Hard Cold Winter (20 page)

I
PARKED ON THE STREET
and sprinted up the back stairs to Luce’s apartment. After the fight with Rusk’s men and a night spent in overheated interrogation rooms, I needed a change of clothes, and I needed another gun. I’d stashed Dono’s Glock behind one of the baseboards in Luce’s kitchen.

Luce had two locks on her apartment door. The spring lock on the knob, and the deadbolt, a heavy Medeco. It took separate keys to open the door, and I always unlocked the deadbolt first.

The key turned. With no resistance. If Luce were home, she’d have thrown the bolt. Habit. I’d seen her do it every time we walked in. If she were out, she’d have locked it behind her.

I stepped to the side. Put the other key in the spring lock, turned it. Pushed the door open.

“It’s okay, Van.” Luce’s voice. “I’m here.”

I didn’t move. “You all right?”

“I’m fine. Just don’t overreact, okay?”

I looked inside. The apartment door opened on a stubby hallway that separated the kitchen from the bedroom. I could see about half of
the kitchen from the doorway. Luce was sitting very upright at one of the two dining chairs she owned, in her frayed Blue Moon Tavern T-shirt and tan jeans and bare feet. She nodded to me, and angled her head to indicate that someone was on the other side of the table from her. I came farther in, to where I could see.

It was Elana. She was standing, tall and stiff, one hand steadying herself on the three-burner stove and the other hand out of sight in a calfskin shoulder bag. She had dyed the scarlet out of her hair and chopped it even shorter, into a tufted black pixie cut.

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were big and her wide mouth parted. Jacked on fear or adrenaline or both.

“I promised her if she stayed, you wouldn’t turn her in,” Luce said.

I looked pointedly at the shoulder bag.

“You were chasing me,” Elana said.

It was the first time I’d heard her voice in a dozen years. I had forgotten it. It wasn’t low and warm like Luce’s. Elana’s pitch was higher, like she’d learned to talk girlishly and never stopped. Or maybe it was just tight with strain.

“I thought I was chasing Trudy,” I said.

“Trudy’s dead.”

“I know. So do the cops. They’ll be looking for you.”

Those green eyes glanced behind me at the open door. “Who are you working for?” Elana said. “Willard?”

Luce shook her head. “No one, El. I told you.”

“Willard told me to stay out of it,” I said.

Elana nodded. “He was right.”

“What happened to you?” said Luce.

“You should keep away,” Elana said to me as if she hadn’t heard.

“The hell I will.” I said. “Someone tried to blow us up. Where’s the Tovex?”

Luce shot me a look that meant
Rein it in
.

“You’re here,” Luce said to Elana, placing her palms flat on the table. “Tell us what’s going on.”

Elana looked at me. “You first.”

“I found the bodies at the cabin. I thought that somebody ought to give a shit about what happened to you.”

“Why? You think that you owe me something?”

“Elana, please,” said Luce. “We’re your friends.”

“Her friends end up dead,” I said. “Or damn close. You should see what Parson looks like now. You’re out of options, Elana. Haymes and his goon squad will run you into the ground, if the cops don’t.”

She stared. “That’s insane. I didn’t kill Kend.”

“What Haymes really cares about is getting his explosives back, before somebody uses them to take down a building. Where are they?”

Elana didn’t answer. Just looked at me, and then at Luce.

“You don’t have to be afraid of Broch now,” Luce said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Her green eyes darted to me. “You did that?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Elana’s face twisted. For a moment I thought she was about to burst into tears. Then another emotion broke through to the surface. Something like satisfaction.

“Move away from the door,” she said.

“They’ll find you, Elana.”

“I won’t give them the chance.” Her hand shifted inside the bag. “Move.”

I backed up, through the stub of a hall and into the bedroom. Elana walked forward, keeping her distance from me, and with half an eye on Luce as well. She stepped sideways and out of the door.

“El,” Luce called, but she was already gone.

I closed the door.

“Damn you,” Luce said. “Why did you push at her? I could have talked her into giving up.”

“No. She was making a point.”

“She wasn’t here to threaten me. She wanted help.”

“Money. Parson can’t be her personal cash machine anymore.”

“And someone to talk to, most of all. Didn’t you see her? She’s terrified.”

“She should be. She’s got the cops and Rudy Rusk after her. And somebody else.”

“Who?”

“The person who helped her and Kend and Parson steal the explosives from Kend’s father. That’s the only way I can make sense of it. Kend wasn’t a thief. Parson might be able to figure out an alarm schematic, he had some kind of savant gift for that. But somebody wanted the Tovex, and probably got the schematic for Kend by bribing some HDC employee. I thought that it was Broch, putting the squeeze on Kend Haymes. Now Broch is dead, and people are throwing bombs at us, and Elana still looks ready to shoot anything that gets in her damn way. So there’s got to be somebody else. Somebody who betrayed Elana and Kend.”

“Then why wouldn’t she go to Willard? If anyone could protect her, it would be him.”

“She doesn’t trust him.”

“That’s crazy. He’d never hurt her.”

“Probably. But that doesn’t mean he’ll help her, either.”
Like before.

“God.” Luce stood and instead of coming to me she stepped to the fridge and opened the cabinet that hung above it, where she kept the liquor. She took down a new bottle of Walker Red and cracked the seal.

When she reached for the second glass I said, “Not for me.” She set it back and poured herself a shot and downed half of it.

Addy had asked what Luce was worth.

I pulled the same chair that Luce had been in closer, and sat down. “Albie missed the thrill, you said.”

She squinted at me over the glass. “Changing the subject?”

“Only halfway. I’m not chasing Elana to get some high off it.”

She took a taste of the Scotch, less a sip than touching the liquid to her lips while she thought. “If you want us safe, all we have to do is leave.”

“Maybe.”

“If what you want is payback for your house, or for people threatening me—”

“For you.”

Luce made a strained smile at my rapid answer. “Then you know what I think about that. Revenge makes everybody pay double.”

I folded my hands. The fingers on my left were a fraction tighter, from the last time I’d been wounded and the Landstuhl surgeons had to do some delicate work on the soft bits in my forearm.

“You know I’m not sleeping much,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, and then set her glass on the stove and came to sit across from me. “I do. I wake up and you pretend to be waking up with me.” Her eyes flickered to the scars on my face. That happened so rarely with Luce now that I noticed it more when she did it. “Are there dreams? Nightmares?”

“Sometimes. But those are just reminders.” I thought about the words I needed. “In combat, everything can be confusing. Chaotic. That’s what all the training is for. So that when you can’t see and you can’t hear and nobody’s telling you what to do and you’re scared all to shit, you’ll still do the thing that’s likely to keep you alive.”

Luce nodded. Waited.

“That’s how it was for me, lots of times. Sometimes even when we were the guys making the enemy piss their pants. And then one time, it wasn’t. There wasn’t any fear or uncertainty then. Just action and reaction.”

Luce had a dreamcatcher in her kitchen window. A wooden circle containing a spiderweb pattern of threads and colored beads, with a crystal at the center that tossed shards of the spectrum around the room when the sun touched it.

“It wasn’t a thrill,” I said. “It was clarity. So clear that sometimes the world after that day seemed like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a telescope.”

“Is that how you feel now?”

“No. I haven’t felt like that for a long time.” I tapped a splash of orange on the table. “But the dreams. They sometimes come before. And I’ve been dreaming.”

Luce reached out. She didn’t take my hand, just rested her arm on
the table and touched my knuckles with her fingertip, like I was touching the bit of orange light.

“Like Dono,” she said.

I looked up at her.

“After a job. His dark moods. You know.”

“I don’t.”

“Jesus, you don’t. I forget how young you were when you left. You never got to know him as an adult.” She ran a hand from her forehead back through her marigold hair. “It was hugely obvious whenever Dono had something going, even though he wouldn’t say a word about it, of course. He’d be bright-eyed and laugh more and be superfocused on everything. Like caffeine or cocaine without the jittery parts.”

“I remember. His accent would come out when we worked.”

“Right, that too. Then there was afterward. He’d crash. Practically in mourning, except that he’d snarl instead of weep. The first time I noticed, I thought the job had gone terribly wrong.”

“It probably didn’t matter how it went.”

“Just that it was over,” she said, nodding.

“I’m not my grandfather.”

“You’re not a crook, no. But you both—” She hesitated. “You both need something more than you can get from a regular life. It was crime for him, and for you when you were a kid. Maybe it was the Army later. The chance to live intensely. With different rules. I don’t know what exactly.”

“Dono always wanted to be a pirate. Maybe I’m a different kind of throwback.” I forced a grin.

She made a joke of considering the question seriously. “I could see you as a samurai. All swords and rituals and battle. You’d have thrived then.”

Not so much today, was the implication. Great in the moment. Fuck-all at planning for any kind of future.

I exhaled. “All that is learned behavior. It can be unlearned.”

Luce’s face was impassive. My phone rang.

“Elana’s here,” Leo said on the other end. I knew exactly where here
was, because I’d given Leo the location. He was parked in Addy Proctor’s ancient Saab wagon, outside the Ravenna address I had found on Parson Yorke’s phone. Elana’s new hiding place.

Luce could hear Leo’s voice across the tiny table, and stared at me.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

“You’re going after her,” said Luce.

I put the phone to my chest. “She might turn herself in, like we hope. Finally tell the cops who her partner was. Or she could be looking to skip town with the explosives, now that the heat’s on.”

“Jesus, Van.”

“If the same asshole who tried to kill us goes after her, she’ll need help.”

“So now you’re protecting her?”

“She’s on the move,” Leo said.

“Leave the line open,” I said to him. I reached down and popped the baseboard and removed the Glock.

Luce went white. “How long has that been there?”

“You weren’t here when I had to hide it.”

“Go.”

“I don’t have time to explain. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage. Get out.”

Leo’s voice popped through the air. “She’s going east on 65th. In a green Audi.”

Luce shut the door behind me, and threw the bolt. It made a very decisive sound.

“Stay on her,” I said to Leo, as I raced for the exit.

L
EO FOLLOWED ELANA, AND
I crossed the city to connect with Leo. She stayed off the freeway. They wound down through Ravenna and across the Cut, through my neighborhood—or what had been, my house now being what it wasn’t—and farther south into the Central district, where I joined the loose parade.

We drove past the large campus of Garfield High School, where Elana had once planted a kiss on me. It seemed impossibly long ago.

Leo came back on the line. “She turned left on—shit—Fir, I think it is. Where the hell are the street signs in this town?”

“We do that to mess with the tourists. Give her some room. She might be watching for a tail.”

All three of us drifted farther down into the Central district, which was like a patchwork quilt of Seattle’s gentrification. Abandoned houses sagged next to shiny townhomes that looked as though the construction crews had just finished smoothing the cement. Rows of residences gave way to industry.

Elana led us on a long path south on Rainier and finally turned onto Cloverdale. My stomach muscles started to tighten. Was she going
where I thought she might be? The feeling intensified over the next few blocks.

“She stopped,” said Leo. “Corner of Volpe Street.”

I knew exactly where it was.

“Don’t park,” I said. “Keep going past and circle around. I’ll meet you one block north.”

Leo was standing outside the Saab when I pulled in behind him. We walked back to the block where Elana had finally stopped. There was a liquor store at the corner, with a dumpster against its wall. The dumpster made good cover as Leo and I peered around the edge of the building.

“She went in there,” Leo said.

The place had no sign. It looked barrel-bottom. Years of exhaust soot had etched the mortar and bricks. The windows were smoked so that no one could see in. A black Lincoln Town Car was parked in front. In contrast to the building, the Lincoln was pristine.

Leo grunted. “Great neighborhood. You know this place?”

I nodded. “The North Asian Association for Trade.”

“North Asian?” said Leo. “Like North Korea?”

“Like Siberia.”

A metallic-blue BMW came fast up the street and stopped with a hiss of antilock brakes half a foot behind the Lincoln. Two men got out.

The driver was a hard case. He didn’t look like anything else. His hands and forearms were veiny and corded with muscle, outside the pushed-up sleeves of his shiny black tracksuit. His face was long and Asiatic around the eyes, and his cheekbones and brow ridge stuck out like knuckles in a clenched fist. The blue edge of Bratva tattoos showed at his collarbone. A hitter, no question.

His passenger I knew very well, from his high forehead right down to the tips of his pointed thousand-dollar shoes.

“And that there,” I said softly, “is Reuben Kuznetsov.”