Chapter 15
ARTUR
The vehicle shop smells of burned rubber and fresh bleach.
Its rolling doors stand open under a faded sign, exposing three empty service bays where tools once hung along pale rectangles on the wall.
Oil stains mark the concrete, but every drain has been scrubbed until white cleaner dries around the grates, evidence that whoever cleared the building expected us.
A cheap wall timer still ticks above the stripped cabinets, its second hand too loud in the emptied space. A refrigerator beside the timecards stands open and warm. Someone removed the food with the files, suggesting the clearing took hours rather than the panicked minutes after the Dally’s attack.
One car waits under a gray cover in the last bay. A guard removes the fabric to reveal an ordinary customer’s sedan with its engine missing, the hood marked by clean rectangles where tools were packed away. Whoever left knew exactly what belonged to the shop and what could connect it to Pasha.
Katie walks beside me in boots and a dark coat, her hair tied away from her face, as Boris follows with two guards and another team searches the office. She crouches beside the nearest paint booth, finding silver dust inside the lower vent where a cloth missed the corner.
“Same base layer,” she says. “The maintenance van had this shine under the white. So did the sedan at the casino and the car outside Dally’s.”
The paint alone proves little, but the rough repair boundary above each rear wheel offers more. Katie finds a curved paper template in the booth trash, stiff with silver overspray, then places it against a photograph on Boris’s phone, and the curve fits the sedan’s repaired panel.
Katie turns the template over: handwritten measurements cover the back, including the distance from the wheel arch to the fuel door. The same mechanic prepared every car to look unrelated from a distance as he preserved the reinforced panel under the paint.
“The repair wasn’t cosmetic,” she says. “They strengthened this section first.”
Boris enlarges the casino photograph, where the silver layer sits over a hidden compartment accessible from inside the trunk. The maintenance van carried weapons into Katie’s building, and the sedan may have carried equipment through my garage.
“They used one template to prepare every vehicle,” she says.
As I look through the cleared office, Boris photographs the match; filing cabinets stand open, stripped of folders. A printer tray contains one sheet caught under the rollers.
The service invoice is creased through the center; it charges the same Saranov shell company for repainting a dark sedan, then lists the electrical contractor that worked inside Dymov Casino before the war as the authorized collector.
“They became careless when they cleared the shop,” Boris says.
“Or they wanted us to find a direction,” I reply.
Katie rises from the paint booth, her gaze passing over the guards searching lockers before settling on a mechanic beside the rear exit.
Only one employee remains, with grease darkening both knees of his coveralls.
Though his hands stay folded, his right foot points toward the open alley.
Rather than watch my gunmen, he checks the exit whenever tires cross the alley mouth, keeping his shoulders low when guards open drawers and lifting them each time an engine slows.
Katie follows the pattern, recognizing that he expects one particular vehicle or fears it.
“Boris,” Katie says quietly.
The mechanic runs before she finishes Boris’s name.
Boris reaches the alley first, and the mechanic turns toward the fence, sees a guard closing from that side, then tries to climb a stack of tires. I catch the back of his coveralls and pull him onto the pavement.
His breath smells of cigarettes, and panic widens his eyes as he raises both hands.
“I didn’t paint the cars.”
“You knew which cars,” I say.
He looks at Katie, his eyes widening before he hides the reaction.
“Igor used this shop,” she says. “The scarred man with the damaged left eye.”
The mechanic swallows. “He came after closing. Paid cash. Nobody asked names.”
“You stayed behind to warn him.”
“I stayed because they said they’d kill my brother if I left.” His eyes return to the alley. “Igor collects messages from a dead drop. That’s all I know.”
He gives us the location under an old rail bridge and describes a magnetic box fastened inside the eastern support; Boris sends a team without releasing the mechanic.
“When did you last see Igor?” I ask.
“The night before last. Before the shooting at the diner.”
The mechanic rubs his palms against his coveralls before explaining that Igor collected a dark sedan, checked the paint himself, then forced the employees into the office during a call. He heard only one sentence through the wall.
“He said the dancer still notices too much.”
My hand closes around the front of his coveralls before I decide to move, and fear empties his face.
“Did he say Katie’s name?”
“No. He called her the dancer.”
Katie presses my forearm until I release the mechanic’s coveralls.
Igor has reduced my wife to the detail he resents most, the skill that exposed him before his gun cleared the service panel.
Katie watches him longer. “He’s telling the truth about being afraid. I don’t know about the rest.”
I trust her judgment and keep the man alive.
An hour later, we descend into Dymov Casino through the service elevator.
Katie walks the southern level with the contractor’s lighting order folded in one hand, her reflection traveling beside us in smoked panels that turn security architecture almost elegant.
Gray corridors run behind the mirrored private rooms, interrupted by electrical cabinets at regular intervals; the contractor serviced four, including one beside the hidden door used during my inspections.
Near the equipment rooms, the air grows warmer from cables carrying current through the walls.
Beneath the blur of ventilation fans, a person can approach from behind without entering a mirror’s reflection.
For years, I have walked these corridors believing their ugliness made them secure.
With nowhere decorative for a stranger to linger, a reflective cabinet at each intersection still gives anyone with a tool bag an excuse to stop.
Rather than follow only the route printed on the invoice, Katie watches the ceiling cameras.
Inside each blind section, she steps aside and searches for the next reflective surface.
A polished fire cabinet shows the garage door, while the dark screen of a service terminal reveals the stairs behind us.
Katie opens the plan on a tablet. “The listed repairs form a path.”
She moves from the garage gate to a camera junction, then toward the private room where the dead captain ran, each stop providing access to another concealed door.
“A contractor following this invoice could map every route you use without entering a restricted room,” she says.
“The captain escorted them,” Boris replies. “He could explain every pause as inspection.”
We reach a mirrored cabinet outside the counting room. Katie presses the shelf release, exposing the narrow passage behind it. The contractor repaired a light less than six feet away.
She stands in the contractor’s recorded position and lifts both hands as though working overhead. From there, the mirror shows the hidden shelf release whenever an officer enters. The repair lasted three hours according to the invoice. Nobody needs three hours to replace the listed transformer.
“They were learning the doors,” Katie says. “The electrical work paid for the time to watch.”
The dead captain did more than admit a contractor. He escorted someone through a lesson in my casino’s private anatomy, and Ivan arrives through the opposite stairwell as that conclusion settles over the room.
His gaze moves from the open passage to the tablet in Katie’s hand. “She shouldn’t have access to casino infrastructure.”
Katie closes the plan. “The infrastructure already has access to me.”
“You are protected because few people understand these routes.”
“Igor understands them.”
Ivan looks at me. “The contractors may have planted devices or duplicate keys. Take Katie upstairs as we clear the level.”
My old response urges me to remove her from the threat and decide everything before danger gains another opening.
Katie has identified every vehicle, exposed the mechanic, and traced the invoice farther than the men who approved it.
“She stays,” I say.
Ivan’s expression closes. “This is unnecessary exposure.”
“It is her investigation too.”
Katie doesn’t thank me; she returns to the plan and asks Boris which rooms Ivan uses during inspections.
Three rooms overlap the contractor’s route, a pattern that proves nothing about my uncle but still requires an answer.
Ivan supervised inspections from the counting room every Thursday until the war changed the schedule, and the contractor worked on a Thursday. Any employee could observe the pattern after repeated visits, but the invoice gave Pasha’s people the best possible seat.
Katie looks between the contractor’s route and the rooms Ivan used. She says nothing else with him present, and her restraint makes the overlap louder.
I don’t wait for the dead drop to produce another scrap.
The contractor’s invoices list a dispatch yard near the old industrial corridor and a storage building west of the Downtown Connector.
I send two captains to those addresses with separate teams, then leave the casino with Katie and Boris for the rail bridge.
During the drive, Boris receives both reports.
At the empty dispatch yard, the team found nothing, but farther west our men caught three Saranov soldiers stripping identification plates from a van.
Without a single Dymov injury, all three surrendered; the search recovered copied casino badges, painted quarter panels, and radios tuned to the frequencies used during the apartment attack.