Chapter 36 - Gavril
The state-of-the-art tracker would still send out a signal if Reuben turned off his phone, so even if he grew suspicious of me being able to follow him, I was hot on his trail.
The bastard wasn’t going to live to see another beautiful Florida sunrise.
Anger and the sting of betrayal fought with the bizarre urge to beg for Lilia’s forgiveness.
Since when did I beg anyone for anything? She had run from me, for a third time now. She didn’t deserve anything but my wrath. But like the other times, there was no doubt in my mind that I would do anything other than forgive her.
Something I couldn’t hope to gain from her, even if I could stop the attacks on her family in time to save their lives.
I followed the signal, neatly pinging loud and clear on the map, and as I got closer, the hope that this would be over quickly and easily began to falter. I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by thick forest leading into marshes and swampland. Where the hell were they?
Stopping the car at the spot where the signal terminated, I got out and swore viciously. Kicking at the undergrowth along the side of the highway, I eventually found the phone, waterlogged and dead.
I stared down the length of the highway, stretching out as far as I could see.
With no turnoffs, they had to have kept going, so that’s what I would do, too.
After another few miles, there was a rickety sign advertising a motel down a small, nearly overgrown road.
I turned, anger barely contained as I pictured the young guard in a small room with my wife.
If he laid a single finger on her, he wouldn’t live to see tomorrow morning.
I’d kill him where he stood with my bare hands.
As the motel came into sight, looking like it had been frozen in time from more than fifty years ago, a sudden, sick realization shrouded me, and I was unable to shake it off.
This final escape attempt might have been brewing for a while.
Maybe Lilia didn’t overhear me talking about the attacks.
What if she wanted to escape solely to be with the guard?
Much closer to her age, and not a bad-looking kid, I supposed.
Certainly had to be charismatic if he turned her head.
What if she wasn’t just using him as a means to get back to her family, but she thought she wanted to stay with him when all was said and done?
What the hell would I do then?
The feeling nearly crushed me. Burning jealousy, mixed with anger, mixed with heartache. The worst was the heartache. How did I let her in so much that she had such power over me?
I shoved it all aside as I careened into the parking lot. There was only one other car, and the man behind the counter in the dimly lit office was asleep when I crashed through the door.
There was no way they’d have given their real names, so I described Reuben, demanding to know what room they were in.
“Room 3,” he said, not a care for guest privacy. He gave himself a long scratch, and I was halfway out the door to surprise them when he called me back. “They didn’t stay long, though, so please don’t bash the door off the hinges.”
It didn’t take too much to get the lackadaisical man to point me in the direction they left and give me a description of the car they were driving.
I tossed him a twenty and took off. It took almost thirty minutes to get to the end of the road he pointed me onto, and I skidded to a halt at the abrupt dead end.
A sludgy lake, surrounded by heavy foliage, lay behind an ancient barrier, a faded sign warning anyone who found their way out of this hellhole that swimming was dangerous. There were no offshoots to the road, not even anything resembling a trail that a car would fit down.
That son of a bitch lied to me.
I couldn’t even put my foot to the floor and race back to exact revenge and hopefully real information, because the road was so rutted I didn’t dare risk blowing a tire or breaking an axle.
All I needed was to end up stranded in the wilderness of the Everglades when the clock was ticking on both the attacks that were due to go down in LA, and whatever was happening with Lilia.
Keeping my mind carefully blank, I made it back to the motel and crashed in, my hands around the man’s skinny neck before he could get halfway out of his seat.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” he yelled, the most energy I’d seen out of him. “The other guy gave me a hundred bucks to tell anyone who asked the wrong direction.”
“You couldn’t just send me back the way I came?” I asked. “You had to point me into the jungle?”
“I figured I'd better earn the hundred,” he said, near tears as I tightened my grip.
“And I’m betting you described a totally different car,” I guessed. I was wasting valuable time with this guy, and let go of his throat. “Tell me the truth, and you get to live. You can even keep the twenty I gave you earlier.”
Still wary, and rightly so, he described another car and directed me down the highway. “There’s not much that way,” he said. “A little town, some old buildings. But keep going, and you can connect back to a road leading to the keys, or back up toward Miami.”
Great. So a whole lot of choices and a whole lot of time for them to get a head start. Almost two hours had passed since I set out after them, and according to the last sighting of Lilia on the surveillance cameras, she had left almost an hour before that.
With no choice but to keep trying to find them, I got out on the road and stopped at the intersection the motel man spoke of.
I could head toward the keys or double back to the city.
Then I thought about the little town he mentioned.
A stupid place to hide, but then again, I didn’t honestly respect Rueben’s mental capacity at the moment.
I kept going in the direction of the keys, thinking if it was me, I’d hire a boat and head up the coast, get out in another city, and head to the nearest airport. Stopping at a rest area, I called Ivan Morozov.
“Are we taking over the Petrov empire today?” he asked, laughing heartily.
“My wife’s gone missing,” I said.
“How can I help?” he asked, sobering instantly.
I explained where I was and the options laid out before me. Ivan owned half of South Florida, so if anyone had contacts who could be on the lookout, it was him. He perked up when I mentioned the little town I passed without a second glance.
“I used to own a place out there. About fifty acres with a house and a barn. Great safe house, good for… other things.”
I didn’t care how many bodies were buried out there. In fact, I might have another to add once I caught up with my wayward guard. “But you don’t own it anymore?” I asked.
“No, sold it more than a year ago. Hang on.” He paused for a long, quiet moment, soft tapping in the background as if he was pulling up records.
“Looks like it was a corporate sale. I figured they’d raze the farmhouse and turn it into a warehouse park.
Does the name Zolan Manufacturing mean anything to you? ”
I couldn’t speak for a few seconds, could hardly see through the red haze of rage.
Oh, I recognized the name all right. It was one of Luigi’s shell companies.
As fast as the new wave of anger hit me, it receded to icy fear.
This wasn’t an escape attempt at all. It was an operation to get my wife back into Luigi’s greasy hands.
Who the fuck knew what waited for her at that farmhouse, or whatever in the hell it had been turned into over the last year.
“You okay, Gavril?” Ivan asked when I remained silent too long. “Just tell me if you need backup.”
“I’ll keep you informed,” I said, thanking him for the information, as well as the promise to send the exact location of his former property.
It felt like half the day had been wasted on wild goose chases, but this new information had to be right.
There was no way this was a coincidence.
The sheer amount of time that had gone by had me so tense I could barely fold myself back into the car.
My imagination worked double time to taunt me with images of what Lilia might have been suffering for the past hours.
Clamping my fingers around the wheel, I forced a calm that wouldn’t last and headed toward the location as soon as Ivan’s text pinged on my phone less than a minute later.
Certainly no Russia, or even California, Florida was still a damn large state, and this far outside of a big city, there seemed nothing but miles of plant life. I could have gone from LA to San Francisco in the amount of time I had been driving first in one direction, then another.
I finally turned off onto a farm road and crept along with a vast expanse of overgrown fields on either side of it.
The house came into sight after about a half-mile, and I pulled off into the weeds.
Strapping a gun to my side, another across my back, and clipping a hunting knife onto my belt loop, I stealthily made my way up to the house.
It might have been nice at one time, but now the wraparound porch sagged at the edge, and most of the windows were boarded up.
An old gray barn with a big piece of corrugated sheet metal leaning where the door should have been stood off to the side.
The car the motel guy described to me was parked right in front, and at the same time I breathed a sigh of relief that they were here, my heart rate kicked into overdrive.
Another car parked beside it and my tension rose. How many? Was I too late? They wouldn’t kill her, not when she was so valuable, but those assholes wouldn’t have any compunction against a bit of torture or some other sick fun.
As I pictured how I would kill them all, I found a window that wasn’t boarded up on the ground floor and peered through. It was a kitchen window and had a view straight through to the living area.