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 barehands. 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 youcan 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.
