Beauty & the Beast: Vendetta

by Nancy Holder

  “It’s my sister’s,” she confessed.

  “Where is it?” the man said.

  “She took it with her. I just borrowed it because, well… I have this awful rash and…” She looked down at her front. Her top had been yanked down when her hands were tied behind her back and the rash was visible. “See? I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Is STD,” the man said, grimacing.

  “I don’t have—”

  “Where is jacket?” the man said, cutting her off. He stepped forward with gun raised to hit her as he had Ravi. The blonde moved between them and blocked his path. He could have stepped around her but he didn’t try.

  “Where is sister?” the woman said, turning back and staring hard into Heather’s eyes.

  “She bought the jacket for her trip. She’s gone. This is her apartment. I’m housesitting until she comes back.”

  “This her apartment?” the man said, shaking his head.

  He said something in Russian to the woman. To Heather it sounded like “Mush-bow-cratch-noz.” Then he headed for the kitchen and the cute, fifties-style refrigerator. The door was decorated with magnets and family photos and a copy of Cat and Vincent’s travel itinerary. The man found the itinerary and pulled it down, sending the heart-shaped magnet skittering across the floor. “Cruise to Hawaii?” he said, shaking the paper at her accusingly.

  Heather didn’t know how much to say, but she had to say something. “It’s their honeymoon.”

  “Did you touch pocket of jacket?” the woman asked. “Put one thing in pocket? Take one thing out of pocket?”

  “No, I didn’t know anything was in there.” She looked at Ravi and added, “He didn’t tell me… anything.”

  “She didn’t know,” Ravi piped up. “She doesn’t know about the deal…”

  The man turned towards her and with obvious pleasure said, “Your boyfriend is liar and thief. And he is greedy. Five million of dollars not enough for him. And now he get five million of nothing. Chip very small, smaller than stamp, maybe in so small plastic case. You didn’t find?”

  “I didn’t touch the pocket. It wasn’t my jacket. It was new.”

  “Okay,” the man said, “we search apartment. You don’t move.”

  The two Russians left the room. Heather couldn’t budge with her wrists attached to the chair back. Ravi, on the other hand, could have gotten to his feet and hopped to the front door, but apparently he wasn’t brave enough to try.

  They were left alone while the Russians ransacked Cat and Vincent’s bedroom. She cringed when she heard glass breaking and presumably emptied drawers hitting the floor.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ravi said, trying to catch her gaze.

  Heather looked away. Ravi was posed like a man about to be executed; she was tied to a chair. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She was a terrible judge of men. Always looking for Sir Lancelot and seeing him where he wasn’t. This was the second guy who had put her life in jeopardy because he was a selfish bastard. Darius Bishop being the first.

  As expected, the man and woman came back from the bedroom empty-handed.

  “Jacket not here,” the man said to her.

  “My sister took it, I told you. To Hawaii with her.”

  “Look, you know where the chip is now,” Ravi said. “You don’t have to hurt us. We’re telling you the truth.”

  “We know only where you say it is,” the woman said.

  “If chip where you say, we don’t need you,” the man said. “If sister has, we only need her.” With that he quickly grabbed a fluffy pillow from the sofa with his free hand and jammed Ravi’s head face down on the sofa cushion with it. The other hand held his pistol.

  The blonde reached out to stop her partner, then let her arm drop as if she knew trying to restrain him was useless. A sadness flitted through her eyes; it was only there for an instant, but Heather saw it clearly. It made her look ten years older. Without a word she stepped into Heather’s line of sight, blocking her view of the sofa.

  “No, please!” Ravi cried into the cushion.

  Muffled by a silencer, two gunshots fired.

  Heather jolted on the chair at each one. Ears ringing, she began to shake uncontrollably. The plastic ties cut deeply into her wrists. It had happened so fast.

  So fast.

  Oh, my God, Ravi, she thought.

  The smell of gun smoke and spilled blood filled the apartment and she gagged, on the verge of throwing up. She was sure they were going to kill her too. Leave the bodies for Cat and Vincent to find in a couple of weeks. Fearfully she looked up at the blonde woman. On her face was an expression of disgust. Heather could see how tightly she was holding the gun, so tight her knuckles were white from the strain. So as not to chip a nail, the woman took off the safety with the ball of her thumb. Heather wanted to pray, but she was so frightened she couldn’t remember a single line of anything remotely religious. The harder she tried the farther away the words slipped.

  The woman kept the pistol along the outside of her thigh, aimed at the floor as she turned to face the man. She said something in Russian in a tone that was unnervingly calm.

  Blinking away her tears, Heather saw the man’s face. It was bright red. Was he embarrassed? Ashamed? Or was it fury he was holding back? She tried not to look at the couch, but she couldn’t help it. Ravi was no longer pressed face first into the cushion. He was slumped on his side on the floor in front of it, still bound hand and foot. He wasn’t moving. The sofa cushion and seat back were soaked in glistening crimson, as was the underside of the pillow.

  “He cheat my uncle,” the man protested, speaking in English, as if he wanted Heather to understand why he had shot Ravi. “He have to pay.”

  “There is five million dollars on table. He could have copy of chip. From company Chrysalis,” the woman argued.

  The man shrugged, but his face turned redder.

  She looked hard at Heather. “You know his work? You can get?”

  Heather couldn’t speak. She could only quake. The blonde stared down at Ravi and spoke in Russian again.

  “Who cares?” the man said in English. “Cut him up in bathtub. Take him down to street in three suitcases.” He smirked at Heather. “What, too messy? Take too long?” He pointed his gun at her. “We do the same to you.”

  The woman snapped at the man. She sounded like she hated him. The two went back and forth in Russian as Heather kept working to keep from losing it. Were they arguing about killing her? She was a witness. They knew she didn’t have the chip. Her sister did.

  “What’s on roof?”

  It took a moment for Heather to realize the woman was talking to her. “A little garden. Laundry.” She didn’t tell them that Vincent and Cat had gotten married up there. Flashes of memory sparked through her mind’s eye of all the preparations for their impromptu wedding. How much fun it had been, and how joyful. She didn’t want these people up there. Ever. She began to pant, and forced herself to take a deep, slow breath.

  “Fence is on edge of roof?” the woman asked.

  Heather shook her head, not following. “No. There is no fence.”

  The woman said something to the man. He raised his chin and sneered at her, then stomped back down the hall toward Cat and Vincent’s bedroom. The way to the roof was through their window to the fire escape. Did they know that? Was he going to inspect the roof?

  The woman took a knife from the wooden block in the kitchen and cut the ties on Ravi’s wrists and ankles. She put the bloody scraps in her purse. There was blood on her purple gloves now. Blood everywhere.

  The man returned with the duvet off Cat and Vincent’s bed. It had been a wedding-shower gift that Cat hadn’t been able to return when their first wedding had been called off. There had been no card attached to it. Heather had always thought it was from someone who had known either their mom or Cat’s bio-dad, but hadn’t come forward.

  “Soak up blood,” the man said, showing Heather the duvet.

  When the woman st
epped behind Heather with knife in hand, Heather’s heart jumped into her throat. He was taunting her, frightening her on purpose. He didn’t care what she saw and heard because she wasn’t going to live long enough to pass any of it along. She tried desperately to see the woman’s face, but couldn’t turn her head far enough. God, she’s going to cut my throat.

  Instead, the woman cut the tie on her wrists.

  “Get up,” the woman said.

  Heather couldn’t move. The woman prodded her with the bloody fingertips of her glove. Ravi’s blood was on her. Heather rose, and the woman fastened a new zip-tie around her wrists. She could barely feel it.

  The man spread the duvet on the floor and pushed Ravi into it. Heather stifled a cry as his ruined face appeared, then was swiftly covered as the man rolled him up.

  “You take us to roof now.”

  Heather watched the man roughly hoist Ravi’s wrapped body over his shoulder. No way was she going to show them the fire escape route Cat and Vincent used. If she could make them go the normal way, down the hall to the interior staircase, someone might open a door a crack, see them, realize she was in trouble, and call the police.

  The woman opened the front door, checked the corridor in both directions, then pulled Heather out by her arm. “Which way?”

  Heather passed in front of the closed doors, hoping against hope. No one looked out. She led them up the narrow flight of stairs to the roof.

  Since it was daytime the fairy lights weren’t lit. The little table with two chairs, checkered tablecloth, and vase looked smaller; the rooftop itself looked grungier—covered with patches and irregular seams of asphalt. Cat and Vincent had gotten married in this secret garden under the stars surrounded by the lights of New York City. Heather knew that for her it would never again be a sanctuary and a place of happiness.

  The woman peered over the edge, then said something to the man. He brought his burden next to her and they both looked down. Then she took off her bloody gloves, put on fresh ones, and dug through the layers of duvet to Ravi’s feet. She took off his loafers and set them to one side on top of the wall.

  And Heather knew in that moment what they had planned for Ravi. Her heart virtually stopped for a few beats. Her gorge rose. She had to stop this.

  He’s already dead, she reminded herself. He couldn’t have survived what they did to him.

  “You stay,” she told Heather. “Do not move.”

  Heather couldn’t stop her tears. She thought of Ravi’s family. Cat had told her many things about her cases over the years, and she had gleaned a few tidbits. One of the strangest things she had ever heard was that people who committed suicide by jumping often first took off their shoes.

  They already shot him.

  But they weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to slow down the autopsy results, delay recognition of his identity.

  Buy time to find Cat.

  Heather watched in horror as they manhandled the limp body into position against the wall. They both bent down, each grabbing a leg behind the knee, and then lifted in unison, shoving Ravi’s body off the roof head first.

  Heather knew it was a long, straight fall to the alley below. She was grateful she couldn’t hear the sound of the impact over the traffic noise.

  The man began folding up the blood-stained duvet.

  Am I next? she thought, weeping hard. Oh, God, is this it?

  A rush of air brushed her neck as the woman came up quickly behind her. Before she could react she felt a short, sharp pain behind her right ear, and then she felt nothing at all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Anatoly Vodanyov listened carefully as Ilya and Svetlana reported in. The two fell over each other’s sentences as each attempted to one-up the other, currying Anatoly’s favor. One was his nephew and one was his protégée. Svetlana was much smarter than Ilya, but Ilya was blood. On the other hand, Svetlana had talents that extended beyond murder and mayhem.

  Anatoly was watching them on an iPad that Ilya had set on a cardboard box. One of Anatoly’s many holding companies had signed the lease on this warehouse years ago. He didn’t even remember what was in the cardboard boxes any more.

  “So then we threw him over the side,” Ilya informed him.

  Anatoly nodded calmly, but inside, he was furious. Had they not even considered that Suresh could have gotten them another copy of the chip? It had taken Anatoly nearly a year to recruit Suresh to betray his employer. Suresh had been his only contact there. Mischa Stepanoff, the “mutual acquaintance” who had served as Anatoly’s go-between with Suresh, had died ages ago. Anatoly had made it look like a drug overdose, but it had simply been a case of ensuring there were no loose ends where the chip was involved.

  But now Anatoly suspected that Mischa had been the one to introduce Ravi to Mr. Q. He would never know. And these two idiots had ensured that the chip was lost to him—unless he managed to get the tiny plastic box away from a police detective on her honeymoon.

  “None of the neighbors saw her leave,” he said to them.

  “I propped her up between us in the car. No one could tell there was anything wrong. She looked completely fine,” Svetlana assured him. Svetlana was upset. Good. At least she understood what a debacle this was. Ilya, on the other hand…

  Oh, Ilya. What should he do with his sister’s idiot son?

  “Suresh was so stupid,” Anatoly grunted in Russian as Ilya and Svetlana dragged the weeping girl over to a chair and began to attach her to it. Anatoly liked zip-ties. No knots.

  “Please, please, let me go,” the girl sobbed. Her makeup was smeared all over her face. She looked like Heath Ledger as the Joker. Anatoly couldn’t help a smile. Good movie. But truly, had she looked like this on the drive over? He wouldn’t call that fine.

  “I haven’t done anything. There’s nothing I can do to help you,” the girl blubbered.

  And you’re just as stupid as Suresh, if you think that, he thought.

  Ilya bound her wrists together with a plastic zip-tie and anchored them in her lap, forcing her to hunch her shoulders. Soon she would be begging them to unbind her. At that point, she would find ways to be helpful. Many ways. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself cutting a Joker smile into her face with a serrated hunting knife. A burst of rage coursed through his veins, but he quickly suppressed it. His fury lurked beneath the surface like a shark, always, but he was its master. He remembered what he had once said to a different American prisoner: “We Russians are like you. We laugh, we cry. But then we grow up.”

  That man had died weeping.

  This girl would too.

  “I didn’t know he put anything in the jacket,” she sobbed. “I barely knew him!”

  She was smart enough to talk directly to him, although she couldn’t see him, of course. The iPad was programmed for one view only: He could see all of them, but the reverse was not true. She also couldn’t see the rat that skittered across the dirty concrete floor behind her, six inches from her feet.

  In Russian, Anatoly said to Ilya, “She was there when you killed Suresh?”

  “Saw the whole thing,” Ilya confirmed, also in Russian. “Shouldn’t we just kill her now?”

  “Show me the cruise itinerary again.”

  Ilya held the paper up to the iPad’s camera. It was spattered with Suresh’s blood, but still legible. Dr. and Mrs. Keller were spending the night in Los Angeles before boarding the Sea Majesty for a fifteen-day cruise. There would be five straight days at sea. Day six would see them in Hilo, Hawaii.

  He put the iPad on mute, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed in a number. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Da,” a voice answered.

  “An American couple is staying at this hotel,” Anatoly said, reading the address off the page. “Their names are Catherine and Vincent Keller. Madame owns a black silk jacket, and in that jacket is a small plastic box that belongs to me. Get it. If you need to kill them to retrieve my possession, do it.”

  The voic
e on the other end of the phone assured Anatoly that it would be handled as discreetly as possible, and that he would be informed the moment that the mission was accomplished.

  “Of course,” Anatoly said, and disconnected. He turned the sound back on.

  Ilya and Svetlana had finished tying up the girl. They stood back, framing her as if inviting him to admire their handiwork. Ankles tied to the chair, wrists bound, face smeared with color, she looked like a silly clown, a silly repulsive clown. She looked like she would sink like a stone if they threw her in the Hudson.

  “My sister is a cop,” she said between hitching sobs. “If you don’t let me go, the entire New York City police force will come looking for me. And they-they’ll find me.”

  See? Americans were so childlike.

  He cocked his head. “Do you by chance speak Russian?” he asked her directly, in English.

  “What? No. No, I don’t.” She hesitated as if trying to decide if her lack of knowledge was good or bad. “So whatever they said to each other, I couldn’t understand them. Okay? Honest. I don’t know anything about any of you.”

  “Except that they killed your boyfriend.”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend. We’d just started dating. Oh, God, please, please let me go,” she cried. “I don’t know who you are. Your names, nothing. I can’t identify you.”

  “You’re so helpful,” he said. “Listen, Heather Chandler. You may be able to save your own life. As you know, your sister has something that belongs to me. It may come to a trade, you for it. You will need to be able to speak to your sister. But you cannot do that if you are dead. And my two friends there will kill you if you try to escape. Do you understand? They will not hesitate.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, pulling herself together with a sniffle. “Okay, I understand.” She nodded like a bobblehead toy.

  “So do I have your word that you will not try to escape?”

  “Yes.” She sounded almost eager to sign her own death certificate. Surely she must understand that he could never let her live. If her sister was foolish enough to agree to the trade, they would still kill her. More quickly, maybe, but where was the fun in that?