Swift Edge (28 page)

“Fane! I am through playing games. We deal now or I will hunt down everyone you ever cared about and kill them.”

I didn’t recognize the voice. It was deep, with a Mexican accent.

“I’m here. Keep your shirt on.”

Dmitri. His voice came from the far side of the rink. He was trying to sound calm, but I heard a slight tremor behind the flippant words. Apparently, so did the other man, who laughed.

“It is good for you to be scared,” the man said.

“You have the money?”

“Right here.” He thumped on something that might have been a suitcase. “You’d better have the data.”

“It’s in the center of the ice. Walk out there, leave the bag with the money, take the disk, and go.”

“What is this shit?” the man grumbled. “If this is some kind of trick…” His voice receded, and I could hear footsteps as he tromped toward the ice.

Where the hell was Kendall? Where was Irena, for that matter? My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness and I slipped my shoes off to silently descend the steps, grateful now for the inky blackness. I prayed the lights would stay off since I was all too shootable on the stairs. The fibers of my socks stuck to bits and smears of gum or congealed sno-cone syrup, and I could feel threads pulling away. Nearing the ground level, I slowed, feeling my way with my toes so I didn’t trip on the last stair.

At the bottom, I hunched low and duck-walked to the wall surrounding the rink. I poked my head up, scanning for either of the women. The ice gave off a dim glow of its own, probably the reflection of exit lights on the oval surface. I caught a flicker of movement to my left; someone crouched, half hidden in the aisle between the seats. Kendall? A faint whiff of musky herd animal and coconut drifted to me. Kendall was definitely nearby. I wondered briefly if my sense of smell was compensating for my eyes’ lack of usefulness in the dark. Staying low, I edged my way along the wall.

I was almost there when a light sliced through the darkness and made me fling a hand in front of my eyes and drop flat on my stomach. When there was no outcry, I raised my head cautiously. A spotlight, the beam of pure white light tracking from far above the rink, illuminated a circle in the middle of the ice where a packet the size of a CD lay. A husky man with brown hair crouched over the packet, duffel bag in one hand, gun in the other. I’d never seen him before, although the brown hair and pudgy physique made me wonder if he was the guy Angel saw with Dmitri at the grocery store. When the light blazed on, he spun around, pointing the gun wildly, trying to evade the spotlight, which followed him as he moved. “What is this?”

“Leave the suitcase and go, Aguilar,” Dmitri called. “Or should I say ‘Belcaro’?”

His voice was close, so I knew it wasn’t him operating the spotlight. Irena? Everything outside the circle of light was darker than it had been, cavern-in-the-bowels-of-the-earth black, and I blinked rapidly, trying to restore my night vision. I edged forward again, but a movement to my left caught my attention. I squinted, making out a vaguely human shape, but it was a man, not Kendall, and he was crouched, forearms braced against the wall, sighting a pistol toward the middle of the rink.

I froze. Whose side was he on? Since he hadn’t shot Duffel Man when he had the chance, I guessed he was gunning for Dmitri.

By this time, Aguilar had pocketed the packet and dropped the duffel bag in the circle of light. He called out, “This better be the end of it, Fane. Don’t expect any referrals from me.”

“I’m retiring,” Dmitri called back. “Open it.”

With the air of someone humoring a child, the man bent, flipped back the duffel’s straps, unzipped it, and flung it open. Bundles of money lined the interior, and several spilled onto the ice as the man nudged the case with his foot contemptuously. “Want to count it?” Aguilar taunted.

“I trust you,” Dmitri said, his voice jauntier now. “Just go.”

The man turned toward me, the spotlight at his back now, and shuffled toward the gate in the wall between the gunman and me. The spotlight trailed him, glancing off the still Zamboni parked by the gate. He would pass within an arm’s length of me when he came off the ice, so I sidled to my left, hoping he wouldn’t spot me in the dark. As he passed through the gate, he muttered, “Kill him,” to the hidden gunman and trotted up the stairs. A slight creak fifteen seconds later told me he’d pushed through the swinging doors leading to the concourse.

Silence settled on the rink. Not a peaceful silence, but the uneasy silence that comes a split second before an avalanche when all the birds and critters still, intuiting the rending of the snow crust before any human can hear it. I’d been skiing the backcountry near Steamboat once and
felt
that silence just before the ground heaved and a wall of snow hurtled down the mountain. The hiss of skate blades across ice broke the silence. Dmitri? I debated calling out, but the growl of an engine startled me, and I flinched as the Zamboni trundled across the ice. I could vaguely make out its hulking outline as a darker shape in the dark. Who was driving it? The gunman, figuring he didn’t have much of a shot with no light? I’d have given six months’ fees to know where the light switch was.

Even as I had the thought, the spotlight flared to life again, its beam skidding across the ice. I saw Dmitri standing in the middle of the rink on skates, the suitcase at his feet. The glare bleached his skin white, and his mouth was pulled down in a snarl of concentration. It glinted off the gun in his hand before moving on, finally illuminating the Zamboni. I followed the light beam up and made out Irena crouched behind the spotlight far above the rink, using it to steady her aim as she pointed a gun at the Zamboni coming from my right. She fired, and a bullet pinged off the metal. Just then, the overhead light blazed on, illuminating the strange tableau. The dark-haired man steering the Zamboni with one hand ducked and tried to level a silenced pistol at Dmitri. I swung my H&K up. I wanted desperately to find Kendall, but I felt some compulsion to keep the shooter from killing Dmitri.

“Look out, Dmitri! He’s got a gun!”

Kendall’s clear young voice rang out, and suddenly there she was on my left, surefootedly running across the ice toward Dmitri, pointing at the gunman. As if Dmitri could miss an armed assailant chugging toward him on a Zamboni. Startled, Dmitri swung his gun in Kendall’s direction. With a look of grim satisfaction, the dark thug’s finger tightened on the trigger.

With no time to think, I fired at the man on the ice cleaner, hitting him midtorso so his shot went wild, digging into the ice mere feet from Dmitri. In slow motion, the man toppled off the far side of the Zamboni, which continued toward the far end of the rink, where it lodged against a colorful travel agency ad on the rink wall, chirring uselessly. As I watched, Kendall flung herself at Dmitri, almost knocking him over, and exclaimed in the voice of a movie heroine, “Thank God you’re safe! I got here in time.”

Dmitri threw an arm around her to keep from falling but quickly disentangled himself. Her expression of bliss turned to one of consternation as he grabbed her by the ponytail, jerking her head back, and lodged his pistol under her chin.

“Drop it,” he said, gaze fixed on me, “and come here.”

“Dmitri, what—?” Kendall began.

“Shut it, Kendra,” he snapped.

“Kendall,” she and I corrected him.

“Don’t think I won’t do it,” Dmitri said meaningfully to me, jamming Kendall with the pistol hard enough to make her whimper.

“Easy,” I said, carrying my H&K loosely in my raised right hand as I bumped the gate open with my hip. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped onto the ice, feeling the cold and wet immediately through my socks. Dmitri motioned toward my gun again, and I stooped to place it on the ice. As I straightened, I said, “You’re stressed, not thinking right, because of what’s happened. We’re no threat to you.” All the missing pieces were falling into place, and I was very, very scared for Kendall. Dmitri was clearly not the victim he made himself out to be, but I had to make him think I still saw him as the coerced, unwilling participant in this whole charade, at least until I figured out how to get Kendall away from him.

“Yeah, right,” Dmitri said. Without taking his eyes off of me, he said over his shoulder, “Mom, get the money.”

I’d been dimly aware of footsteps descending the stairs, and now Irena appeared, lithe figure tensed, gaze darting around the rink, gun gripped tightly in a white-knuckled hand. One foot skidded when she stepped on the ice, but she recovered. She ignored Dmitri’s order, stopping a foot from where he held Kendall. “How’d you get here?” she asked Kendall, eyes narrowed, tapping the gun against her thigh.

“I stowed away when you stole my mom’s car,” Kendall said defiantly. “I wanted to help find Dmitri.”

She tried to smile up at him, but the gun jabbing into the soft flesh beneath her chin made it impossible for her to turn her head. For the first time, she looked nervous, even a little scared, and I thought maybe the cluebird had landed. About time. Some people need a gun pointed at them before they’ll open their eyes.

Irena and Dmitri exchanged a glance. “She knows, then,” Irena said. “Graham.”

“When?”

“On the way here.”

“I don’t know anything,” Kendall objected.

Irena had killed Graham, I deduced from their cryptic exchange, and Kendall was a witness. Not to the killing itself, probably, or she’d be looking a lot more scared, but she could undoubtedly place Irena at the murder scene at the right time, having been riding in the back of the Hummer all evening. I wondered if I’d missed them by hours or only a few minutes. At least an hour, I figured, remembering the clammy chill of Graham’s flesh.

“Get the money,” Dmitri ordered.

Irena strode past the blond shooter’s body without sparing it a glance and picked up the suitcase from where it rested near the far wall. “I have it,” she said, pulled a little off balance by the bag’s weight.

“And his gun,” Dmitri said.

“Why?” She looked from Kendall to me. “Oh.” A small, hard smile curled her lips, and she started toward the body. Almost there, she slipped. She didn’t fall, but she spilled several bundles from the duffel onto the ice. With a muttered curse, she bent to retrieve them.

Kendall began to plead with Dmitri, her tone conciliatory at first but moving rapidly toward hysteria.

I knew that whatever their plan had initially been, their revised plan called for shooting me and Kendall with the dead man’s gun, making it look as if he’d killed us. I didn’t know what kind of story they’d spin for the cops, but if Kendall and I were dead, there’d be no one to contradict it. Anger flamed in me. Not only did I not want to die, but I didn’t want Dmitri free to compete for an Olympic medal, spewing his “I was forced into this” story to a credulous media eager to spread the tale of an athlete’s heroic efforts to save Kendall and me and bring down a villainous identity theft ring. Gag me.

Something different about the sound from the Zamboni’s engine caught my attention, and I slid my gaze sideways in time to see it back away from the wall, ram into it, then slowly reverse and begin chugging toward Irena. Who—? A glimpse of pink huddled behind the steering wheel gave me hope. Irena, preoccupied with fitting the money bundles back into the bag, didn’t look up. Kendall’s voice in Dmitri’s ear, and her wiggling efforts to free herself, kept him from noticing the machine’s movements immediately. I focused on him, waiting for that split second when he noticed the Zamboni headed for his mother. I did what I could to distract him.

“So everything you told me Saturday night was a lie?”

He smirked. “Not everything. Shut
up
!” The latter comment was apparently meant for Kendall, who quieted and stilled when he jabbed the gun’s barrel viciously into the soft flesh under her chin. “That’s better. I really was just lifting credit cards until Graham caught me when I paid for Dara’s tattoo with a stolen card. It was a stupid mistake. Then—”

Shit. I’d wasted a lot of investigative energy by assuming someone caught Dmitri stealing a card. I’d never considered the possibility he’d been nabbed using one. Maybe I should consider another line of work.

I wrinkled my brow, trying not to let my gaze slide to the Zamboni, now going backward in a big circle behind Dmitri and Irena. Who knew I should have set Gigi up with Zamboni driving lessons in addition to surveillance classes and computer training?

“—then, once we teamed up, we got into identity theft and making false identities in a big way. We expanded the business, you might say. Boyce and I provided Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, other financial data, and IDs that we found while catering, and Graham provided artistic and ID-manufacturing expertise, you might say. He’d been doing it for years in Australia before he emigrated here.” He grinned cockily, and his gun hand sagged away from Kendall’s chin slightly. The girl’s eyes flitted to me, and I gave her a reassuring smile that said “don’t do anything stupid but be ready when I make my move.” It’s hard to convey all that with a facial expression, but I tried.

“With Mom’s connections from Russia—lots of her family’s friends have come to the U.S.—and others we found by getting the word out quietly at halfway houses and prisons and the like, we were cleaning up. There’s a healthy balance in my offshore account.”

The Zamboni straightened out and headed for Irena again where she squatted, strapping up the duffel bag. “So, what happened with the feds? You got an attack of conscience and called them, then chickened out.”

His brows slammed together. “That was Boyce. Stupid fuck. He told me Friday night, after the party where that stupid chick accused me of selling marijuana, that he’d had enough, that he had called the FBI and was going to meet with them this past Saturday. He was warning me, giving me time to get out.” An expression of sadness or regret flitted across his handsome features before he firmed his mouth.

“So you killed him and set him up.”

“Not me. I told Graham.”

Irena noticed the Zamboni first, straightening with the dark man’s pistol in her hand to find the ice-smoothing machine only fifteen feet away. “Hey!” she yelped, firing both guns at the metal behemoth bearing down on her. Bullets zinged off the metal and ricocheted around the rink. The sound was an assault, multiplied by the building’s acoustics, which were designed to amplify a band’s music to bone-vibrating levels.