“I stowed away when you stole my mom’s car,” Kendall said defiantly. “I wanted to help find Dmitri.”
She tried to smile up at him, but the gun jabbing into the soft flesh beneath her chin made it impossible for her to turn her head. For the first time, she looked nervous, even a little scared, and I thought maybe the cluebird had landed. About time. Some people need a gun pointed at them before they’ll open their eyes.
Irena and Dmitri exchanged a glance. “She knows, then,” Irena said. “Graham.”
“When?”
“On the way here.”
“I don’t know anything,” Kendall objected.
Irena had killed Graham, I deduced from their cryptic exchange, and Kendall was a witness. Not to the killing itself, probably, or she’d be looking a lot more scared, but she could undoubtedly place Irena at the murder scene at the right time, having been riding in the back of the Hummer all evening. I wondered if I’d missed them by hours or only a few minutes. At least an hour, I figured, remembering the clammy chill of Graham’s flesh.
“Get the money,” Dmitri ordered.
Irena strode past the blond shooter’s body without sparing it a glance and picked up the suitcase from where it rested near the far wall. “I have it,” she said, pulled a little off balance by the bag’s weight.
“And his gun,” Dmitri said.
“Why?” She looked from Kendall to me. “Oh.” A small, hard smile curled her lips, and she started toward the body. Almost there, she slipped. She didn’t fall, but she spilled several bundles from the duffel onto the ice. With a muttered curse, she bent to retrieve them.
Kendall began to plead with Dmitri, her tone conciliatory at first but moving rapidly toward hysteria.
I knew that whatever their plan had initially been, their revised plan called for shooting me and Kendall with the dead man’s gun, making it look as if he’d killed us. I didn’t know what kind of story they’d spin for the cops, but if Kendall and I were dead, there’d be no one to contradict it. Anger flamed in me. Not only did I not want to die, but I didn’t want Dmitri free to compete for an Olympic medal, spewing his “I was forced into this” story to a credulous media eager to spread the tale of an athlete’s heroic efforts to save Kendall and me and bring down a villainous identity theft ring. Gag me.
Something different about the sound from the Zamboni’s engine caught my attention, and I slid my gaze sideways in time to see it back away from the wall, ram into it, then slowly reverse and begin chugging toward Irena. Who—? A glimpse of pink huddled behind the steering wheel gave me hope. Irena, preoccupied with fitting the money bundles back into the bag, didn’t look up. Kendall’s voice in Dmitri’s ear, and her wiggling efforts to free herself, kept him from noticing the machine’s movements immediately. I focused on him, waiting for that split second when he noticed the Zamboni headed for his mother. I did what I could to distract him.
“So everything you told me Saturday night was a lie?”
He smirked. “Not everything. Shut up!” The latter comment was apparently meant for Kendall, who quieted and stilled when he jabbed the gun’s barrel viciously into the soft flesh under her chin. “That’s better. I really was just lifting credit cards until Graham caught me when I paid for Dara’s tattoo with a stolen card. It was a stupid mistake. Then—”
Shit. I’d wasted a lot of investigative energy by assuming someone caught Dmitri stealing a card. I’d never considered the possibility he’d been nabbed using one. Maybe I should consider another line of work.
I wrinkled my brow, trying not to let my gaze slide to the Zamboni, now going backward in a big circle behind Dmitri and Irena. Who knew I should have set Gigi up with Zamboni driving lessons in addition to surveillance classes and computer training?
“—then, once we teamed up, we got into identity theft and making false identities in a big way. We expanded the business, you might say. Boyce and I provided Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, other financial data, and IDs that we found while catering, and Graham provided artistic and ID-manufacturing expertise, you might say. He’d been doing it for years in Australia before he emigrated here.” He grinned cockily, and his gun hand sagged away from Kendall’s chin slightly. The girl’s eyes flitted to me, and I gave her a reassuring smile that said “don’t do anything stupid but be ready when I make my move.” It’s hard to convey all that with a facial expression, but I tried.
“With Mom’s connections from Russia—lots of her family’s friends have come to the U.S.—and others we found by getting the word out quietly at halfway houses and prisons and the like, we were cleaning up. There’s a healthy balance in my offshore account.”
The Zamboni straightened out and headed for Irena again where she squatted, strapping up the duffel bag. “So, what happened with the feds? You got an attack of conscience and called them, then chickened out.”
His brows slammed together. “That was Boyce. Stupid fuck. He told me Friday night, after the party where that stupid chick accused me of selling marijuana, that he’d had enough, that he had called the FBI and was going to meet with them this past Saturday. He was warning me, giving me time to get out.” An expression of sadness or regret flitted across his handsome features before he firmed his mouth.
“So you killed him and set him up.”
“Not me. I told Graham.”
Irena noticed the Zamboni first, straightening with the dark man’s pistol in her hand to find the ice-smoothing machine only fifteen feet away. “Hey!” she yelped, firing both guns at the metal behemoth bearing down on her. Bullets zinged off the metal and ricocheted around the rink. The sound was an assault, multiplied by the building’s acoustics, which were designed to amplify a band’s music to bone-vibrating levels.
Dmitri’s head swung toward his mother, and he whipped the pistol toward the Zamboni, hauling Kendall around with him. In that moment, I leaped, pushing forward with all the strength in my legs. The ice stole some of my traction, but I slammed into the pair of them with a satisfying thud, tearing Kendall from Dmitri’s loosened grip and shoving her across the ice before I landed—bam—on my elbow and shoulder, the ice scraping my cheek. Pain zinged through my right butt cheek and tailbone, still sore from when Bobrova tripped me. Dmitri skated backward, still on his feet, gun wavering indecisively between me and the Zamboni. Irena, apparently out of bullets, flung her guns at the Zamboni and turned to run, taking only one step before Gigi clipped her with the Zamboni’s front corner and sent her sprawling on the ice, out cold. The Zamboni’s ice-shaving blades snagged on the duffel bag and dragged it, spewing money all over the ice.
“Mom!” Dmitri started toward his mother, but I had half crawled, half slid forward until I could reach his ankle. Wrapping my forearm around it, I jerked.
He toppled, the gun sailing out of his hand, as loud voices shouted, “Police! Freeze! Put down your weapons.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Kendall as she stalked toward me. The girl was part penguin, I decided fuzzily, to be able to stay upright on the slick ice.
Ignoring me, she stopped beside Dmitri and launched a small foot into his rib cage.
“Oof.”
“You tried to shoot my mother! And you didn’t even know my name!”
He stared up at her, confused by the vision of petite, blond, scorned fury, as police officers swarmed him, flipped him onto his stomach, and cuffed his hands behind him, letting Kendall kick him a couple more times before gently pulling her away. When an officer yanked him to his feet, Dmitri flashed his engaging smile and started explaining how he was working with the feds to stop an identity theft ring. Two other officers enthusiastically began collecting the money that coated the rink’s surface like a papery lichen.
Gigi dismounted awkwardly from her metal steed, still wearing the pink dress, which looked considerably the worse for wear, like an ’80s bridesmaid gown battered in a mosh pit. Her champagne-colored hair was mashed flat on one side, and a bruise discolored her cheek,
a souvenir of her fender bender, I guessed.
“Kendall!” Southern accent wringing at least three syllables from the name—“Kay-en-dall”—she kicked off the green pumps and staggered toward her daughter, who hurtled into her mother’s arms and promptly burst into tears. “Are you hurt, baby? Are you okay? Where does it hurt?”
It wasn’t Kendall who was hurt, I realized, feeling a dull ache spreading from my right buttock. Cold seeped through my jeans, numbing my thighs where they contacted the ice. I reached a hand down to my hip, and it came away streaked with blood. Damn. I’d been shot. And it hurt.
“There, there, baby,” Gigi said, stroking the girl’s blond hair. “I’m so, so grateful you’re all right. Because I am going to kill you for making me worry like that!” They moved toward the side of the rink, paying no attention to me. No one cared that I’d been shot making sure the spoiled teenager didn’t get a bullet through her perky posterior. I poked out my lower lip and indulged in a little pity party.
I had about decided I needed to make an effort to get up, because the ice beneath me was melting and I was soaked from shoulders to ankles, when Montgomery appeared above me. I stared up into his face in a detached sort of way, thinking how handsome he was, even upside down.
He stretched down a hand, and I reached up with an effort to put my hand in his. His fingers closed over mine, strong and hard and warm. “Are you going to nap there the rest of the evening, Swift?” he asked, a smile slanting across his face. “Come on, get your lazy ass up.” He tugged on my hand, and I let out a yelp.
“Wha—?” He stared at the smear of red that became visible on the ice when I shifted. “You’re shot! Why didn’t you say—? Medic!”
33
I’d have gotten more rest at a Blue Man Group percussion concert than I got in the hospital that night. I lay awake after the surgery to patch up my derriere, gritting my teeth with pain and trying to sort through the events that led to the shootout at the ice rink.
“You’d feel a lot better if you’d take your pain meds,” a sickeningly cheerful nurse said, opening the blinds the next morning. I squinted as the sunlight striped my face. I lay on my left side facing the door, some sort of bolster behind me propping me up so I didn’t roll onto the butt cheek with the bullet hole in it.
“I hate drugs,” I muttered. “They make me feel all … not me.”
She muttered something that might have been “And that’s a bad thing?” as she checked my vitals and scratched notes on my chart. “Breakfast’ll be here in a minute,” she chirped on her way out, “and I’m sure Dr. Tuckwell will be by before long.”
“When can I get out of here?” I called after her, but she was gone. I sipped water from the plastic tumbler on the swing-arm tray beside the bed and discovered the TV remote. I aimed it at the TV, turning my head at an awkward angle, hoping to find some news related to last night’s happenings. Nothing but traffic updates, an Everybody Loves Raymond rerun, and a yoga class. I clicked it off.
A brief knock sounded on the door, and I looked up, expecting to see breakfast—probably a bowl of soggy cereal and that orange juice that comes in little plastic cups and leaves a funny aftertaste. I didn’t suppose there’d be a Pepsi on my tray.
“Charlie, you’re awake. How can I ever thank you?” Gigi came in with a bright smile, hair recoiffed to stiff perfection, bruise minimized with makeup, royal blue velour pants and matching jacket replacing the pink dress. She bore an arrangement of yellow and white daisies tucked into a smiley-face mug, which she placed on my tray table. “Kendall, say thank you.”
Only then did I notice Kendall behind her mom, glowering. “Thanks,” she muttered with all the enthusiasm of a child expected to be grateful for a heaping plateful of boiled eggplant. “Everything was copacetic—I was going to rescue Dmitri and he was going to be so grateful—”
“I’m not sure Dmitri needed rescuing,” I said wryly, “and I missed the gratitude. Did he thank us before or after he shot at us?”
“He was only pissed off because you got him arrested,” she flashed. “Besides, he didn’t shoot! All the shooting was Dmitri’s mom and that other guy, the one trying to—”
I stared at her. Last night she’d been kicking him, but today she was defending him? The teenager’s capacity for self-delusion, or for sticking to a position in complete disregard of all evidence, awed me.
“Kendall!” Gigi said in a much sterner tone than I was used to hearing from her. Apparently, it was new to Kendall, too, because she stopped with her mouth open and stared at her mother. “Wait in the hall.”
The girl left, scuffing her pink boots over the hospital’s shiny linoleum.
“I’m glad I wrecked his car,” Gigi said when Kendall had gone, giving a decisive nod.
That surprised a laugh out of me.
“Well, I am,” she said defiantly. “When I got to the rink—I got the Mustang started again, but it was making a really ugly grinding noise—and saw him aiming that gun at Kendall, I froze. I couldn’t scream or move or anything. Then I saw the Zamboni and … well, it seemed like my only shot, so I snuck out of the tunnel and climbed onto it. Then—”
“Tunnel?” What was she talking about?
“There’s a tunnel from the Ice Hall to the arena that brings you out at ice level,” she explained with a “you didn’t know that?” expression.
“That would have been useful to know,” I said, figuring Dmitri and Irena probably accessed the World Arena through the tunnel and then opened the door I’d come through from the inside for Aguilar and his minions to use.
“I thought Dmitri was going to shoot my baby, but then you pushed her down and saved her life, and I will be grateful to my dying day.” Gigi sniffled, and I gestured at the tissue box on the windowsill.
“I don’t think he would’ve shot Kendall on purpose,” I said. “She startled him.” Irena, however, was a whole ’nother kettle of fish.
“Well, dead is dead whether it’s on purpose or not, and I’ll never forget you saved her, and got shot doing it. I’ll take care of everything while you’re in the hospital and convalescing. You don’t need to worry about a thing. And I’ve got a good mind to make Kendall come to your house every day after school and run errands for you until you’re up and about.”
I blanched. I didn’t know who’d hate that more—me or Kendall. “I plan to be up and about by tomorrow,” I said, “so don’t worry about it. Did Kendall tell you how she came to be at the rink?”
“I’m not deaf, you know,” Kendall called from the hallway. She edged back in, leaning against the jamb. “Mom refused to look for Dmitri even though he was in danger, so when I saw Mrs. Fane taking the Hummer keys, I jumped in the back and covered up with the blanket, thinking she might need my help. She did, too,” she said self-righteously, jutting out her lower lip. “If I hadn’t been there, at the rink—”
“Where did you go before the World Arena?” I cut into her heroine fantasy. Squeaking wheels and the scent of scrambled eggs announced the arrival of the breakfast cart. An orderly walked past the door bearing two trays.
“I’m not sure where all we went,” she said, “because I was afraid to look half the time, for fear Mrs. Fane might see me and … and misinterpret. She drove around for a while—I’m not sure where—and then stopped at some restaurant for dinner,” Kendall said. “In a strip mall. It took her, like, two hours to eat. I was freezing in that dumb Hummer and starving, too. All I had to eat was a stupid Snickers bar.” She glared at Gigi as if it were Gigi’s fault they didn’t have food stashed in the Hummer for stowaways. “Then I know we went to Old Colorado City, because she got out there and I was able to sit up and look around. It was dark, though, so I couldn’t see much.”
“Where did she go?” I tensed and then clenched my fists on the blanket as pain zinged from my ass all the way to the sole of my foot.
“Some tattoo place,” Kendall said.
Gigi leaned down and whispered in my ear, “The police
found a body there. Shot.”
Shocker. Irena tidying up loose ends. I wondered if it had, indeed, been Graham who killed Boyce, as Dmitri implied, or if his mother had, once again, stepped in to keep Dmitri safe. No, it couldn’t have been Irena, because she was in Detroit when Boyce was murdered. The police would figure it out.
“I think it’s really cool that someone that old would get a tat,” Kendall said, looking at Gigi with an expression that said her mom would never do anything half so cool. The girl’s eyes lit up. “Mom, can I—?”
“No.”
The sullen look clouded Kendall’s face again. “Well! You could at least say we’ll talk about it.”
“No.”
I gave Gigi an encouraging smile; she was getting the hang of using the N-word.
Then she went and spoiled it, crossing to the teen where she slouched in the doorway. “Honey, you’re beautiful just the way you are. Why, I know dozens of girls who would kill for your lovely skin.” She cupped Kendall’s face in her hands.
“Where did Irena go after that?” I interrupted before Kendall harangued Gigi into driving her to the nearest tattoo parlor.
“She went to the hospital.”
“Memorial North?”
Kendall nodded. “I got out and did a few jumping jacks to keep warm … she was in there maybe twenty minutes.”
So she’d gone to see her sister. The suspicious side of me wondered if she’d gone to comfort her or tie up another loose end. Either way, I guessed Bobrova was still alive since neither Gigi nor Kendall had said otherwise. I bit my lip, thinking. An orderly sidled past Kendall, tray held high, and laid it on my table after moving the flower, tissues, and tumbler to the windowsill. “Breakfast,” he announced.
Swift Edge Page 23