There she was again. A woman he’d been seeing around the neighborhood. She filled out her jeans very well, and Merlin extrapolated the curve in his mind. She walked past the end of the alley, and he exited and followed.
His phone beeped again. He ignored it. She heard it, and turned, gave him a smile. He liked her face. Now, who are you, girl?
The phone wouldn’t quit, so he took it out and flipped it open. “ ’Lo?”
“Merlin.”
“Yeah?” The voice was unpleasantly familiar.
“Turn around.”
Before he did, he knew it was Anton, driving the Mercedes, creeping along close to the curb. Anton waved and smiled.
Merlin ran past the tight-jeaned woman and got about a quarter-block before Sergei stepped out from the next alley and grabbed him.
The door of the apartment flew open and Merlin lurched in. Blood covered the front of his suede jacket and his face was puffed up and discolored. His left eye had swollen shut. Blood ran from his mouth.
He stumbled into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He stared at himself in the mirror. Then he ripped off his ruined clothes and stepped into the shower.
He let hot water steam him for twenty minutes. He stepped out and covered himself with a white terrycloth robe. He took a look in the mirror. The swelling had gone down. He looked and felt one hundred percent better, but his face and ribs still hurt.
He sat at his computer and typed. He liked to sit at his computer and type. He’d been doing it since his early teens, which was not all that far in the past. He hit the keys savagely. Colors began to dance on the screen.
The bully boys had always had it in for him. Always. They were all alike, white or black. He would have felt guilty about letting white guys beat him up if so many black ones hadn’t done the same thing. He could never defend himself very well, but that didn’t mean he was . . . well, what they always called him. He liked women. The bastards. The bastards.
He kept jabbing keys.
Sara finally found the place, a small oil distribution company in south Brooklyn. It looked more like a junkyard with some of the junk cleared away. There wasn’t much to the non-junk part: a few large elevated tanks covered with rust spots, one or two sheds, a trailer, and three delivery tankers parked in a small lot. The outfit sold home heating oil. If the Organized Crime Task Force report was correct, it bought product in states with low fuel taxes and sold it in New York, which had whopping fuel taxes. The margin of saving was pure profit. Which was purely illegal of course. A common enough dodge, but an extremely lucrative one.
Sara parked the division car and walked through the gate, showing her badge to the uniformed officers who had set up a crime scene perimeter.
As she walked toward the trailer, where a clot of crime scene techs and a few plainclothes had gathered, she saw someone from the Task Force she recognized, Dave Lambert.
“Sara.”
“Dave. Got your report. Thanks.”
“Sorry to take another case off your hands, but we’re mighty interested in this one. So’s the FBI.”
“Are they here?”
“No, they trust us on some things.”
Sara looked at all the techs roving around the yard. “Looks like you’re doing a thorough job. Believe me, I have a big enough workload. I have to make a report, though. Who’s the victim?”
“Guy by the name of Ashkenazi. He was running a pretty big fuel tax evasion operation here. Somebody whacked him.”
“Know who?” Sara said casually.
“Yeah. I think so. I think it was payback for an attempted hit last week. The one on Lazlo Kontra.”
“You have a time of death yet?”
“Tennish, last night. Uh, you look thoughtful.”
“Hm? Oh, nothing. Go ahead.”
“Well, looks like he was here alone, working late. He was a hands-on kind of guy. Didn’t like bodyguards much. He was a tough old nut, veteran of Soviet prisons.”
“What did he have against Kontra?”
“Near as I can find out, it goes back to the old country. They were enemies of long standing. What I got from informants was that Kontra strangled Ashkenazi’s brother, long time ago.”
“Strangled?”
“Yeah. Never did find out the details. It was pure vendetta, this one. Well, they’re all vendettas in a way. Way of life with these people.”
“Know who did the whack?”
“Well, if it wasn’t one of Kontra’s soldiers, I don’t know who it was. Small-caliber pistol left at the scene. Serial number will probably lead nowhere.”
“You seem pretty sure about all the facts. Think you can pick up anybody?”
“Possible we might get some forensic links. Let’s say have enough to get a warrant to haul in both his top henchmen. Before you know it, they’ll produce witnesses who’ll perjure themselves to provide an ironclad alibi. You find a whole bar full of people in Brighton Beach who’ll submit affidavits. Say they bought the suspects drinks all night and that they never left the table.”
And of course their boss will have a different alibi, Sara thought.
“We’ve been down this road before,” she said. “You’d think Kontra wouldn’t use two of his closest associates.”
“Sara, this isn’t the big time. No fifty-thousand-dollar contract killers flown in. Everything’s pretty much done in-house with this crowd.”
She didn’t spend long inside the trailer. Ashkenazi did not look to have suffered before he died. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help interpreting the expression on the corpse’s face as relief that it was all over. No more struggling, no more jail time, no more time, for all time.
And now to look up Kontra and have a chat.
She had a bone to pick with him.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Have another?” asked the bartender.
“Sure,” Sara said.
“Same?”
“Gee and tee with lime. No piano player tonight?”
“Coming up. No, he’s off Tuesdays.”
The place was packed, anyway. Maybe he wasn’t such a good piano player. Or played stuff nobody wanted to hear. She tried to imagine Nottingham playing a Billy Joel tune, or maybe doing an Elton John riff. She couldn’t. But she really did not know enough about the man’s musical tastes to hazard a guess. She did know that he was the only other person of her acquaintance who could wear the Witchblade and live.
“Haven’t seen you around before,” the bartender overtured.
She’d been wondering when he would get around to it. He seemed a little wary of her. Why, she didn’t know, but as this was a bar which Russian wiseguys were known to frequent, he might have figured she belonged to one.
She tried to imagine herself a gangster’s moll. She could not.
Actually, she had always been more inclined to imagine herself a gangster. Ma Barker, maybe. Bonnie, of Clyde fame. That was more like it, if she were to indulge in that sort of thing. But cop fantasies had always taken precedence. She could no more fancy herself a minion of the forces of evil than a mongoose could daydream about being a cobra.
“Never get to Brooklyn much,” she told the bartender.
“Oh? What’s the occasion tonight?” A little on the young side of thirty, he was smiling. He wasn’t bad-looking.
“Looking for a friend.”
“Yeah? Who? I might know him.”
“Actually two guys. Two Russian guys, with accents.”
The bartender laughed. “Around here . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know. One of them is named Sergei.”
The smile vanished. The guy shrugged. “Yell that name here, six guys are going to answer.”
“And the other is Anton.”
“Oh, yeah.” The bartender frowned almost imperceptibly. “I know them. They haven’t been in tonight. Not yet, anyway.”
“They usually stop in?”
“Late, usually. They friends of yours?”
<
br /> “Not exactly. Acquaintances.”
“Uh-huh.”
He was mentally backing off now, sensing something he didn’t trust or like.
“Look,” she said. “No way you’re not going to tip them off now, so I’ll tell you that I’m NYPD Homicide.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve tried to contact their boss, but he’s disappeared. Now I’m looking for them. If you see them, tell them I’m going to pick them up eventually. Meanwhile, I want their address.”
The bartender threw his arms wide. “From me?”
“Just tell me where they live.”
“I don’t know them from Adam. Not really. They just come in every once in a while.”
“Not what I heard. I heard they practically live here.”
“Oh?”
“In here every night, without fail. Now, where the hell are they? I’m tired of waiting.”
“They didn’t come in.”
Sara leaned across the bar. “We’ve established that, dude. Now, where do they live? They must have mentioned it sometime.”
He didn’t dare cast eyes on her cleavage, but was having a hard time resisting. “Look, I don’t want any trouble.”
“Then just tell me where Anton and Sergei live.”
“Upstairs.”
“How convenient. Is there a back way?”
“Yeah. Just go past the rest rooms. Take these keys. I sometimes go up there and take care of things for them.”
“You always so kind to people you don’t know from Adam?”
She got up from her bar seat.
“Hey, don’t you need a search warrant?”
“You offered me the keys.”
“Uh, I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean—”
“Thanks.”
The bracelet had been throbbing faintly all evening. As she climbed the stairs it began to thump like a bass drum.
The stairs showed use. No footprints in dust. They were clean and free of junk and must have been used by the thugs regularly, if not by their houseboy downstairs.
She tried the first key on the ring she’d been given. It didn’t fit. The second didn’t either, but the smallest one threw aside a deadbolt inside the jamb. It was louder than she wanted it. She waited for some reaction inside.
Silence.
She pushed the door open and stared into a dark apartment. Spilling streetlight outlined a small living room.
“Anyone home?” she called out.
The darkness did not answer. She took a step in and called again and got the same response. She closed the door and felt the wall for a switch. She didn’t find one, and had to inch her way across the carpeted floor. As she did, she wished for her jacket and jeans and their many pockets instead of this cocktail dress and silly pocketbook that could barely hold her keychain, which, by the way, had a tiny penlight . . .
She crunched something underfoot.
The Witchblade came alive and began to babble.
She moved forward and kicked something, sending it skittering across the floor. She could now see some kind of upset in the room. The place was a shambles, and as her eyes adapted to the dark, she could see the vast extent of it. The furniture was all overturned, debris littered the floor. She walked on broken glass and scattered paper.
Fumbling in her pocketbook, she wondered where the damned light switches were. There, across the room, by that alcove that went into another area or room. Finally reaching the other side, she still failed to find a switch but got the penlight to work. It cast a feeble beam over the room.
She gasped.
The place looked like a tornado had gone through it. The beam revealed things she was sure she didn’t want to see in detail. Things that looked like blood, pools of blood. Through a daze of a shock that reached through her tough hide for such things, she saw heaps of entrails . . .
The Witchblade yammered at her.
Her foot slipped in something. She didn’t want to look at what it is. She scuffed her shoe into the nap of the carpet.
She found a cordless phone and hit the talk button. The instrument was dead, and she didn’t have her cell phone. She’d have to go back downstairs to call this in . . . whatever it was. A double mutilation murder. She pushed from her mind a pile of messy questions, not the least of which was about how two strapping street thugs could have been . . .
Then, suddenly, weird things began to happen.
It must have come out of one of the bedrooms. Unseen, its odor hit her first. It was the worst wet-dog smell imaginable, an evil musk of dirt and sweat and unnamable exudations.
She turned and saw two red eyes advancing toward her. It was little more than a huge dark shape, a flash of something white and sharp, and slits of molten eyes, all revealed in a second’s sweep of the weak penlight beam
There was some discontinuity of time. The thing attacked as a molasses-like goo enveloped everything, a slowness, a dreamlike slow-motion falling, a nightmare environment of some kind took over and she was fighting to move, fighting an inelastic medium that held her back; but not everything was affected. Her right hand, utterly within its own frame of reference, instantly grew a mailed gauntlet to cover it and metal feathers like wings along the side of her hand and wrist to embellish it. The Witchblade had reacted faster than she possibly could have.
The gauntlet lashed out, its metallic talons ripping and tearing.
The thing howled and staggered back.
The rest of her body caught up to the Blade’s time frame. She moved back in strategic retreat, back-kicking debris out of the way. She leapt over a cocktail table and kicked in the monster’s direction.
The thing howled again and swiped at the Blade as it passed. Flinders flew in all directions. The thing then circled to the right, slowly, cautiously. It had cause now to take the measure of the adversary it faced, to calculate the nature of the threat. It slunk, it crouched. It growled.
She watched it, tensed to spring into action. Her eyes now saw in the dark like an infrared camera.
It stopped. The beast’s fiery eyes never wavered, never blinked.
She eased to the right, sidestepping gingerly.
It sprang forward in a rush, wickedly fast. She leapt away and kicked.
The thing grunted as it tripped over an immense overstuffed armchair deftly slid into its path. It fell over the thing and ended up a heap on the floor behind it. It remained out of sight a few seconds. She moved off and took a stance on the opposite side of the room.
It was annoyed now. She noted that its bestial growling carried an intelligent undertone. It was as if the creature could speak but chose not to, or was contemptuous of communicating with a creature as low as the one it faced. Nevertheless its guttural sounds carried meaning. Now it was thoroughly peeved, as if a simple task had proved surprisingly troublesome. There came a sense that this female creature had been underestimated, and some blame was to be assigned for this failure of foresight. Nevertheless, the job of destroying her had to be done. And this task the creature would accomplish, without further delay. It sprang over the overturned chair and rushed again.
This time it met the full force of the Witchblade, a steely haymaker that sent it crashing against the wall.
The thing was stunned, but only momentarily. It howled out pain and immense anger as it got to its feet.
To Sara, the thing was still just a black shape in the dark. There was a suggestion of the lupine—pointed ears, long muzzle, canine incisors—but there was more to the creature. It was humanoid, it was bipedal, and it had fully prehensile forelimbs tipped with wicked claws. That much detail was visible. But its shape seemed to shift and reconfigure at times, as if it were still deciding what it wanted to be, or perhaps the best shape to assume for the task at hand.
But it was wary now. It almost sauntered to its left, moving away from the wall, side-stepping upset furniture, and from it came a sound faintly like a chuckle, a false note of nonchalance, which was instantly belied. The thing swi
ped at a shelf, came away with some knickknack that had miraculously survived, and threw it viciously across the room.
She dodged it easily.
It chortled and kept ambling.
She tried to keep the jumble of wreckage between her and it, watching, trying to guess its next avenue of attack, for it was only a matter of time before it came at her again. She moved off to one side, stopped, recomputed the angles, moved once more. She could see enough detail in the apartment to do this. The creature, however, was still amorphous, mostly a black-on-black enigma. It seemed to bleed into the shadows, metamorphosing and flowing, and the shadows writhed themselves in coils and swirls.
They danced this way from room to room and back again to the living area. The thing feinted, swiped at the air, shadow-boxed and threatened, but made no move to carry through an attack. It had been stung, and it was chary of launching into another foray before gaining some overwhelming advantage.
The delaying tactics were getting to Sara. When this horrific pas de deux had gone on for over a minute, she took a step forward, tiring of the game.
“Bring it on, puppy dog,” she said.
It almost laughed. You could have called it a laugh, a deeply malevolent chuckle that carried an edge of vicious glee.
You could almost hear it say, Worry not, hellbitch, I shall accommodate you.
But apparently she wasn’t close enough.
“Let’s get it on, dude.”
You are a vexing creature. What exactly is your nature?
“Guess.”
The thing did not answer. It stooped, picked up a magazine stand, and threw.
She ducked. “That all you can do? It seems so petty.”
It threw a trivet table in answer.
She zigged, then zagged as a big glass ashtray went sailing past. It shattered in the darkness.
The thing roared as it lifted the huge couch.
“Careful, don’t get a hernia. That is, if you have any balls.”
But the move was a feint. The critter simply dropped the thing and bounded over it like a gazelle, and in so doing finally caught her by surprise.
In a flash, the enigma was on top of her, slashing and tearing, and it was all she could do to fend off its blows. One miss, and she was steak tartar. But she had no options other than to keep back. Move inside, and come in range of those oversize teeth, those impossibly long and gleaming white spikes of dentition that looked more appropriate on an alligator. Viewed at close quarters, the creature was a polyglot of animal configurations—there a touch of wild bore, here a hint of Tyrannosaurus rex. The wolfish composite was simply an overall style.
Witchblade: Talons Page 8