Chapter 37 - Tatiana
My heart was pounding, I was running on pure adrenaline, without a clue which way to go. Once I was off the small waterfront street, I turned in the more populated direction, just running like my life depended on it. Maybe it did. Or maybe this was the biggest mistake of my life.
I had to cling to the hope that I was saving my father.
If he even needed saving. He could be in charge of this whole operation for all I knew.
That was the main problem. I didn’t know what was true.
But Papa told me I could trust Riku, and Riku told me to run, so that’s what I was doing, along with ignoring the terrible feeling in my gut.
It must have been more than a mile of flat-out running, something that should have been impossible if it weren’t for my harried state, but a car finally swerved up beside me, and the back door flew open.
Jumping in, I put my head between my knees to try to catch my breath while the car took off. After a moment, I sensed a presence next to me in the backseat, and I straightened up. I recognized the man himself, calmly assessing me, his hands resting in his lap.
Riku should have been handsome. Slicked back black hair, smooth olive skin with a trace of a beard, piercing brown eyes. But there was something mean about the set of his jaw, and there was no warmth in his eyes when he nodded a greeting to me, still waiting for me to stop heaving for breath.
I suppose that someone who didn’t know Papa might think he looked mean if he was under stress, and this was a stressful situation, no doubt about that.
Kon could look downright terrifying under the right circumstances.
All the horrible things Kon told me about Riku came rushing back, but I tried not to think about them.
Or think about Kon. I had to concentrate on seeing my father soon, alive and well.
Perhaps he was a traitor, but I’d deal with his explanations for that when the time came.
I smiled tentatively, and a corner of Riku’s mouth lifted in return. “Mr. Yoshida,” I said, still finding it difficult to draw breath despite recovering for several minutes as we drove.
“Miss Kanatova,” he replied. At least we were being polite.
A thousand questions jockeyed to get out of my mouth, but his slightly cold, assessing stare didn’t invite conversation. At least not from me. I waited, trying not to flinch and look away, and when he blinked first and turned to face his driver, I didn’t feel like I’d won anything.
The man was a killer.
But so was Kon.
“Turn off your phone,” he said. “So no one can track us.”
“Oh, of course.” I turned it off and returned it to my pocket, nodding absently at Riku’s murmured thanks. Still polite. Everything was fine.
“Please,” I said after we turned onto the freeway a few minutes later. “Are we going to where my father is?”
“All will be revealed when we’re somewhere safe,” he said.
Didn’t I just leave somewhere safe? All my prior arguments started coming back.
Who was the bad guy in this situation? Or, perhaps it was more accurate to say, who was the less bad guy.
Since Riku wasn’t in a chatty mood and my throat was dry from both running and fear, I concentrated on the direction we were going, taking note of which freeway we were on, and then the exit once we left it.
We were in a residential area now, and if we were still in San Diego, it was on the outskirts.
It was too dark to catch the street names as the car smoothly glided past them.
There were so many twists and turns, I started wondering if the driver was doubling back and circling around to either confuse me or anyone who might be following.
Just like we did when I was hiding in the loom crate, on the run from Los Angeles.
That seemed like a good time compared to this. I knew I was going somewhere safe and that Kon would be there at the end of the journey. How did I know that, though, really?
Because I trusted him. I may have hated him at one point, for ruining everything, but now that I was with the man I’d been trying to contact, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Not about anything. Well, one thing, but I shoved it aside. Whatever that was, it was over now.
By now, Kon would know that I had run away, and he’d wash his hands of me. Unless Papa had a very good explanation for why he was working with the Yakuza now, after a lifetime of serving the Fokins, I was going into Kon's enemy pile.
I swiped my hand under my eyes, staring hard to stop the welling tears.
This was stress, nothing more, making me worry about stupid things.
Kon made me forget what was important for a while, but I was back on track.
On my way to the only family I had. Papa never lied to me before. Why would he start now?
“Are we almost there?” I asked.
Riku chuckled, the sound shocking me as much as a sudden gunshot. “You sound like my four-year-old daughter.”
I smiled, relaxing a bit. He was a family man, just like Papa.
He leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder, and after a few minutes, he turned onto a desolate street in an even more desolate part of town.
At the end of the dead-end road was a nondescript house made of stucco that might have been white at one time.
It was dingy when the car’s headlights flashed on its front, showing windows with drawn blinds and a garage door with a splash of graffiti on it.
“Not your place, I take it,” I said, going for jaunty humor.
Riku smiled again. “You might be surprised at some of the places I’ve been.”
This might be the only place they could get on short notice that none of the Fokins knew about, and that thought didn’t exactly cheer me up the way it should have. All the windows were dark, and once the car was off, we were plunged into the inky black night.
Riku jumped out and came around to my side with the senses of a cat to open my door.
“Sorry,” I said, realizing I was sitting there staring into nothing, not only waiting for my eyes to adjust, but also because the house was anything but welcoming.
As soon as I got out, Riku’s hand was clamped around my upper arm, my feet stirring up gravel as he hustled me toward the door. By now, the faint stars had allowed me to see the shadows of the two men, Riku and his guard, on either side of me.
Inside, it was darker than outside. Not a light coming from under a closed door or even the flicker of a candle anywhere.
There was total silence other than the sound of our feet on the tile in the entryway.
As soon as the door was shut behind us, someone snapped on a harsh overhead light, and I blinked, stifling a scream.
At first glance, I thought I saw a slumped form on the couch, but it was only a pile of blankets where someone had slept. I wanted to demand to see Papa, but the words wouldn’t come out. It was becoming clear that no one was here, unless he was unconscious.
“Is my father all right?” I asked as Riku continued moving me further into the house.
Past the living area, with the rumpled blankets and several discarded frozen food containers on a chipped wooden coffee table. There was a faint smell of old stew and sweat, but what did I expect from a safehouse?
“Is he here?” I tried again when my first question was ignored.
Riku was silent as he turned me down a hall, his hand still clamped around my arm.
Not squeezing, not painful, but what would happen if I tried to jerk free?
The little bit of English he spoke to me had been practically unaccented, but I wondered if there was a language barrier.
I asked if he spoke Russian, because I certainly didn’t know more than five words in Japanese.
Papa had become fluent in his time there, always able to pick up languages with ease, unlike me, who only had the advantage of my American cousins to prod me into giving my all with my English classes.
He answered me in flawless Russian. “You don’t have to worry.”
Well, that was good. Too bad I still was. We came to a door at the end of a short hall, and he swung it open. My heart soared. This was where Papa was. Maybe hurt, maybe sick, maybe just remaining silent in case of an ambush. But I’d see him in mere seconds and get all the answers I needed.
The room was empty. Not a shred of furniture, not even a rug on the bare concrete floor.
I whipped around to look at Riku, whose eyes were flat in the low light from the other room.
Letting go of my arm, he shoved me inside and blocked the door.
He was slight, but taller than me, and his burly guard loomed in the background.
“What is this? Where’s my father?” I demanded, still clinging to the hope this wasn’t a huge mistake. “Tell me,” I screamed.
Riku’s smile revealed small, straight teeth, perfectly white.
They may as well have been fangs for all the kindness this upturn of his mouth showed in his stony face.
With that sneer held in place, he reached into his jacket pocket and held up a phone, turning it around so I could see the silly sticker on the back.
A yellow smiley face with an X for its eyes. I bought it for Papa when it made me laugh in a grocery store checkout. A dead smiley face was humorous when I was so far from any danger that nothing Papa did ever seemed real. Imagine a murderous gangster with a sticker on his phone.
“Why do you have that?” I asked, my heart sinking as my stomach clenched like it was in the grip of a fist. Oh God, what did I do? “Please tell me where he is.”
Riku put the phone back in his pocket, my last link to my father disappearing, along with my hope.
“I don’t know,” he said, voice like razor blades, not a trace of even a fake smile remaining.
“The bastard got away from me. But now that I have you, I’m certain I can get him back.
” He shrugged, the smile returning and suddenly, sickeningly real. “Or better yet, Konstantin Fokin.”
His hand whipped behind me, grabbing my phone, which disappeared along with Papa’s.
He stepped back, as graceful as a pop star on stage, and slammed the door in my face.
I sank down onto the bare concrete, not feeling the cold seep through my clothes, too shocked to cry, as I pondered exactly how much I had fucked everything up.
Definitely the biggest mistake of my life.