Swift Edge

by Laura Disilverio

  Hah! Just as I’d guessed when I’d studied the receipts from Dmitri’s pockets. I love being right. I considered Irena.

  Her affront when I accused Dmitri of identity theft seemed disingenuous; credit card fraud—excuse me, “borrowing”—was equally low, not to mention equally felonious. I bit back my sarcasm and said, “So how does that lead to you being in danger?”

  She bit her lower lip, showing small, crooked teeth with a gray cast. Communist dental health at its finest. “I don’t know,” she said.

  She was lying. I eyed her averted profile as she gazed out the window to the parking lot. Time to bring out the big guns. “A friend of Dmitri’s was killed today,” I said.

  She gasped and slewed around to face me. “What? Not Dara?”

  Shaking my head, I said, “No. A man he worked with, Boyce Edgerton.”

  “Boyce?”

  “You knew him?”

  “Dmitri mentioned him once or twice, I think. You said … ‘killed’?”

  “Shot. Now, don’t you think you should tell me what you know, before someone else—maybe Dmitri—ends up like Boyce?”

  Agitated, she rose from the step and paced the empty living room. At the far end, near the kitchen, she whirled to face me. “He got caught.”

  “Who?”

  “Dmitri.”

  “Recently?”

  She shook her head rapidly. “No. Months ago.”

  “So why don’t the cops have a record of it? Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “The man who caught him didn’t turn him in. He made him a deal.”

  Her story smelled worse than a fish market in a heat wave. “Really? Dmitri agreed to ‘go forth and sin no more’ and the man turned him loose?” I wished I had phrased it differently; my religious upbringing pops up at odd moments.

  “Not exactly.”

  Slamming my hand on the floor so hard it stung my palm, I pushed to my feet. Irena looked startled. “The time for pussyfooting around this is past, Irena,” I said, striding toward her. “A man’s been killed. Your sister’s in the hospital. It’s clear your son is no Boy Scout, that he’s mixed up in something criminal. So spit it out!”

  Backing up a step, her eyes fixed on me as if she thought I was going to beat the truth out of her, she held up her hands placatingly. “The man made a deal with Dmitri. He knew who Dmitri was, knew he skated internationally. He suggested that he could let Dmitri walk away if Dmitri would agree to occasionally carry small packages for him on his trips.”

  “So Dmitri became a drug smuggler?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, it wasn’t drugs,” Irena said. “The man swore it would never be drugs. Dmitri wouldn’t do that.”

  Right. Like it’s smart to take the word of a man who blackmails you. I arched my eyebrows skeptically but only said, “Who is this man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  At my disbelieving look, she said, “I don’t! Dmitri said it was safer for me not to know.”

  That sounded barely plausible, so I let it drop. “So Dmitri started couriering something—not drugs—and all of a sudden this archvillain—let’s call him Mr. X—decides to start offing Dmitri’s friends and relatives?” I shook my head. “I think you’re leaving out a few pieces of the story, Irena.”

  Glaring at me, cheeks flushed a becoming red, Irena spat, “It’s none of your business. I should never have called you back, but you sounded … I thought maybe you could help Dmitri. Just forget it!”

  She stalked toward the door, brushing past me roughly enough to knock me a little off balance. She jerked the door open, her gaze on a cell phone she pulled from her jacket pocket.

  She wouldn’t get far without a car. “Where are you—”

  A bullet zinged past Irena Fane and buried itself in the staircase.

  20

  Irena Fane shrieked and dropped the phone. Diving at the door, I slammed it shut and locked it in a single motion. I scooped up the cell phone and dialed 911 as glass exploded from the front window, fanning out in a deadly burst of sparkling shards. That was going to cost Fane his security deposit. I felt stinging cuts open up on my face and arms. Luckily, my eyes seemed unaffected. I blinked rapidly as Irena screamed again and put her hands over her ears. I grabbed her hand. “C’mon.”

  We pounded up the stairs as another bullet thunked into the wall where the television had stood. When I’d searched the condo a couple of days ago I’d been happy to see that the place was largely deserted during business hours. Now, I wished for a coffee klatch of at-home neighbors to tackle the unknown shooter and/or summon the police. The 911 operator was still squawking from the phone in my hand, and I shouted the address at her as Irena and I ran, adding, “Shots fired!”

  Irena and I dashed through the door of Dmitri’s bedroom—also denuded of furnishings—and slammed it behind us. I turned the lock in the knob. Of one accord, we ran to the window as the sound of splintering wood drifted from downstairs. The shooter was kicking down the door. It might take him a couple of minutes to breach the front door, but the flimsy bedroom door would give him no trouble at all.

  “It’s too far,” Irena gasped, looking down at the inhospitable mix of landscape rock and old snow a long way below us.

  “Up,” I said. “We have to go up.”

  An eave overhung the window, sticking out far enough to make for an awkward grab.

  “I can’t,” Irena said, leaning out the window and twisting at the waist to survey the roofline.

  “I’ll hold you,” I said, thrusting the cell phone into my pocket.

  Another gunshot rang out, and I thought our determined attacker must have given up on the whole kick-the-door-in idea and resorted to shooting out the lock. The sound propelled Irena onto the windowsill. I held her feet as she scootched out backward until her weight rested on her thighs and she could reach up and grab hold of the eave. With one hand gripping the edge, she swung her other forearm up and over. I slowly eased her legs out the window as she pulled herself up until her whole torso disappeared from view. Luckily, she had a decent amount of upper body strength, either from her skating days or because she trained with weights. She got one knee over the lip of the roof and quickly pulled her legs up and out of sight. I heard her footsteps above me as I settled myself on the sill.

  I knew immediately that this was going to be next to impossible without someone to brace me. Reaching for the eave with one hand, I felt myself slipping backward and quickly grabbed the sill again. Bang! The front door slammed into the wall, making the whole condo shudder. Footsteps thudded on the stairs, and I knew the shooter would be on me in a second. Quickly standing, I repositioned myself on my stomach with my legs hanging out the window. Slithering backward, scraping my stomach and arms against the sill, I lowered myself until I was hanging by my fingertips, my body pressed against the splintery siding of the condo. Police sirens sounded surprisingly close by.

  I was losing sensation in my fingers, and my arms trembled with the strain of holding my weight. I looked back over my shoulder at the inhospitable terrain below. Should I drop or hope the shooter overlooked me? It wasn’t that far down, not like leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building. I mean, a serious suicide wouldn’t pick this as her jumping-off point. I had about decided to risk a broken leg by letting go when I heard a foot slam into the bedroom door, which popped open, whacking the wall and probably leaving a hole.

  A patrol car squealed around the corner into the parking lot, running Code Three with its lights flashing and siren blaring. The footsteps headed for the window halted, then reversed, and relief sagged through me. “Help!” I yelled as those anonymous footsteps bounded down the stairs. I struggled to pull myself up, but I didn’t have enough strength left in my arms to manage it. My shoulders screamed. Damn.

  “Drop your weapon,” an authoritative voice commanded.

  Relief whistled through me. The police had caught the shooter.

  “And come down from there,” the c
op added.

  What? I looked over my shoulder again, feeling my fingers beginning to slip. A lone uniformed cop stood almost directly below me, gun held steady in two hands, pointed at me. “You have got to be kidding me,” I yelled. “I don’t have a weapon, the guy ran out the front, and if you don’t move right now, I might fall on you.” With my luck, they’d charge me with assaulting a police officer. “Help me!”

  Another cop came running up, assessed the situation, and disappeared around the front of the condo. In a minute, strong hands grasped my wrists and he hauled me up and in. “Thank you,” I gasped. Leaning against the wall, I tried to flex my cramped fingers. No go.

  “What happened here?” the cop asked. A burly twenty-something with a lumpy nose, he maintained a calm expression as I filled him in. His name tag said GRADNEY, and he took notes with tiny, precise capital letters.

  “The roof!” I exclaimed, halfway through my recitation. “Irena is up on the roof.” I wondered why she hadn’t called out once she saw the patrol cars arrive. Glancing out the window, I saw there were now four police cars in the parking lot. Officer Gradney radioed a compatriot, and in a surprisingly short time a man in painter’s overalls topped with a University of Colorado sweatshirt pulled up in a pickup and unloaded an extension ladder.

  Gradney and I hurried down the stairs and out the open door in time to see a cop descending the ladder, shaking her head.

  “Nothing up there but a pissed-off squirrel,” she reported.

  Several sets of suspicious cop eyes swiveled to me. “She was up there,” I insisted. “Irena Fane, mother of Dmitri Fane, the man who rents this condo.”

  “Not anymore he doesn’t,” the man in the sweatshirt piped up. I pegged him as the condo’s maintenance supervisor. “He moved out yesterday. Saw the U-Haul truck.”

  “Did you actually see Dmitri?” I asked before the cops could get a word in. I had trouble believing Dmitri Fane, on the run from God-knows-who, had casually rented a U-Haul, packed up his belongings, and trundled off to … where?

  “Wouldn’t know him if I did,” the man said simply. “Can I go now? I’ve got a toilet to unplug in 12C.”

  Officer Gradney waved him away with a word of thanks and turned back to me. “Let’s go over your story again. You say you picked up this woman at the airport, came here for a chat about her missing son, and someone opened fire on you?” His tone was still polite, his demeanor calm, but his eyes were narrowed and watchful.

  “On her,” I said, suddenly remembering that it was Irena who had opened the door and drawn the first bullet. I wondered whether she was the shooter’s target or if he was aiming for anyone at the condo. “Can we walk around the building while we talk?” I asked Gradney.

  “I don’t see why not. You want to see if there’s someplace she could’ve come down?”

  “Exactly,” I said, pleased with his quickness. Montgomery might have some competition in the detective ranks before long.

  On the far side of the block of four units, a leafless oak tree extended limbs to within a foot of the roofline. “There,” I said triumphantly. “I’ll bet she climbed down the tree.”

  Gradney shook his head doubtfully, examining the tree. “That limb’s not too sturdy looking,” he objected. “It wouldn’t hold her.”

  “Irena’s about as big around as my pinkie,” I said, convinced the woman could have done it. What I wanted to know was why she had escaped from the roof and then run off. Maybe she’d gotten down before the police arrived and gone to get help? I looked around. No sign of her or any cavalry she might have summoned. No, I knew Mrs. Fane had followed in her son’s nimble footsteps and done a runner. Maybe because being shot at scared her—not entirely unreasonable—or maybe for some other reason.

  * * *

  I dragged myself back to the office once my frozen, cramped fingers thawed sufficiently to allow me to drive. Gigi was back from her outing in Old Colorado City, and Kendall was nowhere to be seen. Still at the Ice Hall, maybe. I made a mental note to ask her what the scuttlebutt among the skaters was about Dmitri’s disappearance. Gigi had tugged down the zipper on her quilted vest and was fanning herself with a back issue of a PI magazine. A red flush mottled her face.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, headed for the fridge and a Diet Pepsi.

  “Hot flash,” she moaned, fanning harder.

  I hoped scientists invented a cure for menopause before I got there. “No sign of Kungfu, I take it?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m going to stake out the tattoo parlor tonight. Do you want to come?”

  The hint of pleading in her voice made me grind my teeth. No, I did not want to come. I wanted to go home, cut out the vanity countertop from the length of plywood I’d bought two weeks ago, and then laze in my hot tub. We were only looking for Kungfu as a favor to Dan, and he was my buddy, not Gigi’s. “Oh, all right,” I said ungraciously.

  She beamed. “Thanks, Charlie. I have a good feeling about this.”

  * * *

  At nine o’clock that night we sat scrunched down in the front seats of my rental car, facing Tattoo4U from a block away on the cross street. I’d vetoed taking Gigi’s Hummer since Kungfu might have spotted it last night. The temps hovered in the midthirties, but I refused to let Gigi keep the engine running, knowing the exhaust streaming from the tailpipe would draw attention to us. I’d worn dark layers of warm clothing, plus gloves and a knit cap pulled low on my forehead. Gigi had on a violet parka with a fur-trimmed hood and lace-up suede boots, also fur trimmed, that made her look like a plump blond Eskimo. She hadn’t worn gloves, so she sat on her hands in the passenger seat.

  “Do you think he’ll show up again?” she asked, practically pressing her nose up against the window glass.

  “No idea,” I yawned. We’d been here an hour already and had watched a man Gigi identified as Graham lock up the store and walk west. Most of the lights on the block were out, including the streetlights, which the city had turned off to save on electricity costs. I don’t know how many streetlights remained lit, but it seemed like only one in every eight or ten. Darkness pooled around Tattoo4U, and none of the diminishing trickle of passersby, all of them headed to or from the liquor store, showed any interest in the business.

  “Irena Fane must be worried sick about Dmitri,” Gigi said out of nowhere. “I know how I’d feel if Dexter up and disappeared.”

  Relieved is how she ought to feel. Dexter was an arrogant, selfish ass who made Kendall look like Child of the Year. “She’s got reason to worry,” I said, arching my back against the stiffness of long immobility. “She knows he was involved with credit card fraud and who knows what other criminal activities. People he was close to are getting beaten and shot, and someone took potshots at us in his condo. That adds up to a lot worth worrying about, in my book.”

  “I don’t know how you keep kids from ruining their lives by doing stupid things,” Gigi sighed. “There are so many traps out there for kids these days—drugs, pregnancy, body piercings that get infected—”

  Ow and ick.

  “—cyberbullying, eating disorders, misfits spraying automatic weapons around school cafeterias. I’ve tried to help them understand…” She trailed off as if thinking about all the things a parent needed to cover with teens exhausted her.

  “At least you’re there for your kids,” I said, thinking about my missionary parents, who serially abandoned me, first with my grandparents and then with my Aunt Pam and Uncle Dennis. “You’re trying. They’re probably absorbing more from your talks than you realize.”

  “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Charlie,” she said. Her amazed and gratified tone made me feel slightly guilty. “Do you really think the kids listen to me?”

  No, but it sounded good. My experience with teens, limited though it was, suggested they installed a V-chip equivalent that filtered out all parent noises. “It’s not like Dmitri is a teenager,” I pointed out. “The man’s twenty-six. It’s not his m
ommy’s job to keep him out of trouble anymore.” A flicker near the tattoo parlor caught my eye. Was it tree limbs swayed by the chilly breeze? I leaned forward to peer out the windshield. No, there was definitely something moving on the east side of the building. It might be nothing more than a stray cat, but …

  “Come on,” I told Gigi, opening the door. My hand went to the H&K 9 mm snuggled in its holster at the small of my back. I didn’t expect to need it, but after coming under fire today, I liked the security blanket feeling of having it with me.

  “Did you see something?” she asked, pulling her hands out from under her and reaching for the door handle.

  “Don’t slam the—”

  Wham. Gigi turned with a guilty wince as the door slammed closed, alerting everyone in a three-block radius to our presence.

  “I’ll follow him around back. You wait in the front in case he makes a run for it.”

  “Got it,” Gigi said, trotting at my side as I strode quickly toward the tattoo parlor. We passed a couple arguing about beer brands by the liquor store, and I slipped into the narrow gap between the tattoo parlor and its neighbor. Shards of broken glass glinted underfoot, and clumps of brittle weeds trapped newspaper pages, plastic bags, and other debris it was too dark to identify. I paused for a moment, halfway back, and listened. I heard nothing at first except the ambient evening noises, but as I tuned those out I picked up a funny scraping sound coming from the rear of the building. Stepping carefully to avoid crunching down on a discarded beer can or something equally noisy, I made my way to the back of the tattoo parlor and peered around the corner.

  I could barely make out a hunched shadow, darker than the surrounding night, scraping at Tattoo4U’s back door. It took me a moment to realize he was trying to pick the lock, a shiny padlock. A muffled “Shit” drifted to me, and I surmised he hadn’t had much training in basic breaking and entering. I sidled silently around the corner, hoping to get close enough to tackle Kungfu before he noticed I was there. I rated my chances as pretty good because he hadn’t once looked up from the doorknob since I’d arrived. I didn’t want to have to draw my gun, not even as a threat, because bad things happen when guns come into play.