51. Kane
KANE
Anton knocks on my door in the early hours of the morning. Even if I hadn’t been awake, I’d have bolted upright.
The urgency of that knock says he hasn’t come with good news.
“Boss. Something’s happening..”
I’m on my feet before he finishes.
The camera feed is up on the laptop in the office. The rear camera over Lilah’s back door shows a gray blur that moves. It takes me a moment to realize what I’m looking at.
Smoke.
Under it, there’s a flickering orange along the bottom of the frame where the trash area is.
“When did it start?”
“Two minutes. Maybe three. I called Yuri.”
“Who’s on the alley?”
Anton winces. “Josef is supposed to be there. But… he’s missing.”
I take the keys off the hook by the door.
“Get Yuri on the phone and tell him to meet me there. And wake my brother.”
I drive myself. Down the West Side and through the tunnel and out onto the expressway with the needle on the speedometer where it shouldn’t be, and I take the Thirty-Ninth Street exit at a speed that makes the truck lean.
The whole way, I tell myself it could be a dumpster fire started by kids or a cigarette in a pallet stack.
I imagine Lilah standing on the sidewalk in her apron, annoyed at the inconvenience.
But I know in my gut that isn’t true.
And when I arrive on the scene, I see that—like always—my gut knows best.
There are two engines in the street and a ladder truck half up on the sidewalk. Thick hoses run across Fourth Avenue. A cop has put flares out and is waving traffic around, and people from the building across the way are standing there in coats over pajamas, watching it all go down.
The front glass is black on the inside. Water is coming out under the door and running down over the plywood ramp where her curb used to be. A six-foot scaffold pipe lies against the bottom of the door, wedged at an angle against the frame with the far end jammed into the base of the lamppost.
The pipe tells me the fire wasn’t an accident.
“Sir. Sir, back up.”
A firefighter puts a glove on my chest. I look down at his hand and then at his face.
“Where is the woman?”
“There’s nobody out. We haven’t cleared the interior.”
“There was a woman inside. She owns it.”
“Sir—”
I step around him.
The alley mouth is taped and there’s a man working a line into it. I walk past both of them. They see my face and don’t stop me.
The fire has been knocked down back here.
It was a pile against the brick, pallets and rags and something that was in a plastic drum, and now, it’s a steaming black heap with water pooling around it and the wall above it scorched two stories up.
The back door stands wide open. Smoke drifts out along the top of the frame.
She isn’t here.
I call for her. “Lilah! Lilah!”
Nobody responds.
So I stand in the middle of the alley and force myself to examine it as I would any other scene.
The wet concrete is scuffed to hell in a rough half-circle about a dozen feet from the street. There are heel marks. Two long drags where the toes of somebody’s shoes went backward through the standing water.
Her keys are lying by the wall. The ring with the bottle opener on it and the little enamel croissant that Priyanka gave her. I note blood on the teeth of two of the keys.
There’s more of it on the brick at chest height.
A handprint, dragged sideways for about a foot, and then a spatter below it going down the wall in tails.
Then drops. Big ones, spaced far apart, in a line that goes toward the mouth of the alley and then stops in a smear at the curb where a vehicle stood.
I crouch there in the water and study the trail.
There’s too much blood for it to be all hers, and the pattern leads the wrong direction. A woman being dragged doesn’t leave that. A man walking out on his own two feet with his hands over his face does.
“That’s not hers,” I murmur.
Yuri crouches down beside me. I didn’t hear him arrive. He’s got a flashlight, and he tracks it along the drops without touching anything.
“No,” he agrees. “She got one of them good.”
“Three sets of prints in the char there.”
“I see them. Big prints. Men, for sure.”
A faint buzz comes from the loading area. I ignore it twice before I register it, then turn my head and follow it to the plywood ramp.
I get down on my stomach on the wet ground in a five-thousand-dollar suit and put my arm into the gap.
Her phone.
The screen is spidered across one corner. There are two missed calls from a number I don’t know. Above them, the log shows a 911 call that ran four minutes and eight seconds before it ended.
I sit back on my heels with her phone in my hand and my thumb over the cracked glass. For a second, I’m a boy again, standing in a doorway and watching my father raise a glass to his new bride while his old one learned at the same time as everyone else that she was no longer of use to him.
“Boss.”
Yuri is looking down at me. Whatever he’s about to say, I don’t hear it, because just then, my own phone rings in my coat pocket.
It’s a number with no name on it. I stand up out of the water and answer without speaking.
“Mr. Makov.” Osip Vetrov doesn’t bother hiding that he’s enjoyed the night. “I understand you are on Fourth Avenue. That was quick, even for you.”
The firefighters are pulling the ceiling inside her shop. I can hear the hooks going through the plaster.
“Whatever you want to say to me, get it the fuck over with,” I growl at him.
“Of course. I will be brief. I want you to transfer it to me. All of it. Every parcel between Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Fifth, Third Avenue to the water. You have seven days to comply.”
Water drips off the fire escape onto my shoulder.
“And then?”
“Then we make an exchange, and she comes back to you as she is now. Unharmed. She has not been touched and she will not be, so long as you and I are doing business.” He waits.
“If you refuse, or if you send men, or if you try to find where she is instead of signing… she dies. Let me say that again to ensure you heard me. She dies, Mr. Makov.”
The line goes dead.
Then my phone vibrates once more in my hand.
It’s a photograph. Concrete floor, cinderblock wall, one bare bulb off to the left.
Lilah in a wooden chair with her wrists bound behind the back of it and her ankles tied to the legs.
Her apron is still on. There’s soot smeared on one side of her face and her hair has come out of the clip on that same side.
Her chin is up, as proud and defiant as ever.
Under the photograph, a message on a line of its own.
EVERY WATERFRONT DEED IN SEVEN DAYS. OR SHE DIES.
She is tied to a chair in a basement right now, wondering whether the man she threw out of her shop will choose her over the property.
That she has to wonder at all is my fault.
Niko comes down the alley with his coat open. He stops when he sees my face. For once in his life, he says nothing.
I hand him her phone. Then I turn my own around so he can see the screen.
He reads it and swallows.
“Kane,” he says. “He wants everything.”
“I know what it is.”
“There’s another way. Give me two days and I’ll find the building—”
“No.”
I put my phone in my pocket. Behind me, a window in her kitchen shatters and falls into the alley.
The building is gone. The lot beneath it is still hers, but that’s just dirt. Her life’s work? That’s ash now. Ash and blood.
And it’s my fault.
“Wake Gershon,” I tell my brother. “Bring him to the house and pull the corporate books from the vault. All ninety-one.”
Niko looks at me. “Why?”
“Because I want him to prepare the transfers.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Kane and Delilah’s story continues in Book 2 of the Makov Bratva duet, SWEET RAGE.