Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

When the man began to walk again, his shadow preceded him, elongated across the floor, creeping up the ice block, Nate’s torso, and finally his face. The man neared but remained perfectly backlit, so Nate could make out nothing of his features.

He halted several feet away, the culminating note of the big stagy entrance. “The width of a cheetah’s canines match perfectly to vertebrae of its prey.” His accent was much stronger, his gruff voice giving him away as decades older than the other men. “To sever the spinal cord.” He made a single clean gesture, planing his hand to cut the air. In the cold his breath rose like smoke from his nostrils. “There are those who are meat and those who are fed. Nature’s design.”

He turned to pace, a slant of light falling across him. Weathered face, ridged and leathery, scored with wrinkles. Wide, rounded mouth. Sapphire eyes, hard as stones. He wore an impeccably tailored suit and, beneath, a form-fitting black thermal shirt with a boxer’s notch at the throat. The fabric hugged his compact muscles; he looked dense, unbreakable, carved from wood. A few coarse gray chest hairs showed at his neck. Hands in his pockets. The sleeves of the suit, tight across his biceps. His skin looked to be nearing seventy, but his lean body and virile bearing seemed that of a man a half century younger.

No doubt, the man from the Town Car.

He halted again. Those stone-hard eyes bored into Nate. “I am designed to terrorize you.”

Nate’s heart drummed at the base of his throat. “I killed five of your men.”

“Those were not my men. Except the one you did not kill.” He showed his teeth, which were unexpectedly beautiful, and it took a few seconds for Nate to realize that they were of course fake. “My men do not get killed by someone like you. They are different. You do not make this kind of tough in America.”

Nate’s mouth had cottoned. His legs ached through the numbness, and he was having trouble keeping his own teeth from clicking together. “What’s your name?” he managed.

“Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.”

“What are you gonna do to me?” Nate asked. “And can we just get it over with?”

Pavlo’s lips peeled apart from those magnificent teeth again, then he held out his hand. It wore a black glove, but Nate would have bet that beneath the leather the nails were manicured and each knuckle sported a tattoo. Valerik stepped forward, sweat-darkened strands twisting loose from the pulled-back hair at his temples, and placed a few photos in Pavlo’s palm.

“When the human body is severed and the torso placed on ice, the cold preserves the brain function. Sometimes for twenty minutes, half hour. So everything is felt and”-he mumbled a foreign phrase, searching out and finally finding a word-“observed.” He held the glossy photos up to Nate’s nose and thumbed through several.

Nate took in the slide show of pink and red. He said, “Excuse me.”

Pavlo nodded like a gentleman, stepped back, and Nate vomited onto the floor. When he lifted his cuffed hands to wipe his mouth, his shoulders screamed. He noted how the ice stretched to his left like a tabletop, and when he looked back over, Yuri stood beside Pavlo, holding the rescue saw with its diamond-tipped circular blade.

Somehow, despite the ice, sweat trickled down Nate’s face, his back. He fought his stomach still, tried to slow his gulps of air, kept his eyes from the saw.

Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and then it’s all over.

He composed himself. “Okay,” he said.

There was a long pause. And then Misha asked, “Okay what?”

“Do it.” It struck him that he’d rediscovered something in that bank, in the face of those bullets. He was once again the guy who’d saved Janie from the ocean, who’d pulled her through a riptide and delivered her to shore. A dark laugh bubbled out of him, edged with hysteria. “Kill me.”

Pavlo’s gaze moved across his face, as if searching out a way to bore in and crack him open. He stared back. The best part of having nothing to lose was that no one had leverage over him. There was nothing at stake anymore.

Pavlo seemed to read this, finally turning away. “There is little red diary,” he said conversationally, “in the back of a closet. It is kept locked. In it are a girl’s complaints. What she views as hardships. How life treated her unfairly. In last entry, on page eighty-nine, she recalls a childhood memory. Her father bursting into her room one night in the clutch of a nightmare, blood streaming down his face.” He turned. The faintest pursing of his lips. Savoring a reaction.

Abruptly Nate became aware again of just how much the ice had chilled the air. The cold in the bones of his legs, aching. Each breath jerked his chest.

These men. In his daughter’s room.

They broke into the house today. Between the robbery and now. They must have moved immediately after the shootings, while Pete and Janie were at work and Cielle at school.

“The ice is not for you. It is”-a black-gloved hand circled-“ demonstration. ”

At once all pain was gone. “Let me be clear,” Nate said. “If you lay one finger on my daughter, my entire life will narrow to the single focus of killing you.”

Pavlo paced, frowning, deep furrows cupping his mouth. “There is a custom in our part of the world. If you step on someone’s foot…” He turned and asked Misha a question in what Nate assumed was Ukrainian.

Misha replied, “Accidentally.”

“… accidentally, you must offer own foot for person to step on in turn. Just a light tap. And yet. We right wrongs at once, so resentments do not fester. Understand?”

Nate swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. Nodded.

“You and I, we require razborka. Settling of accounts,” Pavlo said. “Much planning we spent for the bank heist.”

Nate said, “I will figure out how to get you money.”

“I do not want money. I have plenty of money.”

“You robbed a bank. ”

“I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, no longer with us, God rest his soul. We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object. He place object in his safe-deposit box in First Union Bank of Southern California. We know it is there, but we do not know box number.”

Nate thought about how the robbers had sheared off the hinges of all those nests of safe-deposit boxes and yanked off the tiny doors. How the safes and the cash had seemed like a second priority, an afterthought.

“So you robbed the bank as a cover?” Nate asked. “To get whatever Urban had?” No answer. “What is it?”

Pavlo stopped pacing. His gaze turned on Nate. “It is what is inside the box.” His teeth gleamed. “You interrupted my plan to get it. Now you will get it for me.”

Nate felt his mouth fall open a little. “You’re kidding, right? I can’t do that. It’s impossible. Plus, the bank’s a crime scene. The safe-deposit boxes are sawed open-”

“Bank will reopen and have rebuilt boxes within twenty-four hours. They are bank. They cannot afford not to. Customers will be fearful.”

“So you want me to … what?” Nate coughed out a note of incredulity. “Break in?”

“You are VIP at bank now. You play at being big hero. So use your special…”

“Status,” Misha chimed in.

“Status.” Pavlo repeated the word slowly, tasting it. “To figure out solution. We had our solution.”

Nate stared frantically at Pavlo, but the man gave up nothing. “Just kill me. Let’s handle this now, between you and me. Take it out on me. ”

Pavlo continued, undeterred, “You will find me at New Odessa restaurant. To deliver. In five days. Sunday at midnight.”