Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Willard has talked of you with the same regard,” Lev said. “This deal can happen.”

  I leaned into the BMW’s driver’s side and popped the trunk.

  I had expected Reuben to call out once he knew his father was near. He had not. When I saw him in the trunk, matted with stink and trickles of crusted blood on his face, I understood why. His eyes had the bright, unadulterated terror of a child who is certain that the boogeyman lives in his closet. And who has just seen the closet door move.

  The two men from the other limo hustled Reuben almost gently into the backseat. One sat next to him. The other waited by the driver’s door.

  Lev had not looked directly at his son during the whole exchange.

  “I will have some—adjustments—to make,” he said. “There will be opportunities. We would welcome a man who earns respect.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  He nodded and walked back to the limousine. His driver held the door for him and they all got in their cars and drove away, headed back toward the airport. By this time his private plane would be refueled and checked and ready to return to Siberia.

  A few minutes passed. I sat on the hood, taking deep breaths.

  Willard finished walking down the hillside and crossed the wide parking lot to meet me. He wore a trenchcoat over his suit, and the coat and his pants were wet where he’d been lying in the grass. The Merkel .30-06 with its telescopic sight was slung over his shoulder. It looked like a BB gun in his hands.

  “Everything good?” he asked.

  “I don’t think Lev and I will be sharing vodka shots soon, but yeah.”

  He put the rifle into the BMW’s open trunk and shut it.

  If I had drawn the Glock, the plan was that I would start shooting Lev’s men working from my right inward. Willard would start with the men to my left. I didn’t plan beyond that. My odds of survival wouldn’t rate it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Willard shrugged. “It took a lot for you to trust me.”

  While I had been negotiating with Lev Kuzetnov, I had also been very aware that Willard could have changed his allegiance just by changing his aim by about half a degree.

  “Don’t suppose Elana would have forgiven me,” Willard said.

  “Your niece isn’t someone to piss off. When Kend and Trudy were killed, she went hunting for the murderers herself.”

  Willard showed surprise about as much as he showed any other emotion. His eyebrow twitched. “To kill them?”

  “She loved Kend. And she’s got a lot of steel. When things got very bad with Reuben, she didn’t crack.”

  He took a long inhale. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Won’t we all.”

  He looked over Reuben’s BMW. “Nice ride. Is it yours now?”

  “I miss my truck. If you can fit into it, I’ll give you a lift back to your car.”

  He managed, with his head denting the roof fabric and his shoulder pressing me off center from the steering wheel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  ADDY PROCTOR AND I were sitting at a circular table on her narrow front porch, taking advantage of a sudden spell of bright sunshine in between the winter drizzles. I was rewiring one of her table lamps. Addy was reading a novel by Pat Barker and diligently eating oatmeal cookies.

  Sunlight or not, it was still cold. Addy had encased herself in a couple of thick blue sweaters and a black cloak, of all things. Even Stanley, lying at her feet, had a wool plaid blanket over him. The blanket had many gnawed patches. He kept his eyes open just in case a cookie rolled off the table.

  Guerin’s silver Lexus turned onto the block and pulled up in front of Addy’s house. Stanley noted my attention and a growl started somewhere down around his pelvis. I put the toolbox on my lap and put the tools on the table away in its plastic tray. While the open lid concealed my hands, I slipped the Smith & Wesson from under my coat and into the bottom of the box and covered it with the tray as Guerin got out of the car.

  “I’ll put your tools in the coat closet,” Addy said. She hadn’t missed my little sleight of hand. “If we’re away when you come back for them, you use your key.” Stanley stayed with her as they went inside.

  “You should have called,” I said to Guerin. “What if I’d gone to Rio for Carnival?”

  “Then I would have assumed you’d fled the country,” he said, without any levity.

  He sat down in the chair Addy had just vacated. There was something in Guerin I hadn’t seen before. He looked as shipshape as ever. But he carried an unseen weight underneath the spotless glasses and starched collar. Like the detective had gotten plenty of sleep, but no real rest.

  “This isn’t official,” he said.

  I nodded. He wasn’t holding cuffs. I wasn’t calling Ganz. That was the only way an official visit could go, right now.

  “Got something new on Broch?” I said.

  “Broch,” he said, like I’d asked whether the cops were working on who shot President McKinley. “We got other things than Broch. We have a suspected terrorist, identity as yet unknown, who blew himself up so completely I’m glad there’s any DNA left. We have the manager of a boathouse next door, who was meeting a client he knew as Mr. Algin. That’s about the last thing he remembers. The poor prick was so doped up that night that even if he fingers Algin someday, which I doubt will ever happen, any defense attorney can blow holes in it like—well, like the dead fool who left his size twelve boots as his suicide note. And we have one very large firebomb which, from the whispers, has been missing from an Air Force base for over a year. Not that the Pentagon will confirm that.”

  “Where’d this happen?” I said.

  He ignored me. “We also have a stolen truck from the petro site, which crashed into a Russkie shipping company on the other side of the island. Another dead body there, looking like Godzilla stepped on him. The stiff is clearly Russian, based on his dental work, but damned if anybody will ID him, either. The Feds and Customs agents are going over BerPac splinter by splinter.” He pointed at me. “And of course, there’s your buddy Leo, who happened to be wounded that same night.”

  “Injured. He was injured. Fell down the steps over there at the house.”

  Guerin glared at me. “You are too fucking cute by half. You think you can’t get nailed? Usable prints are on something, somewhere. Or we’ll find a camera somewhere that wasn’t knocked out that night, with your very identifiable mug right there on high-def.”

  I took a sip of Addy’s lemon tea. “Let’s say any of that happens. Nail me for what?”

  He kept up the cop stare for another moment before leaning back in his chair. A fire engine drove down the block, probably on its way back to the Madison Park station. We both watched it pass.

  “Yeah,” Guerin said, still looking at the street. “Everybody knows we dodged something really goddamn nasty. One of the Feds couldn’t even stand to be in the middle of the petro tanks while they were dismantling all the bombs and checking for booby traps. Said it was like being in the middle of an inhale, with the scream about to happen.”

  I raised my eyebrows. That was how it had felt to me, too. I didn’t share the thought. But maybe I understood why Guerin looked the way he did.

  He turned back to me. “So all this crap goes public and it takes six months to get your ass into court. Maybe you wind up visiting Gitmo for a while. Maybe you’re a fucking national treasure, for as long as the news cycle lasts.”

  Guerin stood up.

  “Or maybe it’s a sleeping dog,” he said. “We haven’t decided yet. But keep Rio out of your plans. You don’t want people getting the wrong idea.”

  “I’ll be right here,” I said. “I got a house to build.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  BARRETT AND PARSON YORKE brought Elana to the cemetery on Crown Hill to visit their friends’ graves. They had all missed Kend’s funeral the week before. Elana had been in hiding during the ceremony. Barrett had stayed with her distraught brother.

&
nbsp; Even now, Parson looked shaky. The bruises from Rusk’s beating had healed, but his hurt went deeper than that. He was out on bail, after a lot of legal legerdemain by the Yorke family. They were playing him up as a big, dumb kid who trusted the wrong people. It wasn’t bullshit. But his passport had been confiscated by the Feds, just in case.

  The cemetery still allowed upright grave markers, which were scattered in familial patches through the grass and trees and flat stones. Kend’s was a small wedge of granite, with his full name and birth and death years on a plaque. Other Haymes graves were nearby. On the oldest, the dates were so smooth that I could only make out that the stone had been carved in the ninteenth century. Kend’s marker was the smallest.

  Barrett read a poem. Parson stood and stared blankly at the marker. Elana wept, silently.

  In the days after Harbor Island, Elana had told me her story of the long, horrible night at the cabin. Kend’s gambling and his evasiveness had been driving a wedge between the two lovers. Barrett had been a focal point of that tension. Elana had been convinced that she and Kend were having an affair.

  When Kend had called Elana and said he was leaving for the cabin, she suspected the worst.

  “I thought about how weird that was for him to just leave, and I kept obsessing about Kend and Barrett, together.” Elana had told me. “Then I called Trudy and ragged to her about all of that same crap for half the evening. Finally I figured, screw them both. I might as well catch them in the act.”

  “You and Trudy drove out together. In her convertible,” I had said.

  “Kend had taken my car, since he didn’t have one anymore. I was so mad. That was just twisting the knife, right? Taking off for the weekend with Barrett in my own car.”

  “What happened?”

  “Trudy and I got to the cabin. It was really late, almost morning. No Barrett anywhere. Kend was still awake. And angry. He said we had to leave, but he wouldn’t tell me why. He kept looking up the road.”

  “Waiting for Reuben to come and buy the Tovex.” But it had been Kasym who had made the witching-hour visit instead.

  “Finally I was so furious with Kend that I had to leave, to go up to the main house, and cool off. Our fighting had exhausted Trudy. She stayed. In case Barrett really did show up, but also because she didn’t want to drive anymore.”

  Elana had returned an hour later, to find a nightmare.

  “I hardly remember seeing them,” she had said to me. “Isn’t that strange? It was so—”

  “I understand.” I remembered the cabin a little too well. When the images came back, Elana would need help dealing.

  “I just remember running. Running for help. Running away. Maybe whoever had killed them was after me. I drove as fast as I could. It wasn’t until I got to the ferry that I realized my purse was back at the cabin. Trudy’s purse was still in the car. So I paid for the ferry with her cash, and that gave me the idea.”

  “Hide out as Trudy,” I said, “until you were safe.”

  “By that time I knew—or thought I knew—why someone had killed them. Kend had been honest with me, about the gambling at least. He was in way too deep. We’d argued about asking his father for help, but he wouldn’t. I was sure I could find his bookie. I risked telling Parson I was alive. He tried to help me by placing bets around town, asking who knew Kend. Broch’s name rose to the top of the list.”

  Which was why Parson had called Broch’s place of business, and made himself a prime suspect in Broch’s murder. For all Reuben’s boasting of doing me a favor by eliminating Broch, the loan shark’s death had also snipped a loose end that might have led back to the Russians, after all the bombs went off and Kend was linked to their theft.

  Elana and Barrett had cried a lot together during the past week, and reconciled. Their circle had become smaller, and tighter.

  They didn’t leave a rectangle of bare earth on graves anymore. Too bleak, probably. Strips of fresh grass sod made an emerald patchwork in front of Kend’s marker. Elana bent down and placed the bouquet and touched Kend’s name for a long moment.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said to me, rising. “Walk with us to Trudy?” Trudy had been cremated. Her urn was in a columbarium on the cemetery grounds.

  Elana was unsteady on the dirt path on her heels. She took my arm as we walked down the gentle grade toward the enclosed mausoleum.

  As we made our way through the cemetery, I finally shared the whole story of what I had done with Reuben Kuznetzov. Her mouth was set in a firm line of approval at hearing how Old Lev’s men had hustled him into the limousine.

  “I knew it had to be Reuben, when you talked about Kend stealing cases from his dad’s company,” she said. “Reuben oozed up to me at Willard’s card game a few months ago. He pretended he was just making conversation. Did Kend work for his dad? Was he treating me right, spending money on me, shit like that.”

  “Digging for info, and hitting on you at the same time. Efficient,” I said.

  “Later on I found him getting all chummy with Kend. I thought Reuben was just looking for another sucker to bet big at the card game. But he was setting Kend up the whole time, wasn’t he?”

  “He was probably already imagining ways to steal the metal from his father. He wanted a big diversion. And Reuben knew how to work with explosives.”

  “I was ready to murder him,” she said. “I wanted to do it. Not have Willard step in and handle things. If my uncle never learned about my troubles, that would have been fine with me.”

  The last time Willard had tried to help, he’d convinced Elana to stay silent about our theft at Gallison Engineering. I still felt shameful about that. And I couldn’t fault Elana for being wary of her uncle’s priorities. Kend and Trudy hadn’t meant anything to him.

  Elana and I hung back, as Parson and Barrett stopped to admire some of the older stones. Elana shook her head. “I tried to play Reuben, to get close enough. Told him that Kend’s loan shark must have killed Kend and Trudy at the cabin, and that I had run away and hidden for a few days, thinking Broch would come looking for me next. I said I was so relieved to hear Broch was dead, and could I just hang with big, tough Reuben for a while until I felt safer?” She mimed batting her eyelashes and fanning her face.

  “He wasn’t fooled.”

  “Stupid me. I put on the terrified girl act and he said, ‘It’s okay, baby, I’ll protect you.’”

  “Reuben wasn’t a bad actor himself. And maybe he suspected you already.”

  “The second we walked in the door at the shipping company, that pet maniac of his stuck me in the neck with a syringe. I knew I was dead. I was so surprised when I woke up in the boathouse. With you.”

  “I was pretty glad to wake up there myself.”

  It had been a very, very close thing. I was still pushing the details of that night away with a mental broom handle. I would look at them more closely when some time had passed, and marvel at the nearness of it.

  “Willard’s asked me to take over the card game,” Elana said.

  I looked up, jolted out of my musings. “Do you want to?”

  “It’s a possibility,” she said. “I might try being a straight citizen instead. The path not taken.”

  “What will Willard do?”

  She smiled. “I’m not sure even he knows that. But he’s gotten edgy. He might need more action than he admits to.”

  Willard had looked happy, with the rifle in his hands after the meeting with Old Lev.

  The granite plaque for Trudy’s niche was understated and elegant. Elana was pleased. It read TRUDY instead of Gertrude, which Elana said she would have hated.

  We walked back to the parking lot. The path was smooth, but Elana took my arm anyway.

  “I’m glad that you didn’t kill Reuben,” I said.

  “I was certain that I could, at first.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure now.”

  “It changes you. After.”

  She looked at me. Her jade eyes traversed the line of each
scar in the left side of my face, without haste or shame, and came back to meet mine.

  “I wish you could have known them,” she said.

  I looked across at the verdant lawn, the rows of markers, and thought about that ghostly separation from reality that had plagued me, after the focus of danger. I didn’t feel that remove now. I didn’t feel any longing to be at war, either.

  Mostly, I felt relief that I wasn’t occupying one of those graves.

  It was enough.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  LUCE AND I STOOD on the orphaned stone steps, looking at the charred wreckage of the house. The bits and pieces had fallen where they had first burned, and the rain in the days since had steadily driven the ash and smaller chunks down into the hollow of the old stone foundation, creating a pit of wet charcoal sludge. What remained standing looked like a piece of theater scenery.

  “What’s the opposite of façade?” I said, stepping down to walk around the edge of the heap. “Is there a word for just the back of a house?”

  She smiled, tucking a strand of gilded hair behind her ear. “I wonder sometimes if you’ve always had gallows humor, or if that’s an Army thing.”

  “Yes and yes.”

  Two days of sunshine had grudgingly allowed some warmth, and neither of us wore coats. Luce’s green blouse replaced a fraction of the color from the trees that were now gone. I wore a plaid flannel shirt with long sleeves, although the temperature didn’t require it. The bandages on my burned wrists made too many people look at me with mixed parts embarrassment and pity.

  I pushed a small pile of slag and timber out of the way with my foot. “I’ll need a rake and a shovel. Maybe a few things survived.”

  “One of the gang at the bar will have lawn tools. We’ll come out and make a day of it,” Luce said, a fraction too cheerfully.

  “You don’t need to,” I said.

  “I don’t mind.” Then she looked at me sidelong. “You don’t just mean the salvage work.”