From Manhattan with Revenge (The Fourth Book in the Fifth Avenue Series) (20 page)

Sitting there, stunned by the news, she
knew that now she only had Katzev’s family to use as a bargaining chip against
him. But already she knew that wasn’t much. What she saw in that video was a
family struggling to keep it together. With Katzev’s money, why weren’t they in
a better situation? Had he refused to help them? Obviously, he had. They meant
little to him, including his mother, whom he could have set up with a better
life if he wanted to do so.

Worse for Carmen, if they did mean nothing
to him, would it matter if she threatened to kill them? And if it didn’t, what
pull did she have over him now?

* * *

“Where are you meeting Katzev tonight?”
Jake asked.

“I’m not sure,” Carmen said. “Vincent said
he’d find out by the time he landed.”

“You know you can’t go there alone.”

“I’m not going there alone. I’m going with
Vincent.”

“I should be there,” he said. “Katzev will
have his own people there, wherever ‘there’ is. It’s not going to be just him.”

“Probably not, but I can’t risk it. At the
very least, I need to get Chloe out of there. You don’t understand what she
means to me. She’s like a daughter to me. She’s in that situation because of
me. Whatever happens to me happens. My main focus is getting her out and
following Vincent’s plan.”

“Even if you die?”

“Even if I die.”

He looked at her with disappointment, as
if that fact that she’d choose her death to save someone else’s life was an
affront to his ideals as an assassin. “I’m not exactly an amateur, Carmen. They
won’t see or hear me. Let me help you.”

What Carmen wanted to say but didn’t say
is that she still didn’t trust him. She still didn’t know who he was. He was an
enigma to her. Since they’d been together, he had shared almost nothing about
himself. Who was he? What did she know about this man that was meaningful?
Nothing. There had been opportunities for him to offer a glimpse into who he
was when they were conferencing with Babe, but he chose to remain behind a
shadow of his own making.

Part of her understood that. It’s what
they were supposed to do—keep quiet. Reveal nothing. He was honoring his
profession. She got it. But she would feel a hell of a lot better if she knew
something real about him.

She looked at him. He said he had no idea
why the syndicate wanted him dead. Was that the truth? She wasn’t sure, if only
because he came clean that he agreed to sell her out to them in an effort to
buy time to get out of the city and thus save himself. Would he do so again? Of
course, he would. Worse, if she was in his situation, she’d do the same thing,
which complicated things. To their core, survival was at the root of who they
were. It’s all they had. To keep going, to stay alive, they had to put
themselves first. How could she judge him for any of this when she likely would
have done the same thing in that situation?

Frustrated with her, he leaned back in his
seat and crossed his legs, removing himself from any further conversation. She
felt conflicted. Was she making a mistake by not seeking his help? She wasn’t
sure, but what she did know is that the man seated in front of her was someone
she could never trust the way she trusted Spocatti.

CHAPTER TWE
NTY-FIVE

Time passed and it passed slowly. How long
had she been here now? A day? More than a day? Probably more than a day, though
it felt like three. Maybe longer, but she knew that wasn’t true. They’d yet to
feed her, though when she asked, they did allow her to use the bathroom, which
was just across from her, and they did allow her to use the water fountain next
to the restroom when she said she was thirsty.

Each time they allowed her freedom beyond
the chair, they gave her opportunities they couldn’t understand. They had
dismissed her because of her age. They had no idea what she had seen in her
life, what she had been through or how she had survived as long as she had in a
world that seemed determined to conspire against her.

Chloe Philips, brought to St. Vincent’s
when she was eight, looked at things differently than most because she had a
worldview that was different from most. She looked for the advantage, whatever
might give her the edge should she need it, which often was the case on the
streets, especially when you were as relentlessly bullied as she was.

In her case, she was bullied because
everyone at her school considered her the freak no one wanted, the girl who had
failed to be adopted, unlike her sister, Mia, who found a family in a matter of
months. Not so for Chloe. For eight years, she had been passed over time and
again by dozens of families seeking a child of their own, and as such, she was
considered broken. Worthless. At school, she was reminded of that daily.

The only person who alleviated the shame
and burden that came from all of this was Carmen, whom she loved and who was
the only reason she hoped to survive now. What they said about her being an
assassin was a lie. She decided she didn’t believe it. She wanted her
relationship to continue with Carmen, who had been nothing but good to her, so
she decided she would make an effort for that to happen.

Within reason.

Here, in this museum of grossly expensive
cars, of which there had to be sixty or more, all gleaming under a single
spotlight strategically placed above them, she’d seen a few opportunities on
her way to the bathroom and to the water fountain that gave her a trace of hope
that she might be able to shake things up in her favor.

Keeping her face a stoic mask, she had
started to process those opportunities in ways that might help her to escape
should a window open and present a wedge of freedom to her. Not that she
expected that to happen. In her life, windows didn’t open. Things always seemed
sealed shut.

Knowing that, she knew herself well enough
to know that she wouldn’t be kept like an animal forever, regardless of how
much she cared for Carmen and wanted to see her again. She wasn’t afraid of
taking risks—or facing her own death, for that matter, which she thought
would have happened years ago when her mother brought home that idiot who
struck her with a frying pan and did other unspeakable things to her and her
sister.

But she also knew how to be calculating
when it made sense to do so. As it did now.

The warehouse in which they kept her held
two possibilities for a way out. She’d seen the exit, which was to her right
and probably twenty yards away. Was it locked? Of course it was, but that
didn’t mean under the right circumstances it couldn’t become unlocked.
 

Still, accomplishing that would be
difficult, if not impossible, which is why she liked her other choice better,
the one that involved using her mouth, the box she noticed on an earlier trip
to the bathroom and how each of those, coupled with the Russian’s precious
sports car collection, could be used to get her the hell out of here.

When they first arrived, the Russian
employed two armed men to guard her. But as the hours passed and the men grew
restless, they suggested in front of her that they should take turns watching her.
They asked the Russian if this was acceptable, he agreed to it, and now one of
the guards was resting somewhere in the rear of the warehouse. From where she
sat, she had no idea where he was because the space was too deep. She couldn’t
see him, which likely would become an issue.

The man at her right had been with her for
several hours. A rifle was slung over his left shoulder. He held a gun in his
right hand, which was perhaps a foot away from her. Maybe less. As for the
Russian, he was working his phone, calling people, pacing between his cars,
looking agitated, while cooking up a plan she supposed had to do with her.

She reached up her cuffed hands to brush
her hair out of her face. The guard standing beside her looked down, then
looked away. He was a brute—tall and built, his broad chest straining
against his black T-shirt—but he was starting to look fatigued to her,
which was good so long as he didn’t decide it was time to wake his buddy and
tell him that it was his turn to watch her. If that happened, she’d have
someone refreshed standing beside her. More alert. She decided that if she was
going to do this, she needed to act soon, because she feared if she didn’t,
things would be more difficult for her.

What the man standing beside her didn’t
know is that each time she lifted her hands to her face or bent down to scratch
an itch that didn’t exist on her ankle or calf is that she was seeing how much
range of motion she had with her hands cuffed in front of her.

It wasn’t ideal—she couldn’t reach
her back, for instance—but she expected that and it wasn’t much of an
issue when it came to pulling off what she had in mind.

She looked over at the Russian, who paced
in front of his fancy cars while talking on his phone some thirty feet away to
her right. Did he have a gun? She wasn’t sure. When he was near her earlier,
she couldn’t see any signs of one, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one
concealed beneath the jacket he wore.

She listened to his conversation and
wondered who was on the other line. He was giving directions to the warehouse
and for the first time, she knew where she was. She was in Hell’s Kitchen on
West Forty-Sixth Street, right off Eleventh Avenue near the Hudson.

The irony that she was in Hell wasn’t lost
on her.

“It’s better that we do it here,” she
heard him say. “Here makes sense. The girl’s here. Also, Carmen doesn’t know I
own this space. It will seem like neutral ground to her. You need to bring her
here.”

There was a silence while he listened.
“That’s fine,” he said. “How soon before you can have her here?” Silence. “I’ll
see you both in an hour. I like your plan, Vincent, but you need to be mindful
of the cars. My collection is here. When you arrive, you’ll see cars everywhere
and I don’t want anything to happen to them. Is that clear? Nothing can happen
to them. When you take them down, I want it to be quick and clean, with nothing
happening to my cars. That’s right. They’re that expensive. And fuck you on
whether I have them insured.”

He severed the connection, pulled out a
pack of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket, and it was then that Chloe
saw the holster and his gun. He lit one of the cigarettes, exhaled over his
head in a plume of billowing blue smoke that crowned one of the lights, and
took to his phone again. He was so deep in thought as he tapped out numbers
that she knew if she didn’t act now, she’d miss her moment.

It all came down to timing. Everything did
in life. She learned that when she left her mother, which probably saved her
life. Could she beat death twice?

Time to find out.

Resolved to go forward, her heart
quickened in her chest. Adrenaline cut through her like spears, pricking every
part of her until she felt fully alive in the face of death. She took a breath,
thought it through, memorized the space again, and then acted.

She reached down as if to scratch her
ankle, glanced to her right, saw the guard’s bare arm holding the gun at his
side—and then she made her move as quickly and as viciously as possible.

In a flash, Chloe Philips’s teeth were
buried in the man’s forearm. With everything she had in her, she sank her teeth
in deep, she met bone, she carved through the thick muscle and tore off a piece
of his forearm. She spat it out on the floor, felt blood gush into her mouth
and willed herself not to get sick from the sheer amount she swallowed and
which now covered her. Stunned by the act, the man dropped his gun, which Chloe
picked up just as he was about to kick it across the floor.

Instead, his foot connected with her left
shoulder, which seemed to crumble due to the sheer momentum behind the kick,
but not before she had the gun held clumsily in her hands and stuck out in
front of her. He shouted out in rage and in pain, and then for help, but Chloe
Philips, born to the streets and bullied for much of her sad, rotten life, knew
she had him even before she aimed shakily at his head and put a bullet through
his throat.

Surprise filled his eyes. He looked
genuinely shocked when he fell to his knees, which cracked from the force of
the fall. Blood spurted onto the concrete floor. He covered the wound with his
hand, but since Chloe hit his carotid artery, there was no saving him or
stopping the rush of blood that pulsed through his fingers now.

She was aware of movement on either side
of her. Katzev and the other guard. Time was of the essence even though time
had seemed to stop.
 

For the moment, there was one thing left
to do.

In spite of the pain in her shoulder,
Chloe rolled onto her stomach and looked at the metal box attached to the wall
at the far right of the water fountain. It was the breaker box. Had to be,
given all the thick wires sinking into it and snaking out of it. Just as Katzev
lifted his gun at her, Chloe took aim at the box, put a bullet through it, and
winced as sparks flew into the room.