The Survivor

Chapter 55

Three in the morning and Nate had just finished scrubbing Abara’s blood from his hands. He’d sneaked back into the Bouquet Canyon house, careful not to awaken his father or the kids. Janie had stirred as he’d slipped past into the bathroom, but he couldn’t bring himself to wake her yet to tell her what they had done to Abara.

Beneath the punishing heat of the nozzle, Nate felt the reality of his situation settle in, and he emerged from the shower cloaked in a mood of black finality. Charles waited, holding his towel out for him and dripping blood on the clean tiles. Nate took the towel, his left arm quaking slightly. He refused to acknowledge the ache emanating from deep inside the muscle.

“I’m running out of options, Charles,” he said. “And time. I gotta make a move. But I don’t want to.”

Charles took this in solemnly, chewing a cheek. “You were the guy on the beach,” he said, “who dove into the waves and saved the girl.”

“I was.”

“But when we went over, you lost something.”

Nate was almost afraid to say it out loud. “You mean the helicopter. When I didn’t jump.”

“And with my mom,” Charles said. “You could’ve told her I was dead. You were right there, parked at the curb. But she had to hear it from a stranger.”

Nate nodded. He was afraid to blink, to speak. When he did, his voice scratched his throat. “That’s why you’ve been here all this time,” he said. “You’ve never forgiven me.”

“Of course I have,” Charles said. “You’ve never forgiven you.”

“I don’t understand,” Nate said. “What’s that have to do with this? This decision, now?”

Charles’s face was speckled with dried blood, his lashes heavy with sand. “You gotta decide for once and for all,” he said. “Which guy are you? The guy on the beach or the guy outside my mother’s house?”

Nate dried himself, taking a moment to flex his left hand. Charles’s breath leaked through the blown-open lungs in his chest cavity. Nate dressed and hung the towel neatly over the rack. Placing his hand on the doorknob, he paused.

“The guy on the beach,” he said.

* * *

He and Janie sat the way they used to as college kids, Indian style on the bed, facing each other. The mood tonight, however, was anything but hopeful.

Nate couldn’t get the image of Abara out of his mind. He thought of that lonely house, the single plate resting on the kitchen counter.

“Good people keep getting killed because of me,” he said.

“No,” Janie said, her face still ashen from Nate’s report. “People are getting killed because of Pavlo Shevchenko. Don’t let guilt confuse the issue.”

“It can’t keep going this way. I won’t let it. And at any minute the choice is gonna be taken away from me. As soon as my fingerprints are discovered on that saw, I’m done. I will have killed a federal agent-”

“You can go in, explain-”

“And they’ll believe me? Even if it’s true, I can’t explain everything away. There’s too much against me now, Janie. You know that. Abara was my best-my only-advocate. And before they killed him, they forced him to call in and say he was wrong about me. Then his body? My prints? Along with everything else? It’s done.”

“But the case they’re building against Shevchenko-”

“They’re not gonna be able to tie him to those murders. He covers his tracks too well. And we can’t keep hiding forever. You know that too. It’s only a matter of time before his men track down you and Cielle here. Or anywhere else. You can’t live like this. Our daughter can’t.”

Janie’s breathing quickened. “So what’s that leave us?”

The starlight softened the room’s edges, and he thought about the previous night here in this bed, how everything had been safe and promising then. A fantasy, sure, but one well worth having.

He touched her cheek gently. “No way out but through.”

“What are you gonna do?” She pulled away. “Go to war?”

He said nothing.

She coughed out a one-note laugh and looked to the ceiling. “With what? Yourself? No weapons? You had one gun, and they took that.”

“I’m going now to figure that out.”

She covered her mouth, a gesture that might have looked prudish if not for her anguish.

“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Nate said. “But the ones I regret the most are the things I didn’t do. The things I let fear keep me from doing. But now, with this”-he lifted his left arm, rotated the weakened wrist-“and everything else. There’s none of that. No more not doing.” He moved her hand down away from her face and held it in her lap. “I will not go to my grave knowing that these guys are after you and my daughter.”

She squeezed his hand, hard, holding on. “What are you gonna do?”

“Anything I have to.”

His knuckles ached, but she didn’t relent.

“You come back.” She bit her lower lip hard enough that the color left beneath her teeth. “You come back and say good-bye first.”

It took some effort for him to let go of her hand.

Casper followed him down the hall, his nails making too much noise on the floorboards. Nate tapped a knuckle against his father’s door and heard a muffled answer: “Come in.”

He stood in the doorway as his father rustled up against the headboard, pulling on a pair of spectacles. Early morning leaked around the curtains, a pale shade of gray.

“Dad,” he said. “It’s gonna get bad.”

“Hardly call it a picnic now.”

“Worse. Soon enough I’ll be framed as a cop killer. The whole law-enforcement community is gonna come after me, on top of those men. I gotta leave and take care of some stuff. It’s dangerous for you to stay around Janie and Cielle-”

“I got them.”

“It’s much safer for you to go back-”

“I’m not asking, Nate.” The hard words rang around the room. He cleared his throat apologetically. “I can help protect them from those men. And anyone else.”

“I don’t want you to be at risk, Dad.”

Nate’s father pulled off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, his weathered face was as vulnerable as Nate had ever seen it. “I haven’t done anything worth anything in a long time. Don’t take this away from me, son.”

They regarded each other in the semidarkness.

Nate nodded once and withdrew.

Beneath the fan that had been half torn from the ceiling by the weight of his daughter’s body, Pavlo spread Nastya’s clothes across her luxurious duvet. With a razor blade-her razor blade-he visited a great, calm violence on her shirts and skirts, her bras and panties. He wore bifocals, his sole concession to his age, which lent him greater gravity and a dignified elegance he did not often display. He required them; it was meticulous and vital work. Firming the razor between thumb and fist, he dragged a dress across his arm, the blade’s corner rising through the silk like a shark’s fin.

Beyond the picture window, the lights of the Strip were on a low simmer, daybreak still barely a notion at the horizon. The spectacular city view had been freed once and for all, the curtains torn from the rod and shredded at Pavlo’s hand. Traces of Nastya’s lipsticked message remained, red smudges on the pane.

Yuri and Misha entered and stood like waiters waiting to be acknowledged. Plucking a red bra from the mound, Pavlo sliced through one cup, then the other. “What?”

“The police responded to Abara’s barn,” Misha said, “off our tip. They are processing the evidence now.”

“Good.” Pavlo cut the buttons from a sheer blouse, one by one. “And Overbay?”

Yuri said, “We are watching the airports and-”

“Find him.” Pavlo’s hands stopped, then resumed, making an incision down the length of the blouse, splitting it between the shoulders. “Don’t watch. Do.”

“We have been spending money to gather addresses,” Yuri said. “Overbay’s buddy pals from the war. His friends. Guesthouses or second homes. The wife’s parents have condo in Arrowhead. His father has cabin in Bouquet Canyon. A doctor friend of wife has Malibu beach house. Those kinds of places. It is how they track criminals.”

Pavlo said, “What of the wife’s old boyfriend?”

“He drove east after crossing us. As of last night, he checked in to a motel in Ohio. No phone calls to or from him. He is useless to them.”

Pavlo snatched the sheaf of papers from Yuri’s hand and flipped through them.

“How much did this cost me?”

“Fifteen thousand dollars.”

Pavlo handed the papers back and turned his attention to a pair of panties on the bed. “There are four of you. Split the list in half and go. Start with nearest places first.” He pushed a strip of black lace across the blade until it frayed, then gave way. Misha had exited, but Yuri remained, his big swollen face the picture of concern. “Go!” Pavlo yelled. “Leave me!”

The door clicked quietly closed. Pavlo cut through more black lace, then shoved the razor savagely through the crotch, tearing, ripping. He was sweating, his arms straining against the fabric, and he realized he was burying a roar in his throat. A spasm of fury seized him. He raked the mound of sliced fabric off the duvet and watched the strips and ribbons scatter across the floor, the remnants of his broken daughter. But it wasn’t until he turned the razor on himself, carving a furrow up his ink-sheathed forearm and releasing the pain that had been scouring his insides, that he finally understood the sweet agony Nastya had found in the blade.