Chimera

Chapter 12

W e ended up sleeping in the car.

I didn’t want to take a chance of Jericho and his crew checking the local hotels with our descriptions. The son of a bitch might be in a hospital bed right now, but I didn’t think that had much chance of stopping him. Slowing him down was the best I could hope for, and I’d long used up my hope for better things. I chose a small town off the interstate and eventually found a road that started as asphalt, wound its way to gravel, and finally ended up as a dirt track through kudzu-choked woods. The sun had gone down several hours ago by the time I parked. Stepping from the car, I stretched and grimaced as bones and tendons popped. Michael followed, hauntingly visible in the yellow spill of the car’s dome light. As the scattering of blond in his hair was haloed into a phantom nimbus, he folded his arms and scanned the area with a frown. It was the most emotion I’d seen out of him in hours.

“What’s wrong?” The bullet burn on my jaw from the night before itched fiercely and I gave it a soothing rub of my knuckle. “You still hungry?” He’d put away two cheeseburgers, a large order of fries,, and a chocolate shake for supper, but I’d seen his stomach in action. That may not have been enough. Godzilla descending on Tokyo had nothing on the ferocity of a teenager’s appetite, and if Michael didn’t behave as a teenager in anything else, he did in that.

“No, I’m not hungry.” The frown deepened and he shifted from foot to foot. “Is this where we’re staying?”

The corner of my mouth twitched ruefully at the faint dismay in his voice. “It’s no worse than that rattrap from last night. We have fresh air, stars, and crickets to sing us to sleep. It’s practically a commercial for camping gear. What else could you want?”

The reason for his two-step became apparent as he snapped rather desperately, “A bathroom.”

“Ah.” I fought against the laugh that wanted to spill free. After the day we’d had, I enjoyed the warm swell of humor, but I had a sneaking suspicion Michael wouldn’t appreciate it if he thought the laughter was aimed at him. “Well, that’s easy enough.” I waved an arm. “Pick a tree.”

“A tree?”

I’d dragged him here and there, nearly gotten him killed at every turn, and he hadn’t blinked an eye. But tell him to take a leak in the great outdoors and he was as outraged as an eighty-year-old nun. “Watch out for snakes,” I warned with only partially suppressed glee.

His wasn’t a face made for scowls. It was too smooth, too serene a mask, but that didn’t prevent him from giving it the old college try. As he walked into the trees, I could still see the pale smear of him in the dark. The waves of annoyance that I could feel radiating in my direction weren’t pale at all. Pulling off the baseball cap, I grinned and tilted my head back to see the pink glitter of Mars. If I wanted to pretend it was like the old days, I could. Who was going to stop me? Teasing a younger brother, what could be more natural? What could be more treasured? I closed my eyes as a stream of cool air, pure and clean, washed over me. “If you have to wipe, try to avoid the poison ivy,” I called.

“If you want me to believe that I’m your brother,” the tart voice came from my elbow, “you have an odd way of showing it.”

He’d moved up on me in utter silence. I was impressed, but not particularly surprised. Genes would tell. Our family had three generations of reason to be swift and soundless. Although I still was of the thought that Lukas . . . Michael . . . would’ve been the one to choose a different path from Korsak tradition. It was even possible that had he never been taken, I too might have turned out differently. Turned out better.

“You survived the deep dark woods, Grizzly Adams.” I tossed the hat onto the hood of the car and gave him a quick whistle of mock respect. “I’m impressed. How do you want to celebrate? I think you’ve made your way through all the snack food, but you could lick the wrappers.”

“I think,” he said with narrow-eyed deliberation, not exactly enthused with my humor, “that a blanket would be fine.”

Swallowing another grin, I fetched an armful of cotton from the trunk and put it in the backseat. “There you go, kiddo. Fold up one of them and make a pillow.” I restrained an urge to ruffle his hair. It was so strong that it was painful, but it wasn’t the thing to do. Seven-year-old Lukas would’ve tolerated it, only just, with a laughing protest, but Michael at seventeen wouldn’t remotely enjoy the gesture. Most likely he would retreat, and I didn’t want the day to end like that.

Michael settling down for the night gave me the chance to make some calls. I wasn’t prepared for him to discover what I’d made of my life. It could be I’d never be entirely ready for that, but that was a problem for another day. The first call I made to Dmitri. He was more than a bartender; he was the next best thing to a mob yellow pages. If he didn’t have the information I needed, he would know who did.

I tried the bar first. Unless he was off sick, Dmitri was usually there, six days a week. Konstantin was not one to concern himself with overtime regulations or the Fair Labor Standards Act. The phone rang several times before it was picked up and a voice said without preamble, “Koschecka. We’re closed. Call back next week.”

“Closed?” I drawled as I walked away from the car to lean against a tree. The bark scratched roughly through my shirt. “Damn, Dmitri, who died?” There was silence in my ear. No glasses clinked, no music boomed; the only sound to be heard in the velvety quiet was the rasp of Dmitri’s breath against the receiver. It was eerie enough to have my senses sharpening instantly. Something was wrong.

Ah, shit. Konstantin had found out about Bormiroff. It didn’t get any more wrong than that. I had known that moment of morality was going to come back to bite me in the ass. I’d known it as I’d looked down at the man on all fours, his bloody hands trying to carry him away from death, trying to carry him away from me. I didn’t try to fool myself with false memories. I’d had every intention of pulling that trigger. There was no doubt it would’ve effectively destroyed what was left of my soul, making the generous assumption I had one to begin with, but I hadn’t seen any other option. Vasily had to die so that Lukas might live. It wasn’t a fair choice, big surprise, but it was the one I had to make. That my finger refused to move had stunned me. That I’d lifted Bormiroff unceremoniously off the asphalt and hidden him in the trunk of my car before driving away had done more than stunned me. It had shaken me to the core, and not in a positive manner.

I hadn’t been proud that I hadn’t killed. Far from it. I was furious with myself, choking on guilt as corrosive as sulfuric acid. I had been risking Lukas’s life for the life of a thief, and, at that, one stupid enough to steal from murderers. Vasily had sworn he wouldn’t be seen in the state again, his hound dog eyes terrified in the gloom of the trunk. He’d promised he’d vanish. It could be done, especially if you were assumed dead. Whether that sad loser could pull it off was another story. But I’d given him the chance while simultaneously reducing Lukas’s. The only thing that made the situation any less disastrous was that I planned to disappear myself days later. I hadn’t anticipated needing help so soon. If Konstantin had found out about Vasily, help would be one of the few things he didn’t visit upon me.

“Stefan?” Dmitri asked slowly. “Is that you?”

My attention was shifted from the recollection of helping Vasily from a bloodstained trunk in the bus station parking lot and giving him a fistful of money. “Yeah,” I answered cautiously. “What’s going on, Zakharov?”

“Nothing much.” There was another pause, not as long as the first. “Where are you, pal?” Such a casual question and so very casually posed. I was fucked all right, thoroughly fucked. Dmitri was not especially adept or clever, and he was as aware of that as anyone. That he was attempting to be other than what he was brought home the tense nature of the situation.

“None of your damn business,” I responded flatly. “Now tell me what the hell is going on, Dmitri. I don’t have time to screw around here.” The discomfort of the tree bristling against my back, the ache of the scrape on my jaw all faded. Every nerve ending I had, every sense I possessed; all were centered on the voice in my ear. And then the next three words shocked those senses numb.

“Konstantin is dead.”

Konstantin? Dead? How could that be? People died, but Konstantin? He was a malevolent force of nature; the tidal wave that wiped out cities, the lightning storm that decimated the church picnic, the wildfire that destroyed half a state. How could someone . . . something like that die? My job had been to protect him and I had, but not at any time had I ever been able to picture him actually dying; not even when in the basement of Koschecka when I’d taken out his cousin with a vodka bottle. It just wasn’t conceivable.

“Dead?” I said hoarsely. “What do you mean ‘dead’?” Because that was such an ambiguous word, wasn’t it?

“I mean that someone splattered his brains all over the inside of his car. Give me your fax number and I’ll send you a sketch. Jesus Christ, Stefan, what did you do?” he hissed, the sound oddly hollow from the hand I could so easily picture cupped between his mouth and the phone.

“Not a goddamn thing,” I snapped back. “What the hell, Dmitri? You know better than that. You know who my father is. I’m loyal.” As if there was any other choice for me.

“You don’t show up yesterday and Konstantin ends up a trip. I ain’t the only one connecting those dots.”

A corpse. I still couldn’t summon the image. Immaculate gray hair awash in blood and brain matter proved elusive to my imagination. “I had family business to take care of. I had to move fast.” And asking for a leave of absence for what anyone would have classified as a wild-goose chase hadn’t been precisely practical. I couldn’t see my boss dead, but I had no difficulty picturing the expression on his face at the bizarrely mundane request for time off.

“So come back and explain it then. They’ll listen to you, Stefan; they’d have to. You’re Anatoly’s kid.” It was the same wheedling tone he’d used two weeks ago bargaining over the vodka. Getting me back would be some kind of feather in his cap. He had delusions of grandeur, did my pal Dmitri. He yearned to step out from behind that bar to bigger and better things, oblivious to the fact that those very things would swallow him whole. He didn’t have the balls for the work or the brains to recognize the lack thereof.

In one respect, however, he was right. They would have listened to me because of Anatoly, “would have” being key words of the past. At one time I would’ve been untouchable, but with my father pulling a disappearing act that had lasted well over a year, that was no longer true. His dominance, once bedrock solid, was now on the wane. He still had his contacts, but the tentacles of influence had become like phantoms. He was the monster under the bed . . . terrifying, but given enough time, he could be forgotten in the light of day. If I went back, the Korsak name wouldn’t save me and neither would the truth. I had called for help, but I would no longer find it here.

I disconnected, not bothering to spout protests of innocence. Dmitri wasn’t the one I had to convince and the one I did wouldn’t believe me. Konstantin’s son was a chip off the old diabolical block but with a looser grip on his temper. He would put me down before the first word left my mouth. It was entirely possible that he’d been the one to pull the trigger on his father. I hadn’t shown up; he’d seen his chance and next thing you knew, the head of Gurov senior was popping like a party balloon. It could have been him or it could’ve been one of Konstantin’s many rivals. Whoever was genuinely responsible didn’t matter. My ass was now grass in the city of Miami, if not the entire state.

I had made the call looking for names, for contacts that could provide us with a safe house for a night or two. That plan was shot to hell. I hadn’t planned on going back, even once Lukas was safe, but neither had I planned on having bridges burned so thoroughly. I wondered whether I was making a mistake by not contacting the police, but in the next second I changed my mind. They had found us. . . . That man Jericho had found us so quickly, so effortlessly, I found it hard to believe he didn’t have some government resources to draw upon.

My resources weren’t nearly as high-flying, but I still had them, although locating the one I had in mind wasn’t going to be easy. Anatoly hadn’t vanished from only the authorities and the Family; he’d disappeared from my life as well. He was still in the country, I was fairly certain. He would’ve let me know if he was leaving. I did receive the occasional message, such as the Christmas picture, but Anatoly had made it clear before he went on the run that even I had to stay mostly in the dark. Whether it was a matter of trust or he actually wanted to keep me out of his legal troubles, the bottom line was I had no idea where he was—not yet. But I did have a list of places memorized where he might go. My father hadn’t given me specifics, but our history had given me a place to start.

I made the first call.

Two hours later I gave up for the night. I was on day two of no sleep and even punching in numbers on the cell became a drunken fumble. Walking back to the car, I tripped twice and only once was from navigating the darkness. If I didn’t get some rest, Michael’s theoretical driving would be the only thing getting us around. Blissfully unaware of his potential chauffeuring duties, he slept on in the backseat. He was curled up all knees and elbows under the muffling blanket, and his brown hair shone in the overhead light. Deceptively pale, it looked almost as blond as I remembered it.

Sliding clumsily into the driver’s seat, I closed the door with quiet care. The huddled form in the back shifted but didn’t wake. I reclined the seat and folded arms against the raw breeze drifting through the empty windshield frame. It was in the fifties, unseasonably cold as it had been all the month of January. I let Michael keep both blankets. With exhaustion dragging me down with every heartbeat, a little cool air wasn’t going to keep me awake. It didn’t. I fell asleep between one breath and the next. It was as swift as a stumble and fall into a chasm. Slick fake leather grazed my cheek as I exhaled, and then I was gone.

Dreams of Konstantin followed me every step of the way. With a bloody hand resting on a seven-year-old Lukas’s shoulder, he smiled at me coldly through scarlet-stained teeth. Unaware of the crimson fingerprints that marred the white of his Spider-Man T-shirt, Lukas waved solemnly.

The chill that chased me through the night had nothing to do with the cold.