Chapter 11
11
Nico
“Y ou left me quite the mess to clean up last night,” Sheriff Mills mutters as I join him in the downstairs morgue at the police station.
It’s late evening, and most of his deputies and staff have gone home, except for the night patrol. It’s just the two of us and about six bodies in the stainless-steel drawers. Five are frostbite victims—locals and outsiders passing through, caught in the blizzard. The last is the one I’m most interested in.
“My apologies,” I tell Mills. “We had to get Anya back to the lodge. She’s safer up there.”
“I agree,” he says. “What the hell did you and your brothers walk into?”
I give him a curious look. He takes off his khaki jacket and puts on a pair of blue latex gloves, then pulls the sheet down to reveal the dead guy’s torso. “What am I looking at?”
“This right here.” He points to a tattoo spread across the guy’s chest. It’s a depiction of a bear wrestling a wolf and winning. Droplets of blood are inked across the wolf’s throat. I recognize the tattoo and its significance. It sends shivers down my spine.
“This is Bratva ink, Nico. Why is the Bratva in Seeley Lake?”
“It’s kind of a long story. I never thought they’d show up here,” I reply, analyzing the young man’s facial features. The sharp cheekbones, the smooth jaw, the pointed chin and the shape of his brows are familiar. I’m surprised I didn’t notice the similarities sooner.
“Who is this guy? And why was he trying to kill your friend?” Mills asks. “I checked the camera footage, by the way. It confirms Chance’s account.”
I need about five minutes to bring him up to speed on our friendship with the Asimovs and the circumstances of Anya’s reappearance. He’s understandably shocked and needs another couple of minutes to think everything through and formulate an approach.
“It’s imperative no one finds out that Anya Asimova is here,” I tell him. “So far, only our neighbors met her, but we only gave her first name. Breonna has no idea about the Bratva affiliations. Chance saw Breonna talking to this guy yesterday, but it sounded more like a skeevy pickup attempt than anything else.”
“Who is this guy?” Mills asks.
I give him a curious look. “You didn’t run his prints?”
“You asked me to wait for you before I did anything, remember?” He raises an eyebrow at me, and I can only offer a thankful nod in return for having trusted me. “Who is he?”
“Judging by the tattoo and the features alone, my money’s on Max Sokolov.”
“Max Sokolov?” He repeats the name, though it doesn’t mean much to him.
“Younger brother to Leo Sokolov, head of the Sokolov faction of the New York Bratva. Rivals of the Asimovs and likely the culprits behind the Dalton massacre. Surely, you’ve heard of Dalton.”
He nods once. “Terrible business. But they never charged anyone, did they?”
“Nope. Insufficient evidence, and what little evidence they did have was purely circumstantial. They were able to arrest one of the shooters, but the Sokolovs’ legal team bailed him out in less than forty-eight hours. He left the country the next day.”
“Sounds like they covered their tracks.” Mills covers the dead guy and slides the body back inside its freezer box with a shuddering clang. “So, Max Sokolov, younger brother of a mob boss, came all the way to Seeley Lake to kill Anya Asimova, whose been assumed dead for the past two years?”
“Yes. We’re still putting the pieces together on the past couple of years, but it’s mostly up to Anya retrieving her memories.”
“And until then?”
“We need your help,” I tell Mills.
He gives me a troubled look. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Keep him on ice for a bit.”
“I can’t do that long term,” he says.
I have a solution for that, too. But he’s not going to like it. The thing with Mills crossing legal boundaries with good intentions is that I have to ease him into it one step at a time. “Give me a week, tops, and we’ll figure something out,” I insist. “Can you do that? We can’t risk the Sokolovs finding out he’s dead just yet.”
Mills thinks about it for a minute but ultimately concedes. “Fine.”
“I’ll take his car—he’s got a car here, somewhere in town—and his credit cards and phone. I’ll fake a trail out of Seeley Lake, so if anybody comes looking for him, they can follow it,” I say. “In the meantime, Anya will stay in the lodge with us, out of sight, for the most part. We’ll be careful.”
“And then what?”
“You’ve got friends in the NYPD, don’t you?”
He shakes his head. “I never should’ve mentioned that to you.”
“Too late,” I shoot back with a cool grin. “Come on, man. When you need us, we come through for you every damn time, without hesitation. Help us out. We’re trying to get justice for Anya, while keeping the Bratva away from Seeley Lake.”
“Dammit, Nico. Fine. Yes, I have a few reliable links within the NYPD.”
“Great. Put some feelers out. Find out what the word on the streets is surrounding the Sokolovs and the Asimovs. Rumors will do just fine, too. There’s always a seed of truth in rumors, something for us to follow up on. I’ll text you some names and useful details,” I say, putting them into a note, which I share with Mills. “How good is your tech guy?”
“Very good.”
“Is he up for the USB drive task?”
Mills nods again. “He’s already on it.”
“Whatever information he manages to retrieve, we need to be the first and only people with access to it until we can get it to the Feds. I’m positive it’s the key to taking down the entire Sokolov family. Aleks Asimov worked damn hard to compile whatever is on that thing. Max Sokolov was desperate enough to follow Anya all the way up here to silence her.”
* * *
An hour later, the two of us are checking out the streets around the police station. Assuming Max followed Anya last night from the base of the mountain, where the lodge road connects with the main road into town, we figure he must’ve parked it somewhere nearby.
“There.” Mills points to a black sedan, parked half a block south of the station. “North Dakota plates. By the looks of it, a rental.”
“Max would’ve switched cars a few times along the way to avoid detection,” I agree. “What makes you think it’s a rental, though?”
“The sticker on the windshield. I recognize the logo. AmEx Rentals. They’ve got lots across the Midwest, Montana included. There’s one in Missoula.” He pauses and takes a car key out of his jacket pocket. The key chain has the same logo embedded on both sides. “I also found this on the guy.”
I can’t help but laugh. “You knew what to look for, you sly bastard.”
“I keep a few secrets of my own,” Mills says, and gives me a playful wink as he proceeds to unlock the passenger door.
It’s definitely the right car. I take the driver’s seat, and he rides shotgun as we drive the sedan out of Seeley Lake altogether. The night falls quietly over the mountains on both sides of the road as we pass through Condon and stop for gas before we head up to Big Fork.
“Use his credit card,” Mills tells me as I head inside the gas station shop.
“I’ll pick up something to eat, too.”
Might as well make it seem like Max was on the road and headed farther out. He’d need sustenance for the trip, so I stock up on gas station food, snacks, and drinks. Mills and I catch up on a few things along the way.
He brings me up to speed on how life is on the reservation lately, while I tell him more about our friendship with the Asimovs and our history in New York. It feels nice to talk about these things with someone other than my brothers—not that Chance and Booker aren’t great listeners, but we have the same emotional involvement.
Mills is on the outside looking in.
“So, you still visit the reservation once a week?” I ask as we drive out of Big Fork.
“Of course. My folks are there. Cousins aplenty. And it helps the tribal police, too. I keep my duties separate from tribal matters, obviously, but when I pass through, the tribal police tell me it gets kind of quiet. Fewer bar fights. Less activity on the shady side of town, if you know what I mean.”
“They’re good kids, though.”
“Yeah, they’re all just trying to do something, to earn a living, to survive at the end of the day. Now, let’s rewind to your side of the fence. You said you fellas had a choice to come here or to go back to New York and work security for the Asimovs? Why didn’t you go for the security gig? I’m sure it paid ridiculously well.”
I smile as I follow the road signs leading up to Whitefish, then Trego.
“It would’ve been lucrative, yes,” I tell Mills. “And we were tempted to accept Aleks’s offer, to be perfectly honest. We would’ve stayed close and we would’ve been able to better protect Anya, too. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I doubt the Sokolovs would’ve been able to pull off that Dalton horror if we’d stuck around.”
“But?”
“We were done with the violence. And we had enough money from our military contracts. Besides, we freelanced a lot in our downtime with the Navy,” I say. “The financial stimulus Aleks offered didn’t compare to what we got from settling here in Seeley Lake.”
“Granted, you fellas brought the whole region back to life, buying up all of those failed businesses, injecting just enough seed money to get them off the ground again,” Mills replies. “We are better off with you here.”
“I do have the occasional regret about it,” I confess. “Not that I regret putting so many of our resources into Seeley Lake, but rather not being able to protect Aleks and Anya. I shudder to even imagine what she must’ve been doing in the two years she was underground.”
Mills nods slowly. “I can look into her family, too. Maybe I can figure out where she might’ve gone. There had to have been a shelter or something, not in her name or her father’s. I can cross-check with other members of the Asimov family and their business associates. It’s a well-known practice among the Eastern Europeans that they transfer properties and goods to different folks in their families and circle of close friends to avoid detection.”
“Sure. If you can, and if it doesn’t trigger any red flags anywhere in the system, it’s definitely worth looking into it.”
Once we reach Whitefish Mountain, Mills and I agree to dump Max’s car somewhere as close to the Canadian border as possible, while leaving a consistent credit card trail along the way before we lose the cards, too. I keep Max’s phone but disable every network connection and GPS tracking system in it, then turn it off.
“We’ll turn it back on when we get back to the lodge,” I say to Mills. “You know we have a security system in place there, with frequency jammers and all that jazz.”
“Still not happy about it, but given the circumstances, it does come in handy.”
It’s a bit outside the scope of the law for us to be in possession of such technology, but Mills has been gracious and looked the other way, while we’ve kept a discreet and virtually undetectable digital footprint over the past few years.
We stand on the edge of the road, the night reigning overhead with a flurry of stars. It’s cold, and I’m shivering underneath this jacket, but I experience relief as I glance down into the ravine, where Max’s car has just landed with a crunch and a metallic thud. The bushes do a great job of covering most of it.
“It’ll snow in the morning,” Mills says, checking the forecast on his phone. “In this area, specifically.”
“That should help cover it better,” I reply.
He turns around to look at me. “Chance is coming to pick us up, right?”
“Yes, sir.” I check my phone again. “ETA one hour.”
“I would’ve taken my department-issued car, but—”
“Best to keep your involvement to a minimum on any of the traffic cams. We were careful enough,” I reply.
“Why are you doing this? You’re going to great lengths to protect Anya Asimova when you could simply hand her over to the FBI or something.”
It’s a good, legitimate question. We did debate the possibility, but our hearts wouldn’t let us. She is safer with us, and we’ve become bound to Anya on a much deeper level. It’s not just a sense of responsibility on our part… it’s more. I dare not dream of what could be between us, not under these circumstances.
But I would very much like to give it a try.
“We need evidence. That’s what the USB drive is for. Besides, we’re not sure the Feds can actually protect Anya,” I say, hoping it makes enough sense to Mills not to ask further questions regarding our motives. “We don’t know how well connected the Sokolovs are. I think it’s best if we take them down first, then let Anya work with the Feds to bury the Sokolovs for good. Until then, she’s our responsibility.”
“I’ll admit, what you guys are doing is incredible. It takes some balls, man.”
“We’re just trying to do right by her.”
“You care about her, don’t you?” he asks me, and I pick up on the meaning behind his question. He’s known my brothers and me for long enough to have a clue as to what kind of relationships we build with a woman. “On a deeper level,” Mills adds.
“Yes.”
It’s all I can say. And it’s all my friend needs to understand that there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep Anya safe and happy from now on.
“It’s gonna get messy. You know that, right?” Mills says, almost reading my mind.
“I do. Here’s hoping we all survive what’s coming.”