Altar of Bones (62 page)

R
Y CAME AWAKE
suddenly and sat up. The moon had risen, filling the room with a silvery light. He reached for her, but she was gone.

Then he saw her standing in the bathroom doorway, wearing one of his T-shirts. A man in a black jogging suit stood close behind her.

He had the blade of a knife pressed to her throat.

L
IGHT FLOODED
the bedroom with the flip of a switch, and a second man came through the door. He, too, was dressed in a black jogging suit and Adidas athletic shoes—the uniform of a
vors
in the Russian mafia. Only this guy had jazzed his up a notch. Three gold chains and an enormous gold baptism cross hung around his neck.

“I like your look,
dolboy’eb
,” Ry said to him in street Russian. “Real classy. Do you plan on being buried in it?”

“You’re the dickhead, dickhead. I’m the one with the gun, so shut up and get dressed.” The
vor
tossed a duffel bag onto the floor. “In these clothes, not your own, and be quick about it. The
pakhan
does not like to be kept waiting.”

Ry shook his head slowly back and forth. “I’m not doing a thing until you tell that rutting goat over there to take his knife off my woman’s throat.”

“Grisha, take your knife off her throat.”

“But, Vadim—”

“Do it.”

Grisha gave the other man a sour look, but he lowered the knife and took a step back. His black eyes focused on Ry, a sneer curdling his mouth. “Move, bitch,” Grisha said, and slammed the flat of his hand into Zoe’s back so hard he sent her sprawling.

Ry came off the bed, hard and fast, but he was stopped cold by the poke of a gun barrel in his belly.

Vadim brought his face right up to Ry’s, so close Ry could see the blackheads on his nose and smell the boiled cabbage on his breath. “One
more inch and you die. One more fucking word out of your mouth and you die.”

“Ry,
don’t
.”

Zoe scrambled to her feet and held up her hands, palms out. He could see the fear in her eyes and knew it was for him. To get his hands on the altar of bones, Nikolai Popov would need Zoe alive and cooperating, but if Ry started looking as if he was more trouble than he was worth, he’d get a bullet in his head.

“I’m all right, Ry, really. He didn’t hurt me.” She bent over to pick her bra and panties from off the floor, but Grisha grabbed her arm. “Put on what we brought you, and nothing else.”

For a split second longer, Ry thought about trying to take the other man down, gun or no gun, but that was the testosterone talking—he could feel it, pumping along with the hot blood through the veins in his neck.

He raised his spread hands and backed up a step. “Okay, okay. I’ll shut up and get dressed. But I want her left alone.”

Vadim smiled, showing off the diamond chips embedded American-rapper-style in his two front teeth. “We won’t kill her unless the
pakhan
says kill her. Then? We kill her.”

T
HE CLOTHES IN
the duffel bag were more black jogging suits and Adidas shoes, along with a couple of cheap parkas and some wool hats and gloves.

“Don’t we get any bling to go with our new outfits?” Ry said, once they were dressed.

Vadim dangled a pair of handcuffs from his left pointer finger. “This is the only ‘bling’ you’re gonna get, except maybe for a bullet in the head. So shut up and put them on.”

Ry snapped the metal bracelets around his wrists. Either they only had the one pair of handcuffs, he thought, or they didn’t consider Zoe much of a threat.

It was snowing, the dark streets deserted, but a chauffeured black Mercedes SUV waited for them at the curb, engine running. Grisha
opened the back door, shoved Zoe inside, and climbed in after her. Then the Mercedes suddenly shot forward before he’d finished shutting the door.

“Hey!’

Ry started to run after the car—not so easy to do on a street packed with snow and with your hands in cuffs. It was pointless anyway. All he could do was watch as the red taillights grew slowly smaller until they turned onto the Pevchesky Bridge and disappeared into the darkness.

Vadim came up beside him, wheezing from that little bit of a run. He had his gun out again and this time he looked as if he really might use it. “What are you doing, asking to be shot? The
pakhan
said come in separate cars.”

“Then where’s ours?”

“It will be here when it gets here. Now get out of the fucking street before you get run over by a snowplow.”

They waited, then waited some more. This wasn’t good. Why separate cars?

Vadin fished a Bic lighter and a pack of cheap Russian cigarettes out of the jacket pocket of his jogging suit. He lit up, took a deep drag, then coughed up half a lung.

“Those things’ll kill you,” Ry said.

“Fuck you.”

A snowplow crunched by, and lights came on in the apartments across the street. Vadim began to jiggle up and down on his toes. His lips and nose, even the tips of his ears, Ry noticed, had turned blue with the cold.

“What?” Ry said. “The
pakhan
doesn’t pay enough for you to buy a coat, not even a cheap-ass parka like this one you gave me?”

“I’m from Siberia. In Siberia this is not cold. In Siberia this is spring.”

Ry’s nerves were on the screaming edge by the time the second Mercedes SUV showed up.

Their driver made a U-turn and drove off in the opposite direction from the one Zoe’s car had taken, and for the first time in his life Ry felt literally sick with fear. Not so much because he knew he could be riding to his death—although that was not a pleasant prospect. But
what would happen to Zoe now if she had to handle what was coming on her own?

Their driver took them through a dizzying maze of streets lined with decaying palazzi of long-dead merchants and noblemen, mixed in with fitness clubs, espresso bars, and a Porsche dealer. Trying to ditch a possible tail, Ry supposed. Not that they needed to. Sasha’s security men had positioned themselves well back to keep from drawing attention to themselves, counting on the GPS in the heel of Ry’s boot to let them know if he and Zoe were on the move. A brilliant plan, except that Popov had anticipated it, and now the boot was still back at the apartment, while he and Zoe were now headed God knew where.

Every ten minutes Vadim lit up another foul cigarette, filling the SUV with a greasy yellow cloud of smoke. Eventually the eclectic neighborhood gave way to blocks of crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings and rusting factories. The snow was coming down hard, stacking up on the windshield faster than the wipers could flick it away.

About an hour out of St. Petersburg, they crossed a set of railroad tracks and ran out of asphalt. They were deep in the country now, lurching over frozen ruts through a wasteland of pines and rocks.

Ry was beginning to think he’d fallen into some existentialist hell, then out in the middle of nowhere they came upon an old cemetery. The driver slowed and turned down a narrow lane, lined on both sides by the cemetery’s tall stone walls. They drove for about a mile, and then the lane dead-ended in front of the ruins of a large brick building.

“Once we get out, take yourself and the car up to the farm,” Vadim said to the driver, as the SUV crunched to a stop on the fresh layer of snow.

The frigid air felt good after the smoky stuffiness inside the Mercedes. Flakes, soft and thick as down, fell from a black sky overhead, but Ry’s internal clock told him it would soon be dawn.

He thought the brick ruins were once a slaughterhouse because of the bronze sculpture of a bull that stood guard next to the building’s wide, arched doorway. A lone, bare lightbulb cast just enough light on the yard for him to pick out the remains of what looked like a cattle chute sticking up out of the snow and a rusted-out hay baler.

There was no sign of the other SUV, nor of any living thing. And, worse, no other fresh tire tracks in the virgin snow.

Oh, man, O’Malley, this isn’t good. This is not good at all
.

Vadim poked him in the side with a Beretta. “You speak good Russian for an American. Do you know the word
grokhnut
?”

Literally it meant “to bang,” but it had another meaning as well. “If you were going to shoot me,” Ry said, “you’d have done it by now.”

Vadim grunted a laugh. “Does it comfort you to think so?” He pointed with his gun. “Go over there, beneath the light.”

With Vadim close on his heels, Ry walked toward the wide, arched entrance into what had probably been the slaughterhouse’s bleeding and gutting area. A long time ago fire had destroyed part of the roof and blackened the brick walls, but as he got closer, he could see someone had pulled an old, turquoise trailer house inside and set it up on cinder blocks.

“That’s far enough,” Vadim said, and Ry felt the burn of cold steel in the side of his neck, the wash of hot breath against his cheek.

Ry stood unmoving, the gun at his head. A long moment passed, and then another. They seemed to be waiting for something—but what? It was so eerily quiet, you could almost hear the snow falling.

Here, the stench that permeated the air around the ruins was more pronounced, the old, sour smell of blood and rotting entrails, overlaid by a newer, more pungent stink—like a combination of cat pee and rotten eggs.

He had a good view of the old trailer house now, and the litter of KFC tubs and pizza boxes around it. But he also saw empty cans of paint thinner, stripped lithium batteries, used coffee filters, and empty cold-tablet blister packs. Propane canisters with blue, corroded valves were stacked up on one side of the trailer’s front door. On the other, a pile of rotting bags full of ammonia nitrate.

In other words, everything you would need to make methamphetamine.

A crank lab was usually a hive of activity, but at this one there wasn’t a tweeker in sight. Yet although the place looked deserted, Ry knew it wasn’t abandoned, because under the low aluminum roof of the trailer’s
patio extension, he could see two picnic tables loaded with row after row of mason jars filled with cold-medicine tablets soaking in muriatic acid.

And those babies are cooking all right
. He could actually see the fumes rising in waves out of the open mouths of the mason jars.
One spark, and this whole place could blow to smithereens
.

“Nice little meth lab you all going on in there,” Ry said.

Vadim was silent for a couple of beats, and the gun at Ry’s head didn’t waiver. “I am beginning to suspect you are
mussor
. I think you know that word, as well, huh? How do you say
mussor
in American?”

“Garbage.”

Vadim laughed, because it was also Russian-mafia slang for “cop.”

“I thought you would know it.”

At that moment, Ry heard what he’d been hoping, praying for—the steady hum of a powerful car engine turning down the lane from off the main road, the crunch of tires over snow. He felt Vadim stiffen behind him.

“Now,
mussor
,” said Vadim, “it is time for you to die.”

Ry started to spin around, throwing up his arm to knock the gun away, but he was too late. His head exploded in a white, hot flash, and then there was nothing.