Authors: Shannon McKenna
The subway ride was difficult. Survival instinct prodded her to study her surroundings, but every time she looked at a person directly, the weight of that person’s life crashed down on her. She tried staring at feet instead. Feet said less than faces. Still, it was better now. If she kept the
nobody here
pulsing out, the gray fuzz up and strong, she blocked most of it. But it took every ounce of her concentration.
The subway stop was a long walk from her house. Her nervous, ragged trot soon turned into a hell-for-leather sprint, skirt flapping, sandals sliding. Phone in one hand, glasses in the other.
She finally reached the narrow brick row house she’d grown up in. It didn’t feel like a safe haven, but it had a door that locked.
She longed for a shower, but her crawlies were creeping worse every second that went by. She just wanted to move. She gathered stuff in feverish haste, scrabbling in the drawer for her passport. She hurried up to her bedroom to change, the small room at the back. Years after Stan’s death, she had not been able to use the master bedroom. She could not sleep in a room where Stan had slept.
Stupid,
she told herself as she yanked off clothes and pried her fuzzy coil of hair out of the scrunchie. She should sell this place, buy something smaller. It didn’t look like she was on track to have a family.
And she heard it.
Squeak-pop.
She went still as death. The warped stair, the fifth one, made that sound when a foot was put on it. Her insides froze. She listened ’til her ears ached.
How the hell . . . ?
The alarm should have gone off!
There.
A shush of fabric on fabric. The faint squeak of shoe soles against wood. Someone coming up the stairs. Slowly. Sneakily.
Ghouls, chasing her. Helga, jabbing the needle into her arm, her eyes
red dened, desperate. Yuri’s mutilated body.
She stared around the room, stark staring naked, lungs clenched around a burning bubble of trapped air.
No way out except for the window, but it was swollen shut, as warped as the squeaking stairs. The house was old and creaky, and she didn’t love it enough to take proper care of it. She’d never get that window open, not without a baseball bat.
She grabbed her phone, her purse, and dove for the closet.
She’d paid a considerable sum to a carpenter to design her closet when she’d moved in. It was the only change she’d made.
She’d been reluctant to remodel the place until she was sure she could stand to live in it, but the closet was a must. The second bathroom that Stan had installed had created a recessed wall in the back bedroom. It made the closet space much deeper than a closet needed to be, so it had been a simple matter of having a false wall inserted there. A click, and a panel slid open, a space just wide enough for a terrified smallish person to slither into.
Just a few feet deep. She’d been storing boxes of her mother’s old reference books in there, while she gathered the nerve to get rid of them, but there was space behind the stack of boxes. At eye level, to the side, a tiny knothole made a natural peephole.
Nina pulled the outside closet door closed, and slid into the narrow aperture.
Snick,
the panel clicked into place.
She shivered in the inky darkness. The challenge now was to keep her teeth from clacking. She fastened the manual latch from the inside, so that anyone touching the back panel wouldn’t accidently engage the opening device. The guy who built the closet had suggested a panic room, but that didn’t feel right to her. If the bad guy knew you were there, he could lay seige. You could be starved out, bullied out, burned out. She didn’t want to huddle in a bunker while her assailant banged and threatened.
She wanted to be invisible.
The door to her bedroom opened, with its shrill, dry creak.
Nobody here. Nobody here. Nothing to see. Nothing to see.
She kept her fear tucked in tight. Stayed very small. Her hand, clutching the phone, was wet. Sweat pooled on her forehead, dripped down her back. She felt faint.
So small. No one here. So
quiet.
The inner directive seemed to come from so far away. Barely perceptible over the roaring of her ears, the thudding of her heart. Footsteps clumped around her room. Closet doors were flung open. A needle of light from the knothole pierced her darkness.
She leaned as close as she dared to the hole. Saw a man’s sil-houette, then his face when he used the barrel of a big pistol to sweep her hanging clothes aside. Tall, dark, fortyish. Pouches under his eyes, cruel lines carved around his mouth, pockmarks from acne scarring. A ponytail, like Shira had described. He barked out orders, in what sounded like Russian. Heavy footsteps clomped out. She heard someone in the bathroom behind her.
Crash,
the shower box met its end. Muffled thuds sounded from the master bedroom, on the other side. At least three guys.
Ping.
A message arrived on the phone in her hand. Oh
fuck!
She muted the thing with a trembling thumb. It glowed in the dark.
From Lily. The pockmarked guy had heard it. His head turned, his eyes slitted as he scanned for the origin of the sound.
You didn’t hear anything,
she told him silently.
Random beeps and
clicks and squeaks. Clocks, phones, appliances. Every house is full of
them.
She pulled in even tighter, smaller, and thumbed open Lily’s text. The part of her that read it was a tiny speck, miles deep, inside herself.
Sorry about Aaro. We’ll work on him. With thumbscrews.
She hit “reply,” texted feverishly.
Thugsinmyhouse. Inclosetnow. 3+guys?
Spk russian? Callcopsnowpls!!
Send.
Twenty hammer-blow heartbeats later, another message appeared, blessedly silent this time.
On the way. Hang in there.
She stuffed the relief down deep, kept herself tucked up.
Tight
and small. Tiny gray thing.
She peered through the knothole. He stood in the middle of her room, eyes closed, nostrils wide. Feeling for her.
With his mind. God. That guy was feeling for her with his
mind.
She clamped down on panic.
Not here. Nothing to see. Small gray
thing. Pebble, dry leaf, gum wrapper, bottle cap.
But the pockmarked man persisted, his mind prodding for her like a rough, lascivious hand between her legs.
“Look, I’m just saying,” Miles wheedled. “It’s not that much to ask. Listen to it while you’re driving to the hospice! You won’t miss a beat!”
“Get off my back,” Aaro growled. “I have enough to deal with, fending off Bruno.”
“Oh, come on. Just show them you care. Throw them a bone.”
“Like Bruno would be happy with a bone? He won’t be happy until I spill a couple buckets of my heart’s blood.”
“You could have said what’s going on with your aunt,” Miles scolded. “It’s like you want them to think you’re an icy-hearted asshole.”
Aaro hung up, without comment. He’d never meant for Miles to know about Tonya at all, but he’d been in the room with Aaro when he got the call, and the guy was a goddamn walking antenna. He hadn’t stopped nagging until Aaro had spilled it. Out of sheer exhaustion.
That was the price he paid for having a collaborator. Things had been simpler when it was just him, in sweet solitude. And the three-car accident that had hung him up for well over an hour on the Belt Parkway was divine punishment. Chastising him for not helping the sobbing social worker. Not that she’d been sobbing when she talked to him. Spitting, was more like it. Tough chick. Like boot leather.
After the accident finally cleared, he’d been hanging out in the long line of cars bottlenecked for the exit onto Flatbush, contemplating his sins. The cars were finally starting to move. He’d been spending the dead time staring at his phone. The multi -
media message from Nina Christie glowed reproachfully on the screen. He was bored stiff. Might as well amuse himself by listening to the recording. Then he could call her back, let her spit at him again. It had been stimulating, in a kinky, masochistic sort of way. She had a pretty voice. Low, husky. Feminine.
Hell, after hours of staring at brake lights, he was actually getting curious about the damn thing. Desperate for something else to think about. Anything else. Even something suck-ass.
He pulled Nina’s number up from the call log, on impulse, and hit “call.” Was alarmed at his own action. What, was he going to apologize? Yikes. Dangerous. He didn’t know the choreography of an apology.
No problem, though. She’d blocked his number. She didn’t want no stinkin’ apology from him. She’d given him the digital finger.
Ka-pow.
Aww. He’d made a new little friend. His very special talent.
He was vaguely surprised to find himself grinning. His facial muscles weren’t used to that kind of exercise. They were creaky.
The last bit of resistance in him shifted into something like resignation. OK, already. He’d listen to the recording, then he’d call up Bruno, and give him the gist of it. Bruno could call the woman back. Safer that way, with a nice, thick Bruno buffer to protect him from random, pissed-off female wierdness.
But Bruno called him, just as he was about to call. He hit
“talk.”
“I surrender,” he said. “I’ll listen to the fucking file, already, OK? Just leave me alone for a few while I do it.”
“Never mind the tape!” Bruno yelled. “Go to Nina’s house!
Now!”
Aaro was confused. “House? Isn’t she at the hospital?”
“She left the hospital! She’s at her house, and the bad guys are inside with her! Lily called the cops, but you’re closer. Take Flatbush right now, and floor it!”
Aaro gaped. “How do you know where I am? You sneaky son of a bitch, did you tag my phone?”
“Take it up with Davy. He gave me the frequency. That’s not the point! Move it, Aaro! She’s hiding in an upstairs bedroom closet!”
“Oh, fuck me,” Aaro moaned, muscling himself into the turn lane amid blaring horns. So the dismissal from Nina Christie was not the conclusion to this episode, but just a foretaste of pain and annoyance to come. To say nothing of the possible bullets.
“You armed?” Bruno asked.
Aaro grunted his assent. Understatement. Going anywhere within five hundred miles of the Arbatov family made him nervous.
“Nina texted that there’s three, maybe more. Speaking Russian, she thinks. Go up Flatbush, left onto Avenue U, and then right on Ramsey. If you hit Quentin Road, you’ve gone too far, so don’t. Three blocks up, third house on the right, five fifty-four.
Move your ass!”
The car surged forward. Here was his chance to redeem himself for the colossal fuck-up six months ago, if he chose to accept it.
Bedroom
closet?
How did this shit fall to him? Did he have a note pinned on his shirt that he didn’t know about? He’d spent a lifetime deliberately not giving a shit about anybody’s business but his own, unless he was paid big bucks to do so. Stone cold, out for himself. Taught by the best. And yet, here he was. Speeding down that exit ramp.
He picked up inappropriate speed. Horns blared. Bruno yakked away at him from the phone that lay on the passenger seat. Aaro ignored him. He’d do this his way, whatever that way might be. He didn’t have a clue yet, but something would come to him. He hoped.
In fewer than five minutes, he sped past Nina’s house. A bland brick row house among other unremarkable row houses. Unbroken line of cars parked in front. He jerked to a stop around the corner, snapped open the case for the folding stock Saiga. He’d considered himself a lunatic, bringing the shotgun along, to say nothing of the special loaded mags he’d prepared; sintered metal breaching round up top for blasting out a lock, then alternating buckshot shells and one-ounce slugs.
He slid in the mag, racked the bolt, and loped toward her house.
No good way to sneak up on a row house. No time to go around the block to slither in from the back, not if a bad scene was already going down inside. Frontal attack, then. Classic suicidal dickhead style.
He ran up the stoop, tried the handle, using his sleeve. No need to leave a trail of fingerprints back to himself. Not that he expected to live through this. It was locked, of course.
Aunt Tonya.
He felt a sharp pang of regret. But he’d see her soon enough on the other side, if he bought it here today. Tonya would follow him out. If that was how it worked. Who knew.
Whatever. No time.
The street was deserted. No witnesses. He took a deep breath, swung up the shotgun, took aim at the door lock.
Fuck it. Who wanted to live forever?
“Nina,” Pockmarks crooned. “Nina, where are you?”
He knew her name. Oh, God, that creeped her out. She put her hand over her mouth, pressing hard to keep her heart from jumping out
. Small. Gray. Pebble. Brick. Blank wall. Not here. Nothing to see.
“If you come out, I won’t hurt you,” he coaxed, in a deep, raspy voice. “Just tell us what Helga Kasyanov told you. That’s all we want. Tell us that, and we’ll go away. Never bother you again.”
So why did you cut Yuri to pieces? Liar.
She stuffed the thought as it formed, or that rough, prodding mind would sense it.
Gray, small, blank, boring, nothing. Dry leaf.
Brick wall. Nothing here. No one home.
“Tell us, and we’ll stop bothering you.” Pockmarks’s voice was an oily ooze of menace. “We won’t bother your pretty friend, either—what’s her name again? Shayla, Sharon, Sheryl . . . Shira!
Yes, that was it! Pretty, blond Shira. Who lives all alone in her studio apartment on Sixth Street.” He made an appreciative growl-ing sound. “Pretty legs. Pretty tits. We won’t bother her, or any of the other poor bitches in your shelter. We leave them all in peace.
Everything like it was before. Just come out. Talk to us. Don’t be scared, Nina.”
Brick wall. Blank, corrugated metal. No one here. No one home.
She cowered, focusing her energy with all of her strength.