28. Mat
MAT
FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER
The wind cuts under the collar no matter how high I turn it up. I shrug my coat tighter and snarl at myself yet again to stop looking for her.
Do I do it anyway?
Of course I fucking do. I’m attuned to her. She’s my magnetic north, and no matter how hard I try to resist the temptation, I can’t help but seek her out.
There she is. A flash of red coat through the birches, two flagged positions down the line. A bobble hat. Mittens. A shotgun she has no business holding.
I wrench my gaze away and slap myself across the face for good measure. One hard crack in each direction.
Get your shit together, son, I hear my uncle’s voice bark in my head. Now is no time to lose yourself in fantasy.
Because that’s what thoughts of Cassandra are: pure fucking delusion.
No matter how bad I want her, I cannot have her.
She is a scapegoat, nothing more. It’s kind of fitting that the knocker on her hotel door is a ram.
Or is that a sheep? Fuck it, I don’t know.
I’m here to kill Raymond and pheasants, in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.
So I look at the trees, instead. The birches. The grey sky where the sun is trying, half-heartedly, to struggle above the horizon. I count crows when I see them. There’s an old rhyme my father used to mutter when he saw them gathering on the power lines of Brighton Beach.
One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told
I get the creeping, nagging feeling that there’s plenty of omens there if I want to unpack. But I blink and look away from the crows before I can count them. Today’s not a day for fucking omens. My father had a thousand of these stupid sayings and not one of them ever did him any good.
I shift my grip on the shotgun and try, with all the willpower I possess, to settle into the patient stillness that has gotten me through every job worth getting through.
This is it. The final job. Then you’re free of your father and your uncle and the Bratva, forever.
But the Zen I’m seeking doesn’t take root.
Too many things are still unsettled and uncertain. Raymond was off this morning. Too jolly by miles. Too hands-on with Bill. Too goddamn smiley. I’ve spent years watching him preen and bluster around the firm, so I know the shape of his moods. This morning is wrong-shaped.
What if he knows?
I work that thought over. Bill’s wife could have said something about what she saw last night. And if she did, then what? Is that what’s behind that ugly fucking grin? What if my plan today is not actually my plan at all, but his ?
Twigs crunching drag my attention. Off to my right. Too close.
My hand drops to the safety. Slow, slow, no sudden movement . I turn my head only as much as I need to.
A figure steps out from behind a birch. I snap the gun into place, whirl around, raise it to my shoulder, thumb off the safety, and prepare to kill or be killed?—
But then I stop.
It isn’t Raymond.
It’s Bill Oglethorpe.
“Easy, son!” he cries out, palms up, his own gun broken open and tucked under his arm. “Just me.”
“Mr. Oglethorpe.” I let my hands soften on the wood. “Sorry. Reflex.”
“Good reflex.” His eyes flick down to my white-knuckled grip and back up. “Most of the boys out here couldn’t shoot themselves in the foot if they tried. You hold a gun like a man who’s held one before.”
“My father taught me.” It isn’t a lie, exactly. Just an enormously pruned version of the truth.
Bill nods. He looks, in this light, much older than he does in the office.
HIs skin is grey and thin. The wax cap pulls down too low over his ears.
There are fine red threads in the whites of his eyes that seem to me like a combination long night of not enough sleep, too much booze, and perhaps something else, too.
If I had to guess, I’d say he’s afraid .
“Come talk with me for a minute, Satyrin,” Bill says. He’s drifting deeper into the woods, toward a gap in the trees where the trunks begin to cluster closer. Wary but without a choice, I close my own gun, sling it under my arm to mirror him, and follow.
We move maybe ten yards. Not much, but enough that the buzz of voices from the assembled men sinks into the snow behind us. Bill stops where two birches grow out of the same root and you can’t see anyone on either side unless you stick your head out.
He lifts his flask, unscrews the cap, takes a long pull, screws it back. Strangely, for a man who’s always quick to refill my drink, he doesn’t offer me any.
“How long you been with the firm now, son?” he asks, eyes on the trees.
“Four years this March.”
He nods to himself. I suspect he knew that already. “You’re sharp. Sharper than half the partners. I’d have made you partner last spring if it weren’t for—” He stops himself and smiles a little, sourly. “If it weren’t for politics.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“No, you don’t. You’re not the kind of man who appreciates anything he hasn’t been given yet.” His mouth tugs into a pained half-smile. “I mean that as a compliment, by the way.”
I wait. There’s something coming, but I don’t have a sense of what it might be yet.
I just know it’s definitely fucking coming.
He glances back the way we came. I check, too, but there’s nothing there save for more white-skinned birches. When he turns to me again and talks, his voice is hardly a murmur.
“How well do you know Raymond, Matvei?”
The question is like a cold finger running down the back of my neck. “As well as one knows one’s senior partner, I suppose,” I say cautiously. “I’ve worked under him on most of my major matters. He’s been generous with his time.”
“Mm. Generous. That’s one word for it.” He fidgets with the cap of the flask. “Listen, son. I’m going to say something to you, and I’m only going to say it the once, and then we’re going to talk about the birds. Are we clear?”
I nod.
“Raymond Snyder is not a good man.” Bill’s pale eyes lock on mine.
“I’m not talking about the way he speaks to that wife of his, although Christ knows that alone would be enough.
I’m talking about the things he does that don’t make it onto the firm letterhead.
The clients he keeps. The favors he’s collected.
” He draws a breath through his teeth. “Do you understand what I’m telling you? ”
I keep my face exactly as it is. “I’m not sure I do, sir.”
“Yes, you do.” He almost smiles before thinking better of it.
“There’s a reason I’m having this chat with you, Matvei.
You don’t blink. So I’ll spell it out. He has something on me.
He has stuff on most of the senior partners, in fact.
We have all, at one point or another, signed something we should not have signed, or looked away from something we should not have looked away from, and Raymond keeps a very thorough file.
” His mouth thins into a dark slash that looks just like the eyes on the birch trees.
The effect is unsettling. “Lately, he has been less than subtle about reminding us of the fact.”
The wind pushes through the branches and rattles the last dry leaves. I feel the old, familiar quiet settle in behind my eyes, the one that arrives whenever a conversation becomes the real conversation.
“Mr. Oglethorpe,” I ask, “why are you telling me this?”
“Because—”
His mouth is open around the next word when his eyes flick over my shoulder, and the color drains out of his face so fast I can almost see it pour down the front of his jacket.
I don’t have to turn around to know who’s joined us.
“Bill!” Raymond’s voice. Bourbon-warm and entirely too cheerful. “There you are, you old goat. I’ve been looking for you.”
I turn in my own time. Raymond is ambling along the line, perfectly at ease. That grin of his is as broad as it’s been all morning, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Those remain cold and dead.
“Raymond.” Bill’s voice has acquired three layers of starch in three seconds. “Just keeping the new blood company. Reminding Mr. Satyrin here what end of the gun the trouble comes out of.”
“Ah.” Raymond’s eyes flit to me. There’s no recognition in them of anything beyond useful associate .
I look hard, but I see no flicker of I have seen this man near my wife .
No something is off about this man. It’s simply the cold, pleasant assessment of a senior partner appraising a junior asset.
“Don’t worry about Matvei, Bill. He could shoot the wings off a fly. Couldn’t you, son?”
“I’ve never been asked to try.”
“Well, you inspire confidence that you could do anything you set your mind to. Isn’t that right, Bill?
” He clamps a hand on Bill’s shoulder, the same theatrical clap he’d been giving him by the gun table earlier, and I watch Bill’s whole body absorb the impact like a man taking a punch in the gut.
“Say, Bill, mind if I borrow Matvei a minute? Got a thing I want his ear on.”
“Of course,” Bill says. The flask has disappeared back into his coat. “Of course, of course. I should— Susan’ll be wondering. I’ll be in the tent if anyone needs me. I don’t think I have the stomach for killing this morning after all.”
He doesn’t look at me again as he goes.
Raymond watches him go with an expression I cannot quite parse, and then turns back to me. “Christ,” he says. “That man is one bad hip away from a funeral urn.”
I force a polite chuckle. “He didn’t look well.”
“He never does, lately.” Raymond cracks his shotgun open, peers down the barrels with no real interest, and snaps it shut again.
“Feeble old men. They reach a certain age and start jumping at shadows. Forget what side of the table they’re sitting on, and how they got to the table in the first place. ”