Anna went down on one knee, throwing Mona off balance so that she slid to the tile. The other thug grabbed Anna’s wrist with one hand and with the other, finally pushed her down and kept her there with a foot to her throat.
Anna swiveled, caught an arm around his leg and twisted. But Mona grabbed her legs and pinned her down.
“Jesus Christ!” Mona yelled. “Get the damn gun from her!”
“Trying!” snarled the man.
“There,” Mona sat on Anna’s thighs. “Stop bucking!”
Anna relaxed her jaw, let her other muscles renew their energy, waiting for a new opening as the two sought some stability in their hold over her.
A third man strolled into view and Anna looked up beyond his baggy trousers, his bulging belly, his leather bomber jacket, and into his pudgy ugly baby face. “Anna Karina Sukhova. How nice to finally meet you.”
Anna stared at him, her arms now tied by leather straps, Mona still sitting on her legs. “And you are?”
“A friend of your father’s.”
Chapter Twelve
“How far up the drive is the house?” Grant whispered to Tate and Cord as the three of them stood off the shoulder of the two-lane road and gazed up the ridge.
“Half a mile,” Tate told him. “We’d better go in on foot.”
“Fine by me,” Cord added, tucking his rifle under his arm and silently closing the trunk on his SUV.
Tate glanced around the tangle of cedar and live oak trees surrounded by prickly cactus. “You sure, Grant, there is no electric trip in this scrub?”
“My men walked it off,” Grant replied. “Nothing here except bobcats and javalinas.”
Cord loaded his rifle. “Lucky us.”
Tate fingered his Smith & Wesson in his chest holster. “Let’s go. Anna’s got to be up there by now, judging from her credit card purchase this morning.”
“Buying gas outside Del Rio doesn’t prove she’s visiting Mona,” Grant warned.
“Where else would she be going?” Tate argued. “She needs money and a place to lay low till she finds a good forger. Logic says she’s going to go to the one person who didn’t care what her name was years ago and who hired her anyway.”
“Still,” Grant cautioned, “take it easy when we approach. We now know Mona’s got bad friends. Let’s not make it easy for her to call them for help. First, let’s get my four men to surround the house. You copy?” he said into his audio remote to his men. “Any wide windows, Tate?”
Tate recalled the lay of the house from the one time he’d come here for a party Mona had given. “Yeah, off the front porch into the living room she’s got big picture windows. Smaller ones, waist to head high in the kitchen. But we’ve got to be careful everywhere. She’s got motion detector lights.”
“Any idea what the trip range is?” Grant asked him after he relayed the info to his men.
Tate shrugged. “No idea. The usual here is to detect deer and raccoons that raid the trash cans. So maybe ten feet?”
“Okay.” Grant told his four men that bit of info, then put a finger to his earpiece. “They’re in position. Let’s go.”
Tate watched as his brother and his friend pushed into place their night goggles, then donned his own. They fanned out and began to climb through the jungle growth of tangled grasses, mesquite and giant cacti.
A hundred feet from the steps up to the porch, Tate thrust up a hand to make them stop. He pointed to the Honda and the Range Rover, then frowned.
The Range Rover was filthy. Not Mona’s style. Nor up to her spick and span standards. Was someone visiting her? Someone with coarser sensibilities who didn’t give a damn if they sported muck from the last century?
But the Honda was white, this year’s model and fit the description of the car Anna had rented in Del Rio.
Tate felt a rush of adrenaline. Anna was here. He’d been right about what she’d do. And why. Was he also right about how desperate Mona was to hurt Anna? The picture of Mona’s mother or aunt who so resembled her had established some kind of tie to Anna’s father. Just when Mona had joined in the mafiya Grant hadn’t yet learned. But he had confirmed that Mona Travis had changed her name in nineteen-seventy-eight. She’d been born twenty years earlier in Bayonne, New Jersey to Boris and Maria Mendevsky. Both Mona’s parents had been killed in a gangland style murder in the eighties. Soon after, their daughter Magda Mendevsky had moved to San Antonio, Texas changed her name to Mona Travis. Grant had also learned that five years ago, Mona Travis had been arrested for DWI in San Antonio along with a male companion, Jose Alvarez.
Tate bent, scurrying up to the far side of the base of the steps. Above, he heard a door open and Mona say, “Ditch the car. Drive it back into the property. We’ll worry about how to make it disappear later.”
“Right,” a man barked and slammed the door, then bounded down the steps.
On the other side of the car, hidden in the line of trees, Grant lifted his chin at Tate and tipped his head toward the guy who now was pulling open the Honda’s front door.
Tate rushed him. The guy never had a chance. Fat and weak, he flailed like a fish as Tate put a choke hold on him and Cord came up to stuff a gag in his mouth. The two of them carried him into the woods like a sack of grain. There they tied him up with rope Grant had brought with them for just such a purpose.
Grant was muttering something into his audio, then to Tate and Cord said, “Got the car keys? Here comes Matthews.” The three turned to see a sleek black shadow creep toward them, balaclava displaying only the stark facial features of a big cat. “He’ll move the car like she said. We have ten, twenty minutes max before they’ll expect old lard ass here back again. Move it, Matthews.”
The shadow nodded. “No worries.” He slithered into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition and headed down the dirt lane into the dense woods.
“Let’s go,” Tate ordered.
In a brace, the three of them slithered up the steps to the porch. Tate noted the lights were still on, which meant either Lard Ass had turned the timer on or they had been switched on manually. At the top step, Tate paused and pointed toward one of the lamps. Cord nodded and shrugged. Next to Cord, Grant made a motion to push on. Like crabs, the three of them crawled to the edge of the large window and from different vantage points, peeked over the frame.
Tate’s heart pounded at what he saw inside. Mona and a porky-looking thug in a scarred bomber jacket bent over Anna who sat tied to a kitchen chair like a trussed chicken.
Cord rapped him on the arm. Lifted a chin toward the other side of the kitchen where another man was extracting a knife from a kitchen drawer.
Tate’s blood pounded in his ears. No time like the present to barge in there. Tate began to stand. But Grant tugged at his sleeve and put two fingers in front of his eyes and the same out toward the side of the kitchen.
Tate glanced back inside. One more man lay on the floor, clutching his thigh and rolling in agony, his knee blown away. Had Anna done that? His gaze scanned the floor for the Sig Sauer he’d seen her brandish on the yacht. She’d been a damn good shot then. She must’ve been rushed today not to zero in on his guts and kill the bastard. So where was her gun?
He scoured the room.
On the kitchen table.
He nudged Cord, then kicked Grant, making a motion of shooting a gun and indicating the table. Near Mona.
Both Cord and Grant followed his line of vision and nodded.
Tate put out two fingers to them.
Plan Two.
All three nodded once.
Grant placed a hand to his chest and motioned he was going round the side nearer the kitchen door.
Tate gave him the thumbs up, then glanced at Cord. “Execute the play,” echoed in his head from years of working in a team. A team that won. A team that worked out all the angles and coordinated a great strategy.
From deep in the woods came the sounds of two gunshots.
Tate saw Bomber Jacket swivel his bobble he
ad around, ear cocked listening for more.
“What was that?” Mona asked him.
Another shot fired.
Bomber Jacket pulled out a mean looking Lugar Luger from inside his jacket and headed for the door. “Move her to the storage room!” he yelled and bounded for the back door.
Tate was already putting a shoulder to the front door, Cord right behind him. They crashed through.
Sliding on the wooden floor behind the sofa, they missed the two rounds Mona got off.
Out on the back porch howls met their ears. Bomber Jacket had met Grant then and from the sounds Grant met a stronger man than he expected.
“Come out,” Mona screamed at them. “Come out or I shoot her. Now!”
Tate peered around the edge of the sofa and saw Mona pointing Anna’s gun at her head. Anna’s terrified gaze locked on his and in that moment, he knew all over again he mustn’t let her go anywhere without him ever again.
“Cord, too!” Mona demanded as she backed herself up to the chair Anna sat in—and began to pull her toward the nearest wall. But Anna, bound as she was, dragged her feet in the throw rug, making the task harder for Mona.
“Mona,” Tate urged in as soothing a voice as he could muster, “You don’t want to hurt Anna. Let her go.”
“Not on your life,” she replied, venom in her tone.
“What good will she be to you dead?” Tate rationalized. He rose from behind the couch at the same time as his brother.
Mona blinked, flustered. “Perhaps I can persuade her to talk. What do you think? A knife to cut up her lovely face? Or I take a few fingers until she tells me where the list is.”
Tate wondered how much more Mona knew about the contents and location of the box. He could try to call her bluff, but if he failed, Anna’s life might end. He couldn’t chance it. “You could threaten her and still not have a list.”
“Words. Christ! I need that box!” she screamed at Anna.
“She says she doesn’t have it.”
He took a step forward. His brother walked in tandem with him.
“Guns down!” she ordered. “Now. There. On the floor.”
“But she doesn’t have it, Mona.” He caught the older woman’s gaze. “I do.”
“What? Why do you have it?”
“She left it with me,” Tate said, taking small steps toward the woman. In his peripheral vision, he saw Anna swallowing hard and trying not to cry. Hang on, baby. “So if you want what’s in the box, you have to persuade me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she threw back at him.
“Ah, ah, gotta be nice to me,” he played her.
“Go to hell.”
“That,” said Grant Warwick as he stepped through the kitchen door looking a bit the worse for wear, “isn’t gonna happen.”
Mona suddenly didn’t know where to point her gun. The damn thing waivered from Anna’s skull to Grant, back to Tate and Cord.
“Untie her!” Tate ordered Mona.
The woman’s blue eyes made a quick circumference of the room.
“Put the gun down,” Cord ordered.
Mona leaned over and plucked at the ropes.
Tate saw Anna tug at the remaining ties around her wrists and fling them off. But just as she took one step toward Tate, two men burst through the hallway from the belly of the house. One ran out first, handgun blazing. A bullet hit Grant and had him falling to one knee while his own gun went off.
Cord braced his rifle to his shoulder and fired. A hole as big as a basketball blossomed in the second man’s stomach and a gush of red and grey had him staring at his insides, muttering and dropping to his knees.
Mona’s arms wrapped around Ann’s neck like a vise. Tate fired at the first man and watched Anna shrugged, step to one side, elbow the woman and turn to punch her up and under her rib cage. Mona buckled, gasping for air. Anna fell over her, tugging her behind a sideboard out of firing range.
Pride gripped him.
But the sight of another man emerging from the same doorway made him curse. Wince. Raise his Smith & Wesson once more and fire. The man whip-lashed, but still stood. He snarled, faced him and fired off another round.
Tate had to pause. His head felt like gauze, his body floating. One hand hung limp. His other hand clenched his guts. A warm liquid seeped through his fingers, his gaze burning as he realized this must be blood. Mine.
Chapter Thirteen
Six weeks later, he sat up in a recliner in his living room, his left arm in a sling as he took another Vicodan from Cord’s out-stretched hand. “Never thought of you as a nurse, Bro. But I gotta say if you ever need another profession, you’re trainable.”
Cord shot him a dirty look. “Never thought of you as a bitchy cripple, either. Take the damn pill.”
Tate swallowed the med like a good little boy. “Fluff my pillow now, will you?”
“I’m gonna fluff your ass for you if you keep up this crap. Just cuz you’ve had a few little bullet wounds does not give you the right to be demanding.”
“You give me the keys to my car, I won’t demand a thing of you for fifty more years.”
Cord leaned over and put his face in Tate’s. “You are not driving anywhere, buddy boy. You have a snoot full of happy pills, a gimpy left arm with a bullet wound, and a rearranged set of guts. You can’t even stand without an assist. You’ll drive again after I see you hoist a twenty yard pass. Clear?”
Tate sank into his familiar funk recalling a murderous night when Anna had almost died and so had he. “I’ve got to get out of here, Cord, talk to the feds. Be with Anna.”
“No. No.” Cord told him as he cleared away the foldaway desktop where Tate had reviewed business reports Cord had brought to him. “And hell no. She’s safe. She’s sound. She’s being debriefed. She is not home. And the authorities have no need to talk to you again for a while.”
“Until they get all the names and faces put together, yeah. I know. How long does that take?”
“Beats me, buddy. But I’m telling you for the hundredth time! The FBI thought it best for her to go into seclusion until she could look at all those pictures in the album. And you will accept that and not give me more bull shit about it.”
“You’re a pain in the ass,” Tate complained and threw off the red wool throw over his legs.
“Never doubt it,” Cord responded. “She’ll come to you when she can.”
“How do you know?” Tate prodded. She left me once before.
Cord rolled his eyes, exasperated. “One more time! She promised me in the hospital! Told me she’d promised you she’d return but you were too hopped up on morphine in ICU to remember shit. Now are you gonna believe me?”
Tate grumbled.
“I hope you’ll believe me,” a female voice floated across the room.
Tate couldn’t believe how good she looked to him. So tall and lithe. So frail, with only lipstick and maybe mascara, she seemed pale. A wisp that could blow away on the wind. It had been so long since he’d seen her. He couldn’t remember much of what had happened at Mona’s house. He’d been so foggy with operations and pills and pain. But Anna looked scrumptious is a summery white cotton dress that flowed over her body like a hot breeze.
He shifted in the damn confining chair. That part of his anatomy still worked. “Come closer. Cord is just leaving.”
Cord checked with Anna. “Should I?”
“You’d better,” she warned him with a twinkle in her eyes.
“Yes, ma’am.” He headed toward the door. “Call me tomorrow.”
“If I live that long,” Tate told him. When the door slammed, he said. “Come here.”
She smiled, the curve to her lower lip bringing a light to her features he had rarely seen. Then she strolled forward and dropped her sunglasses and purse on the table top. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks.” He reached out to take her hands and pressed them to his lips to kiss the palms. “You look delicious. Taste that way too. Are you going to kiss m
e or do I have to chase you around the room to get that?”
She chuckled, bent and gave him a sweet little peck. “Need more?”
“Bet your life, I do.” He ran his hand up into her hair. “I missed you. Worried about you.”
“They took good care of me.”
“To quote someone near and dear to me, they failed before so why should I trust them now?”
“That was then. This is now.”
“Sit here.” He tugged her down to the arm of his chair.”
“They explained everything, all of which I can’t tell you.”
“Right.” He winced. “Maybe tomorrow or next week or next year.”
She shook her head. “Never.”
“Why is this time different? Humor me, baby.”
“With those pictures from my mother’s album, they’ve got names and dates and details of different night when they can put people in certain spots.”
“Why is that good?”
“Because two of those most famous hits in the mafiya warfare occurred on nights when the album showed where the murderers were. In one picture, there is a clock in the background and we know what time they were there. In another, there are signs of where they are. Notes on the back are in my father’s handwriting. Couples that with a list we found—”
Tate jumped out of his skin. “Where?”
She grinned and strolled toward a window. “In the lining of the photo album. I saw a paper peeking out when they opened up the album for me and told me how you had pieced together the fact that Mona was really a mafiya’s daughter. Just like I am.”
“Did she talk to the FBI?”
“She did. Seems that she did want to get away from them all. Just like I did. And just like me, she couldn’t. About ten years ago, a member of one of the Sinaloa gangs saw in San Antonio one night in a restaurant. He’d known her mother and father. He learned where she lived and blackmailed her into working with them. Shipping contraband in her spa products across the border. She couldn’t say no.”
“And you? When did she turn on you?”
“Soon after she met me in Monterrey. She was the one who referred me to the forger. I went back to her again after I left you hoping she’d give me another referral.”
Tall, Hard and Trouble Page 10