost single-handedly eradicated a whole faction of Russian gangsters. When she’d first touched down on Californian soil, she couldn’t have imagined it spiralling into this, but she wasn’t sure why she was so surprised. It always seemed to go this way. She was steadily becoming like Slater, like King: namely, a magnet for destruction. Trouble seemed attracted to them all, but only because they didn’t shy away from it.
One of the phones she’d taken off the henchmen started ringing on the passenger seat. She glanced over.
PETR.
She furrowed her brow, thought about leaving it, but as dark suburbia flashed by outside she realised she had few other options and relented. Reached over and picked it up and answered.
‘What are you doing?’ she said before he could speak. ‘You saw me kill them. They’re not answering.’
‘I didn’t want to talk to them.’
The same insane inflections, the randomly accentuated words, the fast-talking.
She said, ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ll only say it once because you won’t believe me, so here goes.’ He took a breath like he was trying to control his heart rate. ‘I don’t really blame you for what you’ve done. This is business, right? People hire people to do things that…aren’t nice. So if people like you aren’t nice to us in return, then whatever. Part of the game. But what I don’t like are pretenders. Pretenders like the stupid bitch who hired me. She’s the contractor, right? Yeah? She should do her due diligence. And she didn’t. She didn’t research who you were — she still has no fucking idea who you are, and neither do I — but that’s the type of shit that needs to be known beforehand. As far as I’m concerned she sent all my men to their deaths because she was lazy and she just didn’t understand what she was doing.’
Whatever Alexis had expected to hear, it wasn’t that.
Petr continued. ‘I’m going to text a set of coordinates to the phone you’re holding. They’ll lead you to a flood control channel along the San Lorenzo Creek, in Hayward. Over the bridge. Be there in thirty minutes. I convinced Heidi to come.
