She stopped shoving it for a minute and listened to what was going on out in the warehouse, which was just more arguing in several different languages, primarily Russian. The door moving on its own didn’t seem to have raised an alarm.
And that was probably because Kir Sokolov had been too stupid to set a guard over her. Matryona Sokolov couldn’t be expected to think of everything. Kir wasn’t pulling his weight in their organization. Matryona probably had to keep her brother in the organization for family reasons.
One of Dree’s uncles who owned a cattle farm had an adult son who was a screwup. Michael was the baby of the family, and his mama and daddy had babied him his whole life. He’d gotten thrown out of college for dealing weed, and he wasn’t even making a profit on it because he was smoking too much of his own wares.
His mama and daddy kept getting him one job after another with family members, trying to straighten him out, but he was just lazy and didn’t want to do what needed to be done.
When Dree had been in high school, Michael had come to stay at the sheep ranch and help herd the sheep. Predictably, within a week, he’d lost the sheep. Dree and her brothers had to go out on the ATVs to find them.
Once again, they’d sent Cousin Michael back to his parents in disgrace.
Kir Sokolov was the same kind of screwup as Michael had been. Dree pitied Matryona Sokolov for having to put up with him, even though Dree was very thankful for his ineptitude at that moment.
Dree inched out of the door, trying not to move it as she slithered along the floor. A door wiggling for no reason might attract their attention.
As she emerged from the storeroom, the huge, rolling garage door was at the far end of the warehouse, dozens of yards away.
Matryona and Kir Sokolov and several of their lesser goons were standing and arguing beside a commercial shipping truck that had driven into the warehouse.
“They will never know if we cut the cocaine with ground-up fiberglass,” Kir said. “Their noses are already calloused like a foot. Fiberglass will just shoot right up there.”
“But what about theirlungs?”Matryona asked him. “What do you think inhaling fiberglass dust is going to do to theirlungs?”
“Who cares?”
“Idiot.Our customers give us money. We don’t want our customers to die because then they will stop giving us money.”
If Dree ever escaped, she was going to send Matryona a letter of condolence for having to put up with that jerk. Kir was as vicious as he was stupid.
They were all standing around down there at the end of the warehouse, so there was no way Dree could inch her way out of that garage door without being seen. She needed another escape route.
About halfway down the side of the warehouse wall, however, a normal-size door was half-hidden behind a stack of cardboard boxes.
Getting to and through that door was slightly more plausible than crawling past all those people at the end of the warehouse.
Dree continued at her frantic snail’s pace. Every foot of crawling took a lot of effort and abraded her knees, but she went slightly out of her way to scoot behind bins and a forklift because it kept her out of sight for those few minutes.
She finally reached the far wall and had perhaps thirty yards to go to the door.
The floor out in the warehouse was worse than the storeroom. Torn bits of paper littered the edges of the room, but the cigarette butts, caked grease, and insect husks were just too much. Evidently, the Sokolovs were not only hiding from the police but also from France’s workplace hygiene inspectors.
As Dree flipped away from a disgusting used cigarette that somebody had been sucking smoke through with their gross mouth, her bound legs, which had the maneuverability of a mermaid tail on land, flapped into a pile of discarded soda cans.
The empty aluminum cans clattered to the cement with a ruckus.
Down at the other end of the warehouse, Kir and Matryona came running.
Kir pointed at Dree humping along the floor. “She’s trying to escape again! Stop her!”
Matryona slowed to a walk. “I think we can catch her.”
Dree flipped herself forward, rearing up and lunging to try to get to the door in the most pathetic slow-speed chase ever.
Matryona reached inside her coat pocket and came up with a gun in her hand, which she aimed at Dree.
Dammit.She’d almost made it.
At least she was going to die during an escape attempt instead of like a victim. At least she’d chosen that.
