And she knew something else. She was not going to let them put her on the bench. Once she was horizontal, she was all done. They would secure her with the straps, and they would go to work, and it would be nothing like Fifty Shades of Grey. They were going to take her apart one painful little piece at a time.
“Cuchka derganaya,” Gura was saying excitedly, his big hands waving.
It all came down to choosing the exact right moment. Needless to say, she wouldn’t get a second shot.
She had no illusions about her physical strength. She couldn’t overpower a tag team of bad guys. She had to rely on surprise and quickness. And she had to fight dirty, which was okay, because that was the only kind of fighting she knew.
Her eyes focused on the extension cord running from the monitor. There had to be an outlet somewhere. At floor level, probably, behind the second row of benches on that side.
She had an idea in mind, or at least the beginnings of an idea. It was probably best not to overthink things, especially since she was finding it hard to think at all.
“Ya tebya dostal.” Streinikov cut off Gura’s protestations with a shake of his head. He seemed to have reached a decision. He turned to Sundance and snapped his fingers. “Get her up.”
Sundance grabbed her by the back of her pants and hauled her upright. She felt a punch of adrenaline. This was it.
“Put down those pruning shears,” Streinikov said, “and get her fucking pizda on the bench.”
She felt rather than saw the blond’s hungry smile. He turned at the waist, looking for a place to rest the scissors. For just one moment he wasn’t focused on her.
Now.
With a twist of her hips she pulled free of his grasp. He pivoted, reacting fast. She stepped into him—if you were smaller, you always got in close and deprived your opponent of his reach—and delivered two quick jabs to the throat. He staggered, and she snatched the scissors out of his hand and spun on Streinikov as he grabbed for her.
The scissors were large and they were sharp and they made a satisfyingly large gash in Streinikov’s side as she plunged them into his torso below the ribs.
Streinikov doubled over. She jerked the shears free. The tips came out stained with blood.
Sundance was choking. She’d hit him pretty good. With a little luck she might’ve busted his trachea. But Butch and Gura weren’t hurt, and they were advancing on her from opposite directions.
She threw herself under the nearest bench and rolled toward the side wall, still clutching the shears. She came to a stop on her stomach beneath the second row of benches.
The extension cord, bright orange, lay a few feet away. It ran to an outlet mounted on the baseboard. Two sockets.
Everyone was yelling. For the moment they’d lost her. The benches and the thick foliage provided cover.
She crawled toward the baseboard. The benches were low, barely offering enough clearance. Gravel scraped her palms. Droplets of water seeping through drainage holes pattered her hair.
Behind her, a crash of shattering pottery. Butch was overturning the benches, looking for her. Potted flowers spilled onto the floor.
Streinikov shouted something in Russian. She didn’t need a translator to know he was pissed. He didn’t want his goons wrecking his hothouse and bruising his precious pansies.
Closer to her, Gura was thrashing his way through the huge palms and ferns that crowded the front wall. He would reach her in a few seconds.
She scrambled out from under the bench and got her hand on the outlet. Jerked out the extension cord, hoping it powered more than the monitor. No such luck. The lights were still on, and the nearby plants rustled crazily. Gura was almost on top of her.
She swung into a kneeling pose, balancing on her sneakers. Rubber soles. And the shears had rubber handles. Insulation, right?
With her full strength she jammed the pruning shears into the outlet, the sharp tips punching through both sockets.
Sizzle in her fingers. Shout of blue flame. She dropped the shears and fell on her ass, banging her head on a bench, and the lights went out.
For a second she was too disoriented to move. But Gura was still coming, and so were the others. The sparks and noise had been as good as a signal flare. She had to move.
She scooted away from the outlet, abandoning the shears, which might still be embedded in the sockets or might have been lost on the floor. Purple afterimages swam across her field of vision. Her teeth hurt. She felt as if she’d bitten down on tinfoil.
She slipped back under the benches and started crawling toward the rear of the greenhouse, away from Gura.
The darkness around her was loud and crazy. Streinikov shouting, Gura and the two younger guys answering back, everyone talking at once, no one sure where the hell she was.
Behind her, a flashlight snapped on. She looked back and there was Gura, aiming the beam at her, his ugly orangutan face lit from below like a Halloween mask. His gun was out, and he couldn’t miss at this range.
But he didn’t fire. She thought she knew why. A house of glass was no place for a shooting match. If the round passed through her or ricocheted, it could bring down the whole wall.
Instead he snugged the gun into his belt, scrambled forward, and reached out with one hairy hand. His fingers closed over her ankle.
With her free leg she kicked him in the face.
He released her, dropping the flash. It rolled away under the benches, painting the darkness in spirals of white light.
She shoved herself forward, out of his reach, and kept going, snaking from one bench to the next. There was no space between them; they were butted together, each one six feet long—coffin-sized. Plants overgrowing their pots hung down in a green curtain, screening her from view.
Other flashlights came on. Gura was yelling something in Russian, presumably telling the others where he’d last seen her. One of them—Butch, she thought—leaped up on the bench directly above her, scattering the pots. His flashlight dipped down, the beam breaking into a fan of spokes as it penetrated the drainage holes.
Flashback: belly-crawling under the Brighton Cove boardwalk while a man named Pascal hunted her from above with an infrared scope.
Butch would spot her at any second. She took a chance and rolled out from under the bench into the center aisle, exposed to view if anyone turned a flashlight in her direction. On hands and knees she scrabbled across the walkway and disappeared under the benches on the opposite side.
No one had seen her. Butch and Gura were still hunting her on the other side of the aisle. They expected her to continue to the rear of the greenhouse. There was no exit at that end. She would be cornered, helpless.
More pots broke. Streinikov shouted a protest.
She turned herself around and doubled back to the front of the greenhouse, where there was a door. Another flashlight came to life. This one was close. Not Butch, not Gura.
In the bedlam she heard Sundance’s voice, hoarse but recognizable. So she hadn’t cracked his windpipe after all. He had joined the hunt, and he was coming her way, bent at the waist, checking the floor.
She couldn’t count on the benches for concealment, not when the beam was probing underneath. She retreated to the side wall and found a dense cluster of bamboo in a giant pot. She hid herself behind it, crouching down.
Sundance’s beam flitted over the bamboo stalks, paused briefly, and moved on.
He was past her now. Converging with the other three at the rear of the greenhouse. She only had to make it to the front and get out through the door. Stooped low, she ran along the side wall, counting on the lush foliage to screen her from any stray flashlight beams.
Somewhere nearby Streinikov was still shouting. He hadn’t moved since she’d stabbed him. She’d hurt the bastard, hurt him badly, and she felt real good about that.
A wall came up fast, squares of damp glass. The door was to one side. She would have to risk exposure again. Now, before they figured out where she’d gone.
She crabbed her way through the big potted plants to the paved aisle and groped for the door handle, not finding it.
Brightness.
A new flashlight. Streinikov’s.
He was slumped in a chair by the dead TV monitor, looking directly at her as the beam of his flashlight pinned her like a butterfly on a mounting board.
“Vot ona!” he shouted.
The beams at the far end of the greenhouse swung in her direction. Gura’s gun came up. He fired one shot, blowing out the glass pane alongside the door in a spray of shards.
Streinikov yelled a curse. He still didn’t want any shooting in here.
In the wavering circles of multiple beams, she found the door handle and cranked it down. The door opened with a rush of night air, startlingly cold.
Streinikov’s men were running at her, but the bench in the center aisle was in their way.
She threw herself through the doorway and fled into the night.
22
“She’s out.”
Ilya spoke the words, his voice hoarse and raw. He still clutched his bruised throat with one hand.
Streinikov knew it. “We’ll get her. Gura, Gregor—hunt her down. Capture her alive if possible, but take no unnecessary chances.”
“I’m going too,” Ilya said.
“Nyet.” Streinikov held up a commanding hand. “You find the outlet she disabled and fix it. Then go to the garage and flip the breaker. Have Lysenko switch on all the outside lights. Tell him to monitor the front gate in case she attempts to slip out that way. And when you return,” he added as an afterthought, “bring a first aid kit.”
He touched his waist, dipping his fingers into a welling lake of blood.
* * *
Bonnie darted off the path and ran north. She remembered Streinikov saying there were woods in that direction. A forest sounded like a good place to disappear into.
She staggered as she ran. Adrenaline competed with the sleepytime cocktail in her system. Willpower gave her the edge. She would not be taken back into the greenhouse. She would make them kill her out here, if it came to that. She wasn’t going to have a scream session on the bench with garden tools all up in her business. That party had been canceled.
She blundered through a row of bushes and came up hard against a perimeter fence, eight feet high.
Fuck.
Behind her, voices and running footsteps. At least two of her pals were headed her way.
She hooked her fingers into the steel mesh and climbed the fence, praying she wouldn’t run into a line of razor wire along the top.
She didn’t. Evidently Streinikov wasn’t quite that paranoid. He just wanted to keep out any errant birdwatchers who wandered off the hiking trails.
She hoisted herself over the fence, descended halfway, and dropped to the soft dirt with a thud.
A shout. Gura’s voice. He was jabbering in Russian, but his meaning was clear. He’d spotted her.
She launched herself into a hard sprint over a flat stretch of ground. It was cold in the night, without a coat, but she was almost too scared to notice.
A stiff breeze blew off the river, helping her to orient herself. That was good, because she sure as shit couldn’t gauge her position any other way. She wouldn’t know the Big Dipper from the Big Bopper. She’d never even gone camping. For her, nature was best appreciated in a TV show about when animals attacked.
Noises at her back. Grunts and jangling metal. Gura and Butch scaling the fence. Sundance, too? She wasn’t sure. But she was certain the boss man wasn’t in the posse. She’d put him out of commission, at least for a while.
When she glanced back, she saw bouncing starbursts of white light. Flashlights. Her pursuers had come over the fence and were following her trail.
The first shot rang out, kicking up dirt a couple of yards from her feet. They’d seen her.
A second shot landed closer. She dived into the underbrush, scrambling toward the river on hands and knees. She needed to get down to the water. That rubber dinghy with the outboard could take her across the river into Manhattan. If she could make it there ... “I’ll make it anywhere,” she muttered in a singsong chant.
Damn. Her head must still be pretty fuzzy if she could make a joke that lame.
The moon was a fading sliver, low in the sky. The stars were clear and bright. They helped her to see—and made it easier for her to be seen.
Ground cover ranged from ankle deep to knee deep. It was clear under the trees except for pine needles and leaves. The low branches were treacherous. She kept her head down, plunging forward, getting caught up sometimes in the thick undergrowth. At one point she lost a shoe. It was sucked right off her foot by clinging foliage. She couldn’t take the time to recover it.
Insect noises surrounded her, a chorus of chirps and hums and weirdly mechanical clicks. Somewhere a bird screeched. Owl, maybe. Or a vulture. How the hell should she know?
She wished she’d been able to hold on to the pruning shears. She needed a weapon. It was bad enough being hunted, even worse when she had no way to fight back. She remembered tracking a wounded man in the Pine Barrens, a man with a bullet in him who wouldn’t go down. Now she was the prey. No bullet in her, just a buttload of doxy-whatchamacallit.
Flailing through a thicket, she came upon a fallen ash tree carpeted in moss. A three-foot branch extended from the tree, stabbing at the sky. Where the branch met the trunk, the wood was rotten, but the rest of the branch was dry and hard, and the pointed end was sharp.
She grabbed the branch and wrenched it viciously, making way too much noise, until the dead wood crackled and split. The branch came loose in her hand. She hefted it. A spear, sort of. At close range it could do some damage.
As a weapon, it wasn’t much, but it made her feel a little better. She kept going.
She wanted to run, but the forest insisted on getting in her way. Trees were bunched together, throwing up rough walls of bark. Bushes sprang up in her path, threatening to trip her when they were small, acting as solid barriers when they were shoulder high. Sometimes she found open ground, but it didn’t last, and even then, there were ruts and gullies, loose dirt and slippery pine needles. Her progress was always slow, always impeded by some new obstacle.
Damn, she hated the woods. Couldn’t somebody have laid down some nice smooth pavement around here?
There were trails somewhere, but hell if she knew where to find them. Besides, she would be too exposed on a trail. It was one of those situations where you were screwed either way—off the trails she could barely move, and on a trail she’d be an easy target. So she could blunder through the brush and lead the bad guys straight to her with all the racket she was making, or she could run into the open and become a human bull’s-eye. Some days, it was hardly worth getting out of bed.
Finally she stopped. She huddled by a tree, listening. The forest seemed quieter now, almost silent. It was as if the bugs and birds had settled down to watch the show.
In the distance, a rustle of movement. A human being—somehow she was sure of it.
A shout, clear in the strange stillness: “I found your shoe, Parker. I’m coming for you.”
It was Butch, the one who’d cleared off the bench. He seemed to be alone. He and Gura must have split up to cover more ground.
By now she knew any movement would make noise, and any noise would draw him to her. Needless to say, her spear wouldn’t be much good against his handgun. Her best bet was to stay motionless and hope he passed by.
Maybe. But she wasn’t the type to sit and wait for the bogeyman to walk right up to her. It went against her nature. And if Butch had any skill as a tracker, he could probably follow a path of broken twigs and bent grass straight to her hiding place.
The rustling sounds were closing in, and she was getting seriously antsy. A new plan took shape. If she proceeded very slowly and very carefully, moving on all fours if necessary, she might be able to double back a few yards. Get behind him, then take him by
surprise.
A good plan? Or only a feeble excuse to move her ass, because, like a toddler, she just couldn’t sit still? She wasn’t sure, but what the hell, she was doing it. To sit and wait was just too hard. Already she could taste the sour flavor of panic rising in her throat.
Holding the spear at her side, she crept away from the tree, along a line of thick evergreen bushes that ought to screen her from sight. If there had been any background noise to cover her progress, she would have been golden, but the friggin’ woods refused to cooperate. The place was as silent as a cemetery, and before long the similarities might not end there.
She was proud of herself, though. She was keeping to a steady pace, tortoise slow, invisible and silent. She began to think she would really get away with this plan.
A bullet rang out, whining like a mosquito near her head.
“I hear you, Parker.”
Piss. Apparently she wasn’t as stealthy as she thought.
She crawled into a grove of pines and, for the sheer hell of it, yelled back. “Missed me, dipshit.”
“I shoot only to wound. You don’t die so easy.”
He still wanted her on the bench. Great.
She left the trees and scrambled to cover behind a tangle of underbrush. She wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore. He could hear her no matter what she did, so she might as well move fast—as fast as possible in this maze of shit.
Then she spotted him. He was standing in an open space, the flashlight arrowed away from her, its beam playing over the pine grove where she’d been.
And he was close. Closer than she’d realized. Yards away, near enough that he could freakin’ smell her, which wouldn’t be hard because she was sweating right through her shirt.
She went down on her stomach, hugging the cold ground, tasting dirt. She risked belly-crawling a few feet.
The flashlight shifted, swinging toward her. A stripe of light painted her arm. She rolled away as another bullet struck the dirt near enough to spray her cheek with pebbles.
Damn. The guy was a good shot, even in the dark.
Bad to the Bone (Bonnie Parker, PI Book 3) Page 14