by Tom Crown
The hard makeup. The skimpy dress. He was reasonably sure he understood her situation, and what had happened to her in this van. His mind reassessed the photos he had seen, trying to factor in all this new information, but he still couldn’t piece it all together. And now was hardly the time. She was watching his slightest move.
“Are you hurt?” He tried to keep his voice calm and even.
She squinted at him and shook her head.
“Can you move?”
She paused and then slowly started to rise. She took a step forward, balancing her body carefully against the crumpled interior. She was severely bruised on her left side and would probably need a hospital at some point.
Ryan realized that Jenny had appeared behind him. He turned and saw her glance toward Mats’s body in the pickup truck. He caught her eye but couldn’t tell exactly what she was thinking. Then he saw the envelope in her hand and the crimson red fingerprints all over it. She had crawled inside the pickup truck and retrieved it from Mats’s jacket.
“Jenny,” he said slowly, searching for the right words. At that moment he wanted to take her in his arms, hold her and protect her. He wanted to make sure she’d never have to do anything like that again. Then he reminded himself that so far he hadn’t actually been able to help her much at all. The destruction around him was just about everything he had managed to accomplish.
Three people dead.
The wreckage moved again, the metal squeaking under the changing pressure, and he spun around toward the noise.
The girl had frozen in place.
He moved closer again and leaned in to help her. She watched and weighed her options, and finally put out her hand, close enough now for him to grab it. He felt her skin, soft and cool, and saw she was scared, ready to sprint. He just stood there quietly for a moment, hoping to reassure her.
She smiled dutifully, a reward he felt she was mustering only for his sake. He pulled her closer and helped her out of the van onto the asphalt.
She looked at Jenny and then at him, smiling uncertainly, her mind working hard behind wide-open eyes. She was obviously intelligent. She wasn’t just being rescued. She was planning her next move, and planning it thoroughly, as if that next decision would determine the rest of her life. And probably it would.
“I’m Ryan,” he said evenly. “And this is Jenny.” He made a slight movement to offer his hand in greeting, but she pulled back.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice hoarse, as if she hadn’t spoken all day. “My name is Katia.”
“Are you all right?”
She turned away without reply and headed for their car, moving briskly in a wide circle around the crashed van.
“Wait,” Ryan said and followed her just a few steps behind.
“No,” she said without looking back. “We have to go! Before they find us!”
CHAPTER SIX
STEVE MANNING DROVE his Land Rover deep into the forest, continuing along an unpaved road that no map could possibly mark. A button on his GPS screen brought up a list of the vehicles he had under surveillance, Mats’s truck, his girlfriend’s old Toyota that never moved, and the Volvo driven by Ryan West, the only real competition he had seen so far in town. Mats’s truck was stopped nearby, but Ryan’s car was still moving.
He glanced across the sparse forest and saw a glimmer straight ahead, right where he expected the truck to be, and his heart pounded hard. He was looking at a wreck, twisted metal and shattered glass, a truck and a van, and a quick glance at the screen confirmed the obvious — the crash site and the location of the truck were one and the same.
He slowed down and took a moment to consider the implications. Mats was crucial to his plan, the main weakness in the organization that Alex Romanov had built here, and as such, was the point Steve had chosen to attack. He had even killed a woman just to frame this man. It hadn’t taken a great effort, but it was risky nonetheless, and he didn’t want to see that effort go to waste now.
He reached for a camera with the longest telephoto lens and raised it to his eye. The van was instantly recognizable, even with its wheels in the air and its side scraped and dented beyond repair. The pickup truck was harder to get a good look at, as it had bounced to the side of the road with the front and the hood pushed back to reveal its massive engine, but it was there and it was definitely not going anywhere.
Mats was nowhere in sight, either dead or alive, and Steve felt his breath quicken. He adjusted the camera and got the van into a perfect frame. He fired off several quick shots out of habit, but then stopped. Something was wrong, well beyond the obvious. He lowered the camera, rolled down his window, and peered through the trees with his bare eyes. For a moment he thought he saw the van moving again, but then he realized he was looking at a different vehicle. He picked up the camera again and zoomed in as close as he could, focusing on the two people up front.
Alex Romanov had come to the rescue and brought along his Neanderthal cousin, Roman.
Steve looked back down the road. No one was approaching. He opened his door and stepped out. He debated for a moment whether to leave the door open or not, but then decided to close it. He didn’t want to attract undue attention in case someone happened to come driving along.
Threading quietly closer to the crash site, he was determined to find a way to use this situation to full advantage. He paused behind a fallen tree, got down on one knee, and raised the camera again. Alex and Roman had gotten out and were now pulling what had to be dead bodies from the wreckage. Steve couldn’t make out the faces, but the bodies had to be Sergei and Dimitri, the driver and the passenger.
This was an opportunity he couldn’t pass on. He reached for his phone, pressed re-dial, and lifted it to his ear. He peered through his camera again and saw Alex patting his pockets, searching for his phone until he found it.
“Yeah?” Alex answered, his voice hoarse.
“You see that I’m serious,” Steve said. “You can see what I can do.”
Alex was silent, but Steve could hear him breathing. Thinking. Rearranging everything he knew.
“Yulia too?” Alex finally asked.
“Yulia too.”
Alex sighed deeply. Steve wondered for an instant if he had chosen the wrong girl, if somehow Yulia had meant more to Alex than the others, so that this business would consequently turn personal, but he doubted it.
“What do you want?” Alex asked, his voice barely controlled now. “Besides dying a gruesome death, of course.”
Steve adjusted the focus on his camera and watched, as Roman leaned down and checked the pockets on the two bodies. He produced their wallets and tossed them to Alex, who couldn’t catch them with the phone to his ear. He shrugged angrily and gestured obscenely at Roman, who just turned and focused on the crashed van again.
“What I want,” Steve said, “is two million dollars.” Even as he said it, he knew the money was a mere bonus, beside the point. Two million was just about what Alex could scrape together if he tried, a very useful amount of money, but what Steve truly wanted was the chase; that’s what had lured him into test car photography in the first place, and what had made him slip into the world of organized crime when that opportunity had presented itself. And now it was making him slip further, into a world where the chase was no longer enough. Now, he readily admitted to himself, he wanted the kill.
“Two million?” Alex said with a scornful grunt. “And what exactly have you done to deserve money like that? You took a couple of girls to Nevada last year.”
“I paid for that out of my own pocket.”
Alex was quiet for a long moment, and Steve could hear him breathing.
“You know what I’ve done,” he continued. “The money I’ve transferred. The markets I’ve opened. The risks I’ve taken.”
“And you’ve killed two of my men for that?” Alex asked, his voice under control now. When he continued, it was low and menacing. “A slow and gruesome death. That’s what you’ll get. Slow and grue
some, buried alive under a blueberry shrub.”
Steve swallowed hard. He visualized the earth shoveled over his battered face and Alex grinning above him, but he pushed that image away. “I brought in new customers in Alaska, Nevada, even here. You know that. You know what I’ve done. The good I’ve done.”
“The good,” Alex grunted in reply.
“And now you know the bad. Add it all up, the pros and cons, the costs and benefits, and I’m sure you’ll come up with that two million dollars as well. Goodbye for now, Alex. I’ll be in touch. And hey, don’t forget to use gloves when you clean up my mess. Even Mats was smart like that, when he found Yulia. And that was a real mess.”
Steve hung up and took a deep breath, wondering for a moment how he had done.
Then he remembered the camera. He trained it on Alex just as the man slipped on a pair of gloves. Steve grinned, as he watched them lean over the bodies and begin to check their wallets, apparently not finding what they were looking for. Roman dove inside the wreckage and came up shaking his head. Whatever they were looking for was definitely missing.
Alex checked his watch. He shook his head and gestured to Roman, who seemed eager to get going. They grabbed one of the bodies, impossible to tell which one, and lifted it into the back of their van. They followed with the second body. It was a bloody mess, but neither man hesitated. He had to admire that about them. They had certainly seen it all before.
He moved along the cover of a fallen tree to get a better angle and turned his camera on the pickup truck. From this position, he could see Mats’s body behind the wheel. It appeared they would leave it right there in plain sight.
He panned back to the two men and watched as they hooked a wire to the wrecked van. Alex got in behind the wheel of the second one, shifted into reverse, and started to tow it toward the forest. They wouldn’t be able to clean up the crash site entirely, but it looked like they at least wanted to make what had happened more confusing for the police when they did arrive. Tampering with the site would raise suspicions, but leaving the bodies would have been much worse.
Steve wasn’t sure what he was going to do now. He’d taken credit for the crash, and Alex had bought it, but in actuality, his plan had derailed. It would be difficult to get to Alex without Mats crumpling and cracking under pressure, and with Sergei and Dimitri gone, it would be harder still. Now Alex had his guard up, and only Roman by his side, an incorruptible soldier.
Steve was in dire need of a new plan.
It seemed he had killed Yulia for no good reason. He had considered her his masterpiece, and now it was for nothing. He had enjoyed it, but death should be so much more than mere amusement.
One way or another, she should inspire his new plan. One way or another, her death would live on in his work.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JENNY WATCHED THE trees pass outside her window, the sparse spruce giving way to lush low-hanging birches as Ryan continued to take them deeper into the forest. The dirt road was narrowing, the greenery was thickening around them, and while the shelter it offered felt good, she was also acutely aware they had barely made it more than a couple of miles away from the crash site. She didn’t want to go back there, not even go near it, but she also knew a decent hiding place up ahead, if the trees would only protect them long enough to get there.
She felt sick inside and she knew it was utter guilt, a feeling she hadn’t truly experienced since she attended Sunday school as a small child. It seemed as if her childish imagination then had been better able to grasp concepts such as life and death and due punishment, while her grown-up self had entirely forgotten the magnitude of it. The fear of God or the universe or whatever. It had all departed and been gone from her life for such a long time, but now she was afraid to even breathe. She felt as if even trying would turn her inside out, as if the force of the moving air would end up rupturing her lungs.
She couldn’t live with this.
She looked down and started to dial on her phone.
“Hey.” Ryan reached over and grabbed her hands, stopping her. “Don’t call anyone.”
“The police!”
“No.”
“No? We can’t just leave them there!”
Ryan didn’t answer. He was watching Katia in the backseat, who had her fingers on the door handle, ready to bolt.
Jenny shrugged and put away the phone.
“I don’t know what we should do,” Ryan said, looking at the road again, “but until we do, I think we should just focus on that. On what we should do. And what we absolutely shouldn’t.”
“What we absolutely shouldn’t do is leave them dead on the road.”
Ryan slammed the brakes and turned toward her. “What I absolutely don’t want to do is leave you dead on the road.” He looked at Katia in the mirror and tried to cool down. “Any one of you.”
Jenny turned away with a shrug. If he wanted to be in control, in command, that was all right by her. She’d only ever managed to create chaos and destruction for herself and everyone around her. And it had always been like that. She had never built anything for herself. Some of her friends had moved south to Stockholm years ago, and others to Norway where the money was good, but most had stayed, married, and had children. She had stayed and done nothing with her life. Nothing she was proud of, at any rate.
She noticed Ryan glancing at Katia in the rearview mirror. The girl kept her focus on the road outside, the forest, the trees. Her eyes moved back and forth, studying everything for possible danger. Yet there was more than fear in the girl’s eyes. She was scouting for opportunity.
Jenny knew that Alex and Roman were bad, and that’s why she had wanted Mats to stay away from them in the first place. She’d even suggested that they’d leave Sweden altogether, perhaps go to London, or even all the way to the Mediterranean. Mats had liked that thought, but there had always been one more deal to close, or a hunting trip he couldn’t get out of. He had never understood that time was rapidly slipping away. His, in particular, with the company he was keeping.
Alex was the worst of the two, uncompromising, cruel, and dangerous. She’d only met him a couple of times, the first time when Mats took her to a restaurant for their five-year anniversary and Alex had turned up with champagne. Mats had kept her far away from Alex ever since, but she’d still heard a lot about him. All of it bad.
Roman was just a common criminal, trouble, but always easy enough to maneuver around. He’d come by the hotel from time to time, sometimes dropping Mats off after a long night out, and she’d had plenty of time to practice how to evade his simple moves.
Ryan was looking at her again.
“I still don’t know where we’re going. Straight ahead?”
“Yes, there’s a good place up ahead where we can stop.” She felt really sick inside. Turning her head to look at Ryan hadn’t been a good idea. She was nauseous, so nauseous that she almost threw up right there in the car.
Ryan seemed to sense what she was feeling and rolled down her window.
“Thank you.” She leaned slowly into the fresh wind and took a deep breath of air, feeling momentarily better.
“We’ll call the police,” Ryan said. “At some point. I just want to understand what we should say to them first.”
His eyes fell to the envelope, which was now lying at her feet. He hadn’t mentioned it since Katia got in the car, and she realized he didn’t want her to see it. Katia probably knew the girl and it was very possible she could help in some way, but at the same time they also knew very little about her. Showing her the photos could go wrong in a number of different ways, so it was a relief that he appeared to have come to a similar conclusion.
She met his eye and moved her head slightly in a nod.
“You better stop,” she said, looking further ahead. “The road ends here.”
The forest suddenly came to an abrupt end, giving way to spectacular scenery down-river from a waterfall. The road circled back on itself, and right on the edge of the
riverside cliffs, white water boiled high against the granite, sending a fine mist into the air.
Jenny realized she had instinctively wanted to come here, to the place she used to go when she was younger, when she’d only just fallen in love.
The nausea was overwhelming her again and she opened her door. The grass and gravel seemed to rush by outside, even though the car was moving very slowly.
“Wait,” Ryan said behind her, reaching for her arm.
The car stopped with a jerk, and she felt instantly worse. She pushed the door fully open, stumbled out to the nearest tree, and threw up.
She heard Ryan get out and walk toward her, but he thankfully had the sense to stop some distance away.
“I still see him,” she said after a moment. “I see him sitting there behind the wheel.”
Ryan just nodded, but Jenny felt her emotions welling up now. She had to cry, she had to talk, she had to do anything at all to get it all out of her. This wasn’t the time or the place, and Ryan wasn’t even the right person, but then who was? She had invested half her adult life in a man who had so utterly disappointed her, and the other half in halfhearted dreams of escape. She had nothing and no one.
“He hurt people,” she said, hearing her voice break. “He hurt me. Still, I’ve never seen anyone dead before. Animals. Reindeer. But never anyone I knew. I mean, actual people. Never.”
“It’s all right,” Ryan said, taking a tentative step closer.
“No, it’s not.”
“No.”
“I met him when I was so young, and I knew to dump him even back then. I always knew. But... Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to get you dragged into all of this.”
“Hey, don’t... I’m not...” Ryan shrugged. “I’m all right.”
He didn’t sound very convincing, but she appreciated his trying. If she hadn’t flirted with him and made him hang around the reception, his night would have been very different. And she had known. Somewhere inside, she’d known there would be trouble. She had wanted someone by her side because of that, and fate had chosen Ryan. No. That wasn’t quite accurate. She had chosen him.