Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Jack drove his fist into Ivan’s midsection, but the big man seemed to scarcely feel it. Instead, he grabbed hold of Jack’s chin, pushed it upward, exposing his neck. Jack twisted away, and Ivan’s fist struck him on the side of his neck. A split instant later and Ivan would have punctured his throat. The man was even bigger at close range, and his rage was palpable. Jack ducked and weaved, got in a punch here and there, but was being methodically beaten to a pulp. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Annika make a run at Ivan. She hit him without visible effect. He lashed out at her with one massive arm, and she careened backward, crashed to the ground, and Jack knew there would be no more help from her.

In the moment after the swipe when Jack’s attention was momentarily diverted, Ivan turned him, had him in a choke hold. Now he was trying to bend him backward. Jack put all his energy to moving forward, crawling with agonized slowness across the width of the alleyway to the shadowed spot where he surmised the Sig had fallen. Hand-to-hand, he was no match for the huge Russian. The handgun was his only hope now.

His breath came in shallow pants, his eyes felt as if they were bulging out of their sockets as Ivan increased the pressure on his windpipe. His mind was whirling, blinding flashes of light interspersed with vast reaches of blackness that threatened to pull him down into their unimaginable depths. The alley canted over, as if about to spill him out onto his ear. He could no longer distinguish up from down, right from left, and so was nearing the end of his ability to keep going. He was drifting, as if leaving one world on his way to another, and he heard her voice, Emma’s voice, as he’d heard it several times after her death. Once, he had even seen her glimmering between the trees behind his house, the house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, his sanctuary, where he’d once lived with Gus, the big, black pawn shop owner, after he’d run away from his abusive father.

“ Dad ,” his daughter called. “ Dad, where are you? ”

“Emma . . . ?”

“ Dad, I’m looking for you and I can’t see you. Where are you? ”

“I’m here, Emma. . . . Follow my voice. I feel like I’m very close to you.”

“ I see you now, Dad. ”

He heard her gasp of dismay.

“ You have to go back . . . ”

“Go back where?”

“ You have to go back, Dad. . . . You’re right near the gun. . . . ”

That was when he felt something metallic strike his knee. Scrabbling around with his right hand, he found not the Sig, but Ivan’s 9mm. He gripped it, his finger on the trigger. He was right up against the alley wall, and he bent over as hard as he could. Ivan’s forehead struck the wall, his grip on Jack’s windpipe loosened enough for Jack to turn the 9mm around.

He fired two shots into Ivan’s stomach.

THE NEXT thing he knew Annika was dragging him up out from under Ivan’s inert bulk.

“Come on!” she said breathlessly, “we’ve got to get out of here!”

“What?”

“You shot a member of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka .”

“Only a minor member, you said.” Gasping to fill his burning lungs, half dead, part of him still in that gossamer nowhere he’d drifted to, he was still only half aware of what had happened.

“You think that’ll matter to Kaolin Arsov?” Annika’s expression was grim. “He can’t allow one of his men—any one—to be shot dead without immediate retribution. Like the heads of all the families, his reputation rises and falls on two things: discipline and revenge.”

He took her proffered hand, began to stumble down the alley away from the body.

“Drop the gun!” she said. “For God’s sake, drop the gun and let’s get as far away from here as fast as we can!”

Jack, in awkward turns running and shambling, let go of the handgun, as he’d seen Michael Corleone do so many times in The Godfather . He stumbled over a leg, and noticed Milan sprawled facedown, as unmoving as Ivan. Were they both dead, he wondered briefly. Then they were back on the brightly lit street and Annika was hailing a bombila , wrenching open the back door, shoving Jack into the interior, and climbing in after him.

“We’ll hole up in Jelena’s apartment until I can make some calls,” she said as she gave the driver an address.

“Emma?”

“Emma?” Annika echoed. “Who is Emma?”

Jack, tears in his eyes, averted his face. He’d almost said “my daughter,” but instead replied, “No one.”

He cranked down the window and pushed his face out into the night. Emma, Emma, how I wish I could have saved you.

“Hey, I’m already freezing my ass off,” the driver protested.

But the bracingly cold wind was precisely what Jack needed to clear his head. The adrenalin was still pulsing through him, and he knew it would be some while before the pain Ivan inflicted on him would manifest itself. Meanwhile, there was the current situation to contend with. His brain, coming around, began to work at its usual lightning speed.

He hunched forward. “Forget that address,” he shouted to the driver over the harsh whistle of the wind. “Take us to Sheremetyevo.”

“The airport?” Annika said. “Why would we want to go there?”

Jack sat back as the bombila changed direction, heading for Ring Road. “Like you said, we need to get as far away from that alley as quickly as we can, and that’s just what we’re going to do.”

FOUR

EVERYTHING IS in the process of being lost. That’s what Emma’s death had taught him. His marriage, too, for that matter. Even at the beginning, in the first ecstatic blossoming, the seeds of loss had been sown, predestined even, looked at in a clear-eyed manner.

These thoughts rolled once again through Jack’s mind as he and Annika jounced along in the bombila . Once they were outside Ring Road and on their way to Sheremetyevo, Annika dug out her cell phone and made a call, he assumed to her superior at the FSB. However, it quite rapidly became clear that she wasn’t getting the response she had expected. After she had accurately described in detail what had happened in the alley behind Bushfire, she was silent, listening intently, her face screwed up in a frown of concentration and, then, frustration. Finally, her voice rose and she began to speak Russian in quick-fire bursts that lost Jack near the beginning. All at once, she cut the conversation short and threw her cell phone onto the floor of the bombila .

“What’s up?” Jack asked. Annika had said nothing to him after she’d queried him about their destination, not a thank-you for saving her life, nothing. Until the phone call, she had appeared sunk in contemplation without any sign of animation whatsoever, as if she were in the bombila by herself. Jack supposed her withdrawal was a reaction to the violence she had endured, the imminent threat to her life, the struggle to survive that required every ounce of energy. It wouldn’t be at all out of place for her to be in shock. Assuming so, he had preferred to give her a chance to calm down before he started querying her. Now a new, ominous element had been added to the mix.

“I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said. “We’re screwed, totally and indelibly screwed.”

“I don’t see why. Ivan was a low-echelon thug and you’re with the FSB.”

She turned her head so sharply he could hear the crack of the vertebrae in her neck. “Where did you hear that?”

“The same place I learned about the ambush. Ivan and Milan were in your room, looking for revenge. They found the cameo you’d hidden in the drain.”

“Fuck me!”