The Survivor Page 9

  Tendrils of black smoke lifted from the edges of his charred flesh. “Christ, you’re touchy.”

  “Look, all I wanted to do is jump off a building.”

  “I get it. You got served a shit sandwich. Any way you slice it, you gotta eat the fucker. But still. I don’t think you have to go all Jane Austen.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the Bell Jar chick who offed herself.”

  “That was Sylvia Plath.”

  “Whatever. I’m just saying, look at the bright side. For the first time in your life, you can say and do whatever the hell you want.”

  “The bright side? I’m dying, I’ve still got PTSD or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days as evidenced by … well, you. Plus, I’m one signature away from divorced, and my kid hates me.”

  Charles crossed his arms over the hole in his chest and did his best to look bored. “I won’t sit here and listen to you whine. You can do that to a wall.”

  “I am doing that to a wall.”

  Charles shook his head with disappointment. “I’m outta here, then. I’m not sticking around for this.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” But Charles remained, looking away like a pouty child.

  Nate banged down the bottle. “Look, I have to do this while I’m still up for it. Do you have any idea how pathetic it feels to be too depressed to kill yourself?”

  “You’re still sitting there talking to me. Which means you want something.” Charles spread his arms, releasing a waft of smoke. “What do you want, Nate?”

  Nate stared at the pills arrayed before him. “I want to die well,” he said.

  When he finally lifted his eyes, Charles was gone.

  Leona Lewis had come on the radio, all soulful runs and sultry beat, a just-audible church organ running beneath the melody like bedrock.

  Nate slid the pills neatly off the table into his hand and stared down at them. His heartbeat skipped, his brain spinning, throwing images. Janie’s skin, pale beneath seawater. Cielle’s baby gums, suckling his knuckle. The car-wash polo, her name embroidered at the breast. His daughter’s education—her whole damn future. How could he not make sure he provided for that? His mind landed on the million-dollar life-insurance policy he was about to void with a single swallow. No payout for Janie and Cielle—his beneficiaries—in the event of suicide.

  All he had to do to assure his daughter’s future was put down the pills and die horrifically, one agonizing minute at a time.

  His daughter’s voice rang in his head: I don’t want anything from you. He remembered as a child finding his mother’s hair, too much of it to be stray, clumps and clusters like the residue of some violent act, loose on the pillow, twined in the teeth of her comb, lining the inside of that snug terry cap she wore. Cielle again, turning her back: Die somewhere else.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He palmed the pills into his mouth.

  On the radio Leona kept bleeding, she kept, kept bleeding.

  The pills melted on his tongue, bitter and toxic.

  He reached for the bottle, unscrewed the lid.

  He thought of Cielle working at that car wash and its still not being enough.

  The bottle was at his lips.

  —You cut me open and I—

  The bourbon pooled in his mouth, smoke and sweetness, the pills swirling.

  A million dollars. All he had to do was suffer.

  —keep, keep bleeding—

  He turned his head and spit out the pills onto the cheap linoleum, leaning on the table, coughing.

  His cell phone rang.

  He said, “Cielle.”

  He darted across and snatched it from the counter. “Hello?”

  An accented voice said, “Remember me?”

  Nate’s insides turned to ice. He looked down at the brown puddle dotted with pills. “Number Six.”

  “Go to your bedroom.”

  Nate could barely hear his own voice over his thundering heartbeat. “Why?”

  “Something you must see.”

  Nate reached across and locked his front door again. Keeping the phone pressed to his face, he walked back, his steps slowed with dread. The room was as he’d left it, the bed neatly made, but one pillowcase was, oddly, missing. The striped ticking of the pillow stared up at him nakedly.

  He halted in the doorway, gaping.

  The voice jarred him. “Now look out the window.”

  His legs had turned to water, but he got himself across and parted the curtains. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Just wait.”

  Something slipped over Nate’s head, blotting out all light. Fabric yanked tight across his face, suffocating him. The last thing he sensed before dropping into a pool of black was that it felt an awful lot like a pillowcase.

  Chapter 12

  Before consciousness there was pain. In the thick soup of his head; in his feet, cold and numb; in his thighs, bitten lengthwise as if by a band saw. The sockets of his shoulders, tendons screaming. And his wrists, overhead. Oh, his wrists.

  Nate’s eyes opened tentatively. Vast, dank room, perhaps a warehouse. Little light. His own biceps crowding his field of vision. His arms, suspended above. His teeth chattered. It was colder than seemed reasonable for indoors, each breath frosting the linings of his lungs.

  When he looked down, it seemed that his lower half had disappeared. Incredulous, he realized that his legs were, bizarrely, encased in ice. Claustrophobia crowded in on him, and he tried, stupidly, to lift his feet, to kick, to run, but there was nothing except the cold cast, enveloping him to the thighs.

  Quick breaths, panic sweat freezing on his face. When he tried to wipe the beads off his cheek with his sleeve, he saw that his hands above were trapped inside matte black handcuffs and snared on a meat hook. The chain holding the hook rose several feet before vanishing into darkness—the ceiling might be ten feet above, or a hundred. Bands glittered at his wrists where the skin had been rubbed raw. And beneath everything else, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the dull pain of the stab wound in his shoulder, straining the stitches.

  He will make you pay in ways you can’t imagine.

  He blinked rapidly several times, a trick he’d learned in the army that was supposed to hasten nighttime vision. First the rectangle of ice around his legs came clear—on its side, the size of a refrigerator. Mist rose from its surface, making the air waver as he peered into the darkness. Pallets. Boxes. Scattered tools. A rescue saw, like the one used to cut through the steel of the bank vault.

  At the fringe of visibility, he became slowly, chillingly aware of four human forms standing idly apart, studying him with cocked heads. He gave a startled shout and reared back, the lip of ice biting his hamstrings, the meat hook’s chain giving off a rusty abattoir rattle that scratched through the huge space and clawed its way back off the walls.

  His vision clarified further, the men’s facial features unsmudging. The tallest he recognized as the face in the crowd outside the bank—the man with the lantern jaw and mashed nose. Broad shoulders like a yoke. Stubble bristled on his bullet-shaped head. Beside him stood a stocky man with a red-and-white-striped Where’s Waldo? sweater, frayed at the sleeves and collar. Rather than hanging regularly from his frame, the sweater sloped out a few inches over the shelf of his muscular chest before falling. Nate took in the next, a slender man with sharp features, shiny dark hair secured in a tight stub of ponytail.

  And there, stepping forth for a closer look, was Number Six, the crew leader from the bank. Nate recognized his bearing—the short form with wiry muscles and a low center of gravity, built for fighting. He looked younger than Nate might have guessed. Blond hair carefully arrayed in a dated style, something just shy of a seventies bowl cut, and a forehead that, Nate noted with a stab of satisfaction, bore a bloody nick where he had nailed it with the empty gun. The puckish round face with blue eyes called to mind that of a youthful sailor from a Soviet propaganda poster, full of confidence and purpose
and yet unnervingly flat, scrubbed of uncertainty.

  He approached Nate, drawing disturbingly close, until Nate could feel the man’s breath against his cheeks. Those blue eyes picked across Nate’s face.

  “He will stay conscious now,” Number Six declared, the accent sounding more clearly Russian to Nate’s ears.

  Nate took it as a bad sign that they had not bothered to wear masks. “Who are you?”

  The crew leader returned his focus to Nate. “We are Tyazhiki. Shadow people. We are not here. We do not exist.”

  “But you have names.”

  “Ah, yes. I did not introduce myself before. I am Misha. You wonder why you are here?”

  “No,” Nate said.

  “He must collect from you. From your body, perhaps.” Lazily, he touched Nate’s chest with a finger and pushed. The chain creaked above, the ice again bit the back of Nate’s legs, and he couldn’t help but grunt.

  He clenched his jaw to stop the chattering. Needles of pain pierced his bloodless arms. What they were going to do to him would no doubt be horrific, but in the end there would be death. He blew out a breath, trying to find that place of fearlessness he’d captured inside the bank. “Will you lower my hands, please?”

  The man in the striped sweater spoke up: “Not yet.”

  “Look, Waldo, there’s four of you, and I’m wearing ice-block pants,” Nate said. “If I make a move, I think you got me covered.”

  The man looked confused. “Waldo?”

  “He is called Dima,” Misha said. “With the ponytail, Valerik. And he”—a flick of the hand to the huge guy from outside the bank—“is Yuri.” Despite the accent, his diction was perfect, if formal.

  “His hands stay hooked on chain,” Yuri declared. “More pain.”

  But Misha leaned close and unhooked Nate’s wrists, their faces inches apart. He smelled of soap. Yuri sucked his teeth and looked away, displeased but unwilling to press the matter. The other two shifted uncomfortably, pretending not to notice Misha’s power play.

  Lowering his arms hurt more than Nate could have imagined. His shoulders throbbed. He fought off the pain, then asked, “Russian?”

  “Not Russian,” Misha said. The first fragment of anger. “Ukrainian.”

  Nate gestured with his chin. “What’s with the ice?”

  “Just wait.”

  Nate looked down helplessly at the freezing block. “You say that a lot.”

  “Do not wear yourself out,” Misha said. “It is frozen solid around your legs. We chipped the hole, lowered you in.”

  “It take all four of you to think this one up?”

  “A sense of humor. Impressive, given the circumstances.”

  “I’m ready to die,” Nate said. “There is nothing you or your boss can do to me.”

  In response Misha smiled. The grin was all upper gums, as if someone had carved the slit of his mouth too high on his skull.

  A bang of metal on metal boomed through the warehouse, Nate stiffening atop the block of ice. An unseen door slid on rusty hinges. Footsteps tapped slowly toward them through the darkness, Nate’s apprehension growing with their proximity. And then a light flared, a directed beam, making Nate squint. Blotting the tunnel of light, the perfect silhouette of a male form. Standing still. Arms crossed high on his chest.

  When the man began to walk again, his shadow preceded him, elongated across the floor, creeping up the ice block, Nate’s torso, and finally his face. The man neared but remained perfectly backlit, so Nate could make out nothing of his features.

  He halted several feet away, the culminating note of the big stagy entrance. “The width of a cheetah’s canines match perfectly to vertebrae of its prey.” His accent was much stronger, his gruff voice giving him away as decades older than the other men. “To sever the spinal cord.” He made a single clean gesture, planing his hand to cut the air. In the cold his breath rose like smoke from his nostrils. “There are those who are meat and those who are fed. Nature’s design.”

  He turned to pace, a slant of light falling across him. Weathered face, ridged and leathery, scored with wrinkles. Wide, rounded mouth. Sapphire eyes, hard as stones. He wore an impeccably tailored suit and, beneath, a form-fitting black thermal shirt with a boxer’s notch at the throat. The fabric hugged his compact muscles; he looked dense, unbreakable, carved from wood. A few coarse gray chest hairs showed at his neck. Hands in his pockets. The sleeves of the suit, tight across his biceps. His skin looked to be nearing seventy, but his lean body and virile bearing seemed that of a man a half century younger.

  No doubt, the man from the Town Car.

  He halted again. Those stone-hard eyes bored into Nate. “I am designed to terrorize you.”

  Nate’s heart drummed at the base of his throat. “I killed five of your men.”

  “Those were not my men. Except the one you did not kill.” He showed his teeth, which were unexpectedly beautiful, and it took a few seconds for Nate to realize that they were of course fake. “My men do not get killed by someone like you. They are different. You do not make this kind of tough in America.”

  Nate’s mouth had cottoned. His legs ached through the numbness, and he was having trouble keeping his own teeth from clicking together. “What’s your name?” he managed.

  “Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.”

  “What are you gonna do to me?” Nate asked. “And can we just get it over with?”

  Pavlo’s lips peeled apart from those magnificent teeth again, then he held out his hand. It wore a black glove, but Nate would have bet that beneath the leather the nails were manicured and each knuckle sported a tattoo. Valerik stepped forward, sweat-darkened strands twisting loose from the pulled-back hair at his temples, and placed a few photos in Pavlo’s palm.

  “When the human body is severed and the torso placed on ice, the cold preserves the brain function. Sometimes for twenty minutes, half hour. So everything is felt and”—he mumbled a foreign phrase, searching out and finally finding a word—“observed.” He held the glossy photos up to Nate’s nose and thumbed through several.

  Nate took in the slide show of pink and red. He said, “Excuse me.”

  Pavlo nodded like a gentleman, stepped back, and Nate vomited onto the floor. When he lifted his cuffed hands to wipe his mouth, his shoulders screamed. He noted how the ice stretched to his left like a tabletop, and when he looked back over, Yuri stood beside Pavlo, holding the rescue saw with its diamond-tipped circular blade.

  Somehow, despite the ice, sweat trickled down Nate’s face, his back. He fought his stomach still, tried to slow his gulps of air, kept his eyes from the saw.

  Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and then it’s all over.

  He composed himself. “Okay,” he said.

  There was a long pause. And then Misha asked, “Okay what?”

  “Do it.” It struck him that he’d rediscovered something in that bank, in the face of those bullets. He was once again the guy who’d saved Janie from the ocean, who’d pulled her through a riptide and delivered her to shore. A dark laugh bubbled out of him, edged with hysteria. “Kill me.”

  Pavlo’s gaze moved across his face, as if searching out a way to bore in and crack him open. He stared back. The best part of having nothing to lose was that no one had leverage over him. There was nothing at stake anymore.

  Pavlo seemed to read this, finally turning away. “There is little red diary,” he said conversationally, “in the back of a closet. It is kept locked. In it are a girl’s complaints. What she views as hardships. How life treated her unfairly. In last entry, on page eighty-nine, she recalls a childhood memory. Her father bursting into her room one night in the clutch of a nightmare, blood streaming down his face.” He turned. The faintest pursing of his lips. Savoring a reaction.

  Abruptly Nate became aware again of just how much the ice had chilled the air. The cold in the bones of his legs, aching. Each breath jerked his chest.

  These men. In his daughter’s room.

  Th
ey broke into the house today. Between the robbery and now. They must have moved immediately after the shootings, while Pete and Janie were at work and Cielle at school.

  “The ice is not for you. It is”—a black-gloved hand circled—“demonstration.”

  At once all pain was gone. “Let me be clear,” Nate said. “If you lay one finger on my daughter, my entire life will narrow to the single focus of killing you.”

  Pavlo paced, frowning, deep furrows cupping his mouth. “There is a custom in our part of the world. If you step on someone’s foot…” He turned and asked Misha a question in what Nate assumed was Ukrainian.

  Misha replied, “Accidentally.”

  “… accidentally, you must offer own foot for person to step on in turn. Just a light tap. And yet. We right wrongs at once, so resentments do not fester. Understand?”

  Nate swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. Nodded.

  “You and I, we require razborka. Settling of accounts,” Pavlo said. “Much planning we spent for the bank heist.”

  Nate said, “I will figure out how to get you money.”

  “I do not want money. I have plenty of money.”

  “You robbed a bank.”

  “I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, no longer with us, God rest his soul. We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object. He place object in his safe-deposit box in First Union Bank of Southern California. We know it is there, but we do not know box number.”

  Nate thought about how the robbers had sheared off the hinges of all those nests of safe-deposit boxes and yanked off the tiny doors. How the safes and the cash had seemed like a second priority, an afterthought.

  “So you robbed the bank as a cover?” Nate asked. “To get whatever Urban had?” No answer. “What is it?”

  Pavlo stopped pacing. His gaze turned on Nate. “It is what is inside the box.” His teeth gleamed. “You interrupted my plan to get it. Now you will get it for me.”

  Nate felt his mouth fall open a little. “You’re kidding, right? I can’t do that. It’s impossible. Plus, the bank’s a crime scene. The safe-deposit boxes are sawed open—”