Tainted Blood

by Ferrel D. Moore

He was a bulky shadow with an extended arm. He closed the gap between himself and Sveta quickly. One of the parking lot lights stood behind him, so his face was difficult to make out save for his bulbous nose. Face round as a hubcap dented with acne like it’d been hit with buckshot. Menacing. It was the way he stood. Stupid in the way he came too close. An open black trench coat and she would bet money no vest under his sweater.

  “I will take those,” he told her.

  She felt the end of his pistol press against her temple, but she turned her head slowly just enough to see his face. Not someone she knew. Russian accent with booze on his breath.

  “I can pay you,” she said.

  “Shut up and give me your weapons.”

  Sveta grimaced, but reached one hand under the pile, placed the other on top, then lifted them toward him. Her finger found the trigger.

  He held up a cell phone in his free hand, pushed a speed dial number. After a few seconds, he said, “I have her.”

  Whoever was on the other end shouted so loud that Sveta could almost understand what they said. She pulled the trigger, and shot him in the chest. He jerked backward and began to crumple. The suppressed round was loud enough for whoever was on the other end of the phone to hear.

  Time didn’t stop when she saw the shock and pain and fear trade places across his face. It was one of the mercury filled bullets, and from that distance he was dying before it left the gun. She could see enough of his features as he turned sideways to guess he had a kid and an ex-wife. Probably more than one kid. With the mercury in his system, she thought, he wasn’t going to look good enough for a funeral. His ex-wife would come when they dropped him in the big hole, but she would be drunk. Somebody else would raise the kids.

  It only took a few seconds, but it was what she was thinking. Happened most times when she killed someone and watched them die. Like writing their obituary to mark their death. Most of the people she killed, no one would notice they were gone.

  She didn’t look to see if he was still twitching, but instead let him fall then drove up even with a large blue parking lot dumpster and threw everything into it. After a quick glance at the unconscious woman, she accelerated away toward the freeway. No sense cleaning up. She had just shot a man in a truckstop parking lot. She might have got away clean after transferring the woman to the passenger side and covering her with a blanket—not likely, but possible. But after shooting a man? No. Any trucker looking out his window would have called it in. The police would be on their way soon enough and there was nothing she could do but run and find a place to go to ground. They would have a rough description of her car; she would have a few minutes head start.

  As she accelerated onto the northbound ramp, she reached down and retrieved the cell phone. She dropped it between her legs and pulled the purse up on her lap as well, sorting through its contents until she found the woman’s wallet, flipped it open and read the name and address. Zoe Winter. If the ID wasn’t fake, then she lived on a street at the southern edge of Detroit.

  Who are you, Zoe Winter, and why did you save me? And who and what is Drogol to you?

  No time for thinking; she had a call to make that she really didn’t want to. But both Hauck and the police were after her now, so she dialed the number from memory, and waited for her cousin Mishka to answer.

  “Who is this?” came the gruff question from the other end.

  “It’s me,” she said while watching the digital dashboard clock.

  “I do not recognize this number. Is the reception good?”

  “No, and it will not improve. I have a carpet that needs repaired.”

  “Perhaps you should find a better cell zone.”

  “Where?”

  “Gratiot and Fourth. It’s a good area.”

  “How will I—”

  The line went dead.

  Sveta thought about the time. Nine point four seconds. Well under the 30 second mark. Digital tracking was a lot quicker than it used to be. There was no way to keep up with every breakthrough. Her eyes caught a glint from the shiny black disc on the dash, right above the words “Passenger Air Bag.” She felt around until she found the latch to the center arm rest, then lifted it up, and, without taking her eyes off the road, located a plastic square the size of a Blackberry and pulled it out. When she held it up to the light, she swore.

  A flick of her finger on the power window control panel and the driver’s side window rolled down. She tossed the portable GPS out and threw the phone after it. The disc on the passenger side was where the GPS mount fixed to while driving. Yuri could locate anyone with an active GPS if he knew the digital number. Or if he knew their cell number. If, that was, he was still alive. She shuddered as she remembered his white van being knocked on its side, the door ripped off by something or someone and a human form pulled from the wreckage and discarded as though it were a toy. With any luck, whatever it was caught hold of Hauck.

  No flasher lights in her rearview, no barricades ahead. If she could make it to Mishka, she might have a chance.

  She was minutes away from Detroit, driving with no guns, no weapons, and her only communication was a now discarded cell phone from a woman who might or might not work for Hauck.

  A quick glance at Zoe. Shoulder length dark hair and a pretty, yet pale face. Black lipstick. Age, according to her driver’s license, was twenty-six. One hand was poking out from underneath the blanket, and she saw that Zoe’s fingernails were black as well. Sveta needed her to live, if only because she needed information so she herself could survive.

  The Fort Street sign raced toward her and she flashed her blinker once, then hit the exit and began slowing down. Now wasn’t the time to get caught. Five minutes, maybe ten, she’d be on her way to safety. Mishka was family; he would take her in. If she was lucky, she’d have at least a day before he sold her out to Hauck.

  Chapter Four

  Pacing the roof of an abandoned apartment building, the beast roared its fury to the night. From the building’s edge, he watched his home flare in the darkness, filling the streets with angry, twisting flames and his heart with a raging desire for blood. A high wind blew across the rooftops and lashed his face. He turned into it, stretching wide his arms and snarling with fury.

  Then he saw flashing red and white lights speeding toward the blaze, stoking his anger to new heights. He leaned over the edge as though about to leap from his four-story perch, but instead glared intently at the city below.

  Occasional headlights burrowed through vacant neighborhoods and beyond them the skyline of Detroit towered above the ruins that ringed it. I-75 was lit by street lamps; its overpasses caged with steel fencing and barbed wire to keep street thugs from throwing trash and bricks into the path of oncoming traffic. Fluorescent flashing pinks and blues proclaimed the casinos, and at the river’s edge towered the three cylinders of the General Motors building

  But the beast cared for none of this. Its eyes were filled with the catastrophe of fire, sirens, blaring horns and red flashing lights.

  Its mind was filled with the sound of his enemy’s name.

  Its heart was torn by hunger.

  Its nostrils filled with the smell of the woman.

  With a single step, it was on the building’s parapet. It crouched, looked down, and then hurtled off the edge toward the cement sidewalk below.

  *****

  “We have lost communications with him, Mother,” said Sasha.

  She continued to sip her tea slowly, holding the tiny porcelain cup by her knotted, arthritic thumb and forefinger. Those who did not know her would assume that she didn’t hear what her son had told her. After a moment’s silence, she set her cup gently on the silver tray resting across the arms of her wheelchair, then reached up to pull her thick blue shawl tighter around her shoulders. Her son moved to help her, but she held up a warning hand, and finished adjusting it herself.

  Behind her, off to her left shoulder, stood her counselor and bodyguard, Ivan Kusnetzov, who was sometimes k
nown as Ivan the Terrible. His white hair high and brushed back, his dimpled skin pale as though he had spent too many hours locked away in the forbidden mountain caves near the village he was raised in. Pale blue veins shone through his wax paper temples. His pale red eyes matched so closely the pink lenses of his wrap-around sunglasses it appeared he had no eyes at all. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, gazing past the old woman as though staring into the beating heart of mysteries only he could see. And as a starets of the Khylsty, monk confessors to pilgrims who pursued divine ecstasy, those mysteries were many.

  Across the room, staring discreetly out the penthouse window over the brilliantly lit Atlanta nightscape, was Dr. Fyodor Pazyryk, the Iron Woman’s tall and aristocratic personal physician. The doctor closed his pale gray eyes for a moment, praying that her blood pressure stayed within limits.

  “Speak,” she said. “Explain yourself. Tell me of your incompetence.”

  Sasha kept his eyes lowered and looked at her teacup as he began to speak. She allowed no one to look her in the eye. It was a rule as unbendable as titanium and inexplicable since her cataracts were getting so much worse.

  “Mother, Drogol has escaped, Hauck lives, and Yuri is either dead or injured.”

  “And Chenko? What of my friend Chenko who suffered so much for me? What of him?”

  Sasha trembled.

  “Speak to me,” she said, raising her voice. “What of my friend Chenko?”

  “He is dead, Mother.”

  “How did he die, Sasha?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “We?”

  “I. I don’t yet know, Mother.”

  “So. It has come full circle. I betrayed Hauck so many years ago, and now he has betrayed me. So it is. Now we will see who will emerge the victor.”

  She smiled tightly, her lips like wrinkled wax. After a moment’s thought she beckoned him to lean forward, signaling she wished to tell him something only family should hear. Sasha did so quickly, anxious to appease her. When he was just a few inches away, she brought her hand up as though to caress his cheek, but instead slapped him so hard across the face he fell back a step.

  “Mother,” protested Sasha, his hand pressed to his burning cheek.

  “Chenko kept me alive in the camps,” screamed his mother.

  “Anna,” said Dr. Pazyryk quickly, “your blood pressure.”

  “Shut up. I am dying and you can do nothing but feed me pills. You are as blind as I am and if I didn’t need you to bring me tea and vodka I would have you shot.”

  “There is no doctor that can do more than I, Anna,” he said, stepping away from the window. “There is no cure for what you have.”

  “Silence,” she shouted. “There is a cure and it is now running loose in that American shithole of a city that I have refused to step foot in until now, but it seems I must go there myself.”

  “Mother, no. It is too dangerous. Let me go, I beg you. Let me redeem myself.”

  “And what will you do for Chenko?”

  “What can I do for the dead, Mother?”

  “You can bring me his body.”

  Sasha swallowed, and considered his next words carefully.

  “I will do it. I will do what is necessary.”

  “And what is that, Sasha? What will you do? How would you proceed against Drogol?”

  “I will take a team of my best men with me. Clearly we underestimated him.”

  He froze. His mother had not changed her expression, but he felt a shift in her emotional state as clearly as if the temperature in the penthouse had dropped.

  “I mean, I. Clearly, I underestimated him.”

  “I must have that man alive,” she hissed. “Do you understand this? I must have him alive. Must. And you, you are no match for him.”

  “Tell me what to do, Mother.”

  Anna Kazakova said nothing for a moment. Her skin was finely cracked porcelain, her hair thin and white, brittle and sparse because of the treatments. Eyes filmed and blue white like cold marbles; cheek bones set high and regal in her face. Even the illness could not bow her head, and her posture, despite all the hard years, was still stiff and erect.

  “You and I are the last of our family,” she said, and though her expression had not changed, her voice was distant. “I have only you to carry on our dynasty. Yet you are too young, Sasha, too impetuous to know and understand the meaning of peril. You think that more guns and more muscle will overcome every problem. This worries at me day and night. What am I to do with you? How can I send you against Drogol when you are too young to understand who and what he is, and the depth of peril that all who seek him face?”

  “May I sit, Mother?”

  She nodded her assent, and waited irritably while he pulled a chair over.

  “May I speak freely, Mother?”

  Again a nod.

  “I am a grown man. Have I not proven worthy in every task you have set me ‘til now? Have I not managed our Organizatsiya well? I have eliminated or conquered our enemies and rivals and kept our products flowing into the streets of the world’s capitals. Is this not true, Mother? Have I not bribed and extorted the police of countries everywhere? Have I not found markets for our weapons and moved the money of nations about like shells in the game? Have I not killed for us with my own hands?”

  Anna waved her hand dismissively.

  “Why, Mother? Why is this different? Why is this man different? Who is he and why do you fear him?”

  “I fear no one,” she snapped. “Nothing and no one. Never forget that. Never.”

  Sasha waited impatiently. The gold and pearl clock on the room’s French provincial desk showed one forty-five in the morning. The television was off. The stereo played nothing. His mother had no use for entertainment. Dr. Pazyryk idly picked up his drink from the bar and drained it discreetly, quietly. The doctor knew Anna found the sound of ice against glass particularly irritating. Sasha nodded at him approvingly.

  The clock read one forty-eight in the morning. Since the suicide of his brother, these moments where she would sit thinking could stretch on for ten or fifteen minutes and were becoming more and more frequent. Now that both his brother and her friend Chenko were dead, he wondered if she would withdraw further into herself.

  In the labor camps she and Chenko had suffered through after Drogol’s escape, she had not been allowed to speak for days, then forced to talk for hours without stopping or be beaten with a rod by a succession of guards who thoroughly enjoyed striking women. Fifteen minutes of silence was not much for a woman who had endured so much. Such was the reason that he had requested he be allowed to sit.

  Finally, she said, “Would you play chess with me, Sasha?”

  “You know I despise the game.”

  “This, you see, is what worries me.”

  “Mother, will you not finally tell me about this man?”

  “Did you know that when I worked at the Directorate, I had in my employ the most brilliant and ruthless man I have ever met? Many good men and women took orders from me in those days, but none as intense as that one. He was a reckless but forceful chess player like the great Mikhail Tal. He saw an opening, and he attacked. And he was handsome in a cruel sort of way. Yes, I noticed such things in those days. I was not a blind old woman back then.”

  “This was Drogol?” asked Sasha eagerly.

  His mother shook her head.

  “That man was Hauck. Drogol was—”

  “Then tell me more about them, Mother. How can I help you if I do not understand your enemies?”

  “Doctor,” she said, “bring me something to drink.”

  Ivan Kusnetzov swiveled his head to focus on the doctor. When he noticed that the doctor was lost in thought and had not responded to his Mrs. Kazakova, he waved his hand peremptorily. It was never good for her to be without vodka for any length of time. On some nights, it was all that she would allow between herself and the debilitating pain that racked her body.

  The doctor jerke
d up at the sound of Ivan’s finger snap and, when he looked around and saw the man’s pale terrible eyes fixed on him and his long, milky white finger pointing at the liquor cabinet, he moved to get Anna a drink. It was bad to keep Anna Kazakova waiting. It was worse to have her mad monk angry at you.

  “I have decided now that we will go to Detroit,” she said. “Sasha, call Chenko’s brother. He will meet us there. He has the right. Ivan will handle the other arrangements.”

  “What other arrangements?”

  “If I wanted you to know now, I would tell you now. Do not try me.”

  “But—”

  “Enough. I will tell you everything on the plane. Be patient, Sasha. No one else in the world has heard the story you will hear tonight. Not a living soul.”

  Sasha considered this.

  “You are too weak to go. Coming to Atlanta has been enough strain on you.”

  Her clouded marble eyes seemed to glare at him.

  “You must do one more thing before we leave. Call Mishka in Detroit. Tell him to meet us at the airport. I have provided him a small army of soldiers and weapons to control that city since the casinos moved in. Time for him to work for his money.”

  “What else should I say?”

  “You must tell him,” she said softly, “that I am coming to hunt.”

  At the bar, Dr. Pazyryk almost dropped the Iron Woman’s drink.

  *****

  Evgeny found Yuri sprawled faced down on the lawn of a burned out shell of a house, alive, but with a broken arm. Across the street, the van lay crumpled on its side. Broken window glass reflected off the pavement like a neighborhood house of mirrors.

  “I have him,” he said into his mic.

  “Status,” asked Hauck.

  “Breathing and swearing but a broken arm, probably a few broken ribs. The van’s ruined. Knocked on its side; looks like it was hit by a bulldozer. I saw it happening, fired three shots into the thing that crashed it.”

  Hauck did not bother to ask if he hit it; Yuri always hit his target.

  Instead, he said, “Tell me what you saw.”

  “Something big, like an ape, but faster. It took off after a passing car.”