Hard Cold Winter (25 page)

H
ALF-BLINDED, EARS RINGING, I
staggered my way through the gore to retrieve Kasym’s gun. An FNP-45 with a chunky rectangular suppressor. Ten rounds left in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Enough. I also snatched up the claw hammer, which was slick with blood. Black smoke swirled and danced, thrown this way and that by the whirling sleet.

Some part of me realized that I was running on very efficient autopilot. Fury and training combining to shut out any pain, any distraction from the objective. The objective being Reuben K. The rage said
Go
. The preparation said
This Way
.

By the front guardhouse was a flatbed diesel Ford, empty of any load. I climbed up and smashed the window with the hammer, and used it again to crack the steering column so I could reach its ignition wires.

Even in first gear, the moving truck snapped the padlock and chain on the gate of the petroleum farm like they were licorice ropes. I swung the truck onto the road, tires skidding on the wet asphalt, and let all eight pistons eat as much fuel as they could handle. It was a little over a mile to the BerPac yard on the opposite corner of the island. I had the
flatbed in fifth gear before I had to brake and turn wide to the right. I wanted as much of a running start as possible.

The gate at BerPac was a lot tougher than a chain-link on hinges. The flatbed truck weighed about five tons. Its speedometer was cresting forty miles per hour when I hit the gate.

It wasn’t even a contest. The gate crumpled like tin foil and exploded backward, flying wildly through the air to chop like a giant’s cleaver into the BerPac building. The truck bucked and slowed but didn’t stall.

I saw the scene through the cracked windshield in tableau. The loading dock’s crane in motion, with a huge steel shipping container suspended in midair on fragile-looking lines. One thug behind it. The second man to the side by a waiting semi-trailer, gawking at the oncoming flatbed. I pointed the wheels at the big target of the container box, letting the truck coast as I jumped from the cab and rolled twice on the pavement.

Two seconds later the flatbed walloped the container and the massive box spun madly, rainwater spraying off it. Cables snapped with high-pitched bangs. I was up and running. A scream sounded somewhere under the crash. Then came an almighty kettledrum boom as the corner of the steel container, loaded with seventy million in precious metal, fell to the dock.

One of the thugs had ducked beneath the semi-trailer. He saw me advancing, the gun in my hand, and he took three big running steps and jumped off the dock into the Sound.

Reuben ran out of the BerPac building, holding a cell phone. Maybe he had been trying to reach Kasym to figure out why they’d only heard one pop, when they’d been expecting a whole fireworks show.

He gaped. The sight of me had to be a hell of a shock, even without my looking like I’d been tenderized and broiled. He dropped the phone to fumble at the small of his back. I smacked him in the forehead with Kasym’s pistol. He flailed and I hit him again. I grabbed my Glock from his belt and tossed it aside.

Reuben was still standing, that big head surprisingly tough, but too disoriented to do more than keep his balance. Blood was starting to run down his face. One of his hands moved thoughtlessly to touch it.
I frisked him, found his car keys in the pocket of his leather jacket and took away a knife and his wallet. He was starting to fight back again when I wrenched his arm and frog-marched him over to his electric-blue BMW. I bounced his face off the bumper twice before stuffing him into the trunk.

Tires screeched behind me, where the gate had once been. I wheeled around to see Addy Proctor’s old Saab clattering its way across the yard. Leo was driving. As he came to a stop, I saw that his face was a mask of dried blood, from a deep cut on his forehead.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, stepping up to the car. “Reuben said you were dead. I was about to go hunting for your body.”

“I’m a little surprised, too,” he said. He opened the door and shakily lowered one leg to the ground. The Mossberg shotgun was resting in his lap.

“What the hell happened?”

“I got antsy waiting in the car. We’d been parked there all day long, you know? Risky. So I went to ground in the bushes nearby. Two of those assholes”—he nodded at the BerPac building—“came sneaking up in the dark, making so much noise I could have heard them if I’d been playing drums. Idiots.”

“Are they dead?”

“They wish.” He lifted the Mossberg. “Your granddaddy’s rubber shells. I figure I broke a few of their bones, shooting that close. I tied them up and gagged them with some of your neighbor’s yarn from the backseat and left them in the sticker bushes.”

Addy’s knitting securing two Bratva killers. That was a mental picture.

From high up on the bridge, I heard sirens. And many more coming, somewhere in the distance.

“What about your face?” The flesh around his forehead cut had swelled. A last few drops of falling sleet did what they could to wash the blood from his cheek.

Leo looked sheepish. “I slipped. Smacked my head on the concrete.” He closed his eyes and winced.

“Don’t go to sleep,” I said. “We’ll get you to a hospital.”

“Yeah. That might be a smart idea. I got to the car and drove off to find you, but I passed out somewhere off the road. Lucky I didn’t drive right into the water.”

I couldn’t see the emergency vehicles coming down the long overpass onto the island, but I could see a river of lights, flashing off the low, dark clouds and making prisms of the rain.

“We both had some good fortune today,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here while it lasts.”

A
FEW HOURS LATER, I
was sitting in a gravel lot two miles off the North Satellite terminal of Sea-Tac airport. The lot was empty, waiting for a construction project that might never come. Reuben’s BMW was about the only thing in a hundred yards, any direction. The BMW, and me, and Reuben, still in the trunk.

He had made a lot of noise for the first half hour after I’d stopped. Threats and promises and pleas like a playlist on repeat. I heard him continually trying the interior trunk release, which I had broken before closing him in. When his raving stopped amusing me, I told him that if he said another word I would run a hose from the exhaust pipe into the trunk and let the carbon monoxide calm him down. He held his tongue for another hour, when he’d asked for water. My answer was to start the engine and rev it once. There was no more chatter after that.

I had not minded the wait. I spent most of the time in the driver’s seat, slipping in and out of sleep. The pain of my burned wrists, and too many contusions to count, kicked rapid eye movement in the ass every time it got near. Finally I was rested enough to get out and walk around
the parking lot. The cold felt good. A few laps and my steps were a lot more reliable than when I started.

Around six in the morning my phone rang. I told an unfamiliar male voice at the other end where I was. He hung up without another word.

Twenty minutes after, two black limousines pulled into the lot. I stood beside the open BMW. My Glock was visible in the front of my waistband. The dead Kasym’s FNP was at the small of my back.

The limousines stopped abreast of each other, twenty feet in front of the BMW. Two large men in rumpled dark suits and white shirts with no ties got out of the front of the left limo. Another similarly dressed man got out of the driver’s seat of the second car. They all left their doors open.

The men looked around the lot. Looked at me.

“Throw the gun away,” said the one who had been driving the second car. He had a heavy Eastern Bloc accent.

I smiled and shook my head.

Couldn’t really blame them for being cautious. Besides the hardware, I was filthy and scarred and looked like a rabid dog who would enjoy passing along the sickness.

I heard the whir of a window rolling down. The man who’d spoken to me leaned in to hold a conversation in very quiet Russian. The other two men and I watched one another.

Finally the driver opened the back door of the limousine, and Lev Kuznetsov stepped out.

There was no question he was Reuben’s father. Same height, stretched much thinner and slightly stooped on Lev, and the same big forehead. Where Reuben was balding, Lev was completely hairless. His eyebrows were so pale as to be invisible. Lev was older than I’d imagined. He must have been near fifty when Reuben had been born. He wore a black double-breasted suit with wide lapels and a tie the color of late-summer corn. His black knee-length coat might have been sable. If so, it had cost more than his son’s Beemer.

Most of all, Lev looked immaculate, despite the long flights. Maybe
that was the secret to power. Kings stayed elegant while soldiers got dirty.

If my gun caused him any concern, he didn’t deign to show it. He walked up to stand ten feet from me.

“You are Shaw,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Willard has said that my son has caused you troubles.” Lev’s accent was very thick and he spoke crisply, as if testing the proper pronunciation.

“Not just me.” And I was sure that by now, it wasn’t only Willard who had fed Lev information about what had happened in Seattle. The old king may know more about Reuben’s schemes than I did.

“I am here,” Lev said. Meaning,
Hand him over.

I nodded and didn’t say anything.

“Yes. The deal. Willard said of your concerns, your—” He made a please-fill-in-the-blank gesture.

“Conditions.”

Lev nodded shortly. “I would like to hear these from you. Your words.”

His voice was spiced with anger. I knew I was following a new map through a minefield. You trust that the path is safe. But not one hundred percent. Lev Kuznetsov had avoided a very bad situation, by luck rather than by his own intrigues. He might feel indebted, and pissed off about that unfamiliar emotion. He might be offended that I had laid a hand on his son, no matter what the cause. Ego was unpredictable.

“I’ll give you Reuben, relatively intact,” I said. “You get to stop a coup. Reuben will know all the Bratva captains who were ready to back him. In return, your Brotherhood forgets about me and my people. And I get your promise that Reuben won’t ever be a threat.”

“That condition, I can give the promise. Your people?”

“Reuben tried to kill my woman, and my friend.”

Lev made a small hum of acknowledgment. “And you have him alive.”

“Because he’s worth something.”

“Not money?”

“Not money.”

Lev nodded. “You are not fearing, meeting me—us—like this?” He dipped his head toward the empty lot.

“Willard respects you,” I said.

Lev made that same little hum. He looked over the hillside that bordered the lot, still grassy and lush even in winter. A moment passed as he thought about whatever he was thinking about. I didn’t have to think. My options were very limited, if this went sour. But I was willing to bet large.

“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.

A
DDY 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.”