Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (35 page)

“
Of course.”

“And, before you go…
can you tell me if Ogorodnikov had any children?” he asked delicately.

His cousin hesitated a moment.  “Yes,” he said finally.

“Did he often take them for walks in the park?”

Zverev responded, using the code for the docks of Chelyabinsk.  “Often.  That’s where
he first met them.”

That was about what Shcherbakov expected.  Not that he cared, he just found it disgusting.  But who was he to judge?  “Thank you.  I think I’ll start there.  You’ve got calls to make.”

The Grey Wolf hung up and sent Zverev the photo of the Camry’s VIN, then put the phone back in his pocket and walked briskly back to his Priora.  A not-too-distant howl got his attention.  He looked to the forest on the other side of the road.  Six pairs of eyes were looking at him, plain as day. 
Good god, how many are there?
  Could it be that a portion of that “super pack” had come this close to the city?  Could it be that
all
of them had?  Perhaps the storm was pushing them this way?  Shcherbakov imagined that there would be plenty of reports of cattle mutilation in all the surrounding farms tonight.

The warm air
inside his car was revitalizing, as was the knowledge that his target was so near, and so elusive.  Ordinarily, his targets were so stupid as to just come to him if he asked sweetly, or to walk into a room covered in plastic sheeting without thinking a thing amiss until it was too late, or accepting help from a stranger as they got their bags of fruit out of the car and struggled to open the door.  But this one…
He’s not coming to me, he’s accepting no invitations, and he’s not sitting still
.  Shcherbakov was certain that if he didn’t bag this target tonight, he would be gone from Chelyabinsk by morning, maybe gone from the country altogether.

As the Priora slid back onto the road like a person testing the safety of a
recently mopped floor, Shcherbakov recalled Zverev’s words from a moment ago. 
You sound like you know him
.  The Wolf smiled.  Something else came back to him, something his uncle had shouted to his aunt in an argument, after she had called him a lunatic for shooting his pistol in the house.  “It takes one to know one,” he said.

Shcherbakov lit a Sobranie,
drew in a lungful, and considered the wisdom in his uncle’s observation.

When he was gone, a lone animal walked out into the middle of the road.  It was larger than any of its kind had any right to be, and when it howled, the others answered.

The roads inside the city were congested, and understandably so.  The storm kept changing its mind, and already the Subaru had slid into another lane, despite its chains, nearly colliding with a jeep.  Spencer had honked his horn to signal the driver, who immediately made adjustments to speed and path to let Spencer coast into its lane, where it finally found traction again.  The roads were still icing—in a storm such as this, no amount of snow plows or salt trucks could keep up with Mother Nature.

“Take
a right up here,” Kaley said from the back.  “No, wait!  The next right.”

They had been driving for nearly an hour, without much being said between the three of them
, besides Spencer humming “Tainted Love,” and the occasional course correction issued by Kaley.  Though it was helpful, Spencer was growing perturbed with her constant reminders and corrections.  There were other things nagging at him, too, and those things more than anything else had him on edge.  Something slithered around his ankles, and if he wasn’t mistaken a light hand had brushed through his hair.

And the whispers.  They never really stopped, they were just drowned out by the honking of horns
, or the hum of the engine, or the roar of the wind buffeting the Subaru.

“When are we going to take him someplace safe?”

“Once I ran to you,” Spencer sang.  “Now I run from you.”  He rooted around in the paper bag in the passenger seat.  He’d pulled into a McDonald’s, a number of which were all over the city. 
God bless American capitalism
, he thought, for it guaranteed a good, familiar meal no matter where one went, and pulled out a few fries.

“Did you hear what I said?”

Spencer took another handful of fries, then looked back at her.  Annoyed, he snapped, “What?”  He winced.  The cigarette, forgotten in his hand resting on the wheel, had finally burned down to the fingers.  He finished it off, tossed it out the window, and was upset to find that the packet of cigarettes had only one left.  He put it behind his ear, saving it for later.  Then, he took another mouthful of fries, wolfed them down.

“I said, when are we going to take him—
”

“I heard what ya said.  We’re not takin’ him anywhere right now.  How
far are we now?”  The little girl didn’t answer.  He turned to look at her.  “How far?”

Kaley’s lips were pressed tightly together, her brow furrowed in anger directed at him.  “I could just not tell you.”

“I could just put a bullet in his head anyway.”

“Out here?  In a crowded street?”

“What’ve I told you about testing me—”

“Two miles!” she
huffed.  Then, perhaps because she was in a library in some far-off land, she spoke in a lower voice.  “One-point-eight miles, if you wanna be exact.  Or whatever that is in kilometers.  You’re looking for a street called…Eka…Ekaterin…inskaya…Ulitsa?”

“
Ulitsa
is a street.”

“Anyways. 
It looks like it goes all the way to the Ruffa Docks.”

“Sure about that?”

She looked at him squarely, and folded her arms. 
Probably not folding her arms in that library
, he thought. 
Fucking weird
.  “I only know what the map is showing me,” she said.

Spencer eyed her a moment longer, then turned back around to face front.  He waved another car to move on through, more because it looked like the asshole was going to try it anyway, and why risk a collision on a night like tonight?  “How we doin’ elsewhere?”

“What do you mean?”

“Our boy, our Prisoner, how’s he doin’?”
  Three cars ahead, a work truck got a little courageous and pushed out of the line of obedient ants and moved along the shoulder of the road.  Spencer watched the truck moving along just fine, so he did the same.  One car honked at him, but he ignored and followed the work truck, all the way to the stoplight up ahead, then, still following the truck’s lead, zipped into a less crowded HOV lane.  “Well?” he said, looking into the rearview.

Kaley
appeared very uncomfortable.  She looked at the boy, Peter, perhaps to make sure he still had his ears covered, which he did.  “It’s hard to say.  He hasn’t left, I can feel that much for sure, but he’s…
they
are a little quieter.”

Spencer remained behind the work truck, because
the driver seemed to know the ins and outs of the streets.  He followed its lead, into lanes that ended abruptly, but not before the truck found a way to use the road and angle of approach to its advantage, relying on the courtesy or common sense of others to let it merge before the lane ended.  If you didn’t know your way around a city very well, it behooved you to develop the skill of identifying those who did.  “They’re regrouping.”

“How do you mean? 
Wait
! This is it.  Take this right, I think.  Eckatyerinskaya, or however you say it. That’s it, that’s it!”

The sign had it written in Russian and English
:
Ekaterininskaya Ulitsa
.  Spencer veered to the right, finally breaking away from the work truck and moving carefully onto this small, narrow road.  There were no other cars on it.  A road used this infrequently, in a storm such as this, there was no reason to waste the salt trucks’ time on it.  There was a thick, unplowed sheet of snow on it, with only one other set of tire tracks in it, and those were in the other lane, going the opposite direction.

Spencer moved slowly, gently, trying to read the messages the Subaru was sending him about the state of the road.  “When I say they’re regrouping, I mean that they’ve got to devise another plan.  They almost got through before, when they took your teacher.  But then you showed you could fight
them back.  How did you do that?”  Kaley didn’t answer, and she didn’t have to.  Spencer was never wrong about people.  “Shannon, eh?”  She looked up at him.  “S’what I figured.”

“How do you figure?”  The tone of her voice was an amusing mix of frightened and
forbidding.  Afraid for her sister, but also trying to warn him to stay off that subject. 
Cute
, he thought.

“I heard them whispering before, back at the cabin.  Somethin’ about ‘the sister.’  You leaned on ol’ Shan for support, huh?  She got you outta that sticky situation.”  He shrugged.  “
Of course, you know that already.”

Kaley looked out the window.  She went silent for a time.  Outside, there were fewer and fewer streetlights.  They were headed down into a dark
section of town.  “So what if you’re right?” she said.  “What can they do?”

“Well, if it was
me
, and I knew I had a problematic guard in my way?”  He shrugged.  “I’d find a way to take out the guard.”

“He can’t get to
Shannon.”

“You don’t believe that for one second, little girl,” he chuckled.  “
Ya saw what he did to Mrs. Cartwright—I didn’t, but
you
did—and you know what these fuckers are capable of.”  Just ahead, the street was lined with cars parked on either side.  It looked like some small tenements, some of them boarded up.  There were a couple of streetlights, but one of them was smashed and inoperable, while the other was flickering on and off indecisively.  They had taken one of those unusual turns every city has, where things looked just fine a moment ago, but after the turn they had abruptly found themselves in an inauspicious, rundown sector that even the locals avoided.  Further proof of this was the utter lack of any other languages besides Russian on the major street signs—this was where Chelyabinsk’s poor went, and where tourists were not expected to go.

Getting closer
, he thought.  Areas such as these were as familiar to him as open skies to a flock of geese, or vast planes of grass to a herd of migrating buffalo.  It was in a different part of the world, but all the elements were familiar. 
Bet the police don’t even come this way, or if they do they quickly zip through it, and don’t tarry a moment
.  It wasn’t Compton, L.A., or even the Bluff in Atlanta, but it was a close cousin.  No one was on the streets, but that probably had more to do with the weather than anything else.  There had to be some skeevy goings on, just indoors, in warm living rooms, basements, and attics.

The roads were precarious.  Twice Spencer lost control of the vehicle and nearly slammed into cars parked along the curbs.  He spotted at least one car that looked like it had slid off into a snow-covered ditch and become stuck; the driver had abandoned it. 
We barely got here in time
. 
Any later and this road would be closed
.

The signs were all in Russian, but Spencer had had some time to familiarize himself with the Russian language
, and had picked the important parts up rather quickly.  He was rather proud of himself for that, since Russian was considered the fourth hardest language in the world to learn.  His prison counselor, Dr. McCulloch, had often commented on Spencer’s ability to pick up new skills rather quickly.  Apparently, a common trait among psychopaths, especially when the new skill had a purpose directly related to their own advancement, be it a money scam or just trying to get a girl’s phone number.

Still, he hadn’t quite mastered the language, especially
reading the pluralizations in the Cyrillic script.  So when he found a large, rundown billboard in lights for Ruffa Docks, he was perturbed to see so many roads listed underneath, some of them with the same name only pluralized, as well as what appeared to be
three separate docks
that were lumped in with the Ruffa Docks.

Spencer drove straight until he came to a T-junction.  He stopped, looking around at the empty street corners, the signs all covered in ice.  Clouds of snow swirled around them, like they were at the epicenter of a tornado.  “Which way?” he said.

“You really think they’re gonna go after Shannon?”

Spencer turned around in his seat.  “Which way?”

Kaley sighed.  “Go right.”

“Ya sure? 
These Ruffa Docks split off into three docks.”

“I know, I can see it right here
on Google Images and some other shots linked to Pinterest, but they’re all pretty much right next to each other.”

“Toll booths or any kind o’ paid entry?”

She gave him a sardonic look.  “Yeah, like I can really tell all that by sitting where I am right now, Spencer.”  That gnawed at him a little.  “How am I supposed to know?” she restated.