Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (30 page)

“I’m on the highway about half an hour behind you.”

“What about Fabretti?” Emily said. “Aren’t you off the case?”

“I never heard him say that,” I said. “My ears are still ringing from that car bomb.”

“Mine, too, Mike,” Emily said with a laugh. “See you there.”

I hung up and asked Siri for directions and proceeded to put the pedal to the metal. I took the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge into the Bronx, then took the Bruckner to I-95.

It was coming on rush hour when I crossed into Connecticut and hit traffic. It was stop-and-go past Stamford when I saw the Chevy’s tank was almost empty, so I got off at the next exit and pulled into a BP gas station and filled up.

As I stood squeezing the nozzle, I looked at my phone and laughed when I saw that Fabretti had left twenty angry texts. Where the f are you? came his latest.

Taking a ride on the gravy plane, I texted back.

My phone rang a moment later.

“Hey, Robertson,” I said.

“Mike, big news!” he yelled. “We just got a bead on two Russians that might be our guys. Brooklyn and I have been going bonkers with these flight manifests, but we have two Russian immigrants who have been back and forth to Cape Verde from the States six times over the last year.

“Their names are Vladislav and Oleg Filipov. They’re father and son. Turns out they flew to Cape Verde out of Miami, not New York.”

“Miami?”

“Yes. The father, Vladislav, ran a brutal Russian prostitution and drug-dealing crew there for most of the eighties and nineties—allegedly, at least, since he never got caught for a damn thing. No fixed address.”

“What about the son?”

“We don’t have anything on him in terms of a record. He had a house in Queens up until six months ago, but since then, nothing. No address. No job. No visible means of support. I’m e-mailing you their photographs from their driver’s licenses as we speak. They could definitely be the guys on the video. One older, one younger. They’re looking good on this!”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Yevdokimov will be able to ID these guys once we catch up to him. Really good job, Robertson.”

I hung up and looked at the pictures of the two Russians. They didn’t have goatees in the pictures, but they both had lean, pale faces with sharp features and the same strong nose.

I left the pump still going and went inside to grab a Gatorade and some Pringles when I saw the clerk at the back of the store by the restrooms, standing with a mop by a pool of something that had spilled. I stopped in my tracks by a rack of magazines when I saw
what
he was mopping.

It looked like blood.

“Hey, what’s up, kid?” I said, rushing over. “Is that blood?”

“It ain’t tomato soup!” the blond college-age clerk said with a disgusted face. “Some guy was just in here, and when he leaves, the next customer comes out white as a ghost, screaming, ‘Ebola! Ebola!’ It looks like somebody hemorrhaged in here. I told my boss, and he said I should start mopping, but I don’t know. You think I should call the cops?”

“This bleeding guy, when was he here?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

I grabbed the mop out of his hand as I took out my shield.

“I am the cops. Show me the camera now!”

“EMILY, LISTEN!” I
screamed as I roared along the shoulder on I-95, scanning the stop-and-go traffic. “I just saw him! I just saw Yevdokimov on a gas-station video. I’m about five minutes behind him. He’s in a white Nissan Altima on Ninety-Five outside Stamford, heading north past exit ten. He’s probably heading toward you. New York plates two seven eight FRG. He’s bleeding heavily, and—”

I dropped the phone as I suddenly saw a white Altima ahead in the left lane. I drew alongside it across two lanes of traffic. I checked the plates. It was him.

“I see him!” I said to Emily as I snatched up the phone. “I’m on him. We’re between exits ten and eleven.”

“Stay on him, but wait for backup, Mike, before you try a traffic stop. Chuck’s on the horn with the Connecticut troopers. Hang back. We’re coming to you.”

A horn honked as I cut back into traffic, then Yevdokimov turned and saw me. He had some kind of bandage on his chin.

He immediately gunned it. He got out of the left lane ahead of the SUV in front of me. A second later, I saw him flash into the right lane and onto the shoulder, going for the exit ramp we were already passing.

At first it looked like he was going to make it, but then at the last second, he sideswiped the yellow water-barrel divider that cordoned off the exit ramp from the highway. I watched as he spun and hit the concrete divider on the other side of the exit with a horrible crunch of metal.

I got over to the right and braked and skidded to a stop on the shoulder and ran back toward the turned-around Altima, now almost completely blocking the exit.

I thought Yevdokimov was most certainly dead after this second incredibly violent incident of the day, so I was surprised when the passenger door opened and he staggered out.

“Down!” I yelled over the honking horns as I pointed my Glock at his head.

Because he was bleeding, I probably shouldn’t have cuffed and moved him, but we were in danger from the traffic, so I had no other choice.

I had him in my Chevy, down on his stomach in the backseat, while I was in the front passenger seat rifling through the glove compartment for the first aid kit, when the truck rear-ended us.

The passenger door was open, and I was thrown from the vehicle. It was the weirdest sensation of my life. One second I was sitting there reaching into the glove compartment, and the next I was out in the air banging the crap out of the back of my head as I skidded across asphalt.

I eventually ended up on a berm of newly mowed grass beside the shoulder. My head was ringing. I must have had a concussion. I felt numb as I lay on the grass facedown, not moving. I was definitely in shock.

Eventually I turned to look at my car.

We’d been hit by a big pickup, a Ford Super-something truck with an extended cab and a push bar in front and six wheels. Everything on it was black. The big tires and rims; the body; the tinted windows.

The two guys who climbed out of it were in black as well. They had ski masks on, and they rushed over and pulled Yevdokimov none too gently out of my smashed Chevy and put him into the cab of the truck.

Behind them, cars were just driving past normally. Some horns honked, but that was it. I couldn’t believe this was happening in broad daylight.

When I looked again, the guys in the ski masks were heading in my direction. That’s when I saw the guns they were carrying strapped over their shoulders—the nasty little black Heckler & Koch submachine guns that ESU guys have. I reached for my service weapon and drew air. That was not a great feeling. My Glock must have skidded loose when I was thrown.

I started backing up, scrabbling weakly on my unsteady feet on the grass. I couldn’t get my bearings. I felt off balance and floaty, like I was standing at the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool.

I thought that was it. They’d just shoot me. But instead they grabbed me and threw me back down onto the grass. I almost laughed. It was like we were all kids again, and they wanted to wrestle or play football right there on the side of I-95.

I didn’t feel like laughing anymore when one of them hit me hard across the side of my head with the metal top of the gun.

One of them was holding me down in a headlock and the other one was fishing for something in the pocket of his leather coat when the Connecticut state trooper vehicle skidded to a stop behind the truck.

“No!” I yelled as the two guys let go of me and without delay opened up on the gray police car.

I sat frozen, eyes closed, palming my ears as the two deafening Heckler & Kochs went off a foot from my face. When the gunfire ceased, I looked and saw that the patrol car’s windshield was now a smoking sheet of holes from the fifty rounds that had ripped through it in the space of five seconds.

As I tried to get up, they got me in a headlock again and slapped a wet cloth onto my face. It was really wet and clingy, like an antibacterial wipe. They smothered me with it. Stuck it in my nostrils. It felt like I was drowning. The smell of it was heavily astringent, medicinal, the scent of rubbing alcohol and something vaguely bitter.

The drug, whatever it was, was powerful. Almost immediately, I felt light-headed. The sky and traffic started fading in and out, like my eyes were on a dimmer switch some kid was playing with.

It took me a second to realize that I was being lifted again. I hardly felt it when my face slammed against the dirty carpet of the pickup a second or two later. I looked up at Yevdokimov sitting in the backseat above me with his eyes closed. Then I turned and, in my swimming vision, saw that my phone had fallen out of my jacket and bounced loose under the seat.

It felt like it was ten pounds as I pulled it out and looked around. There was a little alcove with a drink holder and maps in it beside Yevdokimov’s feet on the seat above me.

The front doors were popping open when, with my last bit of strength and consciousness, I reached up and dropped the phone in there and passed out.

I WOKE SOMETIME
later. I was on my back on a cold, hard floor. I felt hungover, nauseated—that bitter alcohol scent still coating the insides of my nostrils. When I opened my eyes, the light was agonizingly painful, and when I tried to move, I got the spins. So I closed my eyes and lay still. After about ten minutes, I opened my eyes again in little slits, giving them time to get used to the idea.

After a minute or two, I made out that I was in a cramped room with rough stone walls and a raw-drywall ceiling. It was lit by a shop light on the floor whose cord snaked along the ground and out under a cheap wooden door. Across from me along one wall was a huge, cheap-looking leather couch, above which hung a big plastic roll of what looked like industrial Hefty bags on a cylindrical metal holder attached to the wall.

What the hell is this place? I thought groggily. A crash hangout for a janitor?

There was a strong musty smell in the air, which could only mean a basement. It comforted me somehow as I lay there. It was a happy smell. Suburban families, popcorn and videos on sleepovers, board games on a rainy day.

Those visions imploded as I heard the horrendous screams start in the distance. There were three in a row. Three impassioned shrieks of someone in hysterical, unholy pain.

Get out now!
I told myself. But as I jumped up, it was like my feet had been pulled out from underneath me. I smacked the left side of my face pretty good on the concrete. What the hell? I thought. Then I looked down and felt like letting out some unholy screams myself as my mind kicked straight into adrenaline-pumping animal panic.

My left leg was handcuffed to an old galvanized steel heating pipe that was embedded in the concrete floor.

The door shot open. One of the ski-masked guys walked in. He had his jacket off and was wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt. Behind him came a second ski-masked guy wearing an army-green long-sleeved T-shirt, dragging something heavy.

He was dragging Yevdokimov, I realized a moment later. The Russian was naked and very dead. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone more dead. His face and arms and chest looked like they’d been worked on by a very motivated demolition crew. There didn’t seem to be a part of him that wasn’t black or blue or covered in blood.

The second guy walked over and, with a squeak, wheeled off a huge sheet of plastic over the couch. He slit the plastic off the roll with a box cutter that he pulled from his pocket, then the two of them lifted Yevdokimov up and tossed him onto the plastic-covered couch, wrapping him up like the largest, sorriest fish in the history of the world.

They taped the ends with a roll of duct tape they produced from beneath the couch, and when they were done they lifted him up like a rug and dropped him on the floor. The black-shirted guy sat down on the couch and put his feet on Yevdokimov like he was an ottoman. Then his buddy joined him.

Robertson was right, I saw as they peeled off their ski masks. It was Vladislav and Oleg Filipov.

I’ll have to congratulate Robertson, I thought. If I ever see him again.

Father and son Filipov sat there staring at me with their pale, sharp, nasty-looking faces and their feet up on Yevdokimov, not saying anything. Staring back, I’d never been so afraid in my life. My heart beat against my chest like that of a rat trapped in a corner, and when I swallowed, I realized that I didn’t have any saliva in my mouth.

THE OLDER GUY
started laughing.

“And how are you?” he said in a deep Russian accent as he laboriously stood up. “Here. I have something for you.”

The old man took something out of his black cargo-pants pocket. It was a two-foot piece of flex pipe with a sharp-looking fist-size chunk of metal on the end of it. The metal part was a heavy brass hose bibb, I realized as he came forward and whipped me over the top of the head with the metal flail.

As I sat up, I felt a trickle of blood drip down from my scalp, a warm rivulet that fell over my forehead, along the side of my nose, over my closed lips, and off my chin. “Do you like my cop-be-good stick?” he said as I sat there in agony. “It’s the whipping action of the flex pipe that really delivers the groceries. I also love the way it smashes and cuts at the same time. All without putting too much strain on my wrist. I’m older and must consider such things. You will cooperate with us now.”

I glanced into my tormentor’s cold brown eyes as my skull throbbed.

“So here we are,” said the cruel prick as he sat down and crossed his legs on Yevdokimov’s body. “You wished to find us, yes, Mr. NYPD? Well, be careful what you wish for.”

“Aren’t you going to ask us who we are?” said the younger guy—the one in the green T-shirt—who, unsurprisingly, had a Russian accent as well.