Chapter 9

Chapter 9ViktorIwanted to keep my little Olivia at least through supper, but I knew she had obligations…including to my son. The pleasure I felt with her in my bed was beyond any I had partaken of before or since. It made me as eager for her as any smitten twenty-year-old. But the maturity of age gave me control.So we had an early meal together, mostly quiet. We had exhausted each other. And then we worked out the paperwork she had brought in perhaps fifteen minutes, and I sent her on her way.It did not trouble me that she had not told me about Michael yet. That was an awkward, heavy conversation, and though we needed to have it soon, I had no worries that I would never see her again. She would be back. Again, and again.She wouldn’t be able to help herself.As for me, she had already borne me a son. A happy accident, but it made the idea of a regular involvement with her even more intriguing. I was still a young man, but I wanted to put down a few roots now that I was pakhan. I didn’t want my sex life or my personal legacy to fall by the wayside while I was whipping Boston back into shape.I looked back over the inventory sheets for my uncle’s estate sale, confident I would soon have that part of things neatly tucked away in my completed file. I was confident that Olivia would work hard for me. I doubted she would let herself do any less.I wasn’t a manipulator when it came to women. I had seduced plenty of single women who had been on the fence about coming to my bed, but that was more about being able to read what they said, what they didn’t, and what their bodies were telling me. I preferred an explicit yes, but by the end of an evening with me, they ended up saying that a lot anyway.I dragged my thoughts away from Olivia and the things I wanted to do to her, and grabbed my phone, texting Boris.I’ve got the estate sale handled and settled our hospital bills. How are things over there? How is Ivan?There was a long pause before he started entering his answer. I waited, frowning. Then it came, and I nearly dropped the phone onto my desk.He’s taken a bad turn in the last few hours. He’s still alive but he’s going into surgery again.My jaw set and I stood up, my afterglow torn to shreds by a rush of adrenaline. Damn it! I let myself get distracted while Ivan was still vulnerable.Not that I could have done much against an unforeseen medical complication, but something about this didn’t sit right. Boris had been on watch the whole time with his men, but I couldn’t shake the smell of foul play from my nostrils.The hospital was forty minutes away.I’ll be there in half an hour.***I sped the whole way there, mind racing, making plans. I didn’t yet know how bad Ivan was. I didn’t yet know if my concerns about it would bear fruit.I didn’t know Boris to ever be incompetent, but I had checked my phone records when stuck in traffic ten minutes into the drive. He hadn’t tried to contact me even once. Did you forget in the midst of the chaos, Boris? I wondered. But that wasn’t like him either. He had a chess player’s mind inside that thick skull. His memory was as good as mine.This wasn’t like him. And that wasn’t the only thing that was off about this situation. It was just the easiest one to put my finger on as I raced toward the hospital.Boston PD knew my car and kept their distance. Now and then some idealistic upstart of a cop, or even an overzealous detective might come sniffing around me and my uncle’s business, but most knew better. Boston’s Finest would rather have someone like me or my uncle around, keeping order on the streets where they couldn’t, and treating our monthly round of bribes as just the price of doing business, rather than the alternative.By the time that I pulled into the hospital parking lot, my muscles were so tight that my back was starting to hurt. I wanted to spring into action, find someone to fight, some way to take this situation in hand, besides waiting helplessly by his bedside to see if Ivan made it through the night. But again, I knew, you couldn’t fight old age or medical complications. Not unless you were a surgeon.I didn’t fix human bodies. I was significantly better at breaking them. And before, that had made me feel strong.Now, however, it made me feel useless. My fists were balled at my sides as I walked into the crowded lobby to address the desk nurse.The way her face fell when I asked for Ivan’s current room and status didn’t help my outlook one bit. I kept my composure, as always, and my manners as well. She pointed me down the hall.“The crash cart came for him fifteen minutes ago,” she called at my back, and I felt a shudder of the darkest kind of apprehension steal through me. What had happened?I sped up, but didn’t let myself run. I saw the medics with the crash cart come out, rolling it between them, pushing it out into the hallway. Was the crisis over?Then Boris came out, looking around, and walked toward me, holding up a meaty hand as if he was going to try to block me from seeing whatever was coming out of the door after the cart. “You don’t want to go in there right now, boss,” he told me in Russian. “It’s a bad scene.”“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “What happened?”Then I saw them rolling Ivan out on a gurney. His face was covered, the drape falling like tent fabric from his beaky nose.My eyes widened. “What…? God. Boris! He’s dead? How?”He moved his mouth soundlessly for a few seconds, trying to put together the right words for what he had to say.I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Boris! Pull yourself together and tell me.”“I—” He licked his thick lips and blinked a few more times, his eyes bulging with shock. “I just ran off to take a leak for five goddamn minutes, and when I came back, he was flatlining! The cart was already in there and—”I let him go, my hands dropping uselessly to my sides. My eyes locked on the gurney with my friend and employee’s corpse being wheeled away, down to the elevator that led to the morgue. There was no battle to be fought here. We had already lost.And yet…“Where’s the nurse who was attending him when you left?” I ducked my head inside the room, but saw only a tall, thin man scowling as he examined one of the IVs. He had a medic’s scrubs on.“He…he was right here.” Boris looked around, then leaned back to look inside the nurse’s station a few doors down the hall. “Not here. Where the fuck did the guy go?”“Who the hell put this patient on a potassium infusion?” Came the voice from the man inside the suite. He stalked out, blond hair and black glasses askew, and looked around with a scowl before his eyes settled on me. “Excuse me, do you know who the attending was on this? I can’t make out the initials.”“We were looking for him ourselves. We’re hoping for information about our brother.” I said it smoothly, even as my heart banged away in my chest. Boris nodded beside me.“Sorry for your loss,” the man said distractedly. “But we have a problem. I’m going to check with the floor nurse right quick.” He loped his way down the hall, and I stared after him, eyes narrowed.“You think maybe somebody screwed up?” Boris asked quietly, that baffled tone lingering in his voice.“Potassium.” I was not a medical doctor, but if there was one thing I had learned about, it was crime and punishment. The commonest drug used to stop the heart in the last stage of lethal injection was potassium chloride.My heart started pounding faster, and suddenly my fists were clenched again. “Boris,” I said in a firm voice, “we need to find that nurse. Now.”I didn’t have to ask him if the nurse—if the guy even was a nurse—was Puerto Rican. Because what had just happened to Ivan wasn’t malpractice. It wasn’t a screw-up.It was a damned assassination.“Hey!” A yell from the lanky medic who had lingered behind the crash-cart team tore my eyes away from Boris’s incredulous face and forced me to look in the direction of the nurse’s station. Then a compact, muscular man, olive-skinned and with jet black hair, came racing out of it. He was wearing a nurse’s scrubs, but they pulled across his broad back and flooded at the ankles. A bad disguise.He saw us staring at him and turned to race in the other direction.I bolted after him, aware of the bulk of the gun under my coat but also of the security cameras everywhere. I had to catch the bastard, had to question him. But he was fleet and desperate and raced ahead while I followed him toward the service stairs.I heard Boris pounding after me as I followed the man into the stairwell, where I lost him for a moment before a clatter on the stairs below told me where he’d bolted to. I took the stairs two at a time around the open stairwell to catch up, determined to get my hands on that fucker before he could get away.I was halfway to catching up with him when I saw a flash of metal in his hand and ducked back just in time. A bullet rang off the concrete wall where my face had been.“Fuck!” Boris yelled, and we both drew our guns. If this guy wanted to shoot it out with us, he was going to answer my questions with a few bullets in him.I made sure to break the security cameras on the way down, knowing the last thing I needed was a video circulating with my face on it after this mess. Whoever that man was, he was screwing up my life more and more with every passing minute.He fired again as I rounded another corner. I ducked, and this time fired back. I heard him let out a little yell of panic as the bullet barely missed him.Boris was lagging behind. I was so full of adrenaline that I wanted to yell at him for screwing up again. Ivan had died on his watch. This assassin had slipped past his men. And now he was an inch from getting away because Boris couldn’t fucking keep up!But I couldn’t get the breath to yell right now. I had to save it for running, while the air went acrid from gun smoke.We were almost to the ground floor. I lunged forward and fired at the man’s back right as he ducked around the corner. Damn it! This was getting ridiculous. Boris, where the fuck are you? I thought as I clattered down the last few flights.We were lucky. In his panic, the killer ran right past the door to the ground floor, and into the service basement. Jaw set, I quickly followed, praying I could corner the man before he fired again.The basement looked like a low-ceilinged warehouse, with shelf after shelf of file boxes sitting in three rows running all down its length. The man had hidden somewhere in there, waiting to ambush us.“You’re not doing yourself any good, stranger,” I called as I descended into the shadowy room. “You can try to put a bullet in one of us, but it won’t go well for you. Give up now, and have a chance at life.”I heard an echoing clatter somewhere in the rows of shelves, but the concrete walls and the size of the room bounced sounds around strangely. I wasn’t quite sure where he was.Boris came down the stairs fast and nearly knocked into me. “Watch where you’re going!” I snapped, completely out of patience with him.“Sorry, boss.”I lowered my voice to a whisper. “We split up. Check the left side of the room. I’ll take the right. Be careful. This guy’s waiting for us.”He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. When he turned his back to cross the room, I rolled my eyes. I had never seen him act this way before. It was like he’d never chased a man down before.Was it shock from Ivan’s death? Guilt? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to speculate. Whatever it was, Boris had gone from my strong right hand to someone who bumbled things far too much, and I didn’t understand how or why that could be happening right now.I moved row by row, as silently and methodically as I could, fighting to keep my cool in spite of the nerve-wracking situation and my rage. We had to catch this guy, and we had to catch him alive.Now and then I looked down my row and saw Boris, moving in as low a crouch as he could. The sight of his boulderlike profile should have reassured me. But for the first time, it didn’t. I half expected Boris to stumble on the guy and get into trouble I would have to rescue him from.What was going on with him? It was like someone had taken my super competent and reliable friend and turned him into an idiot. It had me so angry after Ivan’s shock death that I found myself contemplating how I would punish him for this.Certainly, I wasn’t going to put him in charge of anything important for a while.The minutes crawled past as we worked our way up the aisles. The guy was keeping still, but I knew he was still in here. Lying in wait for us, him and his gun.I was almost at the end of the row. Nothing yet. Had he slipped out of the aisles and hidden somewhere in the back of the room?All of a sudden, I heard a scuffle on the far side of the room, and Boris let out a grunt and a curse. I was just turning to race in that direction when two shots went off, deafening in that echoing space.Had Boris just gotten himself shot? Fuck! I got there as fast as I could, only to see him breathing heavily as he stood over the crumpled figure of our quarry. The man was still, and a puddle of blood spread around his head. His eyes were open and staring.I turned to Boris, who still had his gun hanging from his hand as he watched Ivan’s killer bleed out. He looked up as I arrived, that stupid blank look on his face again.“Are you shot?” I asked him, and it took a few beats to sink in before he shook his head.“Damn it, Boris, we needed him alive! What the hell happened?”He looked startled at my raised voice. “He got the drop on me. I had to shoot him. I’m sorry.”I squeezed my eyes shut, reaching for my self-control, then bent down and checked the man’s clothes for anything distinguishing. The only thing I got was a nursing ID that was probably faked. “Rodrigo Narvaez Colon. One of the Puerto Ricans.” I was almost certain of it. The dead young man was a Pueblo member. He had to be.“Give me the badge.” Boris held his hand out for it. “I’ll have my computer guys dig up info—”“No, thank you.” I tucked the badge into my pocket as I kept eye contact with him. You’ve fucked up enough for one day. I didn’t say it, but when his eyes widened in surprise, I just smiled benignly.“I’ll be handling this one myself, start to finish. I’ll let you know if I need any help.” Which right now wasn’t likely. On Boris’s watch, in the span of less than thirty minutes, we had lost Ivan, and he had killed the one man who could have confirmed the connection to El Luchador.His face fell slightly, and his eyes took on an angry glint. “It’s not my fault that Ivan’s dead.”I stared back at him coldly. “An assassin got in right under your nose, Boris. Possibly multiple times. You can’t claim you were in the toilet the entire time. So explain to me who you think I should hold responsible for this?”“El Luchador!”I stared at him in disgust. “You’re really doing this now?” He had sometimes dodged responsibility when we were both younger, but nothing like this. “El Luchador may have called in the hit, but you’re the one who was supposed to be on watch for any attempts. You failed.”His chest heaved and he glared at me. He hated it when I had to call him out. I hated it almost as much. It had rarely been necessary, but he seemed to think our friendship should absolve him of any screw-up automatically. And so when I had to call him out for a mess he’d made, he acted wounded, like I was crossing some agreed upon boundary.But this time his mistakes had cost us dearly. “We’ll discuss this elsewhere. For now, let’s get out of here before the police cordon off the place.”We managed to slip out, and Boris immediately walked away toward his car while I made for mine. I felt the separation keenly. That was my best friend, my strong right hand, who had suddenly gone weak, distracted, and incompetent on me when I needed him most. And he was sulking because I’d had to call him on it.Let him stew. He knows I’m right. And right now, I had bigger fish to fry. Boris was right about one thing. El Luchador was our most likely suspect in all of this crap, and if he was, he had just declared war by killing Ivan.And if he wanted a war this badly, I’d give him one.