James PATTERSON - The Big Bad Wolf

So she sat in her room and pondered the unthinkable. Then pondered it again. She felt so bad, so sick to her stomach, so sad, but she was also afraid.

They knew she’d hacked on to the Wolf’s Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she was them, she’d know how. So were they already on their way to her house?

Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed.

When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. ‘ Holy shit! Holy mother! It’s them! ’

Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering.

Domino’s pizza! Jesus!

She’d forgotten all about it. It was a pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn’t going to die, after all.

She opened the front door.

The Wolf had seldom been angrier and someone had to pay. The Russian had a longstanding hatred for New York City, and the smug and overrated metropolitan area. He found it filthy-dirty, foul beyond imagining, the people rude and uncivilized, even worse than in Moscow. But he had to be there today; it was where the Couple lived, and he had business with them. The Wolf also wanted to play some chess, one of his passions.

Long Island was the general address he had for Slava and Zoya.

Huntington was the specific one.

He arrived in the town just past three in the afternoon. Actually, he did remember the one other time he’d been here – two years after he had arrived in New York from Russia. Cousins of his owned the house and had helped set him up in America. He had committed four murders out here ‘on the Island’, as the locals called it. Well, at least Huntington was close to Kennedy Airport. He’d be out of New York as soon as possible.

The Couple lived in a typical suburban ranch house. The Wolf banged on the front door and a goateed bull of a man by the name of Lukanov opened it. Lukanov was part of another team, one that worked successfully in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Lukanov had once been a major in the KGB.

‘Where are the stupid fucks?’ the Wolf asked once he was inside the front door.

The bull Lukanov jerked a thumb toward a semi-darkened staircase behind him, and the Wolf trudged up. His right knee was aching today, and he remembered a time in the eighties when members of a rival gang had broken it. In Moscow that kind of thing was considered a warning. The Wolf wasn’t much for warnings himself. He had found the three men who’d tried to cripple him, and broken every bone in their bodies – one by one. In Russia this gruesome practice was called zamochit , but the Wolf and other gangsters called it mushing.

He entered a small, sloppily kept bedroom and immediately saw Slava and Zoya, his ex-wife’s cousins. The pair had grown up about thirty miles from Moscow. They had been in the army until the summer of ’98, then they emigrated to America. They’d been working for him for less than eight months, so he was just getting to know them.

‘You live in a garbage dump,’ he said. ‘I know you have plenty of money. What do you do with it?’

‘We have family at home,’ said Zoya. ‘Your relatives are there too.’

The Wolf tilted his head. ‘Awhh, so touching. I had no idea you had such a big heart of gold, Zoya.’ He motioned for the Bull to leave, and said, ‘Shut the door. I’ll be down when I’m finished in here. It might be a while.’

The Couple were tied up together on the floor. Both were in their underwear. Slava had on shorts patterned with little ducks. Zoya wore a black bra with a matching bikini thong.

The Wolf finally smiled. ‘What am I going to do with you two, huh?’

Then Slava began to laugh out loud, a nervous, high-pitched cackling. He had thought they were going to be killed, but this would just be a warning. He could see this in the Wolf’s eyes.

‘So what happened? Tell me quickly. You knew the rules of the game,’ he said.

‘Maybe it was getting too easy. We wanted a little more of a challenge. It’s our mistake, Pasha. We got sloppy.’

‘Never lie to me,’ the Wolf said. ‘I have my sources. They are everywhere!’

He sat on the arm of an easy chair that looked as if it had been in this hideously ugly bedroom for a hundred years. Dust puffed from the old chair as it took his weight.

‘You like him?’ he asked Zoya. ‘My ex-wife’s cousin?’

‘I love him,’ she said, and her brown eyes went soft. ‘Always. Since we were thirteen years old. Forever, I loved him.’

‘Slava, Slava,’ the Wolf said and walked over to the muscular man on the floor. He bent to give Slava a hug. ‘You are my ex-wife’s blood relative. And you betrayed me. You sold me out to my enemies, didn’t you? Sure you did. How much did you get? A lot, I hope.’

Then he twisted Slava’s head as if he were opening a big jar of pickles. Slava’s neck snapped , a sound that the Wolf had come to love over the years. His trademark in the Red Mafiya.

Zoya’s eyes widened to about twice their normal size. But she didn’t make a sound, and because of that the Wolf understood what tough customers she and Slava really were, how dangerous they had been to the safety of the organization. ‘I’m impressed, Zoya,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk some.’

He stared into those amazing eyes of hers. ‘Listen, I’m going to get the two of us some real vodka, Russian vodka. Then I want to hear your war stories,’ he said. ‘I want to hear what you’ve done with your life, Zoya. You have me curious now. Most of all, I want to play chess, Zoya. Nobody in America knows how to play chess. One game, then you go to heaven with your beloved Slava. But first vodka and chess, and, of course, I fuck you!’

On account of secrets that Zoya had told him under significant duress, the Wolf had to make one more stop in New York. Unfortunate . This meant that he wouldn’t be able to catch his flight home out of Kennedy, and he would miss the professional hockey game that night. Regretful, but he knew this was the right thing to do. The betrayal by Slava and Zoya had jeopardized his life, and also made him look bad.

At a little past eleven, he entered a club called the Passage in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. The passage looked like a dump from the street, but inside it was beautiful, very ornate, almost as nice as the best places in Moscow.

He saw people he knew from the old days: Gosha Chernov, Lev Denisov, Yura Fomin and his mistress. Then he spotted his darling Yulya. His ex-wife was tall and slender, with large breasts he’d bought for her in Palm Beach, Florida. Yulya was still beautiful in the right light, not so much changed since Moscow, where she had been a dancer since she was fifteen.

She was sitting at the bar with Mikhail Biryukov, the latest king of Brighton Beach. They were directly in front of a mural of St Petersburg, which was very cinematic, thought the Wolf, a typical Hollywood visual cliché.

Yulya saw him coming, and she tapped Biryukov. The local pakhan turned and looked, and the Wolf closed on him fast. He slammed a black king down on the table. ‘Checkmate,’ he roared, then laughed and hugged Yulya.

‘You’re not even happy to see me?’ he asked the couple. ‘I should be hurt.’

Biryukov grunted. ‘You are a mystery man. I thought you were in California.’

‘Wrong again,’ said the Wolf. ‘By the way, Slava and Zoya say hello. I just saw them out on Long Island. They couldn’t make the trip here tonight.’