Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

LAPD had finally upgraded its HQ after nearly sixty years, leaving behind Parker Center with all its scandals and transgressions. Two intersecting planes of mirrorlike glass, ten stories high, formed the new building. The city had gone to great lengths to have LAPD’s kinder, gentler image reflected in the environmentally friendly building-plenty of glass to evince transparency, a cafe called LA Reflection, and a rooftop garden that the media releases referred to as “contemplative.” Headquarters might have traveled merely the distance of two downtown blocks, but the move had allowed LAPD to enter the new millennium.

Nate sat at his desk and gave a nervous glance around. Across the aisle in his chair, Ken arched his back in a lazy stretch while one meaty hand scrabbled across the keyboard to refresh baseball scores. A Detective II, he was wide-shouldered, sloppy in demeanor but neat in appearance. Though disastrous when filling in to serve death notifications, he had proved to be a capable, even sharp detective-a fact that Nate found continually surprising.

He hunkered down, tucking into his computer and logging on to the databases. His job granted him low-level clearances-enough to pull up crime reports and case files, to check rap sheets and addresses. First he keyed in “Pavlo Maksimovich Shevchenko.” A decades-old picture of the man came up, perhaps from when he first immigrated, along with minimal information. No driver’s license. No gun license. Expensive address in the Hollywood Hills. Substantial taxes paid in California for a little more than a decade. He’d had surveillance placed on him by various detectives and the FBI, which at multiple points had tried to build a continuing-criminal-enterprise case. He was suspected of having served time throughout Ukraine and Russia, but his crimes were unknown, the files from Eastern Europe either lost, scrubbed, or made purposefully opaque by a bureaucracy eager to encourage his emigration. However, one detail had made the journey with him. His nickname, listed as Psyk, Russian for “psycho.” Nate scrolled down to a series of surveillance shots, that predatory gleam in the eyes cutting right through the blurry photography.

His mouth, he realized, had gone dry.

A few drops of blood tapped the mouse pad, and he looked up sharply to see Charles there, his skin as gray as death. “Way to go, dipshit,” Charles said. “You broke fortune-cookie rule number thirty-seven: Don’t make enemies with a dude nicknamed Psycho.”

“Not here, Charles. Not at work. Can’t you just … I don’t know, go back to being dead?”

But Charles was already leaning over him, staring at the screen. “Let’s look up that hot girl with the huge rack from English 101. What was her name?”

Nate ignored him, checking the address of the warehouse in which he’d regained consciousness. The deed was held by a company that owned twenty-seven more properties in the Greater Los Angeles Area and Brighton Beach, New York. Slum apartments, a textile factory, scattered storage facilities. The company resided within a shell corp within a shell corp, and that was how many shell corps deep Nate was able to dig before his clearance hit a wall.

Charles had turned to sit on the desk next to him, resting an elbow atop the monitor. He snapped his fingers. “Mindy Scardina.”

“Do you mind?”

Nate must have been making faces, because Ken glanced across, then turned back slowly to his desk, wearing a look of puzzled annoyance. He unclipped from his belt a cluster of keys the size of a hockey puck and tossed them on his desk, the gesture somehow conveying disgust with the state of his surroundings.

“Oh, what, your advanced Google search is more interesting than Mindy Scardina’s tits?” Charles slid over in front of the monitor and squirmed back and forth, making Nate try to read the screen through the hole in his torso.

“Move. Charles- move. You’re disgusting. Would you grow up?”

“No can do. I’m frozen in time.” He made spooky ghost fingers. “Stuck at twenty-seven years old. Like most men. ’Cept I have an excuse.”

“If I don’t figure out how to break into that safe-deposit box, they’re gonna kill Cielle.”

Charles’s brow furrowed, a few grains of sand cascading down his face. “Maybe you can look up the bank?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.” But Nate couldn’t access any bank information whatsoever, let alone obtain a listing of safe-deposit boxes at First Union.

Charles’s shoulders sagged. “Now what?”

Pavlo’s dry voice ran in Nate’s head: I had an acquaintance, Danny Urban, who is no longer with us, God rest his soul.

Already Nate was typing. “Let’s start with the owner of the safe-deposit box.”

Urban’s digital file loaded, and they stared together at the text, mouths slightly ajar.

“You’re kidding me,” Charles finally said. “The guy’s a fucking hit man. What next?”

Nate clicked a link. A file loaded, and then a crime-scene photo jumped out at them-Urban sprawled across a bedroom carpet, having clawed the patterned comforter off the mattress when he fell. A neat hole above his right eyebrow. One hand lay open, the two smallest fingers shot off, a defensive wound, and an assault rifle lay just beyond his reach. His thin lips were stretched wide in a death rictus, the glittering squares of his teeth spaced along the pink shelves of his gums. A subcompact pistol was placed deliberately beside his head, the barrel aligned neatly with his cheek.

An echo of that broken English: We had disagreement over fee and ownership of object. Clearly, this was how disagreements with Paulo Shevchenko ended.

Nate scrolled down and lifted a finger to the screen, reading the lead detective’s report of the ongoing investigation. Though an autopsy had been performed in short order, Urban’s corpse remained in the perennially backlogged morgue, stowed for future tests. The hit man’s private weapons cache had been taken into evidence, a small arsenal that included everything from frag grenades to AR-15s, ironic given Urban’s low-tech MO for his murders: He used a ten-dollar lock-blade knife, available through any hunting catalog.

According to ballistics, the SIG Sauer P250 set down by Urban’s cheek had fired the bullet extracted from his head. Leaving the gun behind with the body protected the killer from being found with the murder weapon. The move was also, the detective had noted, a calling card of elite contract killers hired by the Eastern European mob.

Misha.

Charles shuddered, sand falling off him like dandruff. “So a hit man killed a hit man? What’s the story?”

“Pavlo hired Urban to do a job,” Nate said. “To knock someone off and get something.”

“Why’d he use an American killer?” Charles asked. “Why not one of his Ivans?”

“Maybe to make sure there was no connection that could be traced back to him.”

“But then once Urban pulled a double cross or wanted to keep what he stole or whatever, our boy Pavlo went back to his roots.”

“Which exposed him more. Then again, so did having Misha run a bank job. But Pavlo was willing to take the risk.” Nate rocked back in his chair. “Whatever’s in that safe-deposit box, he wants it bad.”

“We don’t even know which box it is,” Charles complained. “What are we gonna do, break into all of them?”

“That was Misha’s plan.”

“What the hell could be in that box?”

“Incriminating photos. Family heirloom. A priceless jewel.”

Charles shrugged. “I vote sex tape.”

The floor creaked behind Nate, and he closed out of the screen quickly. Pivoting, he looked up at Ken.

“What you looking up?” Ken asked.