Chapter 27
DANIIL
Thin yellow stoop light, low autumn sun off the vinyl siding. Halmoni stood at the top step in her quilted house jacket, watching us load the SUV the way she had once watched fishing boats leave a harbor, in a country she still kept folded inside her chest.
Chloe went up to her last. Halmoni reached and laid a small dry palm against her granddaughter's cheek and held it there.
She said something low in Korean I did not catch the shape of.
Chloe nodded with wet eyes and bent and pressed her face into the old woman's shoulder for a beat.
Halmoni patted her back twice the way you pat dough, firm and final, then let her go.
Then Halmoni turned to me. I stepped up one stair so my head was closer to her level, because I had been raised right. She set her hand on my forearm. Her fingers were light but they did not waver. She looked up into my face and said it the way she would have said the sky is gray.
"Bring her back. Bring yourself back too."
"I will, Halmoni." I gave a small bow of my head.
She held my forearm one beat longer. Then she released it.
Rhea barreled into her legs from the side, two braids swinging.
Halmoni laughed, the dry crack of a laugh used carefully for decades, and bent and took my daughter's small face in both hands.
Beom-Beom got included, his one damaged ear flopped sideways, his eyes still bright.
Halmoni kissed Rhea on the crown, kissed the bear on his good ear with great seriousness, and straightened.
"Go," she said. "Be safe on the road."
I walked Rhea down the steps with my hand on the back of her coat.
Anatoly was already behind the wheel. Sergei rode shotgun.
Chloe climbed into the back. Rhea wedged in between her and the door so she could press her nose to the window and wave until the line of sight broke.
Behind us the chase car idled, two of my men inside.
I shut my door. Anatoly rolled us off the curb. Halmoni did not move from her step until we turned the corner. I watched her in the side mirror until she was gone.
The parkway opened under us in long gray ribbons.
Late autumn had stripped the trees down to wet black bones.
The river beyond the rail ran the color of dull steel.
I watched the wing mirrors. I watched the cars three back.
I watched the overpasses as they came up.
I do this on every drive. It is not paranoia. It is the rent.
Chloe sat behind me with her hand on Rhea's knee. The two of them were quiet, the kind of quiet that means a child has been loved well in a grandmother's kitchen. I let myself enjoy it for two miles.
I clocked the first SUV at mile three.
Black, tinted, two cars back behind the chase car, moving up. It slipped into the next lane and accelerated until it rode the chase car's rear quarter. A second one sat a quarter mile ahead in the breakdown lane, hazards on, no occupant visible.
"Sergei." Quiet.
He had already seen it. His hand was already on his weapon.
The black SUV behind us did not pass the chase car. It clipped it. A hard angled tap into the rear quarter at sixty miles an hour. The chase car slewed, fought it, lost it. Mischa overcorrected and went up the slope of the shoulder, two wheels off, then four, gone into a low bank of brush.
The second SUV pulled out into our lane the same second a third came up alongside on the passenger side. A window dropped. A muzzle flashed. The round took out a chunk of my passenger window and buried itself in the headrest a hand's width from Sergei's skull. Glass sprayed across the dash.
"To the shoulder. Hold." I snapped at Anatoly. He was already on it. The wheel went hard right under his hands and the SUV bit gravel and slewed, kicking up a brown tail of dirt and dead leaves. The blocker ahead blew past on our left, missing its window by inches.
I twisted in my seat. "Chloe. Down. Now. Rhea on the floor."
She did not freeze. I will remember that until I am old.
She unclipped Rhea's belt with one hand and her own with the other and pulled my daughter off the seat onto the rubber mat in one motion.
She folded her body over Rhea's, one arm around her head, Beom-Beom pinned between them.
Rhea had been told once that if Papa said floor, the floor was the answer.
She put her face into the bear and stayed.
I reached under the seat in front of me.
My fingers closed on the compact pistol I keep clipped to the underside of the frame.
I dragged it free, turned, and pressed it into Chloe's right hand, fitting her fingers around the grip the way I had taught her one rainy afternoon when she had not known why I was teaching her.
My other hand cupped the back of her head for a beat. Her hair was warm.
"Take this. Stay down. Do not come up. If a man you do not know opens that door, you fire. Do not wait. Hold the trigger steady. I will be back for you."
Her eyes were huge. I needed her nod. I waited a half second for it. It came.
"Call my brothers. Alek. Speed dial two."
"Okay." Small. Real. Her voice was a thread, but it was not broken.
I went out low, rolling the door shut behind me with my heel. Cold hit my face. Then cordite. The third SUV had pulled abreast twenty feet off our left flank. A man was already out the rear passenger side, jacket open, weapon up. He had been looking for me at the front. He had not adjusted.
I put one round through the bridge of his nose. He dropped.
I moved up the side of our SUV. Sergei was already out his door, weapon braced on the open frame.
He took the driver of the abreast vehicle.
Anatoly worked the front quarter on the same side, breathing slow, picking each one as it showed.
We had drilled this in a Brighton Beach lot more times than I could count. The body knows.
Two more came around the front of the abreast SUV.
I went to one knee behind the wheel arch and put the lead one down through the throat.
Sergei took the second through the shoulder, then the chest as he stumbled.
Cordite stung the back of my mouth. My breath came out in flat white plumes.
My hearing had narrowed to a tunnel. Outside that tunnel was a thin ring of parkway noise, distant traffic, a far horn.
Inside was only the next angle, the next muzzle, the next man.
Behind us I heard tires. The chase car. They had clawed themselves out of the brush. Doors slammed. My men spilled out flanking wide, hitting the abreast SUV from its blind side. The blocker ahead of us had unloaded three more shooters trying to hold a ragged line down the centerline of the road.
They were not Cesare's men. I knew it in thirty seconds.
Cesare's men had moved like a unit. These had been promised money and a chance to even a score.
They flinched on the recoil. They fired in long panicked bursts.
One tried to run for the treeline and got dropped from sixty yards by Mischa, who had pulled himself out of the chase car with a cut above his eye and was the most annoyed man I had seen in a year.
I took another myself. Center mass, twice, and a third up high when he tried to come back from it. He stayed down.
Then I heard her.
"DANIIL!"
Loud. Not a scream. Sharp. Like a coach calling a play.
Then the shot. One single crack from inside my SUV. Pistol. The one I had put in her hand.
I came around the rear at speed. A man in a black leather jacket staggered back from the rear passenger door, free hand pressed flat to his chest, weapon still half raised in the other.
He had been about to step around the panel and put a round into my back.
He looked down at his palm. Wet. His knees folded under him and he went down sideways onto the asphalt.
Chloe was in the doorway of the back seat with both hands wrapped around the pistol grip. Her arms were still extended. Her elbows were locked. Her face was the color of paper. She was not crying. She was not breathing either.
I crossed the gap in three strides. The remnant shooters were pinned now by my men working them from two angles. I had a window. I used it.
I angled my body across the open door so anyone coming up around the rear panel still had to come through me to reach her. I put my free hand to her cheek. Her skin was cold.
"I did not mean to." Her voice was flat and small and very far away. "He was about to shoot you."
"I know." Level. Immediate. I kept my hand on her face. "It is not on you. Look at me."
Her eyes lifted to mine. They did not quite focus at first. Then they did.
"It is not on you. Did you call?"
"Yes. They are coming."
"Good." I bent and kissed her forehead, once, hard, the way you set a seal. "Stay down. If anyone else comes up, do not hesitate. You shoot. Do you hear me?"
She nodded. The fear sat all over her face but the nod was clean. "I hear you."
"Good girl."
I was gone again before the words had finished landing.
It took another two minutes. Maybe less. The remnant fell apart from the inside, the way scared crews do once two of theirs go down badly. Two threw their weapons down and put their hands behind their heads. We zip-tied them face down on the centerline. The rest stayed where they had fallen.
Sergei walked the line of bodies in low ready, kicking each weapon out of reach with the side of his boot. Anatoly was already on the radio. The cold smelled of cordite and wet leaves and copper.
Tires up the road. Three vehicles in close formation from the direction of the compound. Alek's car, then Mikhail's, then Ivan's. They came onto the scene with the choreography of twenty years doing it together. Doors opened in sequence. They moved in.