Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [90]
“You should be.” Kirilenko clacked his teeth together like a chimpanzee or a crocodile. “If you don’t listen to me I swear I’ll bite your head off.”
“Alli . . . ,” Jack warned.
Alli, staring down Kirilenko, spat into his face, then she turned and, crossing the small room, obediently put her ear to the door.
“You asked for it,” Jack said to the Russian in a mocking voice, before turning back to speak in low tones with Annika. “You’re not going to kill him, that’s out of the question. Besides, he knows something.”
“What if he’s simply pretending he knows something?”
“What if he’s not?”
But Jack’s attention was now divided. He was watching Alli, who had come away from the door in the wake of their conversation. She had begun to walk back toward Kirilenko.
Annika, becoming aware of Jack’s growing agitation, turned to watch. “What the hell is she doing?” she said under her breath.
“Alli, get away from him,” Jack said sharply as he strode toward her.
But before he could get to her, she waggled in front of Kirilenko’s face the cell phone she’d scooped up from the corridor floor as the others were dragging his body in here.
“It’s you who should be frightened,” she said. “I have your life in my hand.”
Jack pulled her back. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You missed this,” she said to Jack as she proffered the phone in the palm of her hand.
“This girl has balls,” Annika said with a laugh, “you have to give her that.”
Jack, noting the sour look on Kirilenko’s face, wondered whether Alli was onto something. He was about to pluck up the cell, when he changed his mind. “Check it out yourself,” he said. “You earned the right.”
Alli hesitated, looking as if she didn’t quite believe him. Then, seeing no contradiction in his expression, she flipped it open. She spent a few minutes scrolling through different menus before she apparently came upon something of interest. Reversing the screen, she showed Jack and Annika the grainy photo of the three of them as they emerged from Rochev’s dacha.
“Mine is the only face identifiable,” Annika said, peering closely at the image.
Alli zoomed in on a portion of the photo. “Look at what you’re holding.”
“The sulitsa,” Annika breathed.
“What the hell is a sulitsa?” Kirilenko still had the remains of his own blood and Alli’s spittle on his cheek. “What did you use to kill Ilenya Makova?”
“At last we know her name,” Jack said, taking the phone from Alli.
“I didn’t kill her, none of us did,” Annika said. “As Jack said, we found her with this thing—this antique Cossack splitting weapon—sticking out of her—”
“I don’t believe you, Annika Dementieva.”
“—so deeply she was impaled to the mattress.”
Kirilenko moved his head from side to side. “I know you.”
“The fuck you do.”
“I know people just like you, I know you killed her.”
Jack pushed his way past a seething Annika and said to the Russian, “Listen to me because I’m only going to say this once. Annika is intent on killing you and I’m now inclined to agree with her.” He adjusted Kirilenko’s ugly tie so that the knot bit into his Adam’s apple. “Against my better instincts I’m going to give you this chance. Tell us what you know.”
“And then what?” Kirilenko said. “She’ll kill me anyway, I see the look in her eyes.”
“She won’t kill you if you answer my questions.”
Kirilenko laughed. “You think you can stop her?”
“Yes,” Jack said softly and slowly. “I do.”
The Russian peered into Jack’s face with his weary gaze. “Fuck you, Americanski. Fuck you and your entire decadent fucking country.”
FOLLOWING HIS numerous night visits Dyadya Gourdjiev had slept uneasily until noon. He dreamt that it had been raining for days, possibly weeks, and his apartment was developing cracks in the poorly constructed ceiling, around the cheap aluminum window frames. As a result water was leaking in from so many places it was impossible to caulk or patch them all. As soon as he dammed one up, two appeared in its place.
He awoke entirely unrefreshed. As he lay staring up at the ceiling, spider-webbed with cracks, he knew