Swift Edge

by Laura Disilverio

  I restored the OJ to the fridge and was debating whether I wanted to soak in the hot tub or just tumble into bed when a vibration against my thigh, accompanied by a slight buzzing, made me jump. Sliding my hand into my pocket, I pulled out Irena Fane’s cell phone. I hadn’t given it a thought since calling 911 on it earlier. I mentally smacked my forehead for overlooking it as the phone vibrated again. I pushed SEND, lifting the phone to my ear.

  A man’s voice, tense with anxiety, said, “Mom! Where’ve you been? I was worried when I didn’t hear from you. Mom?”

  “It’s Charlie Swift, Dmitri,” I said when he paused. “Don’t hang up. Someone shot at your mom and me today.”

  An indecisive silence drifted down the line, but he didn’t cut the connection. “We need to meet,” I said. “I can help you.” Probably.

  “Who are you? Where’s my mom?”

  “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been looking for you. I don’t know where your mom is. We were talking at your condo when someone opened fire on us; your mom escaped, and I haven’t seen her since.”

  Suspicion crept into his voice. “Why do you have her phone?”

  I explained. “Let’s meet. Maybe I can help you figure a way out of this. Your mom told me about the credit cards.”

  “Shit.”

  I tried to make out the background noise coming over the phone and finally decided it was traffic. That didn’t help me pinpoint Dmitri’s location. “Your mom’s in danger,” I said when he’d let thirty seconds elapse without responding.

  “Do you do any bodyguard work?” he asked finally.

  “Sometimes.” I’d done it once and decided never again. Most people who wanted bodyguards, according to a friend of mine in the personal security business, either grossly exaggerated their importance or were so nasty that they inspired people to want to shoot them. Who needed the aggravation? Still, if saying I did bodyguard work convinced Dmitri to meet with me, I was all for it.

  “Okay.”

  He paused again, and I could hear what sounded like a roar in the background. It came again, a lion or tiger announcing dinnertime or wooing a nearby female. Maybe Dmitri was near the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. The zoo wasn’t too far from the Ice Hall.

  “Meet me at the Garden of the Gods visitor center at eleven.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  The prospect of finally catching up with Dmitri swept away my exhaustion, and a couple of ibuprofen pills took care of my aches. I was back in the rental, headed toward the rendezvous point, in fifteen minutes. The Garden of the Gods is one of the city’s big tourist attractions, an expanse of rock formations set on the city’s west side. During the day, the formations were a sandy red. Set against the backdrop of Colorado’s pure blue sky, they made beautiful postcards. Rock climbers tested their skills against the formations, occasionally tumbling to their deaths. Hiking trails wound through the thirteen-hundred-acre park and were a favorite with joggers in the early morning. At night, however, even with a half-moon shining, the park was a featureless collection of gray and grayer lumps casting inky shadows.

  I eased into the visitor center parking lot, across the road from the park proper, and coasted to a stop. No other cars loitered in the lot, and the visitor center was deserted and dark. I’d had enough of sitting in cars for one night, so I switched off the ignition and climbed out, marching in place to stay warm. Moments later, a car’s headlights panned the lot and a car pulled in. Dmitri’s silver Mustang. He parked a healthy distance away, leaving his headlights on and pointed toward me. I walked outside the light cones, not liking the spotlit feeling. My H&K was still reassuringly heavy at the small of my back. When I was twenty feet away, Dmitri called, “Charlie Swift?”

  “That’s me,” I said, stopping near the passenger window, which was rolled down to let heated air and the throbbing bass of an Aerosmith tune escape. I bent to peer in but could get only a vague idea of Dmitri’s appearance in the backwash from the headlights. I got an impression of dark hair, pale skin, and a strong profile.

  “Hop in.” The locks clunked open.

  “You get out,” I countered. I had no intention of getting into his car and ending up God-knows-where.

  “But it’s cold,” he said.

  The man was an ice-skater, for heaven’s sake. He and cold should be on first-name terms. “Deal with it.”

  Grumbling, he got out, ostentatiously rubbing his hands together. The headlights showed a lean, athletic figure clad in jeans and a dark hoodie. A broad expanse of brow and high cheekbones made his face arresting, and I could see why Kendall found him appealing.

  “I still haven’t heard from my mom,” he said.

  “Have you tried the hospital?” I asked drily.

  “The hospital?”

  “Where your aunt is on life support?”

  His lips thinned. “I didn’t want that to happen. I’d visit her if I didn’t figure they’d be watching for me.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  Dmitri leaned against the hood of the car, between the headlights, and crossed his arms over his chest. A yip-yip-yip sounded from Garden of the Gods, and I figured a hungry coyote was hunting. “You said you do bodyguard work,” he said, not answering my question.

  “Sometimes, but I don’t think you need a bodyguard. You need to go to the police, tell them what you know.”

  He gave a crack of unmirthful laughter. “I’m not looking for a bodyguard for me; I want you to watch out for my mom.”

  I shook my head. “No can do.”

  “You just said you do bodyguarding!”

  “I’ve been hired to find you, Dmitri.”

  “Find my mom and take care of her. I can pay you.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for her. The best thing you can do for your mom is talk to the police. From what she says, you’re into something criminal, something way over your head. You need to suck it up on the credit card fraud and tell the police what you know about the men who beat your aunt and killed Boyce.”

  He stiffened. “Boyce is dead? How? When?”

  He could’ve been faking his astonishment, but I didn’t think so. “Shot. Early this morning.”

  “Oh, God. Boyce didn’t know anything about anything. Why’d they kill him?”

  He sounded like he was talking to himself, but I answered. “To put pressure on you, maybe. What’ve you got that ‘they’ want?”

  “I’m going to level with you,” he said in an earnest voice that told me he was about to lay a whopper on me.

  “Great.”

  “I was using the catering gigs to lift people’s credit card data. To make things a little easier, what with all the skating fees and everything.”

  Why is it crooks always think they deserve for things to be “easier”? “You didn’t get a family discount from Bobrova?”

  “Have you met her?”

  At my nod, he said, “Then you know the answer to that. Coach Bobrova is my mom’s oldest sister. She and Mom were never close, mostly, I guess, because she was so much older. When she offered to take me on and paired me with Dara, Mom thought it was an olive branch of sorts. I think she knew I was going to make it big and she wanted in on that.”

  His off-putting hubris didn’t mean he wasn’t right. “Why hide the relationship?”

  “Would you want to introduce her as your aunt?” Without waiting for an answer, he added, “She didn’t want anyone thinking she played favorites, so we didn’t play up the relationship. Some of the old-time skaters, from when she and my mom and dad were still skating, they remember.”

  “Did she know you were hiding out in her cabin?”

  He jerked forward, losing contact with the Mustang’s hood. “How did you—?”

  “Boyce told me about the cabin. I was there when it blew up. Know anything about that?”

  “They almost got me.” Remembered fear made his voice shake. “I stuck one of them with a knife.” His face seemed a little paler.

  That explaine
d the blood on the cabin floor. “What happened then?”

  “I ran. I got lost in the woods and almost froze to death. I saw the glow from the fire, but I didn’t know what it was until I found my way into Estes Park the next morning and read about it.”

  Dmitri had probably been within half a mile when I got to the cabin. If only I’d arrived an hour earlier! Maybe Boyce would still be alive. “So, you stole credit card data and got caught. The guy that caught you made you a deal, and you started couriering for him and—”

  “Mom’s got a big mouth,” Dmitri muttered. “I suppose she told you the rest of it?”

  “Enough,” I said, trying to make it sound like I knew more than I did.

  “I didn’t tell her everything,” he said, and I felt rather than saw his sidelong glance at me. “I wanted to keep her safe.”

  Yeah, that was working great. I wondered how safe she felt fleeing from a gunman spraying bullets around like Glade air freshener. “Of course,” I said.

  He shifted against the car’s hood, and I figured his butt was getting as cold as mine was against the frigid metal. “I took a couple of the packages and delivered them as instructed,” he said. “One in the Czech Republic and the other in Japan. They were small, didn’t tick and didn’t smell. I was worried that TSA would stop me, but they went right through the scanner, no problem. Then, on a trip to France, I got curious and I opened one of the packets. I’d studied the way the other two were wrapped, and I came prepared with the same kind of tape and everything.”

  He sounded proud of himself, and I fed his ego, wanting to keep him talking. “Clever,” I said admiringly. “What was it?”

  “IDs. A passport, driver’s license, an ATM card, even a library card. I didn’t know what to think. I’d expected drugs or diamonds, something like that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Wrapped it back up and delivered it like I was supposed to. I guess I felt a little better about the whole thing. I mean, I’d’ve felt bad if I’d found out I was passing along drugs.”

  “It’s important to feel good about your illegal activities,” I said. What a toad.

  “Hey! I didn’t think there was anything so bad about it, not until…”

  “Until what?” I pulled my leather jacket tighter and stamped my feet to get some feeling back in them. Something scrabbled at the edge of the parking lot.

  “Well, I took to opening the packets every now and then, just curious, you know. A few weeks back, I recognized the photo on the driver’s license. It was a guy who’d been on the news, a man convicted of raping and killing a twelve-year-old girl in Oklahoma.” Revulsion sounded in his voice, and I was glad to know that he found some crimes distasteful. “I realized then that I couldn’t do it anymore—couldn’t help make it possible for pervs like that to get away.” Scuffing at pebbles with his boot, he sent them skittering across the lot. “Anyway, my mom probably told you what I did next.”

  “Um.”

  “So you know I’m working with the feds.”

  Hell, no, I didn’t know that! “Working with the feds can be frustrating,” I said, feeling my way.

  “You got that right. When I first went to them with what I had, they were like, ‘Yeah, man, let’s go get ’em.’ They said this bust could make some people’s careers.”

  I was furiously trying to figure out which agency he was working with. FBI, probably. How could I finesse more information out of him without revealing that I had no clue what he was talking about? If he realized his mother hadn’t blabbed all the details , he might clam up on me.

  “Now they want me to turn over my proof, but it’s the only insurance I’ve got. It’s not like I can go into witness relocation or anything. How could I skate then?”

  “It’s probably not easy to skate if you’re dead, either,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not going to be dead,” Dmitri said with breezy confidence. “I’m too smart for them.”

  It would be way easy to dislike this guy. “I’m sure Bobrova and Boyce are impressed.”

  Sulky silence descended. A glint of red appeared at the far edge of the headlights. Two eyes stared at us.

  “Get out of here!” Dmitri bent suddenly, and my hand went to my gun. He scooped up a rock from the asphalt and flung it at the coyote, which loped away. “Go on!” He scrabbled on the ground for another handful of stones and flung them uselessly into the dark.

  I let my hand drop to my side and raised my brows. Portrait of a man on the edge. I shifted, momentarily stepping into the headlights’ glare. Dmitri straightened, letting pebbles dribble between his fingers. His eyes widened as he stared at me.

  “Hey, you were in my condo! In my bathroom! I only saw you from the back, but— You—” He pulled a gun from the hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

  “You knocked me out!” I said, stilling at the sight of the weapon in what I was pretty sure were untrained hands. I didn’t want to add a bullet to my body’s tally of abuse for the day. “Easy with that.”

  “I came back for this.” He waved the gun in a way that reminded me of Gigi—not reassuring. “I heard you sneak in, so I hid in the shower.”

  “I was looking for you,” I said. “Dara hired me—”

  “Ha! You’re with them.” Keeping the gun trained on me, he backed around the car to the driver’s door. “You tell them that if something happens to me, they are so fucked.”

  “Tell who?” I asked as the door thunked closed and the engine turned over.

  For answer, Dmitri revved the engine and headed straight for me. I leaped sideways, and the car’s nose grazed my thigh. As I sprawled on the asphalt, the Mustang gathered speed and zoomed out the exit, fishtailing as it turned left onto Thirtieth Street. The brake lights flared for a moment and then receded into the distance, disappearing altogether as the car swung around a curve. I pushed slowly to my feet and plodded to my car, rubbing my thigh. I’d found Dmitri as I’d been hired to do, but I wasn’t ready to chalk it up in the “win” column. I hadn’t convinced him to talk to the police, and I still didn’t know why “they” were beating up and killing Dmitri’s family and friends. Further, I didn’t get the feeling that he was ready to return to skating practice and Olympic competition, which was why Dara had hired me to find him in the first place.

  I sighed and lowered myself gingerly into the seat, counting up the various ways people had inflicted harm on my poor body today: guns, Tasers, cars. I guessed I should feel grateful I hadn’t been knifed or poisoned. Feeling stiff and distinctly ungrateful, I put the car in gear and headed for home.

  23

  I awoke Sunday morning feeling like I’d gone three rounds in a ring with Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and a troop of wild chimpanzees. When was the last time Norris made a movie? I used to love Walker, Texas Ranger. Good guys win, bad guys lose, with a little martial arts and romance thrown in for good measure. At any rate, it was all I could do to swallow a handful of ibuprofen, grab a Pepsi from the fridge, and sit in the hot tub until my muscles loosened up enough to allow me to dress. There was no movement at Dan’s house as I drove past, and I winced at the memory of the coldness between us when I left last night.

  With Boyce Edgerton’s murder investigation less than twenty-four hours old, I knew Montgomery would be working on a Sunday, so I pointed the car toward downtown and police headquarters. Undercover operations and the witness protection program were way out of my league—it was time to fill in Detective Connor Montgomery and see what he could chisel out of his contacts.

  “Did we have a breakfast date?” Montgomery asked, landing hard on the last word, when he responded to the desk sergeant’s notification that I was in the waiting area. He looked good in a yellow dress shirt tucked into gray suit pants with his badge looped over his belt. “I must’ve forgotten to put our date on my calendar.”

  “This is impromptu,” I said, trying to ignore the broad grin from the desk sergeant and the curious looks from other people in the waiting room, “
and it’s not a date. It’s friends having breakfast.”

  He slanted a wicked grin my way. “Friends with bene—”

  “Do you want a free meal or not?” I headed for the door.

  Catching up with me, he draped an arm over my shoulders. “So, where are we going—and what bit of information do you want in return?”

  “The Olive Branch,” I said, naming a downtown Colorado Springs institution. “And what makes you think I’m after any information? Can’t I take a friend to breakfast without an ulterior motive?”

  He laughed as if I’d suggested something outrageous—Lady Gaga doing a photo shoot wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, for example—and held the door for me.

  When we were settled into a cozy booth with eggs, pancakes, coffee, and Pepsi in front of us, I told him about my meetings with Irena Fane and Dmitri.

  “I saw the report on the shots fired at the condo,” Montgomery said, crunching into a piece of toast. “I was meaning to call you about that today. What’s your read on what happened?”

  “Someone was watching the condo,” I said promptly, having already sifted through the possibilities, “probably hoping Dmitri would show. I don’t see how anyone could have followed us from the airport—no one knew I was picking up Irena—so the only alternative is the shooter was already in place.”

  “And he opened fire because…?”

  I shrugged. “He was bored? He was trying to scare us? I suppose he could have been trying to kill Irena as a warning to Dmitri—” A stray piece of information tumbled into place and I set down my fork. “Dmitri’s father, Stuart Fane, was killed in a car accident last November—I’m not sure of the exact date. What if—”

  “It wasn’t an accident?” Montgomery nodded consideringly. “I’ll check it out.”

  I made a mental note to follow up with a friend in the insurance biz. “Can you also find out which agency Dmitri might be working with?”

  “Might be? You don’t believe him?”

  “I don’t not believe him; I’d just like a little independent confirmation.”