41. Mat
MAT
I know it’s a holding cell because, well, they’re hard places to misinterpret. It’s bleak concrete and steel bars everywhere I look.
I know it’s dawn, not because there are windows in my cell to show me the sky—there aren’t—but because I feel it in my heart that the first day of the rest of my life has arrived, and it’s nothing like how I thought it would look.
Some clocks aren’t on the wall.
Some clocks are in your bones .
The man who just ripped off my hood stomps away, keys jangling at his belt. As he goes, he informs me with all the warmth of a brick fucking wall that someone has posted my bond.
He doesn’t tell me who and I don’t bother asking. There’s only one person who could’ve known already what happened and then done something about it.
They process me out the side door, return my belongings in a manila envelope with my name spelled wrong, and dump me on the curb of East Sixty-Seventh in the same clothes I was arrested in—black slacks, black shirt, no jacket, no belt, no laces.
February is doing what February does: freezing the shit out of everything it touches. My breath is coming out in white puffs. So is the exhaust from the Mercedes idling at the curb, waiting for me.
The passenger door pops open as I approach. I slide in and close it behind me, then shut my eyes and let my head fall back against the seat. “Fuck.”
Afon, smoking a Sobranie and exhaling it through a crack in the window, points a tobacco-stained finger at a Styrofoam cup in the center console. “That’s for you, nephew.”
I take the coffee and drink gratefully.
We ride in silence to the FDR and then down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I don’t know where we’re headed, but right this second, I don’t give a damn. I feel beaten-down in a way I’ve never been beaten before.
What the fuck happened? How did we end up here? I have a thousand questions, and nine hundred and ninety-nine of them have to do with Cass. But I don’t ask them yet.
“They tossed your apartment,” Afon says out of nowhere as we’re passing over the bridge.
“And?”
“Waste of their time. We got there first.”
“I’m sure they have everything they need from the scene,” I mutter.
Afon shakes his head. “Nah. The Glock is gone. An unfortunate little oops from the Evidence department. There’s enough of a hole in the story for you to slide through. How exactly you do that is up to you, but the Bratva has given you the out you need.”
I rub my throbbing temples. “My thanks to the head honcho, then. I assume we’re gonna go pay him a visit?”
“Not yet. Lukas thinks you need some time to decompress before you’re of any use to us. In my opinion, he’s not wrong.”
“Fuck,” I say again. “Let me get one of those cigarettes.”
My uncle has never offered me one before and I’ve never asked.
But he offers me the pack and his lighter with nothing more than a mildly arched eyebrow.
I light it up and inhale, but if I thought it was going to offer me some comfort, I’m dead fucking wrong.
It just makes the ashes in my mouth taste more like ashes.
But I’m nothing if not stubborn, so I’ll burn this joyless bastard down to the filter. As I do, smoke spiraling around my head, I stare blankly out of the window and think about Cass.
She’s awake by now. Has to be. That half-milligram doesn’t last forever, and they’d have shaken her out of it sooner rather than later. New York cops aren’t exactly known for letting a person sleep through their own arrest.
I can picture her fear all too well. Her mouth dry. Her hands cuffed. Some mustached lifer across the table from her with a folder full of photographs he’s going to slide her way one at a time, watching her face for every little micro-tell.
She’ll ask about me. She won’t be able to help it. Whatever he tells her about where I am, whether true or false, she’ll hear it and her stomach will drop in a way that I will, if there is any justice in this world, get to apologize for in person. One day.
Will that day come soon? I have no fucking clue.
I’m here, dikarka , I think uselessly, as if she can hear me. I haven’t gone anywhere. Hold on.
When the cigarette is half-gone, Afon glances over at me. His eyes are tired in a way I’ve only ever seen them tired twice in my life: once when my father died, and once, twenty years back, on the day his wife was buried.
“Talk to me, plemyannik ,” he orders. “Start at the beginning. I want every part of it. Including the parts you have been keeping from me.”
So I do. It doesn’t take as long as I figured it would. In the end, the story isn’t that complicated: I met a woman I never should’ve met, and things got complicated.
Before I’m finished with all the build-up, the prologue to this fucking shitshow, Afon is grimacing. “ Bozhe moy .”
“Yeah.”
“So she’s pregnant. Tvoy ?”
“Yeah,” I say again. “It’s mine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“ Bozhe moy ,” he repeats. “Alright. Keep going.”
So I do, everything up through what happened last night. When I get to the part about Raymond being dead before I walked in, Afon grunts. Then he pulls over.
“What’re you doing?” I ask in alarm.
My uncle wouldn’t kill me for my failure to handle Raymond properly, would he? Lukas wouldn’t order my death, would he? Would they?
No. Surely not.
Unless…
“Relax, nephew. I’m pulling over,” he explains, “because you look like you’re going to be sick, and if you throw up in my car, then I really will fucking murder you.”
He’s right—I’m pale and shivering. He’s got the heat blasting, hotter than the vents of hell, and sweat is beading up on my forehead. As he slows down, I press my face against the cool glass and let it reorient me.
He steers into a service lane just past the bridge, on a stretch of cracked asphalt under a graffitied overpass, and throws it in park. Then he waits.
After a while, I sit back up and look at him. “It was Vainakh,” I say. “It was Vainakh who killed Raymond.”
He sucks his teeth. “I know that, Matvei. Why do you think I bailed you out?” He undoes the clasp of his watch and rubs at the skin underneath.
“We didn’t kill Raymond Snyder. Someone beat us to him, someone good.
This is not the work of amateurs in a back alley.
That can mean only one of two things: Either there is someone we don’t know about who wants Vainakh territory for themselves. ..”
“Or it’s Vainakh,” I conclude, “cleaning their own house.”
He nods.
I switch the jail envelope from one hand to the other. Inside, the sonogram crinkles, the smallest sound.
“So I was right,” I conclude, remembering the day I laid out my theory to Afon at Café Volna.
“Raymond wasn’t the head; he was the face.
And when he saw how much money was coming through, he got greedy.
He was robbing the Syndicate blind. Bill must’ve known it, and that’s why Raymond had him killed.
Susan, too. They were calling him in to that meeting in the Caymans with no intention of letting him leave.
He would’ve weaseled his way out, left Cassandra behind as collateral, and then disappeared for good, letting them keep her to do with as they pleased. ”
Afon takes all that in with a straight face. “Does it feel good?” he asks. “Being right?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to be right. I want her out. And I want them dead.”
That earns me a withering scowl. “Oh, yeah?” he asks sarcastically. “Do you? Here’s a question for you, nephew: Who the fuck is they? Do you know where they are? Do you know what they look like? Do you even know if they have a name?”
When he sees I’ve been silenced, he nods with grim satisfaction. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Bozhe moy, you’re just like your father sometimes. All action, no forethought.”
Maybe I’m like my father, maybe not. I wasn’t yet a man when I lost him, so there’s no telling for certain what his impact on me would’ve been if he’d survived.
All I know is that there’s a fire burning me up inside, and every second I spend here while Cass rots in a jail cell, framed by my own choices and oversights, is a second of divine fucking vengeance delivered to me and me alone.
Which is pretty fucking funny, when you think about it. I got everything I wanted. Raymond is dead, I’m free, and Cass is taking all the heat.
But it doesn’t feel funny. Not one bit.
“If you say so,” I tell him coldly. “But I won’t sit idly by. These motherfuckers, whoever they are, have been watching me. The whole shit was choreographed, down to the timing of the police call. They framed the framer. I was the punchline to a joke I didn’t even know was being told.”
He nods. “At least you understand that much.”
“So what the fuck are we going to do about it then, huh?” I snarl.
“Right now,” he replies evenly, “‘we’ are not going to do anything. You’ll meet with Lukas in a few days, once you’ve rested. Until then, we bide our time.”
“No. Hell fucking no. I’m not waiting days sitting on my ass.”
I wrack my brain, but I come up empty on things to do—until one hits me like a lightning bolt.
“Susan,” I blurt.
Afon raises an eyebrow and waits for me to go on.
“Susan Oglethorpe. Bill’s wife. She was breathing when they wheeled her out. Cass said Bill’s daughter, at the funeral, told her that the doctors were optimistic she’d wake up.”
“And? What does this change?”
“You remember that Bill pulled me aside in the woods at the partner retreat, yeah? He started to tell me something about Raymond, but he didn’t get the chance to finish.
Hours later, he and his wife are half-dead from carbon monoxide poisoning?
That’s not a coincidence.” I glare at him.
“If you and Lukas are really as in the dark as you say you are, then Susan might be the only living person in New York to possibly know who really runs Vainakh.”
Afon flicks his ash out the window.
Then he puts the car in drive.
“You really are just like your father,” he mutters as he accelerates back onto the highway. “Always talking me into doing stupid, reckless shit.”
“Thank you,” I breathe.
“Don’t thank me,” he snaps. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this because I would also like to know who put a gun to Raymond Snyder’s head before we could. Anyone who can move that fast on our home turf is someone I would like to introduce to a very deep hole. Before they do the same to us.”