“Thought you had enough for the day?”
“Rape case. The other investigator is off, so I catch the call.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Better get home to Lizzy.”
She stood up, hitched her pants slightly and adjusted her gun belt, smoothed her leather jacket, stalked out of the bar.
Jimmy watched her go.
Getting home to Lizzy sounded good to him.
Chapter Twenty Nine
“So where do you reckon we’ll find him, then?” Deon said patiently.
“Where else do these fucking Russians hang out?” Joe said. His humor was gone and his nerves frayed by Marcus’s constant gibing. Marcus had gone into a Huck’s Convenience Store to get some bottled water. They had spent most of the night driving round the Russian neighborhood, checking bars and social clubs and the few restaurants for any word about Vladimir Darko.
Nothing.
Nothing down in Viet Nam town, which was a wasteland tonight after the battle of Harriet Street.
And no hints yet from any of their informants.
But all three of them had the sense that Darko was still out there, that he hadn’t left town, that he was not that far ahead of them. That’s something that man-hunters do…you keep chipping away at the time you are behind someone, till finally you are in the same time and place as the man you’re hunting.
They weren’t far behind.
Not far at all.
Deon stroked his chin. Where to go? What to do? Driving around aimlessly wasn’t going to get them any further, and they were all tired. So maybe take a time out and wait for some intelligence to come in.
Marcus got in the back of the car, handed over liter sized bottles of water to Deon and Joe. They sat in silence and hydrated for a while.
“He’ll run to the Komoravs,” Deon said. “He’s probably there already. Komorov will be getting the rest of his troops together, and Vladimir will be leading the charge.”
“He’ll be coming after us if you don’t keep him on the run,” Marcus said.
Joe shrugged. “I don’t think so. We put a bad scare into him.”
“You weren’t supposed to scare him. You were supposed to kill him.”
Joe sighed.
“Komorov’s makes sense. He can’t stay out in the cold now. So it’s wide open now,” Deon said.
“So let’s just go over there and get it over with,” Joe said. “Hit them hard and fast and violent. Take a sledgehammer to their egg. Get it over with.”
Marcus shrugged. “May as well. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“How very pithy,” Joe said.
“I’ll take the long gun and prime shooter slot this time, my friend. Since you had your shot and you missed it.”
Joe turned and looked out the window.
“We’re a little light for a hey diddle diddle right up the middle on the Komorov crew,” Deon said. “Let’s go back, tool up, call some friends.”
“I know just who to call,” Marcus said. “No more SEALs, though.”
“Fuck you,” Joe said.
Marcus laughed.
***
Nina walked into the Emergency Room. Two uniformed officers stood by the admissions desk. One, a youngish blond with the burly thick neck of a wrestler or habitual steroid user, raised a meaty paw and waved her over.
“Detective,” he said, his voice surprisingly high for somebody so dense in the body. “I’m Rathbun, this is Erikson, my partner.”
Erikson was rail thin, tall and lanky with a pronounced Adam's apple.
“You got the call?” Nina said.
“Yeah. She was able to get to her cell phone after, had 911 on speed dial. We responded, got EMS there in a hurry, got her down here,” Rathbun said.
“Bad shape?” Nina said.
“Shit yeah she’s in bad shape,” Erikson said. He had the high in the nose sound of someone from the upper Midwest, Minnesota, North Dakota, something like that. “This asshole beat the living shit out of her. Jaw broken, face broken, nose broken, one arm broken, probably ribs….looks like he stomped on her. Multiple penetrations, oral, anal, vaginal…that’s what the doc said a little while ago.”
“She’s out, then?” Nina said.
“No talking to her. She couldn’t talk if she wanted to. Semi-conscious, they got her all drugged up. You can go back and take a look, we got all our notes together and we’re writing it up,” Rathbun said.
“Thanks,” Nina said. “Let me go take a look, talk to the doc. Then let me have what you got. Who’s at the scene?”
“Couple of uniforms, criminologists.”
“Thanks, guys. Let me get all that address and stuff from you.”
“Sure, Detective. We’ll have it together.”
The two patrolmen watched Nina stalk off and palm open the swinging door into the patient area beyond admissions.
“Nice ass, but she got to fix that fucking nose,” Erikson said.
“She’s supposed to be pretty good,” Rathbun said.
“Who’s hitting that? How you know?”
“No,” Rathbun said. “She got a good rep with the detectives, the patrol guys who have worked with her. She don’t ever talk about that nose, don’t take no shit about it. She dropped the hammer on that banger not two months after she came over here.”
“I heard about that. Wasn’t the first time, either.”
“No,” Rathbun said. He stared in the direction Nina had disappeared in. “I heard that, too.”
Nina went to the curtained bed where she saw a young Hispanic doctor and several nurses in hushed discussion.
“This the victim?” Nina said. “I’m Detective Capushek, Lake City PD.”
The young doctor nodded. “Yes.”
“What can you tell me?”
He inclined his head. Nina peeked around the curtain. You could hardly tell that the woman on the bed was anything more than a mannequin swathed in bandages; her head and neck were wired in a brace, wrapped in gauze that went around her head and showed bald patches where the hair had been shaved away to a black stubble. Her eyes were sunken in blue and black bruises. One arm was wrapped in plaster and gauze and suspended above the bed. Multiple IVs ran into her undamaged arm.
“Jesus,” Nina said. “Has she talked? Did she say anything?
“Not very much,” the doctor said. “She was semi-conscious when they brought her in, and we’ve been working on her for over an hour. She’s on morphine now, she’s in a lot of pain, we have to be careful though because her blood pressure is so low.”
“Did she say anything about who did this to her? Boyfriend, husband? Who did you call, who’s her contact?”
One of the nurses, a short matronly woman with permed blond hair spoke up. “She has a girl friend who is on her way. Her family isn’t from around here, they’re up Menonah way. We called them, too. I asked her who did this to her, a couple of times.”
“What did she say?”
“He was a Russian,” the nurse said. “Some kind of Russian, I think.”
***
Jimmy eased the key into his door, shut it silently behind him, turned the bolt gently into place, locked the door. He stood in the silence, feeling the ambience, the charge of air in the unlit rooms, the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the walls, the hiss of tires passing as a car drove by on the late night street. A faint scent: lilac, warm, hint of musk…
Lizzy.
He set his keys down on the table beside the door, slipped off his low cut hikers. Walked down the hallway and paused by the half-open bedroom door.
Lizzy curled in his bed like a question mark, her red hair swept back over her shoulder, her face relaxed, head laid back on a thick pillow. She’d left a space for him. His side.
He remembered the first time, when he’d let her stay and sleep, how she stood beside the bed and asked him, “Which side shall be mine?” and waited till he showed her, then slipped beneath the comfort
er and the sheets, bringing with her the sound of skin on cotton and the heat of a naked body beneath the covers.
Jimmy stood and watched her sleep, the slow rise and fall of the covers over her. Then he went down the hall to the bathroom, urinated, washed his hands and face, stared in the mirror. His eyes were rimmed with red, dark bags under his eyes, and the lines there deepening into wrinkles. There was humor there still, but tiredness, and something else…something he didn’t like to think about. He grinned, crookedly, pushed himself away from the sink and went back to the bedroom, undressed down to the skin, and left his clothes piled at the foot of the bed. He was already erect, swept by a rush of lust as he watched her sleeping. He slid beneath the covers, leaned over her, put his face close to her, smelt her breath and felt it on the small fine hairs of her face, touched his lips to hers.
She didn’t startle, she just opened her eyes, wide awake in that moment, something he wondered about. She pecked at his lips, smiled, then reached out and touched his face. He didn’t want gentle tonight. He grabbed her by the back of her neck, pulled her close, drove his tongue deep into her mouth as he rolled her on her back. She was naked, as he insisted she sleep when she stayed with him. Her legs opened to him, and she put the flat of her hands on his back, just beneath the blade of his shoulders, put the flats of her feet against his calves, relaxed back, open to him…
He thrust against her, slid against the wet she already had there for him, eased back, slid again till he slid into her, her one hand coming down to guide him in, then coming back, wet with her juices, to trace a line beneath his nose and she put her hand back on his shoulder…
Jimmy gripped her by the back of the neck and one hand on her buttock and drove and drove in her, Lizzy’s cries and moans bringing him to a white hot heat and he shot and shot and shot into her, his head thrown back, an inarticulate cry rising out of him…
And then he lay on her as she wrapped her arms and legs around him, she still rocking with her own, moving against him to finish for herself.
“Am I crushing you?” Jimmy whispered.
“No,” Lizzy said. “I love to have you in me. Don’t move.”
Chapter Thirty
Sergey Komorov’s balls ached. Irina had denied him any release, even after two hours of play, while Vladimir rounded up what they had in the way of soldiers.
“It will make you a better fighter,” she mocked him. “It’s time for you to take the lead.”
He was dressed for the street, in the old fashion of the bratva he had started with after his discharge from the Army. Black jeans, black heavy boots, a black T-shirt and the black nylon bomber jacket, thin goatskin black gloves to protect his hands.
Vladimir was dressed much the same, as were the two hard-eyed middle aged men with the look of butchers or longshoremen who sorted out their guns and ammunition on a nearby table. Two younger men, in their early twenties maybe, stood off to one side, diffident, shifting their weight from side to side. New boys, Sergey thought, not much, if any, blood on their hands. They’d get their chance tonight.
“Vladi!” Sergey said. “Give them something they can shoot.”
Vladimir limped over to the two new boys, looked them up and down with disdain, limped to the table and came back with two Ruger Mini-14s.
“Here,” he said. “This is how you work this weapon.” He showed them how to load it, where the safety was. “You know how to pull a trigger, right?”
“Yes,” one said. He was dressed in cheap denims, heavy work boots, a snug and faded T-shirt beneath a camel brown Carhartt jacket. “I can pull a trigger.”
“Good,” Vladimir said. “What is your name?”
“I’m Tim. This is Brian.”
Brian was dressed similarly, but with a John Deere tractor hat.
“Where did we get you two from?”
“They work for me out at the farm,” Sergey said. “They want to move up. I told them this was their chance.”
“This is not unloading trucks and moving boxes and walking around with a flashlight,” Vladimir said. “We are going into a fight. Are you ready for that?”
“Sure,” Tim said. “We’re ready.
His friend Brian shrugged.
Sergey laughed. “We’ll see how you think when someone is shooting at you. It’s a little different, between talk and action. So we’ll see. Because we’re going hunting.”
The two boys shifted uneasily, held their new carbines awkwardly.
“If you do well, we’ll give you a real grown up gun next time,” he said. “But those will do you for now. Give them plenty of magazines, Vladimir.”
The two older men, Yuri and Aleksander, laughed. Sergey slapped their shoulders as he went by them.
“Show the young boys how it is done,” Sergey said. “My old grey lions will teach you some things.”
Magazines loaded and placed in pockets and in shoulder bags. Weapons oiled. The click and snack of magazines inserted into weapons, the sharp chunk of bolts and slides going forward. The smell of gun oil, and just the hint of fear and adrenaline.
They were ready.
Sergey led his crew to the two Jeep Cherokees outside the warehouse. Three to a car, two up, one back.
They rolled.
***
Nina stood in the ER with Rathbun and Erikson.
“You guys ever seen this guy?” Nina said, holding out the picture of Vladimir Darko.
“Nah,” Rathbun said. “Not a face to me.”
“Me either,” Erikson said.
“This is the guy that did that,” Nina said.
“How do you know that?” Erikson said.
“This girl, she’s a pros or a stripper, right?”
“Yeah,” Rathbun said. “One of the EMS guys knew her from the THE DEEP BLUE. She’s a dancer down there.
“She told one of the nurses a Russian did her. This guy, he’s a Russian, wanted for serial rape offenses over the water by Interpol. A new arrival in our fair city. I’ve been after him for a while…he goes for the high end talent. He was a shooter in that fucking mess down at The Trojan Horse,” she said.
“No shit? This guy, huh?” Rathbun said. “Can I?”
Nina handed him the picture. Rathbun studied it closely. “I don’t like the way this guy looks. Does he carry?”
“He didn’t empty out that club with his hands. Took a beating from the security staff, came back and shot the place up.”
“Looks like a shoot on sight to me,” Erikson said. “I won’t fuck around with that guy.”
“That’s a good idea,” Nina said. “A real good idea.”
Rathbun looked at the closed door of the patient area, back at Nina. “He do them all like this?”
“This one lived,” Nina said. “About half his vics don’t.”
“Shoot on sight sounds good to me.”
“First we have to sight him,” Nina said. “So let’s hit the road, I want to get to the scene, see what they’ve got. Let me know if you hear or see anything about this guy.”
“You got it, Detective. Later,” Rathbun said.
They watched her go.
Out in the lot, Nina sat behind the wheel for a long moment. She’d been up all day and most of the night. By the time she got to the scene, took away what she needed, it would be almost five o’clock in the morning. Her nerves drummed, and she felt a slight tremor in her fingers from lack of sleep. Coffee, that’s the ticket. She backed out and drove away, looking once again at the address she’d jotted down on her note pad, looking for the pink lights of her favorite 24 hour Dunkin Donut.
***
Jimmy and Lizzy were curled together in the wreck of his bed. The rise and fall of lights from passing cars fell across them, unnoticed.
***
Deon used bolt cutters to snap off the Master padlock at the back door of the abandoned storefront across the street from his gun store. The three men entered a storage room littered with empty boxes and covered in dust. Through the storage room,
there was a counter, and several rows of metal shelving, dented and rusting, pushed to either side leaving a clear space in the middle of the aisles. The big plate glass window was covered with sheets of cardboard and taped on backing. Deon knelt and cut a small hole in the cardboard where it met the lower part of the window frame. He peeked out.
A great view of the front of his gun store and the parking lot beside it.
“Well, okes,” he said. “Let’s get comfy and see who shows up…”
Marcus and Joe made several trips to the alley where the Jeep was parked and unloaded sleeping pads and duffle bags bulging with weapons and ammo. Deon tinkered with his laptop, running a power line to a portable 12-hour battery, then called up his wireless network. His screen split into four frames, each one showing a high resolution grey scale image: the front of the store, the parking lot, the back entrance, the small showroom. He hit a function key and the screen refreshed with a double split screen showing the small office and the sleeping quarters he maintained behind the office. He tapped another key and then one screen with all six cameras came up.
“There we go,” he murmured.
Marcus and Joe arranged sleeping pads to sit on, set out bottles of water, put plastic wrap and toilet wipes down in the designated latrine corner, broke out snack bars and beef jerky.
Their weapons stayed close at hand.
Deon made himself comfortable in front of the laptop. “Some water, eh?”
Marcus set a bottle next to him, then went to the window and carefully cut out well spaced loopholes in the cardboard. The glass stayed intact. Joe went into a battered Pelican case and took out two tiny wireless cameras with sticky plastic dough on the bases. In the alley, he set them up to cover both approaches, went inside and powered up another laptop, watched with satisfaction as the two images came up.
Good to go.
With the ease of long practice, the three hunters made themselves at home. In the parking lot across the street, a pick up truck with a shell took up two spaces at a slant. In the back of that three men lay on their bellies on inflatable camping mattresses. The one on the far right, a very lean and hard faced man with a straggly goatee and shaven head, proned out behind a M-60 machine gun. The man to his left lay almost pressed side to side, holding a long linked belt in his hand, neatly coiled in front of him. The third man, farthest to the left, had a M-203 laid out beside him. He sat cross legged, watched out the tinted glass. A bungee cord was looped around the interior handle of the drop gate, which was cracked open slightly, and ran past his feet to an attachment point in the bed of the pick up. A tug on the cord would drop the gate open.
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