Rasputin's Shadow

43

Call him,” Koschey ordered Ae-Cha.

He kept checking the rearview mirror of his Yukon while he drove on without a particular destination. He’d quickly swapped cars less than three blocks from the restaurant, dumping the Bureau car and hustling Ae-Cha into the SUV he’d left there. It had been a calculated gamble that had paid off. Bureau cars and police cruisers had trackers on them, complications he preferred to avoid if given the choice.

He didn’t know where Jonny was at the moment, but his mind was already thinking ahead, evaluating possible venues for what he was planning. He selected a couple of options as Ae-Cha pulled out her iPhone and called Jonny.

JONNY WAS HAVING TROUBLE processing the astonishing sight he was witnessing.

Lolita had descended into a mad frenzy of extreme, unbridled violence. The huge thug-seemingly oblivious to the knife wound in his side-had beaten Neck Tattoo’s face to a bloody purple mess and had started pounding the back of his head into the sidewalk.

A table had smashed through the right-hand window, followed by two young guys trading blows with broken bottles.

The long-haired guy had staggered to his feet only to be knocked down again by the Uzbek. The two of them were rolling around on the ground-a blur of gouging, biting, and punching.

The tall woman had removed her heels, dragged herself upright, and begun to rain down stiletto blows on the pimp’s bald head, which already looked like a ball of vanilla ice cream covered in raspberry sauce. Then a miniskirted woman wearing a cheap fur coat emerged from the bar, took a snub-nose from her purse, and shot the young guy in the stomach at point-blank range.

Bon was ecstatic-reveling in the kind of sustained excitement he usually reserved for watching Chan-wook Park’s vengeance trilogy back-to-back. He was laughing hysterically and pounding away at the steering wheel.

Jonny was mesmerized, but not by the blood and the violence. He was already thinking about all the things he could do with this technology at his disposal. Then he noticed Bon’s pounding of the wheel-the big man was now really having a go at it.

“Hey,” Jonny called to him, tapping his helmet.

Bon turned, his face twisted in a ferocious look of aggression that startled Jonny, so much so that it pushed aside his empire-building fantasies. It also made him fail to notice the incessant vibrating and pulsing blue-white light of his Samsung smart phone as it sat on the cabin floor by his feet and rang away.

“HE’S NOT PICKING UP,” Ae-Cha told Koschey, fear raising her voice to a higher pitch.

“Try him again,” he rasped, his eyes resonating with deadly intent.

Ae-Cha nodded tensely, and hit the Call button a second time.

AN ONSLAUGHT OF QUESTIONS battered me as I surveyed the chaotic aftermath of the shoot-out at the Green Dragon.

A team of paramedics was already here and tending to Jaffee, who was going to be all right. Gaines, on the other hand, was probably dead before he hit the ground. The waiter, too. Some patrons had been injured in the mad scramble to get out of the place, but none seriously. And, of course, Ae-Cha was gone, which had caused her aunt and several of her relatives who worked there to freak out with worry.

I tried to block out the cacophony and focus on what had just happened and why it had happened. I hadn’t expected our shooter to show up. He had Sokolov. Why had he come here? Why this late, this urgently? What the hell else did he want?

He had to be here for Jonny. But Jonny wasn’t part of this. He’d only helped Sokolov. He wasn’t a threat to him, in the sense that he couldn’t ID him. I didn’t think Ivan was petty enough to come out here for revenge, either. And he took Ae-Cha. Only reason for that would be leverage over Jonny.

Had Sokolov given Jonny something to hang on to for safekeeping? Something Ivan was after?

Then it hit me.

The van.

Jonny had lied about where he’d dumped it. Then he’d gone out soon after we’d questioned him about it. And now this.

It had to be the van. Sokolov had hidden something in it.

I grabbed my phone and called Kanigher.

“That APB on the van. Send it out again, priority one, tristate. That’s what our shooter’s after. We have to find that goddamn van before he does.”

THE SOUND OF AUTOMATIC weapon fire punched through Jonny’s ear protectors, forcing his mind away from Bon’s sneering face and back to the side street off Brighton Beach Avenue.

There were now at least a couple dozen people out on the sidewalk, all involved in one, large, messy, lethal fight-either one-on-one or locked in a Grand Theft Auto version of a bar brawl. Inside the bar was no different.

Jonny was enjoying the spectacle, the sensation amplified by the cocaine lighting up his neurons, but Bon was getting too agitated. Jonny knew it was only a matter of time before the cops arrived and that the wise move was for them to leave before that happened, but he was finding it hard to tear himself away from the show.

He scanned the street ahead and checked the van’s mirrors, scrutinizing the night for any telltale sign of spinning lights, when the blue light inside the van caught the corner of his eye.

His phone was glowing.

The display said: AE-CHA.

Jonny stared at it, uncertain about whether or not to take it. This was really going to mess up his high and kill the moment. He felt a chill as he imagined what she was probably calling about, this late at night: Jachin. Maybe she knew. Maybe she’d heard. And if so, he could just imagine the state she might be in, given how she felt for his now-dead friend.

He hesitated, then decided not to take the call.

He stared at it with a heavy heart as it droned on in silence, its blue light coming on and off hauntingly inside the dark cabin of the van, its ringtone muted by the big ear protectors on his head-then Bon lashed out, twisting around and slamming his big fists into the partition wall behind his seat like a caged animal on a rampage.

Jonny flinched and shouted to Shin, “Kill it!”

Shin punched in the first preset, the one that hadn’t had a discernible effect, just as Jonny grabbed the phone. And at that same moment, a police cruiser came around the corner, lights spinning.

“Get us out of here,” Jonny barked at Bon.

The big man looked at him with a dazed expression.

“Pulgarasi, we need to move.”

Bon stared at him for a second, then sat back down, threw the van into gear and floored the pedal.

Jonny looked back, watched as the police car pulled in outside the restaurant, then breathed out and answered his call. “Ae-Cha.”

It wasn’t Ae-Cha.

It was a voice he’d heard before, out on the docks that night, with Sokolov.

“Where are you, Jonny?”