Orange Blossoms & Mayhem (Fantascapes)

by Blair Bancroft

“Don’t try it. Stay safe, Laine. Let it play out. We’re waiting. Whatever happens, the bastards won’t get away.”

  Right. Sure. I was a Halliday, and passive wasn’t part of my gene pool. I hit the End button, cutting off Rhys who was still cautioning me to take the safe way out.

  “Okay, Dasha, what’s going on?” I was quite certain she spoke more English than she’d acknowledged.

  She shrugged. “Nichevo.” The catch-all word to avoid an answer.

  I stalked toward one of the side windows, wondering with every step what Dasha would do. I popped the latch and put my muscles into heaving open a window that probably hadn’t moved since the day it was installed. It groaned, and so did I as Dasha hit me hard in a shoulder block that would have qualified her for the NFL.

  Okay, so now I knew. Fleetingly, I wished I’d paid more attention during Crouching Tiger and the Kill Bills. But adrenaline’s an amazing thing. I don’t much like being knocked about, and in those scant seconds on the floor my temper went from a cold determination to find out what was going on to flat-out incandescent rage.

  Dasha had paused her attack, evidently expecting the silly American wedding planner to cave at the first sign of trouble. She stood there, hands on her hips, waiting to see if I would stay down. I tried to looked cowed. Harmless. Down for the count. Guess it didn’t work. She launched herself forward, gathering momentum, her silk gown rustling as she ran straight at me.

  I rolled like a dervish in a frenzy, barely evading the kick Dasha aimed at my head. I sprang up snarling and kicked her hard in the ribs while she was still off-balance. I followed up by jumping on her back, wrestling her to the ground. Not my best move, because if they gave black belts for wrestling, Dasha would have had one. Air whooshed out of me as I took a blow to the boob that almost made me wish I was flat-chested. In the two seconds it took for me to swallow the pain, Dasha had one of my legs pinned to the rug and was reaching for my throat.

  This wasn’t a training session. This was real. Stupid idiot, she’s going to kill you!

  I needed a gun. Definitely no place to hide one in Dasha’s bridesmaid gown. Probably in her purse, which was on a table ten feet away. It might as well have been on the moon. I was in hand-to-hand combat with someone more experienced than I. Yet this was a fight I had to win. Time was of the essence. Whatever Viktor planned, it was going down now. The guests of honor had arrived. The main event could begin.

  Okay, time to play dirty. I gritted my teeth, jerked one arm free, and went for Dasha’s eyes. She screamed, loosed her grip, and I double-fisted her as hard as I could, smack on that obnoxious chin of hers. She went limp.

  Well, hey, good for me.

  I heard a sob and looked up to find Marina backed up against the far wall, the veil still covering her face. She was probably just beginning to realize she’d been used. Betrayed. But wasn’t sure which one of us, Dasha or I, was the enemy. Thank God for her confusion, because if she’d joined Dasha, I’d have been in really big trouble. I put my fingers to my lips in the universal signal for silence. I told her everything was going to be okay, to trust me. I didn’t feel guilty about the lie because I knew she couldn’t understand me, but I hoped my soothing tone would reassure her. “Saditsyah!” Like an automaton, Marina followed my instruction to sit, collapsing onto a couch while I searched Dasha’s purse. To my disappointment, her gun was only a .22, but it was better than nothing.

  My phone, thank god, was still around my neck. I speed-dialed Rhys. “Dasha’s down. I’m heading out to see what’s going on.”

  Ignoring his strong protest, I ended the call. I peeked out one of the front windows, made a quick survey of the parking lot. Only a couple of the younger security guards, standing at ease, their backs to the window. A check of the side window revealed just one guard, teenage and bored. He was looking toward the front of the club, enjoying a cigarette. Unless he was more conscientious than he seemed, I ought to be able to make it.

  Okay . . . before I dropped to the ground outside, I’d better analyze my options. Returning via the side door was out, as it would bring me right back in the front of the guard at the room we were in. The front door—forgetaboutit. The rear door, the one we’d used for the eggs, would put me right in the middle of the ceremony, almost at Center Stage with the bridal canopy and the eggs. So I would have to make my way around to the entrance on the far side of the building. Which meant skirting the entire rear of the club. Not good, but what choice did I have?

  My minuscule command of Russian deserted me, and I pantomimed to Marina, Stay here, stay quiet and gave her a swift hug. I kicked off my heels, opened the window, checked the guard, and jumped. As my feet hit the sandy ground, the guard threw his cigarette down, grinding it out with his shoe. I bent into a crouch, which should keep me hidden behind the parked cars, and duck-walked my way to the rear, where I paused, peeking around the corner. Surprise. Not a single goon in sight. Which, in itself, was odd. The back of my neck prickled, the hairs on my arms stood on end. They were all inside . . . seeing what? Doing what? Time, time, time. I was running out of time.

  No heroics, no blazing guns. No capturing the bad guys single-handed. The place will be surrounded by cops. Let them do their job. Is. That. Clear?

  Sorry, Rhys. It’s just not in my nature. Okay, so I was still blindly confident that Viktor wouldn’t have me shot.

  I hauled in a deep breath and sprinted for it. Past the wheelchair ramp we’d used to bring in the eggs, past the remaining windows on the other side of the rear door. Skidding to a halt at the corner, I took a peek at the side entrance. It, too, was deserted.

  Hm-m-m. I straightened my shoulders, dropped the .22 to my side, hiding it in the folds of my girly pastel dress. I was nothing more than a wedding guest, arriving a trifle late. If recognized, merely the frilly, frivolous, air-headed wedding planner, wondering why things were running late.

  I could do this.

  No heroics, no heroics, no heroics . . .

  I had to do this. Something awful was about to happen, I knew it. If I had the slightest chance of stopping it, delaying it, screwing things up for Viktor and his goons, then I had no choice. I pulled open the side door and stepped inside.

  Okay, so I am a frilly, frivolous, air-headed wedding planner, who should have run for it when she had a chance. Arms the size of a tree branch clamped around me. The .22 was handed off to a slightly less giant-sized wiseguy with something that sounded all too much like a guffaw. They were laughing at me. “You want to see?” the giant chortled in my ear on breath that reeked of sausage and onions. “It begins now. Come.” With one hand over my mouth, the other easily holding my arms behind my back, he propelled me down the hall. His cohort pushed open a door at the rear of the wedding hall, and we stepped inside.

  The forty guests were seated in folding chairs near the middle of the room, with the beautifully decorated tables, ready for the reception, between them and us. At the far end of the hall was the centered dais with the canopy and, to the right of the dais, the large pink egg. Viktor stood on one side of the egg, his best man, Yuri, on the other. As the Eastern Orthodox priest in his ornate robes and tall mitered hat finished some kind of Invocation in Russian, Viktor and Yuri stepped forward and slowly, with a nice sense of drama, laid the pink egg back on its rear hinges, displaying the jade green egg beneath. Exactly as planned.

  The audience response, however, was even more dramatic than anticipated. They gasped, they applauded. They smiled. Even the dour dark-suited men seated in the front row—the men from the stretch limo, I presumed—looked at each other, nodding their approval. For a fleeting moment I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d made a fool of myself. While I was skulking around, playing Nancy Drew, someone had retrieved Marina, tucked her inside the egg . . .

  The giant’s hands tightened over my mouth and arms. Viktor and Yuri, laid open the green egg, revealing the Romanov blue egg beneath. The audience breathed almost as one, a great collective sigh of approval.

&nb
sp; Surreal. Totally surreal. I wanted to shout, scream, yell. Run. And I couldn’t move. It was like the day I watched the space shuttle shatter into pieces on live TV. Or sitting at home watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Impossible. But it was happening, moving inexorably to a close with me unable to do a damn thing about it. My only consolation was that, even I’d run for it, what could I have said to the policemen in the patrol cars outside? What would have justified cops rushing in to stop a formal wedding, presided over by an Eastern Orthodox priest?

  The blue egg opened. When the guests saw the iridescent white egg inside, there was a great murmur of satisfaction as they recognized this was it, the bride egg. The final step. I could feel my giant goon shift from the almost nonchalant grip he had on me into attack mode. Every muscle went tense, ready to spring. Viktor, in a glittering glance that looked as if he were merely enjoying the satisfaction of the effect of his eggs on the wedding guests, checked the room, including his surrounding array of wiseguys. And me. An infinitesimal nod, but I knew it was aimed at me. A thank-you. Whatever was about to happen, it was my fault. To the best of my ability, I’d aided and abetted. I’d been used.

  Yet I still had no idea how badly.

  Viktor and his buddy opened the white egg very slowly. All we could see was the great swath of a full-length veil. Marina? Surely not. The audience held their breaths, the silence absolute.

  And then it all went to hell. The veil billowed, was thrown aside. Instead of Marina Galikova, a man in a white suit emerged, his AK-47 raking the front row of guests. Viktor and Yuri backed him up, now also armed with automatic rifles retrieved from the egg. My giant threw me aside and joined the fray, he and his companion using their 9mms to efficiently pick off the security guards who were not part of Viktor’s conspiracy. I staggered, flattening myself against the back wall.

  Shouts, screams, sobs. Pounding feet as Viktor and his men disappeared out the double doors at the rear.

  Horrified, slammed by gut-wrenching guilt, I ran to the window and watched them tear their way through the tangled brush along the canal’s steep bank. No way to see the canal below, but there had to be a boat waiting. The getaway I’d almost missed. The getaway I was determined would not work.

  Chapter Twenty

  I hit the Talk button on my phone. Anything I said to Jeff would be instantly communicated to the other law enforcement agencies. “Shots fired. Body count high. Getaway by boat.” I hit Speed Dial for Doug. “I was right. They went straight down the bank to the canal. Pick me up at the bridge.”

  After realizing the canal was a getaway possibility, I’d checked it out. About three-quarters of a mile north of the Slavic American Club, the canal made a sharp left under the Tamiami Trail, a standard highway bridge with little headroom for boats. But a small boat could make it. After that, the canal was navigable all the way to the Calusa River. A lovely, serene two miles. The residents living along it unsuspecting that a monster was about to move among them.

  Around me, the hall was now eerily silent, as heads inched up and people who had flattened themselves on the floor struggled to their knees. Visions of the VistaDome flitted through my head. Like the other survivors, I blinked in disbelief. The carnage was appalling.

  This was a Fantascapes wedding, and I was in charge.

  I straightened off the wall and started down the center aisle. The bloody aisle. The body-strewn aisle. The path paved to my own private hell.

  I understood the full depravity of it now. Viktor had sold out to the New York mob. Today, in a superbly planned execution, he had eliminated the entire hierarchy of the Miami mob in the space of . . . what? Twenty seconds, tops. Dear God, what had I done?

  Somewhere, over my anguish, I heard sirens. Help was on the way. I had to leave the carnage to the police. Had to get to my car, join Doug . . . but I’d have to be inhuman to ignore the carnage around me.

  They were wiseguys, I told myself. All of them, wiseguys. Trafficking in drugs, arms, innocent women and children. Why waste my tears?

  They were human beings, flesh and blood, with wives and children and . . .

  Oh, God, no! I paused, my stocking feet, stained in blood, refusing to move. Collateral damage. That’s what they call it when ordinary, everyday people are killed because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. So sorry, so long, goodbye.

  At my feet was Viktor’s collateral damage—a young mother and a little girl of perhaps three or four. Sprawled in the aisle in pools of blood. As I fell to my knees beside them, the mother stirred, the child began to cry. Mercifully, the blood wasn’t theirs.

  I rose to my feet, took another look around. This mother and child might suffer only from the horror of the massacre, but not all the bullet-wracked bodies I saw were wiseguys.

  I bowed my head and raged. At myself. At Viktor. At God.

  There were no words bad enough to vent my rage. For this, my big brown bear was going to pay. I relinquished my vigil over the mother and child, as the priest, heedless of his embroidered satin robe, knelt down beside me. Marina . . . I had to find Marina. Was Dasha still where I left her? Incredible as it seemed, less than ten minutes had passed since I slugged her.

  I raced down the hall and was just in time to see Dasha going out the window I’d left open. After all her efforts, they’d abandoned her. The getaway boat was, by necessity, small; Viktor and his goons, large. Poor Dasha. My heart bled for her. Yeah, right. The parking lot was swarming with local cops and men in dark suits. I yelled at one of them, and that was the end of Dasha.

  But, otherwise, the room was empty. Marina was gone. I hoped there was some special hell for the Viktors of this world. He’d probably planned to abandon both girls, but one look at Marina, and who could blame him for being reluctant to give up his bride? A monster he might be, but he was a monster with taste.

  “God, I was afraid I’d lost you!” Rhys, closely followed by two of the Gerries, burst into the room, took one look at my face and swept me up in his arms. “It’s not your fault, Laine. You did everything you could.”

  Of course it was my fault. But for all of ten seconds I let him hold me, providing the instant surge of comfort I needed to keep me going. I told him about Dasha and what I suspected had happened to Marina. “We have to go,” I added. “Doug’s waiting at the bridge.”

  “Letting Viktor blow right past him?”

  I nodded. “For now. Even Doug knows he can’t take them alone.”

  “But he’s a Halliday,” Rhys said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “Infallible. Leaps tall buildings, takes on a room full of mobsters without a second thought.”

  I ignored him. “If you’re coming along, now’s the moment. I’ve got a Glock as well as my Lady Smith in my car. Or is that against Interpol rules?” I even had my bolas.

  “It’s against the rules, but after what I just saw, I don’t give a bloody damn,” Rhys responded grimly.

  I told the Gerries to fall back to the strip mall and wait for orders. Frankly, I was afraid they’d be swept up in the overlapping tangle of local cops, FBI, FHP, and who knew what else. Except for rounding up the young wiseguy wannabes, it looked like the action was going to be waterborne. Best to keep Jordan’s Geriatrics in reserve.

  We crept out of the parking lot with extreme care, making our way through the maze of law enforcement vehicles, with Rhys holding his Interpol ID out the open window. After dropping our two Gerries at the strip mall, I zoomed the Lexus onto the Tamiami Trail and headed for the low bridge over the canal. We were in luck. There was a convenient motel parking lot, with a low canal bank and no underbrush. The gate in the motel’s anti-alligator chain link fence gaped open. I parked, jumped out, and searched the sky to the west for Flint and Jeff in the county chopper. And Yes! there they were. Closer than I’d expected. I hit the Talk button. “Jeff, what have we got?”

  “They off-loaded to a bigger boat about a half-mile down the canal. Powerful. Sea-going.”

  “Is Marina with them
?”

  “Girl in a poofy white gown?”

  “Right.” I groaned. “Don’t lose them.” I winced as I clicked off. Telling Flint to do his job was clearly a sign that my nerves were rattled.

  “Hostage?” Rhys asked.

  “As far as we’re concerned, yes, but I think Viktor really wants to keep her. He has good taste in women.” Bile rose in my throat as I thought of all the times Viktor had looked me over.

  “Hey!” Doug yelled from the canal below. “You coming or not?”

  Airboats, designed to function in the swampy grass of the everglades, have almost no draft, so Doug had no difficulty bringing the Halliday family airboat up tight to the shallow bank. The boat’s power was enough that I didn’t worry about catching up with Viktor. When my miserable Russian bear opted for a water escape, he must have thought he’d have plenty of time to clear the 776 bridge over the Calusa River, some seven miles south—the last obstacle before the river flowed into the massive Charlotte Harbor, where finding any one boat would be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  Viktor was wrong.

  The Halliday airboat was small, with just three seats, a high platform for the driver right in front of the raised engine cage and a double bucket seat set into the well of the boat. Rhys and I jumped aboard the airboat and slid into the bucket seats.

  “A fifteen-foot Whaler, twelve minutes ago,” Doug reported. “Overloaded. Seven guys and the bride. Can’t get far in that, must be planning a switch.” When I told him what Jeff said, he nodded, then thrust the airplane engine from idle to a moderate roar.

  Airboats are flat-bottomed for skimming over the water rather than ploughing through it. They’re propelled by an airplane engine that rises from the stern, like some great roaring monster, enclosed in a protective cage of iron bars. The ugly, ungainly boat can skim over the water like a thundering tornado, and tip over just as fast. They’re great for swamps and quiet shallow water, a disaster in open water with any kind of waves. Fortunately, the canal was glassy calm. Hopefully, on this beautiful sunny day, the river was too.