by Ninie Hammon
For whatever reason there was, it felt like there was too much energy, a kind of pressure to the image that caused the sparking effect. It mattered, because if she got flashes from María, maybe one of them would be like Macy feeding her little brother. Maybe a reflection in a toaster …
The child stirred, murmured something, and wiggled. So Bailey started singing softly again with tears streaming down her face and her breath hitching in and out in a wheeze almost as profound as María’s had been when she was a little girl.
“Somewhere out there, with my very last breath, I’ll get mine and their shares and they’ll just starve to death.”
Her heart broke for her little sister. What was happening to María in Boston, a thousand miles away from Shadow Rock?
María stood at the hotel room window, looking out across the still water of Whispering Mountain Lake toward Shadow Rock on the other shore.
She was exhausted, had not slept, of course. The pain in her smashed fingers had throbbed so relentlessly she could not have slept even if there hadn’t been an armed gunman outside her door.
She looked down at her fingers. Perhaps Mikhailov was right. Maybe her fingers had not broken, though she envisioned the bones in both of them from the joint to the fingertip pulverized. Not broken by the strictest interpretation of the word, but reduced to a substance similar to ground glass.
The fingers were double their normal size. The nails black. She could see that because she had taken her fingernail polish off Sunday night. She had been scheduled to have her nails done this morning.
Scheduled to have her nails done. A normal life event. Like taking her shoes to get the heel fixed that she’d broken off running down the steps. Normal, like getting Bethany up and dressed. While she put her makeup on, María always sang silly songs with the little girl, then she’d drop Bethany off at Mrs. Trimboni’s on her way to class.
School. One more semester and she’d graduate. Might even start law school in the fall. Except, of course, she wouldn’t. Wouldn’t start law school or anything else in the fall. She would be fortunate indeed to see another sunrise.
She caught herself before she banged her fist in mute protest against the pane of glass. With two not-broken-but-crushed fingers, that would hurt. But the rage that filled her, fighting with terror for real estate in her tied-in-a-knot gut fueled a desire to hit something. Break something. This was crazy. She should be home oversleeping. Home burning the toast because that stupid toaster didn’t turn off automatically at a particular setting but just kept getting hotter and hotter.
She blurted out a sound, some king of snort, cry, aborted scream. Some sound more feral than human, the cry of an injured beast, a cornered beast … a mother defending her cubs.
Bethany.
Thank God the child was safe with Bailey!
Right, safe with Bailey.
Like Bailey was safe.
María didn’t know what Mikhailov was planning, how he intended to get at Bailey, but she was absolutely certain that bringing her here was part of some sort of plan to do that. Mikhailov had remembered where he’d been the night of October 31. Here. The Nautilus. That’s why he’d hopped in a plane and flew half the night to get here.
Which meant he believed Bailey was somewhere nearby and he intended to find her, and María had been brought along and kept alive for that purpose.
Her fingers hurt. What a pathetic wimp she was to be caught up in that when …
But they hurt. The injury to them had been more than physically painful and Mikhailov had calculated all of it. There was such an offhanded brutality to deliberately smashing someone’s fingers in a car door. It communicated a disregard for pain or injury. For a person’s whole humanity. It even communicated how efficient Mikhailov had become in his line of work.
Like he’d said, maximum pain, minimal damage.
The pressure under both fingernails was something approaching unbearable. She looked around, found two straight pins on a hanger in the closet affixed to the bag where you could put your laundry or dry cleaning. The light in the bathroom was soft — dim! — like maybe they’d figured out it was depressing for a woman to see herself in glaring light, especially first thing in the morning. Even María didn’t like seeing those tiny lines around her eyes. She bet if you were over fifty, bright bathroom lights made you look like you were dying of pancreatic cancer.
But there was a gooseneck desk lamp on the bedside table and in that bright light she used one of the pins to drill a hole in the top of each fingernail. Bailey had taught her this little trick. Though María had never used it, she’d watched Bailey puncture her toenail after she dropped an iron skillet on it. Bailey’d said it didn’t hurt. It didn’t. In fact, the blood that spurted out relieved the pressure beneath the nails and the crushed fingers hurt less. She’d lose both fingernails.
She forced herself to try to move the index finger at the first joint and was rewarded with a lightning bolt of pain that threatened to return to her the sandwich she’d eaten last night. But she could move it and she thought maybe she should. She might need her right hand.
Throughout this whole adventure María had been a world-class weakling. A coward. So scared she could hardly get her breath. She didn’t know how people survived fear like she’d felt. But they did. Whether she liked it or not, so had she. Maybe that’s all courage was — surviving your fear. No, it was more than that. It was doing whatever you needed to do even though you were terrified.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had no courage, not a single shred of it. The monster who’d so casually ordered her fingers smashed was going to kill her — that was a given. Bailey, too, if he got a chance. Even precious little Bethany.
Courage or no courage, María had to stop him if she could!
How?
There was only one way, of course. Simple, really. Easy to figure out, but the execution … not so much. The only way to stop Sergei Wassily Mikhailov was to kill him.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Maxwell Crenshaw strode toward him, beefy hand extended before he remembered Mikhailov’s refusal to shake his hand earlier. He managed to redirect the gesture deftly, reached out and clapped Mikhailov companionably on the shoulder, a charming smile stapled to his face and alert calculation in his eyes.
“So sorry you had to wait, Mr. Mikhailov. Please come in and sit down and I’ll have your lunch—”
“No food, just water. Distilled. No ice. Let us do our business so you may go on about the rest of your day.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Mikhailov.” He instructed his assistant to bring water. It would, no doubt, be in a leaded glass goblet. Then Crenshaw led the way into his plush but admittedly tasteful office. “Please have a seat and—”
“I prefer to stand, but perhaps you might want to sit.”
He loved watching fear leap into the man’s eyes.
Loved it.
Maxwell Crenshaw had no idea what real fear was. How Mikhailov longed to — an icepick into his ear. Yes! Puncture his eardrum while he screamed and blood stained his shirt and —
Mikhailov felt himself slipping, sliding down a slick surface toward the darkness, a hole in the universe beyond which was nothing at all. Regaining control was getting progressively more difficult, required an effort of will that sometimes produced beads of sweat on his forehead.
“I require a table tonight in the back of your dining room, against the far wall.”
“That’ll put you behind—”
“Your green friend, I know.” He decided to smile but couldn’t remember how, didn’t know which facial muscles to engage. His face merely shifted expressions, as if he had undergone a sudden assault of conflicting emotions. “His color is quite offensive. You do know that, don’t you? The green of pus from an oozing sore.”
Then he remembered how to smile and so he did.
The smile on Maxwell Crenshaw’s face looked like he, too, had only just remembered how.
“A table f
or tonight. No problem. How many in your party?”
Sergei bleated out a sound that he managed to cover with a cough, though Crenshaw gave him a strange look.
Party. Yes, it would be a party!
“I want no other customers seated in that area. The six tables closest will be for my associates.”
He saw Crenshaw hesitate, knew he would have scheduling and juggling to do.
“Certainly, Mr. Mikhailov.”
“Because I will be in attendance, I require certain security measures. Instruct your staff that my associates are to be granted unlimited access and unquestioned authority in all such things.”
Crenshaw started backing up.
“Well, now, security’s a touchy subject in a casino. People come here to let loose, rock and roll, do things they’d never do ‘back home.’ If they showed up here and had to line up for metal detectors, or get patted down, or walk through a gauntlet of security guards — that would ruin their experience. An overt security presence is the opposite of excitement, impunity and dubious deeds. It’s a ten o’clock curfew. It’s the chaperones at the prom.”
Mikhailov had no idea what was a prom, but it was clear that Crenshaw was not sufficiently intimidated.
“I am sure I don’t have to remind you what … organization I represent. We have special interests in a … wide range of business endeavors, employ a security force unequalled in the private sector. My men are trained—”
He almost said assassins. Again, he made the strange sound and covered it with a cough. What was the sound? It was like a sneeze, came on him irresistibly, without warning.
Focusing again on Crenshaw, he saw that the man had gotten the subtext of his remarks.
“I can provide your associates discreet lapel pins that my staff recognize as … shall we say, trump cards. They will extend to them every courtesy.”
Crenshaw reached for a smile but dropped it before he was able to affix it to his face. The man was rattled, unsure whether or not he had … what was the colorful way Americans put it? Oh, yes, not sure if he had stepped in it.
“Excellent. Our business is concluded.” Mikhailov turned without another word and left Crenshaw’s office, made it all the way out into the hallway and halfway to the elevator before he made that sound again. It was like aborted laughter, but more high-pitched. A sound like a frightened woman would make.
When T.J.’s phone rang at 4:30 that afternoon he looked at the screen and saw the name on Caller ID.
Leroy Burgess.
“Got ‘er done,” Leroy said without preamble.
“What’s it gonna cost?”
“Oh, it’ll run ye, that’s a fact. But you’re gonna have to crank it up in the water ‘fore I’ll know for sure.”
T.J. was tired, bone weary, but it didn’t have nothin’ to do with not gettin’ much sleep last night, taking turns driving with Brice as they drove from Boston through Hartford, Wilkes-Barre, and into the mountains in the darkness.
He’d missed many a night’s sleep in his life and didn’t feel like he felt now.
Ordinarily an optimistic man by nature, most likely to come down on the it’s-gonna-work-out-fine side of a situation, T.J. had tried to jam this circumstance into the shape of good fortune he wanted it to fit into. But no matter how he tried to see it from another angle, it was clear’s the nose on his face that things wasn’t gonna end well for María Whatever-her-last-name-was. She wouldn’t survive an encounter with a murderous maniac like Mikhailov. In fact, the best thing that he could hope for her was that she’d die quick. But she wouldn’t. That wasn’t going to happen and soon’s Bailey was able to see anything else in all the world beyond the face of that precious little girl of hers, she was gonna figure it out, too. Brice and Dobbs already had.
That picture Bailey’d painted of María, the nightmare of fire and smoke and agony. T.J. didn’t know what he believed about that. Maybe their trip to Boston had saved her from that fate. Maybe Mikhailov’s kidnapping had. T.J.’s gut told him that somehow that 8 p.m.-tonight-ticking-clock still counted for something. Just about every time in his life that he’d failed to listen to his gut, he been sorry.
T.J. had been headed home, by way of the grocery to pick up a couple of little things, when his phone had rung and soon’s he seen it was Leroy Burgess, he almost didn’t answer it. Leroy was an old friend and a master mechanic. If he couldn’t make it run, whatever it was — be it lawnmower or Jeep Cherokee — you might as well sell it for junk because it wasn’t never gonna go nowhere under its own power again. Leroy spent the winter puttering around on repair jobs that’d been left in his garage workshop and wasn’t but one reason he’d be calling. The motor for T.J.’s jon boat was fixed. He didn’t want to think about that right now.
No, actually, he did want to think about that right now. He wanted to think about anything else in the world besides the devastated look that was gonna come on Bailey’s face when they found out the fate of her sister.
Leroy preceded to tell T.J. way more than he wanted to know or understand about the internal organs of a four-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, and then explained that he had it in his truck and he’d be glad to meet T.J. at the Possum Trot boat ramp where T.J. had his old metal jon boat tied up.
“So’s you can crank it up and see does it suit you.”
It was not a particularly cold day for early December, but it still wasn’t a day you wanted to go tooling around the lake in a jon boat. It’d be dark by five o’clock. But it was almost as hard to put Leroy Burgess off as it was to get him to agree to repair whatever it was you had broke in the first place.
“Fine,” T.J. said. “I’ll meet you at the boat ramp about five.”
When Dobbs’s phone rang at 4:30 that afternoon, he looked at the screen and saw the name on Caller ID.
Kavanaugh County Sheriff Brice McGreggor.
“I’m going to be a little late for my shift today,” Brice said. “I’m going to go shake a tree and see what falls out.”
Brice was scheduled to show up at about six o’clock and take Dobbs’s place as the Bailey Watchdog. He’d spend twelve hours in the guest bedroom until T.J. showed up at six o’clock tomorrow morning.
Around the clock — Bailey wasn’t going to be left alone in that house even for a second until Mikhailov and his son were safely arrested.
“Any tree I know?”
“A Maxwell Crenshaw oak.”
Then Brice told him what he had figured out during the nonstop marathon drive from Boston the night before. Mikhailov had been at the Nautilus for an off-the-books poker game when he was captured in the background of Bailey’s birthday picture. One of the games nobody was supposed to know existed, where high rollers from all over the world won and lost millions.
“Crenshaw knows Mikhailov or he’d never have allowed him in the game. How well acquainted are they? Maybe they’re twins separated at birth or maybe they were introduced at the game a month ago. No way to know which. So I’m taking a shot in the dark.”
It was at least conceivable that Crenshaw knew Mikhailov well enough that he could provide some tiny fragment of information about the man that would help police track the monster down before he butchered María, and if there was even the slightest possibility …
“I’m going to … explore the nature of their relationship,” Brice said. “Pay a visit to the casino, have a little chat with Crenshaw.”
“You be careful. You never know what might clock you over the head if you shake a tree hard enough.”
Crenshaw was a criminal who had bribed and glad-handed his way out of trouble his whole life. He was dangerous.
Ending the call, Dobbs glanced toward the stairs. He thought he’d heard Bailey’s phone ring the same time his had. Maybe it was T.J. who’d called her.
It wasn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
When Bailey’s phone rang at 4:30 that afternoon, she picked it up and saw the name on Caller ID.
María.
Bailey froze as still as a statue, unable to move or breathe.
Heaven to hell in a heartbeat.
Only minutes before – a mere handful of minutes -- she had been rocking Bethany!
She’d been reluctant to put the child down, reluctant to stop touching her, feared in that totally irrational way of psychotic fears that this part was just a dream. She had, after all, dreamed so often of being reunited with Bethany, of touching her, holding her, kissing her, and now the child was sleeping peacefully in her arms and it really did seem too good to be true.
Bailey didn’t know if Bethany normally took a morning nap — so much she didn’t know! — but she surely took one in the afternoon. Given how disturbed her sleep had been during that awful journey from Boston, the child should be exhausted and Bailey hoped she’d sleep for hours.
She got up carefully, but movement didn’t rouse the child. Then she recalled that Aaron had told her to stop tiptoeing around the house like a cat burglar while the baby slept. Bethany had to adjust to normal noises when she slept or every little thing would wake her up.
Aaron. He was always so reasonable. So wise.
He’d made a similar observation about carrying the sleeping child into the apartment after she fell asleep in the car.
Just put her in bed and take her shoes off. She’ll be fine.
She smiled now, thinking of Aaron. It felt good to smile at the thought of him instead of the dagger of pain that stabbed into her heart at the memories.
She walked to the couch in the parlor, the brand new couch, thank you very much Raymond Dobson, and gently — but not carefully — laid the little girl down. Bethany wiggled, then put her thumb in her mouth and drifted back off. Bailey snuggled both the old and the new minion blankets around her and forced herself not to tiptoe out of the room. She didn’t close the door all the way, wanted to be sure somebody’d hear Bethany when she woke up.