A Welcome Grave (33 page)

“I did not do this. I did not kill your husband, or Donny Ward, or anybody else. They can put me in jail for it, though. Fine. I’ll let them do that. Turn myself in. But not until Amy’s safe.”

“I believe you, Lincoln. I’m scared, okay? I’m scared, and I’m confused, but I believe you. That’s why I’m warning you.”

I took a few steps across the living room without purpose. The numbness that settled in me at first after the morning’s call returned as I thought about Donny Ward and a stack of cash covered with fingerprints from me and Alex Jefferson.

“We’re on our own, Joe. We can’t go to the police now. It’s not even an option. They’ll arrest me for murder when they see me, and my story about Amy is going to seem like a distraction, a smoke screen. By the time they confirm that she’s really gone, too much time will have been wasted.”

A car pulled up to the house then. We heard the tires and the engine, and then it went quiet and a door opened and closed. Joe was closest to the door, and he looked out and said, “Cop.”

Karen’s eyes didn’t go to the door. Didn’t leave mine.

“Detective Targent or someone else?” she asked.

“Patrol officer. Young one.”

She moved then, a swift blur, walking past Joe to the open door. I watched her go and looked at the backyard and wondered if I should chance it. We wouldn’t get Joe’s car out of the driveway with the cop there, but if I made it out of the yard I could find another car, steal one if I had to, do what it took to stay out of a cell until Amy was safe.

“Hello,” Karen said, and then the cop was inside the house and it was too late for me to move. I turned to face him, and he looked at Joe and me, and his eyes went guarded and his hand inched toward his gun.

“Mrs. Jefferson?” Still looking at me. He was very young, early twenties, just a patrol officer, and unless he’d been shown a photograph of Joe and me he would not know us. I watched him and knew that he did not. He was suspicious enough to indicate he’d heard a description at least, but he wasn’t sure.

“Thank you for coming,” Karen said. She stood close to the door frame, using her body to hide the damage I’d done. “Detective Targent told me he was sending someone.”

“Uh-huh.” The kid looked uncertain. He was watching me as if ready to go for the gun, but Karen’s calm didn’t fit with what he’d thought of the situation, and now he was confused.

“This is John and David,” she said, pointing at Joe and me. “Friends of my husband. I asked them to wait with me until you were here.”

He squinted at her, trying to pick up on any sign of a lie, but she met him with a composed stare.

“You were fast, though,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Uh, yes, ma’am.”

We had a chance. She’d given us that. Time to get moving.

I walked up to Joe and gave him a soft pat on the back, nodding at the door. “Probably should get out of here, let the officer do his job.”

“Right.”

We walked to the door, and I expected the cop to stop buying it at any second, go for the gun, and radio for backup. Instead, he stepped aside as we approached.

“Thanks for coming,” Karen told us. “It meant a lot.”

I leaned down and embraced her, put my face against hers, and whispered “Thank you” into her ear before stepping outside.

“Good luck today,” she said, and she stood in the door, blocking the ruined trim around the frame until Joe drove us out of sight.

W
e rode in tense silence for a few miles, both of us watching the mirrors and waiting for the sound of sirens. Nothing happened. If he’d seen the door frame, she’d provided him with a convincing excuse. It had been a hell of a thing for her to do after I’d just lost my mind like that, kicking my way into her house. She knew me, though. After everything else, she still knew me. It was a small thing, maybe, but it had been enough in that moment.

“Donny Ward,” Joe said. “The poor son of a bitch. Do you think it was Doran? You told him about Donny.”

“Doran already knew about him. I don’t know who it was, and I can’t worry about that now. It’s about Amy, Joe. She’s the only thing. I meant what I said back there—get Amy back, and I’ll turn myself in and let it go the course. But I can’t go to the police now. Not to turn myself in, or for help. That option was just eliminated.”

“I know.”

“More of that damn money,” I said. “They’re throwing away a lot of it just to set me up. Makes it seem they’re pretty confident about the chance of success with Karen.”

“This was supposed to be the trump card. I don’t think Doran and his partner wanted to show it so early.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is enough for the warrant, enough to put you in jail. After they get their money, it’s perfect—you command all the police attention, and they disappear. But to find Ward’s body so early doesn’t help them. It makes it impossible for you to maneuver with Karen, and they needed that.”

“If they know that . . . If they find out how useless I just became . . .”

“They could panic.”

We didn’t need more discussion of what panic meant while Amy was with them.

“We’ve got to find them before that happens and before they go for the money,” I said. “That’s the time frame, Joe. It’s that fast now.”

“It’s
too
fast, Lincoln, Marshals and cops have been looking for Doran for weeks. How are we going to find him in a few hours?”

“We’ll get help.”

“I agreed with that this morning, but if there’s an arrest warrant for you, then going to the police—”

“Not that kind of help. Not the police.”

“Then who are you thinking of?”

“Thor.”

I had no idea where to find him. Guys like Thor don’t list phone numbers in the book, and even if they did, I wasn’t sure of his last name. I’d seen it written only one time, on an FBI report, and it wasn’t the sort of name that you glanced at and remembered. Some bizarre collection of
K
’s and
V
’s and a dozen vowels, maybe? Without a full name, we’d have to go through his acquaintances, find someone who would be able to tell us how to locate him. Thor’s acquaintances tended not to be the sort of people you sought out if you cared about your health.

“We’ll try Belov,” I told Joe. Dainius Belov had offered help to us once in the past. It was the sort of offer you never wanted to need, but right now it might be our best hope.

“That house on Lake?”

“Only place I know to find him.”

He shook his head, not liking the idea.

“He can help, Joe,” I said. “If he’ll tell us how to find Thor, we can get the name of the man who put Jefferson in touch with him. The same person probably hooked Jefferson up with Doran’s partner. We get that much, we’ll find Doran’s partner, and then we’ll get Amy back.”

“Assuming we can find Thor, and assuming he’ll actually talk.”

“It’s what we’ve got. Maybe the only thing.”

“You understand who you’re counting on for help. He’s a killer. An enforcer for one of the worst criminals in this city.”

“We’ve got to get into this guy’s world, Joe. It’s also Thor’s world.”

Joe looked over his shoulder, made sure the lane was clear, and then accelerated onto 480 westbound. He didn’t offer any argument, didn’t say anything else for a long time.

I thought of her while Joe drove, the way she’d looked on the couch, how she slept with her hair over half of her face, breathing slow and deep. Was she awake now? Had they hurt her, knocked her out, drugged her? Was she bound and gagged, or was Doran sitting above her with his Colt Commander? I thought of the possibilities, and my chest tightened and my temples ached and things deep inside of me went cold.

An arrest warrant had been issued, a piece of paper that would send me to jail for murder, and that was somehow an afterthought in my mind. It caused me no fear when compared with Amy. If I could get her back from these bastards, the hell with the rest of it. Targent seemed like a good friend compared to Doran’s partner, that voice on the phone.

Joe’s driving—right at the speed limit—seemed impossibly slow, but I understood his reasoning. The last thing we could afford right now was to be pulled over for speeding. His car would soon be a risk anyhow. Targent would put Joe’s plate out on the radio eventually.

He drove us into the city, then came back to the west down the Cleveland Memorial Shoreway until we hit Lake Avenue. We didn’t have the address, but neither of us would struggle to locate the house, either. The only time we’d been inside, it had been in the company of Thor and another of Belov’s enforcers. Visits like that tend to stand out in your memory.

The big Victorian house looked the same, the home and grounds immaculate. I wondered if the neighbors knew what Belov did, or if they guessed about it—real estate, commodities broker, maybe?—while they ate dinner and looked out at his quiet estate and the stern-faced foreign men who visited.

We parked in the driveway and went up the walk and rang the bell. There wasn’t a sound from inside. Joe rang the bell again, and we gave it a few more minutes, but nothing happened. No one was home.

“He’s not here, and that means we’re in trouble,” Joe said. “I could go along
with you on the idea that Belov might put us in touch with Thor. But without him?”

“We’ll try the River Wild.” I turned and walked down the steps and back to the car.

Joe was still standing at the door, looking down at me. “Just walk through the door, clear your throat, and ask for Thor? In that place?”

The River Wild was a Russian-mob-controlled bar in the Flats, a strip club where Dainius Belov’s crew could often be found.

“You wearing a gun today?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

The River Wild was on the east bank of the Flats—the old warehouse district that had been converted into an area of restaurants, clubs, and nightlife. Many of those once successful businesses were gone now, the Flats having fallen on hard times yet again. The River Wild hung on, but it’s easier to do that when you’re backed by mob dollars.

The building’s windows were covered with faded gray boards so passersby wouldn’t get a free glimpse of the dancers inside, and the door had a chain looped through the handle but not locked. I slid the chain off and pulled the door open and stepped into the dim interior.

I’d never been inside the bar before, but I’d seen it once through a grainy surveillance camera. A camera that had recorded a murder. We entered into the wide main room, looking out over rows of tables at the base of a tall stage with four brass poles mounted in the center. There was a bar on the left and another across the room. A wall clock shaped like a pair of breasts ticked over our heads. No one was in sight, but there were voices in the building.

“There’s another room in back.”

“Yeah.” Joe didn’t say anything else, but I imagined he was thinking exactly what I was: The room in back was where the surveillance camera had caught the murder.

We crossed the empty room and went past the stage and the rear bar and found a set of twin doors beside it. The voices were louder now. I let my hand drift back to check the Glock, then shoved through the doors with Joe behind me.

Three men at a table and one standing, everybody turning with hostile looks when we entered. There were decks of cards on the table, but nobody
was playing; one cigar leaked a thin trail of smoke into the air. I didn’t know any of the men by name, but the one on his feet—a shorter guy with the flat face and beefy shoulders of a small, muscular dog—was familiar. I’d seen his photograph during a briefing with the FBI a year earlier.

“You got business here?” one of the guys at the table said. He had a deep cleft in his chin and steel-colored hair that clung to his head as if he’d just climbed out of a pool. “Or you in the wrong place, want to excuse yourselves and get the hell out?”

Joe moved around beside me, and now a chair creaked as the only man with his back to us turned all the way around.

“Looking for Thor,” I said, as if that were a perfectly normal thing for strangers to be doing in here.

The man on his feet said, “No Thor here, officers.”

“We’re not cops.”

“No? Then I won’t need to be polite again. Take off.”

He had the heavy Russian accent that Thor spoke so carefully to avoid. His nose was crooked, and there were scars above his lips and beside his eye, a face that had taken plenty of beatings and probably enjoyed every one, seeking the violence out like an alcoholic who’ll drive thirty miles to find an open bar for one more drink.

“We’re not cops,” I repeated, “and Thor knows us. So does Belov.”

“If you’re such good friends, you’d know how to find him.”

“Call him,” I said. “You get in touch with him, I’ll tell you my name, and you can let him make the decision. But I need to speak with him.”

“People who need to speak to Thor know how to find him, asshole. And if they don’t, and Thor needs to speak to them? He finds them. You get the idea? Now get out. We aren’t open yet, and this is a private room.”

I shook my head. “Maybe I’m not making myself clear. This matter I need to discuss, it’s the sort of thing that can get police involved. Thor finds out he could have avoided that, but then you screwed it up? I don’t think that’ll make him happy.”