Chapter Eleven
There were only so many ways for a man from the Eastern Bloc to enter the United States without drawing suspicion, even fewer when traveling north from Mexico.
Option A was to get into a car and drive straight to Montana. It included sitting in an interminable line at the Tijuana border crossing, having the car and driver scrutinized closely, and, if they were lucky, making it across the border six to eight hours after starting.
Option B was the airport, though it too posed the problem of going through customs. Beyond that lay the chore of renting a car upon arrival, a task that would leave a paper trail for anybody that might be looking.
Upon getting the word from Viktor, Pavel chose Option C. He called ahead to their contacts in San Diego and had a car posted at the Laguna Beach lot, with the keys stuck in a hideaway in the rear driver’s-side tire well. Once that was in order, he caught a ride north on the day’s shipment container, using the three-hour ride beneath deck to bank some rest, knowing he would need it soon enough.
There was little doubt that his passports and credit cards would check out if examined closely; they already had on multiple occasions. The bigger issues were time and visibility, both of which the third route better afforded.
The boat north out of Mexico left at noon sharp, depositing him at the San Diego pier just shy of three o’clock. A twenty-minute cab ride in the thin afternoon traffic took him to Laguna Beach, and just six hours after standing on the veranda with Viktor, he was on his way north.
Folded behind the wheel of a three-year-old Dodge Avenger, he kept the radio off as he stared out at the road ahead, running through every possibility the day could bring him.
Of paramount importance was finding Lita, alive or dead. The name on his passport indicated Pavel was her brother if he needed to show ID to get near a hospital room or identify her body, but beyond that he felt no connection to the woman whatsoever. Though he would never admit as much to Viktor, he too had wondered why Sergey had chosen her for the job. He didn’t buy the thinly veiled excuse that a woman would be better suited to gain trust and access in America.
If they had just let him come to begin with, none of this scrambling would be necessary.
The second order of business was to determine if Lita had been successful in eliminating Mateo Perez. Finding him had been a stroke of pure luck, and if he had slipped through their fingers there was no telling when or if he would pop up again.
The third order was the former agent, the Hawk, a loose end from another life, an annoyance that would be eliminated without trouble.
Armed with only a few scattered details of Lita’s trip ten days prior, Pavel pieced together what he could about her itinerary from credit card charges made to the company account. A flight from San Diego into Bozeman. Two nights’ stay at the Big Sky Plaza Inn. A car rental charge that remained open, the meter running.
A fifty-thousand-dollar expenditure to Hawk’s Eye Tours in West Yellowstone.
For fifteen straight hours Pavel sat behind the wheel, his heavy eyebrows knitted into one thick caterpillar across his forehead. He made only five stops the entire way, each time pulling into a Travel Plaza just long enough to fill up the tank, twice grabbing a tall coffee and a PowerBar for the road.
Given the hour time difference between the mountains and the coast, Pavel pulled into West Yellowstone just before eight o’clock in the morning. A thin fog lay over the town as he rolled through; only a handful of people were out in the early-morning light. The automated readout on the Bank of the Rockies sign announced it was thirty-four degrees, a full fifty colder than he’d experienced a day before.
A thin smile crossed Pavel’s lips as he stared at the digits, computing the numbers from Fahrenheit to Celsius in his head. His formative years had been spent in the brutal cold, and his body easily adapted to it. He wasn’t made for life on the beach—the last year had been an unending torture of sunshine and warmth.
Gripping the wheel in either hand and leaning over it to peer out the windshield, Pavel coasted through town, his gaze darting over every road sign he passed, scanning for the address he’d committed to memory a day before.
In a town like San Diego or Los Angeles, he would have been forced to bring directions with him, running the risk of someone else finding the papers later on. The towns were just too big to navigate blind.
In West Yellowstone, it took him seven minutes to find his intended target.
Hawk’s Eye Tours was a single wooden building at the far end of the one main street running through town. To the right of it was a matching wooden cabin with a red-white-and-blue-striped pole above the door. A sign tacked to the front fence stated it was the West Yellowstone Barber Shop. To the left was nothing but thick forest; trees butted up to within a few yards of the building’s exterior.
The entire structure looked to have cost less than fifty thousand dollars. What Lita had possibly needed to spend that kind of money on, he couldn’t imagine.
Pavel remained behind the wheel for several long minutes, keeping the car angled back toward town so he could see the front door and any morning traffic. Content there was none, he climbed out and crossed over the gravel parking lot, the cold morning air filling his lungs.
It was cleaner than he was used to, but the icy temperature of it brought a contented smile to his lips.
Pavel hopped up the three short steps leading to the front door in a quick burst, his body eager for movement after fifteen hours in the Avenger. He walked to the door and knocked on it twice with the back of his hand, even though the posted shop hours in the window said it wouldn’t be open until nine. Hearing nothing from within, he pressed the side of his hand to the glass and used it to block any reflection, bringing his face in tight and peering inside.
The office looked like a basic setup, with a small sitting area, a rack of brochures and pamphlets, and a counter running across most of the room. Overhead the lights were still dark, the place giving off the unmistakable vibe that it was void of life.
Blowing out an angry sigh through his nose, Pavel pulled back from the glass and looked in either direction. He turned toward town, walked the length of the front porch, his boots ringing hollow against the wooden floor, and came to a stop in front of a latticed window evenly spaced between the door and the edge of the building.
He turned on the ball of his foot and stared down at the homemade piece of poster board propped up in the corner, with simple black letters on a white background, drawn out in a woman’s handwriting:
Thanks for a great season, see you next year!
Pavel balled his hands into fists, thick mallets aching to lash out and strike something. He felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders tighten, running the length of his triceps and down into his forearms. Despite the cold, his body temperature rose, venom welling deep within.
“Dammit,” he muttered, hopping off the deck and walking back across the lot.
There were a few other options he had worked out in his mind, but this was by far the easiest. Without knowing where Lita and the guide went, it would be almost impossible for him to determine where to start looking. For all he knew, they could still be in the field, set to return at any time.
Given that the sign in the window said the shop was closed, it seemed unlikely but not completely unfeasible.
Halfway to the car, Pavel slowed his pace. He drew in deep breaths, forcing his mind to compute what he knew, what was available to him. At his disposal he had the last place Lita was known to have gone, a building that at the very least would have records of the trip or an intended location.
He also had going to the authorities and posing as Lita’s brother, a less than appealing option, or going into the park and seeing what he could find on his own, which would be even worse.
Casting a glance over his shoulder, he walked to the woods edging up against the parking lo
t and took a few steps in, making sure he was seen, should anybody be looking. He waited a few moments, pretending to relieve himself in the trees, before again tossing a look back behind him.
Seeing nothing, he circled around through the trees to the far side of the building, a latticed window staring out into the forest, a perfect copy of the ones on either side of the front door. Curling his index finger into a ball, Pavel tapped each of the three bottom panes of glass, listening close for whichever sounded the weakest.
Content that the far right was his preferred target, he shifted himself perpendicular to the building and drew his left arm across his body. With a mighty exhalation he snapped his torso in a tight arc, his hips twisting, sending his elbow careening into the glass.
The point of his ulnar bone smashed through the glass as if it were tissue paper, and the pane fell away in six jagged shards.
Pavel ran a hand over his skin to make sure there was no blood before snaking his arm up inside and flipping the lock open. The rusted implement resisted for a moment before turning itself free, allowing him to shove the window open. He rested his palms on the outer sill and leaned his head inside, glancing in either direction. After a moment he bent his knees a few inches and vaulted his body through to the waist, moving his hands to the floor and walking himself forward until he was completely inside the room.
The office was warmer than the air outside, though it was obvious the heat was turned down for the winter. Every light was out, shadows stretched across everything, put there by the faintest bit of ambient light drifting in.
Pavel counted to ten, listening for the sound of footsteps, and upon hearing nothing went to work.
The first place he started were the bookshelves, scanning over the volumes there covering every known topic about Yellowstone Park.
Wildlife. Volcanic activity. Hikes, waterfalls, campgrounds.
He hadn’t expected to find anything of use, opting to start there to cut away the obvious dead ends first.
Next he went for the desk situated in the middle of the room, leaving the chair in place and moving around behind it, careful not to disturb anything. The top left drawer was filled with maps of every kind, one after another in their own plastic sleeve, each labeled with a particular set of coordinates and a common name. Pavel thumbed through them quickly, none of the names meaning anything to him, and closed the drawer less than a minute after he’d opened it.
The drawer on the left was equally useless, filled with a plastic bag of granola and a couple of chocolate bars. For a moment he thought of his own hunger and considered swiping some fuel for the road, but decided against it, wanting to leave as little of a trail behind as he could.
A broken window could be explained easily enough, especially given how close it was to the forest. An emptied desk would be a little tougher.
Frustration grew within Pavel as he looked around. There was no computer anywhere in the office, no filing cabinets lining the walls. There had to be a system in place for dealing with customers, some way of storing files, he just wasn’t seeing it.
Giving up on the office, Pavel went to the door and eased it open, the hinges creaking softly as he peeled it back and peered around it. The front half of the building looked exactly as it had from the front window: everything shrouded in half darkness, the room silent.
Stepping out from the door, Pavel crossed over behind the desk, his eyes alighting on a power cord and an Ethernet cable extended out into the middle of it, connected to nothing. His face curled into an angry sneer, lips pulled back over misshapen teeth, as he tilted his head to the side and swore softly.
As he did so his gaze caught on an item in the trash, an old newspaper rolled up and cast aside. Reaching down he extracted it from the bin and placed it down atop the desk, smoothing it out with his hands.
The anger within Pavel abated as he stared down at the headline stretched across the top of the page. Written in bold block letters, it reported that authorities were still looking for answers in the double murder that had occurred in the park a week earlier.
Pavel nodded in approval. The girl might have gotten herself killed, but she had at least eliminated the primary target first.
The thought was pulled from his head before he had a chance to scan the paper any further, before he was afforded the opportunity to see what happened to the guide.
The alternating pulse of red and blue lights flashed through the front windows, striping across his torso, bathing everything in an unnatural hue. His initial reaction was to reach to the small of his back, grabbing for the USP Compact 9 mm that almost always resided there, before remembering it was tucked away in the middle console of his car.
Outside a pair of shadows crossed in front of the windows, heading for the front door. As he watched them grow closer, a handful of shaky plans passed through Pavel’s head, each as unlikely as the one before it.
Faced with no other option, he grabbed up the newspaper from the desk and walked to the front door. He switched the deadbolt down and snapped the door open, catching a pair of middle-aged deputies by complete surprise. Both jumped back a few inches as they stared at him filling the doorway, the paper crumpled between his hands.
Pavel looked at each of them in earnest, doing the best he could to appear sincere, and muttered, “Please, you have to help me. She’s my sister.”
Chapter Twelve
Despite being kept frozen for the first nine days, and on dry ice the entire time since I'd left Montana, the contents of the cooler were beginning to smell ripe. Not the stale, pungent aroma of milk a week after its expiration date, but the rancid smell of flesh beginning to putrefy.
The tech gave me a look that could melt stone as she lifted the first appendage from within, gripping it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. Ignoring the thin plastic glove encasing her hand, she had a look on her face that relayed a fear of catching some sort of flesh-eating bacteria just from being in the same room.
Once the specimen was free of the cooler, she flipped the lid on it down, hoping to trap inside what little stench she could. Rotating on the ball of her foot, she dropped the hand down on a sheet of clear glass beside her, the top shelf of a scanner.
“You know, Hutch occasionally alludes to you guys around here,” she said, her voice nasal, “but we all just kind of thought it was bullshit. The kind of nostalgia old warhorses feel once they’ve been confined to a desk job.”
My eyebrows tracked a full inch up my forehead as I turned to look at Hutch, a half smile on my face. “There is so much ammunition in that one statement, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I do,” Hutch responded, his face impassive as he stared at the girl. “You’re fired.”
A wide smile spread across her face, wide gums standing in exact proportion to her teeth. She shook her head, sending a bright orange ponytail flipping behind her head, eyes twinkling beneath oversized goggles.
“Where did I cross the line?” she asked.
“Old warhorse put out to pasture,” Hutch said.
“Claiming our stories were bullshit,” I added.
The girl looked at each of us and laughed, again twisting her head. In front of her the scanner kicked to life, a bright fluorescent bulb aiming light toward the ceiling, passing the length of the glass plate and back again. We all stood and watched as it traversed the length of the hand, a digital readout of it appearing on a flat screen on the wall across from us.
“Yeah, well, you both deserve it for putting me through this,” she said, sniffing extra loud so we knew exactly what she was getting at.
Above her, the screen took the scan and digitized it, reducing it to nothing more than the identifying prints lining the fingers and palm. Once the background was stripped away it mapped out two dozen individual markers among the myriad of lines, then connected them with iridescent red lines and locked them into place.
“How long will this take?” I asked, watching the scans whir by for a moment before shifting my attention back to the girl.
Again her face contorted into a sneer as she lifted the hand away from the plate and dropped it into the cooler. She snapped up an antibacterial wipe and worked to clear the glass, her arm making furious circles, stripping away any remnants of the prior scan.
“Depends,” Hutch said, watching the girl work, not bothering to glance my way. “If they’re in the system, only a few minutes. If not, we’ll have to start digging through Interpol, NSA, whatever we can get our hands on.”
I nodded, processing the information. Despite the fancy new equipment they had at their disposal, the databases for fingerprints backing them weren’t much different from what we’d had five years before.
“So the longer it runs, the lower the odds,” I said, more a statement than a question. I wasn’t expecting an answer, didn’t take it personally when one wasn’t provided.
Instead we both watched as the girl lifted the second hand out of the cooler and plopped it on the glass, the thawing flesh slapping against it with a sickening smack. A few stray droplets of fluid flew out as she did so, sending her retreating back a couple of steps, raising her hands by her side.
“If I never see you again,” she said, turning to glare over at me, “I won’t be sad.”
I considered telling her the feeling was mutual, that I wished nothing more than that this woman claiming to be Lita had never walked into my office. Right now I would be in northern Montana airing out my cabin for the winter, maybe heading down into Glasgow for my big supply run of the season.
Damned sure wouldn’t be standing in a lab, smelling the stench of rotting flesh, trying to figure out why the hell this mess had found me after so many years on the sideline.
Cold Fire Page 6