The Venetian Judgment (35 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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Still on her hands and knees, her shoulders shaking, she looked at him, her eyes smeared with running mascara.
“No. Shoot me here.”
He walked over, grabbed her by the shoulder, jerked her to her feet.
“Anybody else here?”
Gretel shrugged, but now there was a blankness in her face that had not been there before. He pushed her ahead of him, and they went through the warehouse together. There
was
no one else there, and most of the space was empty except for a card table and a cot, where Dalton figured the young soldier he had just killed had slept, and a large rusty fish freezer, still muttering away, where the kid probably kept his food and beer. Next to the cot was an ammunition box, open, full of shells for the shotgun. Dalton, reloading the weapon and filling his pockets with spare shells, saw something sticking out from under the cot, a black triangle of wood. He used his shoe to drag it out from under the bed and found himself looking into the eyes of the President of the United States, the glass shattered, as if the picture had been stepped on. The President grinned up at Dalton, apparently delighted to see him. Dalton kicked the frame back under the cot and walked away.
He found a small, windowless room in a far corner that looked as if it had just been built. The exterior walls were made of new spruce two-by-fours, carelessly hammered together, obviously hasty construction. There was a solid-steel door set into one wall, with a heavy glass window reinforced with chicken wire in it. Dalton looked through the glass, saw a steel table, a wooden chair behind it, a lightbulb hanging down over the table. The table was covered with circular brown stains where coffee cups once sat, and there was a large glass ashtray in the middle overflowing with cigarette butts.
Dalton stepped away, walked back to Gretel, who stood in the middle of the warehouse, her shoulders slumped, staring dully at him. He pulled her over to the cot, pushed her down onto it.
Her eyes grew very wide.
“Hey, I’m not going to rape you, lady. That’s a Russian thing.”
He found some wire left over from the construction of the little room and trussed her up as gently as he could and left her there. He went back to the door, tripped the light switch on the outside.
A lightbulb, large and painfully bright inside its wire cage, came on, casting a harsh glare all over the room. Dalton opened the door slowly, looking right and left and above, before he entered.
The interior of the room had been walled with thick panels of Sheetrock and then painted institutional colors—pale green over dark green—and had been treated with something to make the walls look old and dirty. The windowless room smelled of cigarette smoke, stale urine . . . and blood.
On the left-side wall, about halfway up from the floor, there was a large black-spattered stain with bits of lumpy material stuck here and there, mainly in the center. Dalton touched the stain, looked at his finger. It was blood, all right . . . old blood.
The table was made of steel and had been bolted to the floor, and the chair behind it was also screwed down tight. There were U-bolts set into the concrete, as if whoever sat here had been chained to the chair. He sat down in the chair, looked around the room from that perspective, and saw a small grate in one corner of the room at ceiling level.
He leaned forward and picked one of the cigarette butts out of the pile of ash. An American cigarette, he realized, a Camel filtertip. He rolled the cigarette between his fingertips. It was still soft, the filter stained almost black.
Whatever had happened here, it had happened a while back, maybe a month ago, maybe less. He got up, went outside, got a chair, and used it to take a closer look at the grating in the wall. He could see that something had been screwed in place there, probably a camera.
Dalton stepped back down, walked around the walls.
“They made this room look like a police interview room, Gretel. Why did they do that? Who was in this room?”
Gretel said nothing, lying on the cot, her eyes closed.
Dalton looked at her for a while, knowing that he wasn’t going to get anything out of her without force and not quite ready to use it. He stood in the empty space, trying to get a sense of what had been going on here. The warehouse was probably leased, but by whom? The Russian trade mission? But now that Dalton was burning up their network, they were dismantling everything and pulling back. But to where?
Kerch?
A sudden wave of exhaustion rolled over him. He hadn’t slept since they had flown into Santorini. How long ago was that? A week? A day? He drew in a long breath, and that
scent
was there, faint, hard to detect under the stale cigarette smoke and the reek coming from the bathroom on the seawall side. Where was it coming from?
He followed the smell across the room, ending up by the fish freezer near the sliding steel doors that opened out onto the wharf. He stood over it for a while, staring down at the rust-streaked lid, at the thin stream of brown water running out from underneath it and pooling by the sliding doors. He looked back at Gretel Pinskoya and found her staring back at him, her expression fixed and white.
“What’s in here, Gretel?”
He didn’t expect an answer. He opened the lid. A white fog rose up from the inside of the freezer. Huddled there, wrapped in what looked like a tattered American flag, was the frozen corpse of a young girl, her black eyes wide and glazed with hoarfrost as she stared upward at him, her mouth a little open as if she had died struggling for air. The left side of her skull had been blown open by some sort of heavy round. There was a star-shaped entrance wound on the right side of her skull, which meant that the weapon that killed her had been pressed right up against it when the trigger was squeezed. She was wearing jeans and a thin T-shirt, and her blond hair, stiff with blood and matted in a frozen tangle, looked fake, tawdry. She had been crying when she died: her fogged eyes were streaked with black. She may have been thrown into the freezer moments after she died. What looked like tear tracks were still visible on her cheeks, thin silvery trails running sideways down her face. He turned around and went back over to stand beside Gretel Pinskoya, no longer feeling quite so chivalric.
“Gretel, what the
hell
have you people been up to?”
She stared up at him, shook her head several times.
“I had nothing to do with . . . that.”
He was about to describe to her what he was going to do to assist her memory when he heard a big boat engine, deep and powerful, muttering, burbling, closing in on the other side of the steel doors that opened onto the wharf—Levka and Mandy with the
Subito
?
How did they know he’d be—he heard a big bolt racked back, a sound he knew too damned well—and hit the concrete just as whatever was on the other side of that steel wall opened up. There was a deep shuddering roar and a hail of large-caliber bullets that shredded the doors, the air full of the clatter and hammer of the rounds zipping and zinging around inside the warehouse like bees. He could feel the thudding chatter of the machine-gun rounds striking the concrete in a shower of red sparks, a row of rounds stitching sparks across the floor. The slugs found Gretel cowering on the cot, tearing her to bloody bits in a split second.
The weapon tracked on, sweeping back and forth, pouring hundreds of rounds into the side of the warehouse, ripping the building apart. Daylight was streaming in through hundreds of holes in the doors and walls. A spray of rounds caught the freezer and ripped it to shards, spilling the torn carcass of the young woman stiffly out onto the floor.
Another slicing ribbon of rounds caught her and chipped away at her like someone hammering a block of ice, parts of her skittered across the concrete, spinning crazily like ice cubes across a bar.
Dalton belly-crawled across the floor, feeling a ribbon of lead chattering up the floor inches from his hip, stinging pain as chips of concrete tore into his flesh, still crawling, ears ringing.
He could see the door into the parking lot, see the body of the man he had killed, dead but jumping and jerking as stray rounds and ricochets pumped into his corpse. Dalton grabbed the frozen girl, his hands slick, and shoved it in the line of fire between him and the machine gun out there, huddled behind it, feeling rounds chipping the ice, trying to make himself as small as what was left of her.
By now, the steel doors of the warehouse were hanging on their hinges, and he could see a large fishing trawler idling just beyond the wharf and a man in the cabin, gritting his teeth as he worked a Russian PK machine gun.
The machine gun chattered to a halt—a jam, time to change out a superheated barrel, or the end of the belt—and the silence was stunning, immense. The gunner took a moment to toss a satchel charge through a rent in the steel, and it skimmed across the floor and slammed into the far wall, its fuse hissing white smoke.
Dalton scooped up the KS shotgun, racking the slide as he got to his feet, charged at the hanging steel doors. The gunner looked up from the breech—he’d been trying to change out a hot barrel. Dalton raised the KS shotgun and blew the man’s head into pink mist.
Behind Dalton, the satchel charge blew, and a white-hot flower of phosphorus opened up behind him, the sudden blast of heat scorching his neck and shoulders. Whoever was at the wheel shouted something in Russian, and the trawler heaved around and powered away, leaving a deep white wake as the props dug in. Dalton got a glimpse of the name painted across the stern:
.
He ran out onto the wharf just as the warehouse caught fire, fired off five more slugs, the heavy shotgun bucking in his grip as splinters flew off the stern boards.
A navigation light shattered in a spray of red glass, and three ragged holes punched into the boards just at the waterline. The pilot pushed the throttle to max, and the stern buried itself deep into the Bosphorus, heading at speed for the open water of the Black Sea.
Dalton heard a klaxon horn sounding from the river on his right, saw the huge blue bow of the
Subito
plowing directly toward him, white wings curling out on either side of the cutwater, Mandy out on the bow with a line, Levka’s white face behind the helm in the cabin.
Levka wheeled the boat into a sharp curve to starboard as the cruiser heeled dangerously and white water boiled up along her port side. Mandy staggered, caught herself on the railing, the
Subito
rushing in past the wharf, her engines thudding, Mandy racing along the rail, her wide gray eyes fixed on Dalton. Levka reversed the motors, and Dalton, holding the shotgun in one hand, his eyes on Mandy, set himself . . . and jumped.
GARRISON
THE TACONIC, NORTHBOUND
Brocius, doing a hundred miles per hour northbound on the Taconic, hurtling through a blinding snow squall, caught a glimpse of the bright green I-84 exit sign and nearly put the rented Escalade in the ditch as he swerved across the lanes just in time to lean it into a long right-hand-curving loop and up onto the westbound lanes.
He had picked up the Escalade at La Guardia, intending to take Highway 6 westbound at Shrub Oak, which would put him on 9D, the highway that ran parallel to the Hudson just north of Peekskill, but when he reached the turnoff there was a New York State trooper patrol car parked across the ramp. Highway 6 was closed due to heavy snow coming down from the Hudson Highlands. He had been forced to take the long way around, going north to 84 and then west to connect with Route 9 north of Garrison.
Settling back into a steady seventy—the highway was oddly empty at this midmorning hour, and a major snowpack was building up in the outside lanes, leaving him just one bare lane to follow—Brocius picked his cell phone up again and flipped it open. His thumb hovered over the 911 button for six long seconds while he thought it over—the signal was very weak, barely one bar, this
damned
storm—and flipped the phone shut again.
Briony was in trouble, that was clear enough, and the fact that she had worked pretty hard to keep the frog prince from understanding their exchange on the phone had set off serious alarms for him, although they had been ringing faintly in his subconscious for days.
But what
kind
of trouble was she in?

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