The Survivor

Chapter 15

At first light, Nate emerged from the depths of a slumber, his cheek buried in the bare pillow. Despair washed over him, magnified by aches. Stab wound in his shoulder. Freeze burns on his legs. Chafe marks on his wrists. Concerned that his fingers were still weak, he sat up and tested his grip around his own forearm. Not great.

Trudging through the living room, he tapped the photos of Cielle and Janie as was his morning ritual. No matter how unpleasant it would be, he’d have to update them now in some fashion. He owed them the truth, but he’d rather not do it during the morning rush to school and work. This afternoon, then.

Reaching the kitchen, he confronted the puddle of bourbon and half-dissolved pills he’d spit on the floor last night when he’d decided not to go through with it. A pathetic postscript ensued-him on his hands and knees, wiping the mess off the linoleum with a dishrag. There’d be no easy way out now. Sitting, he took his pills, properly this time. Fifty milligrams, twice a day, on an empty stomach. Because deteriorating from Lou Gehrig’s wasn’t unpleasant enough, he had to forswear alcohol and caffeine while taking riluzole. Sober, tired, and dying-a cheery little triad. He downed some Keflex-antibiotics for the stab wound-and sat, rubbing his eyes, trying to ratchet himself fully awake without the benefit of coffee.

The situation was surreal, beyond nightmarish. Had he really, ten hours prior, been ensconced in a Volkswagon-size block of ice? Had a Ukrainian thug actually threatened to murder his daughter if he didn’t break into a safe-deposit box? He tried to formulate a next move, but his brain couldn’t find traction.

When it came to robbing a bank, where did one start?

He grabbed the morning paper and read the account of yesterday’s events. “Local Man Foils Heist.” There he was in grainy black and white at the press conference, mouth ajar as if in mid-belch, being steered aside by the police captain. His current job was listed, Professional Crisis Responder for LAPD, and he was described as a former soldier. An Upstanding Citizen, brave and newsworthy. He wondered how the article might have read had the reporter known he’d slunk out onto that ledge to give up the ghost. No mention was made of his family. With that in mind, he flipped back a few sections. The obits were thin today. Henry Vivian White, global head of corporate development for a Century City-based investment bank, had died due to complications of a malarial infection he’d contracted while on safari.

Henry leaves his beloved wife, Beatrice (Poundstone), and sons Robert (24) and Michael (22).

Atta boy, Henry.

After disabling the fire alarm, he retrieved his suicide note from the coffee table and burned it in the kitchen sink over the disposal. The words curled and vanished into black.

The ringing phone jarred him from his quiet desperation. A chirpy front-office woman was on the line, confirming his dental appointment for next week.

“Oh,” Nate said, staring at the dying embers, “no thank you.”

“Would you like to reschedule?”

“Nah. I’m gonna be dead soon, and one of the great benefits is not worrying about plaque.” He thanked the puzzled silence and hung up.

Then he called to check in on Erica and Sean O’Doherty, the parents to whom he’d served the death notification yesterday. One advantage to still being alive was that he could do his job another day. Reaching voice mail, he left his information again should they need anything.

Into the shower, blasting the heat, flexing that left hand beneath the stream. Leaning into the burn, he thought, I can still feel this. My nerves still function. My muscles still work. Little victories. Little defeats. Breathing the steam, he contemplated his first step in dealing with Pavlo Shevchenko. He’d go into the office. What better place to gather information than at LAPD headquarters?

Given that the funeral for Flores Esposita, the bank manager, was in a few hours, he pulled his suit from the back of the closet, brushing dust off the shoulders. His gaze caught on the gun safe buried beneath a pair of kicked-off trousers. Squatting, he twirled the dial, inputting Cielle’s birthday. The safe clicked open for the first time since he’d lugged it into the apartment. With some hesitation he peered inside. There the pistol sat. An M9, the same model he’d toted around the Sandbox. Chewing his lip, he considered. What was he gonna do, gun down mafiya in the street? If it came to it. But not today. Today he had to go through a metal detector at LAPD headquarters. He kicked the door closed.

The suit still fit well, a pleasant surprise. Sitting on the bed, he leaned over to lace up his shoes, but his left hand had gone weak again, and he stared at it, willing it to clench, to obey. If it couldn’t do this, how the hell could it grip a gun, pull a trigger, protect his family? His fingertips chased the laces around until he sat back up, winded with exasperation. He sat for a time, breathing.

Then he got up and retrieved his loafers from the closet.

* * *

When Nate stepped off the elevator at the Police Administration Building and entered the bull pen, the detectives and clerks rose and clapped-a tradition to recognize officers who’d closed tough cases. He literally stepped aside and glanced behind him, not getting it until Ken Nowak shouted out, “Look at Hero Boy all dolled up. You goin’ on Oprah today?”

Nate moved into a sea of handshakes and backslaps, noting how odd-and enjoyable-it was to be recognized as an equal here on this floor, where, by dint of his unusual job, he’d never quite fit in. The only person seemingly unimpressed was Jen Brown, who remained hunched over her desk in her private office. Her center-part haircut had not been updated since he’d known her-nor, he suspected, for sometime before that. When he darkened her doorway, she did not look up from her paperwork. As a sergeant, she was tasked with overseeing the ever-diminishing Crisis-Response Unit, an added responsibility which bore little upside for her.

“So,” she eventually said, not yet giving Nate the benefit of her gaze, “you shot a bunch of thugs. Good work, Overbay. And here I thought you only did touchy-feely.”

“Look at you, getting all emotional.”

She looked up finally, trying to stop a smile from forming. She liked him, he knew, no matter how much she tried not to, and he felt the same way about her. “Why are you here?” she asked. “No one died today. Yet.”

“I wanted to do some more follow-up for the O’Doherty family. From yesterday.” Telling a lie here, in the heart of LAPD headquarters, felt perilous. The first step onto a slippery slope. Jen was staring at him blankly. Or was that suspicion? “Remember?” he added. “Nineteen-year-old? Car crash?”

“Right. I forgot. Mr. Research. If my detectives did half the legwork you put into holding people’s hands, we’d have a ninety-percent close rate.” She pulled off her eyeglasses, ducked out of the chain, and set them on her desk. Shoving back in her chair, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Her white blouse, as close to feminine as her wardrobe allowed, was tucked into severe wool pants. “Parents take it all right?”

“About as expected.”

“Nineteen years old. What a thing.” She sighed. Then her sergeant face snapped back on, and she waved him out. “Whatever you need for them. Just keep out of my hair. Oh-and, Nate?”

He leaned back through the doorway.

“The bank. Seriously. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Nate went to his desk, a ledge of pressed wood floating above a swivel chair. If the half-partition walls hemming him in were more ambitious, he could call it a cubicle. Despite the cramped quarters, he couldn’t complain about the work space or the building.

LAPD had finally upgraded its HQ after nearly sixty years, leaving behind Parker Center with all its scandals and transgressions. Two intersecting planes of mirrorlike glass, ten stories high, formed the new building. The city had gone to great lengths to have LAPD’s kinder, gentler image reflected in the environmentally friendly building-plenty of glass to evince transparency, a cafe called LA Reflection, and a rooftop garden that the media releases referred to as “contemplative.” Headquarters might have traveled merely the distance of two downtown blocks, but the move had allowed LAPD to enter the new millennium.

Nate sat at his desk and gave a nervous glance around. Across the aisle in his chair, Ken arched his back in a lazy stretch while one meaty hand scrabbled across the keyboard to refresh baseball scores. A Detective II, he was wide-shouldered, sloppy in demeanor but neat in appearance. Though disastrous when filling in to serve death notifications, he had proved to be a capable, even sharp detective-a fact that Nate found continually surprising.

He hunkered down, tucking into his computer and logging on to the databases. His job granted him low-level clearances-enough to pull up crime reports and case files, to check rap sheets and addresses. First he keyed in “Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.” A decades-old picture of the man came up, perhaps from when he first immigrated, along with minimal information. No driver’s license. No gun license. Expensive address in the Hollywood Hills. Substantial taxes paid in California for a little more than a decade. He’d had surveillance placed on him by various detectives and the FBI, which at multiple points had tried to build a continuing-criminal-enterprise case. He was suspected of having served time throughout Ukraine and Russia, but his crimes were unknown, the files from Eastern Europe either lost, scrubbed, or made purposefully opaque by a bureaucracy eager to encourage his emigration. However, one detail had made the journey with him. His nickname, listed as Psyk, Russian for “psycho.” Nate scrolled down to a series of surveillance shots, that predatory gleam in the eyes cutting right through the blurry photography.

His mouth, he realized, had gone dry.

A few drops of blood tapped the mouse pad, and he looked up sharply to see Charles there, his skin as gray as death. “Way to go, dipshit,” Charles said. “You broke fortune-cookie rule number thirty-seven: Don’t make enemies with a dude nicknamed Psycho.”

“Not here, Charles. Not at work. Can’t you just … I don’t know, go back to being dead?”

But Charles was already leaning over him, staring at the screen. “Let’s look up that hot girl with the huge rack from English 101. What was her name?”

Nate ignored him, checking the address of the warehouse in which he’d regained consciousness. The deed was held by a company that owned twenty-seven more properties in the Greater Los Angeles Area and Brighton Beach, New York. Slum apartments, a textile factory, scattered storage facilities. The company resided within a shell corp within a shell corp, and that was how many shell corps deep Nate was able to dig before his clearance hit a wall.

Charles had turned to sit on the desk next to him, resting an elbow atop the monitor. He snapped his fingers. “Mindy Scardina.”

“Do you mind?”

Nate must have been making faces, because Ken glanced across, then turned back slowly to his desk, wearing a look of puzzled annoyance. He unclipped from his belt a cluster of keys the size of a hockey puck and tossed them on his desk, the gesture somehow conveying disgust with the state of his surroundings.

“Oh, what, your advanced Google search is more interesting than Mindy Scardina’s tits?” Charles slid over in front of the monitor and squirmed back and forth, making Nate try to read the screen through the hole in his torso.

“Move. Charles-move. You’re disgusting. Would you grow up?”

“No can do. I’m frozen in time.” He made spooky ghost fingers. “Stuck at twenty-seven years old. Like most men. ’Cept I have an excuse.”

“If I don’t figure out how to break into that safe-deposit box, they’re gonna kill Cielle.”

Charles’s brow furrowed, a few grains of sand cascading down his face. “Maybe you can look up the bank?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.” But Nate couldn’t access any bank information whatsoever, let alone obtain a listing of safe-deposit boxes at First Union.

Charles’s shoulders sagged. “Now what?”

Pavlo’s dry voice ran in Nate’s head: I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, who is no longer with us, God rest his soul.

Already Nate was typing. “Let’s start with the owner of the safe-deposit box.”

Urban’s digital file loaded, and they stared together at the text, mouths slightly ajar.

“You’re kidding me,” Charles finally said. “The guy’s a fucking hit man. What next?”

Nate clicked a link. A file loaded, and then a crime-scene photo jumped out at them-Urban sprawled across a bedroom carpet, having clawed the patterned comforter off the mattress when he fell. A neat hole above his right eyebrow. One hand lay open, the two smallest fingers shot off, a defensive wound, and an assault rifle lay just beyond his reach. His thin lips were stretched wide in a death rictus, the glittering squares of his teeth spaced along the pink shelves of his gums. A subcompact pistol was placed deliberately beside his head, the barrel aligned neatly with his cheek.

An echo of that broken English: We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object. Clearly, this was how disagreements with Paulo Shevchenko ended.

Nate scrolled down and lifted a finger to the screen, reading the lead detective’s report of the ongoing investigation. Though an autopsy had been performed in short order, Urban’s corpse remained in the perennially backlogged morgue, stowed for future tests. The hit man’s private weapons cache had been taken into evidence, a small arsenal that included everything from frag grenades to AR-15s, ironic given Urban’s low-tech MO for his murders: He used a ten-dollar lock-blade knife, available through any hunting catalog.

According to ballistics, the SIG Sauer P250 set down by Urban’s cheek had fired the bullet extracted from his head. Leaving the gun behind with the body protected the killer from being found with the murder weapon. The move was also, the detective had noted, a calling card of elite contract killers hired by the Eastern European mob.

Misha.

Charles shuddered, sand falling off him like dandruff. “So a hit man killed a hit man? What’s the story?”

“Pavlo hired Urban to do a job,” Nate said. “To knock someone off and get something.”

“Why’d he use an American killer?” Charles asked. “Why not one of his Ivans?”

“Maybe to make sure there was no connection that could be traced back to him.”

“But then once Urban pulled a double cross or wanted to keep what he stole or whatever, our boy Pavlo went back to his roots.”

“Which exposed him more. Then again, so did having Misha run a bank job. But Pavlo was willing to take the risk.” Nate rocked back in his chair. “Whatever’s in that safe-deposit box, he wants it bad.”

“We don’t even know which box it is,” Charles complained. “What are we gonna do, break into all of them?”

“That was Misha’s plan.”

“What the hell could be in that box?”

“Incriminating photos. Family heirloom. A priceless jewel.”

Charles shrugged. “I vote sex tape.”

The floor creaked behind Nate, and he closed out of the screen quickly. Pivoting, he looked up at Ken.

“What you looking up?” Ken asked.

A flush crept hotly across Nate’s face. His mouth opened, but his brain was still waiting to feed it an excuse. One second passed. Another. Then: “Just a word I overheard the other day. Tyazhiki.” Nate grimaced. “I think it means-”

“Shadow people,” Ken said. “They’re enforcers brought in by the Russkies. No papers, no visas. Utterly lawless. They’ll literally ship ’em in on container ships, route ’em through the Long Beach Port. They do a job and head back. Not a footprint.”

Charles was standing behind the detective, imitating him, wagging his head importantly. Nate did his best to focus.

“The Russian mob’s ruthless,” Ken continued. “They’ll shoot you just to check the sight alignment on their guns. If it’s cheaper to bring in a hit man than pay off a loan, they put out a contract. Life means nothing.”

“How about Ukrainians?” Nate asked.

“The Ukrainians?” Ken whistled, and Charles at last stood still at the ominous note. “Even the Russians are afraid of the Ukrainians.”