Chapter 16 #2
The loading entrance was ten feet away. Five. The metal door was open and beyond it was darkness—a warehouse interior, the smell of dust and tile grout and cardboard. A tile showroom. Somewhere behind the dark interior was a front door. A street. People.
I heard Boris behind me. Not following. Firing. The muzzle flash lit the road in stuttered bursts of orange.
I reached the loading entrance. I crossed the threshold into the dark.
I made it six steps inside before the hand caught my coat.
Fingers closed on the collar—a grip from behind, yanking backward.
The coat tightened around my throat. I twisted.
The fabric was my father’s old coat—no. Daniil’s coat.
The oversized one. The one I had grabbed because it was nearest. The buttons pulled against the loops and the collar pressed against the back of my neck and I could feel his breath on my hair.
I ripped forward. The buttons gave. One, two—I heard them scatter on the concrete floor, small sounds in the dark. The coat fell away from my shoulders and the man behind me staggered backward holding empty fabric.
I ran.
The warehouse stretched ahead—a corridor of display racks, each one holding rows of tile samples mounted on wooden boards.
Porcelain. Ceramic. Travertine. The names on the labels meant nothing.
The racks meant cover. I ducked between two of them, my shoulder striking a board, and a tile sample rattled on its hook.
He was behind me. I could hear his footsteps—heavy, deliberate, not running. He did not need to run. He knew I had nowhere to go.
My right hand burned. The cut across the palm was deeper than I had realized—I could feel the blood making my fingers slippery. I felt faint. My knees ached from the collision—both of them, a deep bruising pain that sharpened with each step. The concrete floor was cold through my shoes.
A workbench. Against the wall, between two display racks. Tools. A score cutter. Boxes. And tile samples—loose pieces, stacked on their edges, waiting to be mounted. I grabbed one. Porcelain. Twelve inches square. Heavy enough.
I turned around.
He came around the end of the rack. A man I did not recognize—dark jacket, close-cropped hair, heavy build. His eyes found mine. He reached.
I swung the tile.
It caught him across the temple. The edge of it—sharp, porcelain, unglazed—sliced a line above his ear. He staggered. His shoulder hit the workbench and the boxes shifted and something fell and the sound was loud in the warehouse. He put his hand to his head. Blood between his fingers. Bright.
I ran.
Between the racks. Through the displays. My hand left blood on a travertine board as I passed—a smear of red across beige stone. I kept my eyes forward. The showroom was ahead—I could see light. A glass front. The entrance. The street. Witnesses. Boris had said witnesses. I needed witnesses.
Every step I expected a hand on my shoulder. On my hair. On my arm. I expected the floor to tilt or the light to vanish or the rack beside me to crash down. I ran with my shoulders hunched, my head forward, my bleeding hand pressed against my side, and I did not look back.
The showroom opened in front of me. Smaller than the warehouse—a sales floor, carpeted, with a reception desk and sample boards on the walls and a glass front door looking out onto the street.
Morning light poured through the glass. Traffic moved beyond it.
Cars. A delivery van. A man walking a dog on the opposite sidewalk.
I was safe.
A woman stood behind the counter. Middle-aged. Brown hair. A telephone in her hand—she had been in the middle of a call. She stared at me.
I was bare-armed. My coat was gone. My blouse was torn at the collar. My hand was bleeding onto her carpet. I had come out of the dark warehouse like something dragged up from a basement.
“They’re trying to take me,” I said. “Please.”
The words came out ragged. I had to say them twice—the first time, nothing came but air. The second time, my voice worked. My voice sounded like someone else’s.
The woman set down the telephone. She came around the counter. She took my arm—my uninjured arm—and guided me behind the desk.
“I’ll call the police,” she said. She picked the phone back up. Dialed. Her hands were steady. Her voice was steady. She gave the address—the tile showroom, the street, the name of the business—and she said there was a woman who had been attacked and she needed help immediately.
I crouched behind the counter. I pressed my back against the wall.
The glass front door was four feet away.
Through it, I could see the street. The man walking his dog had stopped.
He was looking at something—the road, the intersection, the noise that I could still hear distantly.
The gunfire. It had stopped or it hadn’t. My ears were still ringing.
Traffic moved. A bus passed on the far side of the road. A woman with a shopping bag crossed the street. Ordinary people doing ordinary things at noon on a Thursday.
I was behind a counter in a tile showroom with a bleeding hand and a torn blouse and a strange woman calling the police and the street was full of people and I could see them. I could see them.
I might survive this.
I pressed my uninjured hand flat against the carpet.
The fibers were grey. Industrial. The kind of carpet chosen for a showroom floor where samples would be dragged across it and spilled coffee would be cleaned from it and no one would ever think about it twice.
I pressed my hand into the carpet and I felt the texture of it and I thought: I am alive.
I am in a room with people and a telephone and a glass door and I am alive.
Then brakes screeched outside the showroom.
The sound was close. Very close. A vehicle pulling to the curb—the tires biting the asphalt, the engine still running. I saw the shadow of it through the glass. Large. Dark.
The woman behind the counter looked toward the door.
I looked toward the door.
I was not going to survive this.
He filled the door frame. He was enormous. His suit was jet black and it fit badly across the chest and his collar was open and his hair was cropped so short the scalp showed through.
The broken nose. Crooked, never reset, giving his face an asymmetry that made it difficult to look at directly. The scar through his right eyebrow—a thin line that divided it into two unequal halves. And the eyes. Pale blue. Very pale. Almost colorless in the showroom’s fluorescent light.
“Mrs. Sokolov. A pleasure to meet you. I’m Oleg Voronin.”
He said it warmly. The way someone says hello to a neighbor. The way a man introduces himself at a dinner party. His pale eyes found mine across the showroom floor and they did not leave.
I moved. I did not think about moving—my body moved.
I came up from behind the counter and I went for the door.
Not the door he was standing in—the side door, the one I had seen at the edge of the showroom, the one that led to a parking lot or an alley or anywhere that was not here. I was three steps from it.
He was too fast.