Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  I asked, even though I dreaded the answer. “How much time?”

  Elana scowled at me. “I’m not mad at you. Don’t get all guilty.”

  I realized what it was about her that looked a little different. Motion. She didn’t fidget anymore.

  “I should have stepped up,” I said. “Told the cops what happened.”

  “Then you’d be an idiot. I’d still be here, and you’d be on the other side of this building with the boys. Or maybe doing time in Monroe.”

  “You’d have gotten a lighter sentence. Maybe none at all if I could’ve convinced them you weren’t in on it.”

  “And you would have had to give up Dono. Uncle Willard explained everything.” Her voice was bitter.

  At the next table, the family with the weeping young girl was led away by one of the guards. The inmate had already left, but the girl kept crying anyway. Nobody paid any attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Elana shrugged. “It’s done. Another fourteen months and I’ll be out. I’ll have my GED by then. I can get my driver’s license in here, too.”

  Fourteen months. Christ. Almost two years in all. That was more time than Dono had served in County when I was a kid.

  “You’re okay? You’re safe?”

  “Tell me about Watson instead,” she said. “It’s boring without news.”

  So I told her some of the stories from senior year. Mostly tests I had muffed and parties that had been lame, trying not to make anything sound like too much fun. Elana listened and made a few of the right expressions in the right places. When there was three minutes left in our allotted half hour, I stopped right in the middle of a tale about Rob Firmino and his buddies filling lockers with water balloons. We were silent for a moment.

  “What do you need?” I said. “When you get out?”

  “When I get out, I’m going to pick a direction and drive away. For a while, at least.” Her feline eyes looked at me. “You can resist the urge to visit me here. That’s what you can do.”

  “The County says you get an allowance to spend. I could—”

  “I don’t want to see you again,” she said. She stood up and the C.O. started to walk over to our table.

  “Elana.”

  “All done?” said the guard.

  “Done,” Elana answered. The guard nodded and headed for the exterior door. Elana took a step or two backward in the same direction.

  “Call it my present,” she said to me, before she turned and followed. “I just had a birthday.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON, THE hard case with the clenched face came out of the BerPac building and climbed down into the Cobalt powerboat. He started the engine and cast off the lines and drove the boat north, up the channel and out of sight.

  There was no sign of anyone else around the building. Not Reuben, nor Elana. They had been inside BerPac for twenty hours. She had walked in on his arm. Practically with a spring in her step.

  So why did I feel so uneasy about her?

  I dialed Leo, in the Saab. “Any movement?”

  “I’d have called.”

  “The big son of a bitch just drove the boat away.”

  “You going to follow him?”

  “We want the Tovex. Or the girl.”

  “Better decide on which,” Leo said. “We can’t stay here forever.”

  No we couldn’t.

  “Hold position,” I said. “I’ll bring the boat across.”

  Clouds had been slowly rolling in from the west all morning, black and heavy with intent. The temperature at noon was colder than it had been at midnight. February was determined to go out fighting.

  I met Leo at the car. He sat in the driver’s seat, watching the front of the BerPac yard. He didn’t look fatigued, or bored. He looked positively sharp. I realized I felt the same.

  “They’re waiting,” I said. “For the feeder ship to deliver the metal late tonight. I don’t know why they’re waiting. Or why they had to be here for so long beforehand. But they’re here, and it’s coming.”

  Swallows nested in the unconquerable thickets of blackberry bushes that grew alongside the roads and between the towering columns of the overpass. The dropping air pressure had them on edge. They swooped in and out of the brambles at top speed, never losing a feather.

  “When it’s dark,” I said, “I’m going in.”

  Leo was very still. “I got faith, man, but—”

  “No fireworks. I just want a closer look. The Tovex takes up a lot of space. If it’s in the building, I’ll spy it through a window, or at least figure out where it could be stashed. If I get eyes on it, we call Guerin and he brings the whole damn world down on BerPac.”

  “What about Elana?”

  “What about her?”

  “Come on. I’ve seen the girl. Guys would belly-crawl naked through scorpions for less.”

  “We weren’t like that.”

  “Then what?”

  I thought about it. “Our childhoods were both pretty twisted, in similar ways. I always figured she and I were more alike.”

  “And you’re hanging on to that.”

  I looked at him. He shrugged.

  “If this was just about retaliation, what would we do, Sarge? We’d set up in one of those old shacks across the water, wait for the Russian dude to walk by a window, and bam. Simple. But we aren’t doing that.”

  “That’s a line I don’t want to cross. Unless I have to.”

  “So obviously there’s something else you want.”

  There was. I wanted Elana to tell me how. How she’d gotten so tangled with the Kuznetsovs that she could see her friends dead. How we had gotten our lives so fucked up.

  But I wasn’t going to get that chance. The best I could hope for was visiting her in prison. Again.

  “If you’re going in there tonight,” Leo said, “you’ll want spare magazines. And some darker clothes.”

  He was right, the workout gear I was wearing wouldn’t cut it. I had some black jeans and a jacket as spare clothes in the speedboat. The right costume for the job. If Elana Coll could dress to kill, so could I.

  Oh.

  A realization, so stark and solid that it trapped my breath in my throat.

  Damn.

  “Leo,” I said. “I think I’ve made one king-sized hell of a mistake.”

  He turned.

  “Elana isn’t a killer. But she’s aiming to become one,” I said. “She’s going to kill Reuben.”

  ELANA HAD RUN FROM the murder scene, and Willard had lied to me. Those two facts added together had poisoned my thinking about the whole situation from the start. Every move that Elana made, I had been working on the assumption that she had helped to steal the explosives, and was trying to stay one jump ahead of whoever was after her. The cops. Rusk. T. X. Broch. But none of them even knew Elana was part of the equation. I was the only one who had been chasing her.

  She had gone to ground, after fleeing from the cabin. She had used Trudy’s credit cards for money and Trudy’s studio to hide in because it was better if everyone thought that Elana Coll was dead, for as long as she could pull it off.

  Camouflage. Concealment. While she tried to find out who had murdered her friends.

  Elana had been surprised when Luce and I had told her that Broch was dead. She knew Kend was a compulsive gambler. She had been looking for his loan shark. When she found out he was already dead, her first impulse had been anger, at me, thinking I had stolen her revenge.

  Luce and I had told Elana something else, too. We’d told her about Haymes, and the Tovex. She’d been confused about why Haymes and his attack dog Rusk would be trying to find her. I’d said the word explosives, and she’d replied with a blank stare. Perplexed. She hadn’t known about the theft at all.

  But she’d put some pieces together, right there in Luce’s kitchen. A dead loan shark plus explosives, and a mental lightbulb had switched on. Elana had left immediately. Gotten herself looking f
ine. And ventured out to find Reuben K.

  “If she wants him dead,” Leo said, “should we leave her be? Let her do it?”

  I looked at BerPac. In the gloom of the overcast sky, it looked isolated and forsaken.

  “She been in there for a full day,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Back to Plan A.” He looked at the low ceiling of clouds. “Weather’s for shit.”

  “Snow, or rain, or both. Maybe winter works in our favor for once. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have everyone huddled inside that building.”

  He grunted. “Gotta love your optimism, man.”

  I turned to Leo. “I’ll be breaking laws. If this goes sideways, maybe I’ll have to break some big ones. You’re not an accessory, not yet. And you don’t have to be.”

  There was bright amusement in the tightening of skin across his cheekbones. “Kinda forgetting they tried to blow me up, too.”

  “That is a fact.”

  The wind pressed harder outside, making the swallows launch into another frenzy of loops and spirals.

  “We’re at the party,” Leo said, “so we might as well dance.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  LEO STEERED THE SPEEDBOAT in tight to the concrete pilings, ten feet under the docks. The outboard under its rubber cowl burbled gently as it pushed us forward through the darkness at a half knot. The cloud cover was so low I could have spiked it like a volleyball.

  We’d agreed that the open dock was the best insertion point for the heavily fenced BerPac yard. I stood up on the starboard bow. When we were ten yards shy I held up a hand. Leo eased off on the throttle. Before the boat could drift I jumped high and grabbed the support beam with gloved fingers.

  Under me I heard the outboard’s growl deepen as Leo nudged it into reverse. I began to make my way in the opposite direction, toward BerPac. Left hand, right hand, left hand. Like the obstacle course at Benning, only with more splinters and the possibility of getting shot at the end.

  The fence between the yard next door and BerPac extended out from the concrete dock over the water. I had to hook the toe of my boot through the chain-link, and reach to get my fingers on it. Very slowly. The metal rattled softly with my weight, and the fence pipes creaked. At least there was no razor wire. I climbed around the fence edge, biceps stretched to the limit with the strain of moving like a sloth.

  On the other side now. I got hold of the concrete lip of BerPac’s dock, took a big inhale, and hauled myself up, behind the stunted pyramid of the articulated crane’s base. I lay on the concrete and looked around.

  Nothing and no one on the dock. No cameras on this side. No motion sensors on the exterior lights. Just three lamps along the building wall and a whole lot of lovely shadows. I hunched low in one of the pools of black.

  The boat was tied back in its place, down at the bottom of the dock ladder. Through the dim, I could see something at the rear of its cockpit that hadn’t been there before. A long rectangular crate, six feet by three by three, like a casket for an especially fat corpse. Too small to hold the Tovex cases, unless they had unpacked and repacked all of the water gel tubes into the crate. I didn’t have the tools or the time to open it and find out.

  And I had a different priority now. Where was she?

  Light shone weakly from two windows in the building. One upstairs, one down. The windows were placed high, intended to maximize sunlight more than allow any view of the outdoors. Nothing moved inside to interrupt the light.

  I took the Glock from my jacket pocket and ran along the chain-link to the corner of the building. The room revealed itself through the window degree by degree as I edged closer. It was an office area with messy desks and filing cabinets and no people at all. The opposite door was open to the far room.

  I could see the side of a chair through the door. And a woman’s leg, a long calf in gray pants and short black pumps

  There was a second window farther along the near side of the building, light beaming out onto the fence. I went around the corner toward it. A stubby length of dowel rod propped the window open an inch. I waited. No sound came from inside.

  I peered through the glass panes. Elana lay slumped in the chair, her back to me, with only a patch of dyed black hair visible. The chair was tall and upholstered in brown leather, out of place in the empty, crude space of what looked like BerPac’s garage. Elana’s head lolled to the side. I watched her for a few heartbeats. She might have been breathing. But her hand hung slackly from one wooden arm of the chair, and her legs were splayed without grace. A painful sprawl. She would wake bruised and sprained in half a dozen places. If she woke at all.

  Drugged. Or so exhausted she might as well be.

  A rustle-thump of movement. Upstairs. Were all of the men up there?

  I waited. No one came into the room.

  Could I get her out? There was the door to the office area I’d seen. The big garage door to the front was closed and locked. One more open passage out into what looked like a hallway, where the stairs must be. I tested the window. It swung easily on its hinges with only a tiny tick of sound.

  I hoisted myself up and gently set a boot on the windowsill. Listened again. I sat on the sill and dropped into the room.

  Elana had not stirred. There was another brush-step of sound from the floor above. Then only the lengthy, even wave-beat of Elana’s breath.

  In three steps I was beside the chair. Her face was so relaxed that her jaw hung loose, with her wide bottom lip half an inch off center. I checked her eyes. Her pupils were a fraction too wide to be normal. I could sling her over my shoulder and go out the back to the dock. Signal Leo, or swim with her limp body to the opposite shore, if I had to.

  Motion behind me, reflected in her unseeing jade iris.

  I spun, raising the Glock. Made it halfway before the Taser barbs hit me.

  Every muscle from my scalp to my toes seized in anguish. It was like being simultaneously crushed in a vise and torn apart by horses. My lungs were desperate to scream but unable. My last clear vision was of the hard case’s brutal face, twisted in triumph, in the hallway door. In the next instant I was slammed to the cement floor so hard that the world went very far away.

  The worst effects of a heavy electrical shock wear off quickly, if you survive. I was just rounding the moon and coming back to Earth when I heard Reuben K’s merry laugh.

  “Hit him again,” he said.

  And I was long, long gone on a rocket of agony.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  TERROR WOKE ME. NOT all the way. Not the way that banishes a nightmare almost instantly. I was very tired. My mouth tasted foul. We rose up and dipped down, and then the We suddenly resolved into me and Elana, lying next to each other on the coarse non-skid floor of a boat’s deck. My jacket was gone, and I could feel the spiky surface through my T-shirt. It was still nighttime.

  The up-and-down motion was lulling. I didn’t want to fall backward into sleep again. Couldn’t help it.

  Then I snapped to, as hands grabbed my shoulders and ankles and I was lifted very rapidly. When they dropped me I was just alert enough to expect it, and tucked my chin to my chest for the big whump of impact. My teeth clenched on a wad of cloth in my mouth.

  “Awake?” asked Reuben from somewhere. I tried to look. My wrists and elbows were bound tight behind my back. Same with knees and ankles. I could writhe, a little, but not turn.

  The hard case in his black tracksuit came into my line of sight, blurred and tilted on the diagonal from my point of view. He stood feet planted, staring at me. I had a moment of clarity that told me he was about to stomp on my head.

  “Kasym,” said Reuben.

  The hard case looked up.

  “Turn him over so he can see,” Reuben said. Then something in Russian, maybe repeating the order.

  Kasym put his boot on my shoulder and kicked so that I rolled to the other side and onto my face. I squirmed to get back upright.

  Reuben walked over, leaned down to
look at my face from a foot away, like he was peering into a fish tank. His high forehead and snub nose came into startling focus.

  “Hey, you look lively,” he said. He grinned at Kasym. “See, you gave the bitch too much. A half dose is just about right.”

  I tried to spit the rag out, but couldn’t seem to get my mouth and tongue to coordinate. Reuben tapped my cheek.

  “Party time, my friend,” he said. “A little Z blend.”

  That explained why I was so out of focus. They’d doped me. The same stuff used for severe insomnia. Or date rape.

  Reuben plucked the cloth from my mouth with his long fingers. I coughed through shuddering breaths, as Reuben strode away to sit on a stool by a broad worktable. Kasym joined him. He glared at me for another moment and then picked up a tool and bent over to adjust something on the table.

  The drugs they’d given me weren’t so different from Ambien or other sleep meds. Shake it off, Shaw.

  Reuben smirked. “Kasym’s pissed because you almost killed him, did you know? He gave you the big zap with the stun gun back there, but fuck if you didn’t get a shot off.” He leaned back on the stool to look at Kasym, who wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Right past your ugly head, eh?”

  My vision was clearing. I could see farther away now. Beyond Reuben and Kasym at the worktable there was a large window, and through its panes I could see the shiny white curve of a petroleum tank, looming in the near distance. A roof arched thirty feet over our heads, made of wooden beams and aluminum sheeting. Despite the roof, it felt and sounded like we were outside. The Cobalt bobbed gently nearby. My mind assembled these facts groggily and came up with the conclusion that we were in a large boathouse next to the petroleum farm.

  Where was Elana? I twisted and was half surprised when my body cooperated. Elana and another man lay against the wall of the boathouse. Elana was facing me, bound like I was, with thick plastic zip ties around her arms and legs. A strip of tape across her mouth held in a lump of rag. She moved weakly against her bonds. The man was dressed in paint-stained coveralls. He was not tied and gagged. He might be dead.