Cold Hit

Chapter 58

When I regained consciousness I was back in the trunk and we were moving. I wasn't sure how long I'd been out, but my whole body ached, and my left index finger was throbbing like a bitch.

Memory started to return, and as it did, I knew I was going for a ride I wouldn't come back from.

I now had some of the "bows," but the "whys" still eluded me. To keep my mind from disintegrating in fear, I tried to reason them out.

Nix was Virtue's right hand, so that meant Virtue was, for some reason, allied with the Petrovitches. Why?

Virtue and the Petrovitches were all in Moscow in the mid-eighties. Stan Bambarak and Bimini Wright had also been stationed there. Was this part of Bimini's '85 problem? Alexa told us that Sammy had been an assassin for the KGB. Was he the shooter who did Bimini's Russian doubles in that Moscow prison? How did all of that tie to R. A. Virtue? Why would Virtue take such a risk? I wasn't sure, but it felt as if it started back then.

Then came a wave of frustration and anger, most of it directed at me. For the past three years, I had gotten into the habit of playing just outside the boundaries. I was usually able to pull it off, but little by little, I had become overconfident. Past successes had blinded me to current weaknesses. I had allowed myself to be taken and then hadn't held up. I'd given our case away. It would now come to nothing. That memory shamed me.

I started to review the events that lead me here. There was now little doubt that Samoyla Petrovitch had degenerated from whatever he'd been in Moscow into a much more dangerous, murderous psychopath. He had pulled that tree-limb cutter from the trunk of his car. Then he'd snipped off my fingertip. Did it without a hint of hesitation or a flicker of emotion.

A question began to bump up against that gruesome memory. What the hell was Samoyla doing with a tree limb cutter anyway? Maybe he bought it to cut off Davide Andrazack's fingertips so the Mossad agent could be dumped in our serial murder case. Then a new idea struck me.

Alexa told me about the Stinger attack in Kabul. How Sammy had been stitched up by a U. S. corpsman who saved him, but also disfigured him for life. I'd seen firsthand that Sammy was an impulse killer. He almost murdered me in his Century City office.