The Stolen Ones (31 page)

VOLOVOI RODE THE ELEVATOR
to the lobby. Saw the carnage as soon as the doors slid open. The doorman lying dead behind his desk. The shattered front entrance, bloody footprints in the shrapnel glass. More blood on the walls, on the marble floor, a massacre site. But no sign of the Dragon or the girl.

Outside, police sirens. Flashing lights. Volovoi limped into the lobby and eyed the empty doorway, saw two FBI agents standing over a body on the sidewalk, gesturing down the street. It was the Dragon’s body. The fool had chased Catalina Milosovici right into their bullets.

Volovoi ducked out of the doorway as more police cruisers screamed to a halt outside on Park Avenue. The cavalry was arriving. The Dragon was dead. The police would have the neighborhood in lockdown soon enough.

His pistol was hot in his hand, slick with blood and sweat. Volovoi contemplated his escape. His next move. His last move, perhaps.

He could go out shooting. Step into the doorway and raise the pistol and attempt to kill as many of the FBI insects as he possibly could, blast a path to the BMW at the curb and try to muscle his way out through the cordon of police cars. No doubt, the FBI agents and their NYPD companions would cut him down where he stood. There were too many of them. The BMW was parked too far away. It would not be a prudent course of action.

And anyway, the Dragon was dead. Volovoi felt a sudden freedom, a weight lifted from his chest. He imagined his life without the gangster watching over his shoulder, without the bastard’s hand in his wallet. A life without worry. A second chance.

Volovoi realized he didn’t want to die, not tonight. He wanted to get the hell out of Manhattan and try again.

He turned away from the front doors. Crossed the marble floor to an interior doorway, and followed a long, narrow hall through the bowels of the building to a rear exit and a quiet, tree-lined courtyard. He was limping. His heart was a runaway train. He was bleeding everywhere, and he was dizzy as shit. He would slip free from the police cordons. He would hijack a car. He would find a way out of Manhattan.

He would fucking survive.

Wouldn’t he?

Volovoi navigated the courtyard, past the high-rises that neighbored the DuPont and back through the shadows and away from the sirens and the shouting and the chaos, until the courtyard doglegged and he came to a little gate and, beyond it, Seventy-seventh Street.

He pushed the gate open. Stepped out onto Seventy-seventh Street, a narrow, leafy roadway lined with parked cars and off-duty ambulances. There was a hospital, he remembered, a few buildings down. Nurses and bandages and medicine—and he, outside, with serious wounds, and no time to tend to them now.

The street was quiet. To his right, on Park Avenue, hell was breaking loose. Police cars screamed up. Voices shouted. High above, a helicopter. But Seventy-seventh Street was dark, and the noises were muted. Volovoi stood in the shadows and surveyed the block. Then he heard her.

Thin, gasping breathing. Feet slapping the sidewalk. A hushed cry of pain with almost every step. The sounds of a scared teenage girl, a girl who’d walked on broken glass to escape her captors.

Catalina Milosovici was across the street, in the shadows, barely twenty feet away.

Volovoi watched her, had an idea. The girl had been trouble for him for days. Now she would be his ticket to freedom, his hostage. He hoisted the pistol and clutched the jacket around his wounds. Started across the street to intercept her.

“AROUND THE CORNER.”

Stevens and Windermere left the remains of the Dragon in the hands of the NYPD uniforms now arriving on-scene. Pistols in hand, they ran for Seventy-seventh.

Be okay,
Stevens urged Catalina as he searched the Park Avenue sidewalk for any sign of her.
Just hold out. You’re almost safe
.

At least the girl wasn’t bleeding out beneath a parked car on Park. Stevens and Windermere reached Seventy-seventh Street with no sign of her, and Stevens hoped that meant the Dragon hadn’t shot her. Meant she was still alive, still okay.

“Catalina,”
he called down the street. No response. “Shit,” he said, turning to Windermere. “You see her?”

Windermere squinted into the darkness. Then he heard her gasp, and followed her eyes to the sidewalk.

Blood. Fresh blood.

Shit.

HER FEET WERE KILLING HER.

Every step felt like a hundred more knives. The sidewalk was gritty and hard, her feet bloody and raw. Catalina wanted to scream. She kept quiet. She knew the Dragon would find her.

She stopped in the shadows to try and wipe the grit from her feet. Tried to tear the hem of the T-shirt to make some kind of protection. The fabric was thin, but it wouldn’t tear. Her hands were slick with blood. She was shaking with fear.

She had to keep moving.

She crept out of the shadows and hurried down the block. There were ambulances beside her, dark and empty. A bright light up ahead, a red cross. A hospital. They would have police there probably. They would protect her.

The light seemed miles away. She heard voices behind her, police sirens. She didn’t dare look back. Didn’t dare turn around. She moved forward. Kept running. Fought to reach the light.

A police car pulled up to the hospital entrance. A police officer got out, a fat man with a mustache, a kind-looking man. Catalina ran toward him.
“Halp,”
she cried out.
“Halp me, please
.
”

The police officer stiffened and reached for his gun. Saw her emerge from the shadows, and picked up the radio on his collar instead. Then the world blew up behind her.

The cop’s eyes went wide. He looked down at his shirt, at the crimson blossoms that had appeared on his blues. Catalina threw herself sideways as more shots burst out. This was a different gun than the Dragon’s; it was louder, slower, but more powerful. A big weapon. Deadly. Catalina crawled between an ambulance and the police officer’s cruiser, heard gunshots echo on the building walls around her.

The shooter was behind her. She could hear him approaching, knew she couldn’t stay still. She gripped the knife tight and contemplated an ambush. Knew she didn’t stand a chance against his gun.

Quiet as she could, she crept toward the street. Dodged around the police cruiser, her head down, her knees scraping the pavement. She reached the front of the car and glanced back as the shooter lurched forward, steadying himself against the ambulance.

It was not the devil-faced Dragon. It was the other man. The silent one. Volovoi.

She wondered what had happened to the Dragon, if he was still hunting her, too. She imagined both men stalking her on this narrow, dark street. Imagined escaping the Dragon only to wind up in the arms of this other man.

Behind Volovoi, far up the street, police lights and sirens. Loud shouting. She’d heard gunshots behind her as she’d run from the apartment building. A police car screeching to a halt. Maybe the police had killed the Dragon. Maybe only Volovoi remained.

If that was the case, then Volovoi was the only man who knew how to save the other girls. If he died, Dorina and the others would disappear. They would suffer the fate she’d escaped, with men as evil as the Dragon.

She would have to disarm him. Knock his gun away, and force him to tell her where the Dragon had moved the girls. She would have to hurt him.

Volovoi was coming closer. The police car sagged from his weight as he leaned on it, limping his way out into the street. Catalina crouched as low as she could, realized too late she was as good as naked in the light from the hospital doors. He would see her instantly. There would be no surprise.

She pulled herself to her feet. Heard Volovoi’s breath catch as he saw her, heard his pistol boom again. Then she was running.

STEVENS WAS HALFWAY DOWN
the block when the shooting started. He ducked behind a car as muzzle flashes lit up the dark block. Felt Windermere slam down beside him.

“Another shooter,” she said. “Where the hell’d he come from?”

Stevens peered over the car. “Wherever it was, he brought a hell of a gun.”

They searched the darkness for the shooter. Saw shadows moving against a patch of bright light up ahead.

“He wasn’t shooting at us,” Windermere said, “was he?”

Stevens shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

She was already running. “So what are we waiting for?”

CATALINA RAN,
zagging into the shadows, her feet screaming again. Ahead was a busy intersection, more light. Behind her, the silent man.

He’d stopped shooting. The policeman lay dead in front of her, and up the street, where she’d come from, were more voices, shouting, more sirens. The silent man, though, Volovoi, had stopped shooting.

Maybe he’d run out of bullets.

Catalina ducked behind another parked car and peeked back at him. He stood on the sidewalk, unsteady, his breathing slow and ragged. He barely moved. He was injured, she realized. He looked close to death. He would die from his wounds, or he would lurch all the way to that next crowded intersection, and a police officer would see him and shoot him there. All she had to do was stay hidden a few minutes longer and fate would run its course. She was free.

Her parents were safe. Irina was safe.

Catalina Milosovici was safe.

But Dorina wasn’t.

The other girls weren’t.

Catalina stood. Her feet burned beneath her. Her legs ached. Her knees bled. She steadied herself on the parked car, careful not to make noise. Gripped the knife in her hand and inched out of the shadows.

>   >   >

VOLOVOI LEANED AGAINST
a parked Buick and gripped his pistol. Tried to focus his eyes where the light caught the slick steel. His vision was blurry; his whole brain unfocused. He was hurt worse than he’d thought. He needed a rest.

The police were everywhere now. He’d given away his position when he’d shot the city cop, and now the whole circus was coming. NYPD. FBI. A helicopter roared by overhead, its searchlight painting the whole street with light.

He would die here, he realized. The Dragon was dead and his nieces were alive. Surely that should be enough.

Fast footsteps behind him, the police approaching. Volovoi thought about going out shooting, about taking down as many police officers as he could before their bullets felled him. He thought about raising the pistol to his mouth and eating his last bullet instead. He was tired. His thoughts were slow and foggy. He was still mulling the question when Catalina Milosovici stepped out of the shadows.

“Not so fast
.
”
She had the Dragon’s knife gripped tight in her hand. “Don’t you die yet,
bulangiu
.”

CATALINA ADVANCED ON VOLOVOI,
her knife at the ready. He was holding his big pistol, but it dangled from his hand, useless. He was in no condition to use it.

Volovoi looked at her sadly. Looked up the block as red and blue light filled the shadows. The police would be here in seconds, she knew. They would take the man away, or they would kill him. They would not know how to find Dorina.

“Don’t you die,” she said, holding up the knife, showing him the long blade. “Don’t you die until I say.”

Volovoi didn’t answer, and she saw something different in his eyes, something like regret. For a moment, she slowed her advance. Then she shook it off. She’d believed the thug who’d kept her in the box was human, too, and he’d tried to kill her in the end.

“The other girls,” she said. “Tell me where they are, or I’ll stab your guts out.”

Volovoi let out a ragged cough. He slumped against the parked car and didn’t say anything.

Catalina held up the knife. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where they are, or I’ll hurt you, you coward
.
”

But Volovoi didn’t answer. He dropped his pistol. Then he dropped to the ground.

Catalina flew at him. Landed on top of him, pinned him. He was weak now. He was minutes from death. She felt useless, consumed by frustration.

“Tell me,”
she said, hammering his chest with her fists.
“Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

>   >   >

VOLOVOI BARELY FELT
the girl’s punches. She was shouting in his face, questions about the other women. Pavel’s collection of prizes.

They would die in their warehouse, he knew. Tomas would abandon them to save his own skin, would leave them locked in the basement until they all starved to death. They would die, every one of them, and at last the Dragon’s Manhattan project would be finished.

The girl held her knife to his cheek. “I’ll hurt you,” she told him. “You’re not dead yet.”

There was determination in her eyes. Anger and urgency, and behind it all, fear. She was barely more than a child. She should have been playing with dolls, or walking her little dog, or whatever else it was teenage girls did. Instead, he’d put her into the box. He’d brought her here. He’d turned her from a child into this angry ball of fury and desperation, itching to kill him.

Volovoi pictured Veronika and Adriana, one last time. Imagined their innocence stolen away. Felt a sudden sickness as he realized that no matter how many Dragons died, how many Volovois, there would always be more men to take their place. There would always be predators lusting after his nieces. And he wouldn’t be around to protect them.

He looked up at Catalina Milosovici. Wondered if she would ever regain what he’d stolen from her. Felt his energy slipping away, and closed his eyes.

“The warehouse,” he told her. “The girls are in the warehouse.”

>   >   >

CATALINA FELT VOLOVOI DYING.
She pressed the knife harder against his skin. “What warehouse?” she said. “Where is the warehouse?
Where are the other girls?
”

Volovoi opened his mouth. Spat, burbled blood, tried to speak. Catalina pressed her ear to his mouth. Strained desperately to hear the man’s answers.

She never got the chance.

Suddenly there were arms around her, picking her up and sweeping her away from the man. Police officers. A man. She fought him, kicked at him, screamed, struggled to free herself from his grip. But the cop was bigger than she was, and much stronger, and he carried her away swiftly and spoke English to her, words she gathered were supposed to be soothing.

“Let me go, you big dumb oaf,”
she told him in Romanian, but he ignored her cries. Kept pulling her away.

Volovoi coughed blood on the sidewalk. He made a choking sound, spasmed and went limp again, and then she knew he was gone. He was dead, and Catalina could do nothing but rage at the cop who held her, whose stupidity had just killed thirty girls.

No matter how much she kicked and punched, though, how hard she struggled, the cop wouldn’t release her. He wouldn’t let her go.