The Devil's Garden (39 page)

And now this man. A man who claimed to be their father. Another intruder.

Aleks looked at the imposters.

“Do it now,” he said. “Or I will do it for you.”

The man raised the weapon, and pointed it at the woman’s head.

T
he building was a three-store commercial block on Ditmars near Crescent, home to a bodega, a dry cleaner, and the shuttered space on the end. There was a driveway to the right, leading behind the building. Next to it was a six-suite, two-story apartment building. Powell had been by this block many times, but like so much of New York, she hadn’t noticed it.

Above the storefronts were living quarters. Along the block the windows on the upper floors were open, some with sheer curtains billowing out in the warm spring evening, some with the sounds of dinner being prepared, the evening news blaring its tragedies.

Powell stepped up to the front entrance. It was covered by a rusted steel riot gate. The windows were soaped, all but opaque. Everything seemed benign, empty, peaceful. Had she been wrong about this? She had gotten reports from her teams every minute or so. There had been no sign of Michael Roman or the girls, no sign of their cutter.

Fontova came around the corner. He had gone to check the back entrance to the building.

“Anything?” Powell asked.

“The window in the back door is broken.”

“Recently?”

“Yeah. The glazing doesn’t look weathered.”

“Any vehicles?”

“No, but there’s no glass laying on the ground in front of the door.”

“It was broken from the outside.”

“Yeah. And it’s got blood on it.”

The two detectives looked at each other with understanding. “Let’s get some backup here.”

Fontova lifted the handset to his mouth, and called it in.

That’s when they heard the gunshots.

T
he blasts were deafening in the confined space. Michael was stunned at how easy it was to do what he had done, how little pressure was needed to pull the trigger, how short the journey between life and death. He had talked about it for many years, had sat in judgment and conclusion of those who had said things like “it just went off,” and “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” never having any understanding of the process.

Now, having pulled the trigger, he knew it wasn’t that hard. The difficult part was making the decision to aim the weapon.

Michael had pointed the gun at the ceiling and fired the rounds. He kept pulling the trigger, but it seemed that Aleks had told him the truth. There were only two bullets in the gun. Michael ejected the magazine and threw the two parts in different directions.

As soon as the echo of the gun blast began to fade, Aleks stood. Michael could see in his eyes a fierce determination to bring this all to a close. He strode with slow deliberation toward Abby, the knife at his side.

“You have made a mistake,” Aleks said. “You could have made this far less painful for your wife, for yourself, but you chose to defy me. To defy your destiny.”

He stopped in front of Abby, raised the knife. There was nothing Michael could do to stop him.

“
Isa
!” Emily screamed.

In that second – a moment where Emily cried out the word
father
in Estonian –Aleks turned, looked at Emily. Michael knew there would never be another moment. He ran at Aleks, hitting him full force in the side, knocking him backwards. The two men crashed into the drywall with a bone-jarring force. Aleks righted himself, and lashed out with his fist, catching Michael high on the left side of his head, stunning him, showing him flashes of bright white light behind his eyes. Michael went down to the hardwood floor, but was able to roll, absorbing most of the impact with his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, and was now face to face with Aleks. Aleks slashed at the air between them, closing the distance little by little. The blade came in high, but Michael sidestepped. He caught the blade flat on his upper arm.

Michael backed across the room, toward his daughter. In the background he could hear Abby screaming into her gag, the sound of the metal pipes clanging as she struggled ferociously to break free. Michael was breathing hard, the blows he had taken to the head were clouding his vision. Aleks slashed at him again, this time slicing open the back of Michael’s right hand. As Michael pulled away, he stumbled over something on the floor, momentarily losing his balance.

Aleks lunged toward Emily. With all rational thought beyond him, Michael righted himself and threw his body between them. The knife carved into the left side of Michael’s stomach, slicing away a large flap of skin and flesh. Michael fell back into the wall, the pain a searing lava flow down his right side. He felt his leg go numb, slid down the wall, his hands groping for purchase. He found one of the dismantled table legs leaning in the corner.

As Aleks moved again toward Emily, Michael struggled to his knees, clawed his way to his feet. He raised the table leg high, and brought it around in an almost complete arc, hitting Aleks on the side of his head, stunning him. The sound of the impact was loud, the long rusted bolt fastened at the top of the table leg cut deep into Aleks’s scalp. Aleks’s eyes rolled into his head as he staggered back and went down, blood now seeping from the head wound. Michael brought the bludgeon down twice more, all but shattering Aleks’s right knee.

Michael limped across the room, lifted his cuffed hands over Emily’s head, picked her up, the right side of his body now grown ice cold. He glanced behind them, at the front door of the bakery. It was locked with a deadbolt, secured by iron bars. No exit. Aleks was between them and the back door. He was trying to get to his feet.

Michael looked at Abby. Her eyes told him all he needed to know. She wanted him to get out with Emily while he could.

Filled with a suffocating fear, with no way out, Michael held Emily close, and lurched toward the steps leading to the second floor. He angled his body against the handrail for balance. One step, two, three. Each effort drained him of energy, leaving slick scarlet footprints on the worn treads. Moments later he heard Aleks mount the stairs behind them, dragging his fractured leg.

“You will not
take
her!” Aleks screamed.

The knife came down, splintering the dry steps, just inches behind Michael’s feet.

“
She is my daughter
!”

Again the knife descended, this time tearing at the hem of Michael’s jeans, the hot blade cutting through the heel of his shoe.

When the two wounded men reached the top, Aleks swung the knife in a whistling arc, nearly taking off the newel post on the landing. The blade missed Emily’s head by inches.

Michael turned the corner at the top of the stairs, his sense memory propelling him down the short hallway to his old bedroom. He burst through the door, ran toward the window, nearly slipping in his own blood.

He put Emily down at the far side of the room. He knew the door had a slide bolt, and if he could just make it back, he could bolt the door, and it would give him a few precious seconds to break the window and get the attention of someone on the street.

But when he turned back to the door, Aleks was there. He lunged at Michael, the knife out front. At the last second Michael was able to dodge the full force of the blade, but it sliced into his left shoulder. Michael shrieked in pain as Aleks turned and came at him again. This time Michael warded off the blow as Aleks slammed into him, the momentum of the attack propelling them both into the closet door, knocking it off its hinges, choking them in the dust and soot of decades. The two men fell to the floor, struggling for control. Michael grabbed his attacker by the wrist, trying to hold off the knife, but Aleks was too strong.

As Aleks brought the blade ever closer to his throat, Michael sensed something brushing his cheek, something in the debris on the floor of the closet. He flashed on a mental image, the drawing Emily had made in the dust, the crude sketch of a little house, a cottage with a chimney and smoke.

It was something that lived in Michael’s heart, his memory: his mother on the fire escape, a warm, summer evening, the skyline of Manhattan before them like a glittering promise.

Next to him was his mother’s knitting basket. The basket with the Estonian cottage embroidered on its side.

Michael felt the knife tip nearing his Adam’s apple. With all his strength he pushed Aleks away from him, buying seconds. His hands still cuffed, he tore the knitting bag open, groped inside, felt the needle, the vintage twelve-inch Minerva steel needle his mother used for lace.

As Aleks came in for the kill, Michael summoned the final vestige of his strength. He did not have time for thought. He swung the needle up with all his power, plunging it into Aleks’s left temple.

Aleks screamed and staggered back, blood gushing from the wound.

Michael tried to stand, to cross the room to Emily, but his legs would not hold him. A darkness began to descend. The last image Michael had was Aleks staggering across the room, red eyes bulging in their sockets, spinning wildly, blood spraying the walls, his voice a rutting animal sound.

I’m sorry
,
my love
, Michael thought as the last of his strength left him, the light wavering, then falling dim.
I’m sorry
.

A
bby pulled furiously at the copper pipe. The tape had dug deep into her wrists, and she could barely feel her hands. But she could not stop. The rusted pipes moaned and groaned under her efforts, but she could not seem to break the welded fittings.

She recalled her training, the resource of how to face crises, how to pull a twenty-four-hour shift, from where to summon strength and energy and focus. She closed her eyes, saw Charlotte and Emily in their little cribs on that day in South Carolina, the look on Michael’s face.

With one last burst of force she broke free. The severed copper pipe sprayed water high into the air. She pulled the duct tape from her wrists, her mouth, ran across the room searching frantically for something, anything she could use as a weapon. She spotted Aleks’s shoulder bag in the corner. She fell upon it, tore it open. At the bottom were four loose bullets, the rounds Aleks had taken from the magazine of Kolya’s gun. Abby pulled them from the bag, then began to search the nearly dark room for the weapon. She crawled on her hands and knees, more than once slipping in the blood. The sounds had ceased coming from upstairs, and the silence was even more terrifying than the sounds.

She soon found the .9 mm pistol underneath the old oven. She tried to remember where Michael had thrown the magazine. She couldn’t recall.

Michael had thrown the weapon to the right, the clip to the left. Abby stood where Michael had been standing, followed the trajectory with her eyes. To her left was a stack of wooden moving pallets. She ran across the room, began lifting the heavy pallets, pushing them to the side, her fear and frustration coursing through her like an electric current. When she lifted the last pallet she heard the metallic clank. In the dim light she saw the magazine. She fell to her knees, loaded the bullets into the magazine, her fingers slick with blood and sweat.

“
Isa
!” Emily screamed again from upstairs.

“Oh, my baby!” Abby said. She jammed the magazine into the gun, chambered a round, ran up the steps.

When she reached the second floor, and looked into Michael’s old bedroom, she saw a tableau she knew would haunt her forever. The room was covered with blood. Emily sat in the corner, just beneath the windows, her hands folded in her lap. She was shaking. Aleks was slumped against the wall near the closet, a long needle protruded from his temple, leaking blood. His eyes were closed.

Then there was Michael. Michael was on the floor, face down. The back of his shirt was covered in blood. Abby ran over to him, put down the gun, and tried to put pressure on the wound, but it felt too deep.

From somewhere in the distance she heard sirens, shouting. Perhaps it was in another world, another life.

The phone, she thought. Aleks had a phone. She crossed the room, began to rummage in Aleks’s coat pockets. She went through them all, found nothing. It must have fallen out downstairs. Before she could get to her feet Aleks opened his eyes. He rocked forward, struggled to his feet, lifted her high into the air. He threw her into the wall. Plaster crumbled, exploding into the room in a cloud of dust.

“
Tütred
!” Aleks screamed as he fell back to his knees, and began to creep across the room, toward Emily. He crawled on his stomach, using the knife, sticking it in the floor, pulling himself forward in a sheet of glossy blood.

“Em!” Abby shouted. “Come to Mommy. Run!”

Emily was frozen. She did not move. Abby looked around frantically, found the gun in the morass of her blurred vision. She picked it up as Aleks edged ever closer.

“No!” Abby yelled. “
No
!”

Abby held the gun out in front of her, hands trembling. Sweat salted her eyes. Aleks was now just a few feet from Emily.

“
Stop
!”

Aleks brought himself to his knees. Choking back blood, he raised the knife over his head.

The booming roar of the gun shook the room, stealing all sound. The bullet slammed into Aleks’s back, blowing a large hole in his chest. He fell to the floor, driving the long needle deep into his skull. The metal snapped. He rolled onto his back, his eyes wide, feral, disbelieving.