Vanity, Vengeance And A Weekend In Vegas (A Sophie Katz Novel) (20 page)

I jumped forward and threw my
arms around her before grabbing the iPad from her hand. “Can we email the
police? How does that work? Can you make phone calls from this thing?”

“It’s not a phone, Sophie.” Dena
glanced at the door as she took her device back. “I kinda doubt the guys over
at the 911 phone center have an IM account. But Marcus does.”

She sat down and started typing
away, faster than I’d ever seen her type.

“Email Leah too,” I said quickly,
“it’ll go to her phone.” I started opening drawers as quietly as possible.
There had to be something I could use as a weapon. I felt like
such
an
idiot. I had thought Alex had given me that gun to set me up for a crime and
now I find out it wasn’t even a real gun? Did the drugs Anatoly slipped me
screw with my brain? How could I have not noticed that!

“I don’t think we need to contact
Leah,” Dena whispered. She held up the iPad to show me Marcus’ response:

Try to stay in that room for as long as possible, HELP IS ON THE
WAY.

Now it was my turn to cry. The
hot tears burned my eyes and trickled down my cheeks. Maybe there was hope!

Out in the hall I could hear
Margarita’s voice. She said something in Spanish and the man outside our door
replied. I leaned in and listened to their short conversation that I couldn’t
understand and then the sound of Margarita’s heeled shoes walking away.
 
Dena tucked the iPad into the back of
her pants, pulled her shirt over it again and I took several steps back.
Help was on the
way. Everything was going to be okay.

Everything
had
to be okay.

It became a little harder to
convince myself of that when the door opened and the man walked in with a hand
pruner. Usually a hand pruner is something you use to prune bushes by hand but
I had a horrible feeling that today the name would have a double meaning. He
clipped the blades together a few times for his own entertainment.

“Looks like we got a lead on
where your boyfriend is,” he said with a heavy accent. “Do you know which
finger you want to send him? Your choice.”

His gun was tucked in his
waistband. How could I get it from him? Dena was a few feet to my right, her
cane in her hand. I knew she was trying to figure out how to best use it as an
effective weapon.

“You have a lead on Anatoly?” I
asked, taking a step back. Maybe if I dived to the floor and tripped him? Then
maybe I could get the gun. “Where is he?”

“Here.”

I gasped and looked up at the
doorway to see Anatoly. The tattooed man whirled around just in time to see the
crowbar coming toward his head. He fell to the ground and Anatoly swiftly stepped
inside and closed the door behind him before hitting him in the head again.
Blood spurted out of his skull and Dena and I instinctively turned away.

When I turned back the man was
either dead or close to it. “Help is on the way,” I said weakly.

In three swift steps Anatoly was
in front of me.
 
He pulled me into
a brief, fierce embrace. “We have to get out of here, now.”

He took the gun from the bloody
man on the floor and went back to the doorway where he looked both ways before
gesturing for us to follow him out.

“Did you come in the front or the
back?” I asked.

“Back.” Quietly, he pulled the
door closed behind us. “I dragged the body of that guard into the bushes but
they’ll figure out what’s going on soon.”

“How many are there?”

Anatoly just shook his head as we
crept down the stairs. He didn’t know.

“How did Marcus know you were
coming?” I whispered once we were almost at the bottom.

“Marcus?” he asked turning around
to face me. Alarm registered in his expression as he looked behind me. “Move!”
He grabbed both Dena and me and literally hurled us down the last few stairs as
bullets flew above our heads. The iPad flew forward but Dena and I were the
only ones to notice as Anatoly returned fire on yet another tattooed man. We
grabbed the iPad and scrambled to the side of the room.

“Do we really need that anymore?”
I asked breathlessly. “I think we may be past the point of IMing.”

Dena just gave me a look before
glancing toward the front door. It was still a ways away…and we were in serious
danger of getting shot if we stayed in the open.

This time we didn’t have to wait
for Anatoly to tell us what to do. The little hall that led to the library was
right next to us and we quickly ducked in there and ran to the room with the
vodka.
 
Anatoly was right behind
us.

“You’re giving up on your gun
fight?” Dena yelled.

“He’s on top of the stairs,
that’s sniper position.” We got into the library and another man jumped up from
one of the leather chairs. The fire raged in the fireplace behind him. He
reached for his gun but Dena slammed down on his hand with her cane and before
he could turn on her Anatoly took his shot. The man fell, falling on top of
Alex’s sipping vodka. I started for his gun but the man who had been shooting
at us from the top of the stairs was now in the doorway. Dena and I leaped
behind the couch. The bay window was
right there
. We just had to break it and get
the hell out of here!

Dena must have been thinking the
same thing because she crawled to the widow and pounded on it using the metal
jaguar of her cane. I had always assumed that windows were easy to break.
People were always accidently crashing through them in movies but the force of
Dena’s blows seemed to only scratch this thing. I tried to peek around the
couch to see Anatoly. He had taken a position behind a chair. He leaned out and
took his shot…and he was out of bullets.

The sound of the trigger being
pulled to no effect was by far the most horrifying thing I had ever heard…and
it seemed to be becoming the night’s theme. Dena was so busy pounding on the
window she barely registered what was going on until the tattooed man came
around the couch and put the gun to my head.

“I think my boss wants to talk to
you,” he said, looking straight at Anatoly. Dena stopped banging on the window
and Anatoly stood with his hands up high enough for us to all see that they
were empty.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said
quietly.

The tattooed man laughed. “But
she only wants to talk to you. We don’t need the ladies.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and
tried to block out the feeling of the barrel pressed up so hard against my
head. Would there be pain? Or just…nothing? He pulled the trigger…

…and he was out of bullets too.
Anatoly dove for the gun by the corpse on top of the vodka bottle just as I
elbowed the tattoo man to get free. In one shot Anatoly had him. The bullet
sent him flying back into the window…that still didn’t break.
 

He’s the third person I’ve seen die in the last five minutes.
I should be horrified, hysterical, throwing
up, crying…

I turned to Dena and Anatoly. “I
think maybe we should just try our luck with the front door.”

I would worry about the
possibility that I was a sociopath later. Right now we just had to get out.

Anatoly nodded and checked the
chamber of his newly confiscated gun. “Damn it, he’s out too.” He knelt by the
body, ready to search him for bullets.

“This is not how I planned our
first meeting,” Alex said as he entered the room. And of course he had a gun
too…not the handgun he had waved at me before but a semiautomatic weapon.

Anatoly stopped searching the
dead man.

“I imagined I would come to you,”
Alex went on. “I thought you’d be holed up somewhere with Natasha drinking
cognac or something…”

“Where’s Margarita?” I asked.

Alex turned to me, as if noting my
presence of the first time. “She’s upstairs. She’ll stay there for now…I
wouldn’t have let her hurt you, Sophie.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh
my God, you are just such a typical man.”

Alex looked down at his gun, then
at the dead people on the floor and finally back up at me. “Excuse me?”’

“You’re just telling me what you
think I want to hear without any way to back it up! If Margarita wanted to hurt
me you’d be the last person to effectively stand in her way. You’re like those
guys who tell you they’ll support you five minutes after the credit agency has
repossessed their car!”

“She’s right,” Dena said, finally
lowering her cane away from the window, “you’re pretty typical.”

“You have to trust me, Sophie--”
Alex started, but I cut him off by breaking into hysterical laughter.

“Do you see these dead people?
They work for your partner in crime and they just tried to kill me. It’s not
the kind of thing that inspires trust.”

“Did you think she was stupid?”
Anatoly muttered, but I whirled around and glared at him.

“Shut up, I don’t trust you
either at this point.” I turned back to Alex. “Look, you want Anatoly because
he has information, well guess what? I’ve got that information now too.
 
If you want me to think you are
anything short of a completely repugnant monster then you’ll take it and let us
all go.
Then
you
can talk to me about trust!”

“You don’t have the information,”
Alex said, but I could tell he wasn’t sure.

“Dena, do you still have your
iPad?”

Dena looked around the room. “I
dropped it somewhere…oh.” She approached the body of the man who had crashed
against the window and pulled her iPad out from underneath him.
 
She looked a little sick to her stomach
as she handed it to me.

I stared down at the body as I
took the iPad from her. Perhaps I didn’t feel upset about these men dying
because they didn’t seem like men to me. They were predators, weapons, nothing
more than embodiments of a threat. Seeing their lifeless bodies was a relief.
If that’s what it meant to be a sociopath then it was probably a pathology I
could live with.

At that moment I wouldn’t have
minded seeing someone blow Alex’s brains out either.

“What’s on the iPad?” Alex asked,
pulling me out of my thoughts.

“Evidence that the Ignatovs sent
people down to Mexico the day those drugs were stolen from Los Tres Seises.”

Alex’s eyes widened and he took a
step toward me but I leaped away from him, toward the fireplace. I held the
iPad over the fire. “If you shoot me now this will fall into the flames. Maybe
it’ll survive enough for you to retrieve the files or maybe it won’t.”

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Alex
said quietly.

“That’s good, because I don’t
want to die.”

“I wouldn’t mind shooting him,”
Alex said moving the gun to point at Anatoly. “Maybe we can do a trade here.”

I needed to stay calm. My ability
to lie while staying cool was the only weapon I had at my disposal. “I told
you, I’m done with him. But if someone was threatening to destroy evidence that
I needed I probably wouldn’t shoot the only other person who was able to confirm
that the evidence ever existed.”

Alex considered that before
moving the gun to point at Dena. “What about your friend here? Seems to me
there are three people in this room who can give me the details of what’s in
that file.”

“If you shoot her I’m
definitely
going to destroy this thing and I will never tell Margarita or anyone else what
was on that file. Not
ever,
Alex.”

“Sophie,” Alex said, almost
pleadingly, “Margarita will have you tortured for it.”

“And I still won’t talk,” I said,
completely serious this time.

“So it seems we’re at an
impasse.”

“It would seem.”

I glanced at Anatoly. His back
was to me.
 
Dena could see his face
and she seemed to be watching him intently. He was being awfully quiet. Maybe
he was strategizing an attack? But I couldn’t focus on that now. I had to play
out my own hand.

“Any suggestions on how we get
past this?” Alex asked.

“I know,” Dena said. “We could
start by letting me pour myself a glass of that cognac.”

I blinked in surprise. That was such
a me thing to say. Of course I would have asked for the vodka, but someone had
died on it.

Alex chuckled, his eyes still on
me. “I can see why you like her.” He nodded at Dena. “Help yourself.”

Carefully, Dena made her way
across the room to the bar.

“What
exactly
is in the files?” Alex asked.

“Copies of airline tickets and
records,” Anatoly answered, even though he wasn’t the one being addressed. “It
proves that Vadim Ignatov purchased tickets for several of his men to go to
Cuidad the day the drug shipment was taken. I can even show evidence that more
income was coming into the Ignatov’s coffers during the months that followed
than there should have been considering that the shipment supposedly didn’t
arrive.”