“I’ll keep it in mind,” White said. “I need to find a restroom and wash off my face.”
The desk clerk offered to show her where it was, and White followed her out. Beard turned to Lucas and said, in a stricken voice, “On the Derrick Beard one-to-five shitstorm scale, this is a Category Five. Martha, my God, her head blew up, like, like…”
He didn’t know what it was like.
Then the family came back with their rolling suitcases. They all turned to look, and the man asked, “Can we still check in?”
2
When Lev Nikitin and Matvey Orlov burst out of the woods, they were focused on the big Jeep and getting into it. Orlov reached it first. He threw the spotting scope and its tripod on the floor of the back seat and jumped in after it, pulling the door shut behind him. Nikitin, carrying the rifle, took an extra three seconds to skid around the back of the truck to the front passenger door, popped it open and vaulted inside, putting the butt of the rifle on the floor and trapping it between his legs. Katerina Abramova was behind the wheel and was rolling before Nikitin had his door shut and she was chanting, “Fast, fast, fast…”
Nikitin: “What! What!”
She was looking in the rearview mirror: “In the street behind us…”
She was leaning on the gas pedal as the bullets started poppingthrough the back of the truck. Orlov cried out and said, “Hit!” and then, the impacts coming like hail on a tin roof, “Hit again…”
Nikitin was hit next, then Abramova was hit in the rim of her left ear, blood spattering the windshield, but she ignored it and put a phone to her other ear and shouted into it, “Crash pickup, three wounded, three minutes.”
The incoming bullets had all been fired in four or five seconds and they ran away from them and Nikitin turned in his seat, groaned and asked Orlov, “Matvey…how bad?”
Orlov groaned and Nikitin said, “Matvey…”
“One above my belt in my back…no exit. One in my butt and down my leg. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding is bad.” He groaned again. He was slumped over in the back, but held up a hand, saturated with scarlet streaks of blood.
Nikitin: “Katya. How bad?”
“I have a new hole in my ear,” Abramova said. “I will not bleed out. And you?”
Nikitin had pulled down the sun visor, then pushed up the cover on the mirror on the back of the visor, and was peering at his neck. “In my butt and the side of my neck. I don’t think it hit the carotid, it’s not pumping but it’s bleeding, small hole in, bigger out, but it might have been a fragment. I think it hit the headrest first…”
“Two minutes or less,” Abramova said.
Orlov: “I can’t walk.”
“We’ll carry,” she said.
The truck ricochetted off a pothole and Orlov screamed, groaned, said, “Don’t do that…”
She did it again, because she couldn’t slow enough to miss the potholes, and Orlov screamed each time and began farting, and hescreamed with the farts and Nikitin half-groaned and half-laughed and said, “Mat, you dirty piece of shit…”
Abramova glanced over the seat at Orlov in the back and asked, “Mat, can you put on your mask? Can you get your mask out?”
“Yes…” Another groan.
Nikitin had taken a black ski mask out of his pocket and was pulling it over his head, and when it was on, reached across to Abramova and pulled a mask out of her parka pocket and dropped it in her lap. She waited until she was clear of traffic and then quickly pulled it over her face.
Three miles away, Melor Titov was sitting in a cream-colored Subaru and when the call came in—“Crash pickup”—he smothered a groan, blurted, “On the way,” and put the little SUV in gear. He’d had some training in avoidance and escape driving, but much more in computer systems and language, and he wanted nothing to do with this hit team.
His job was acquiring papers, not doing crash pickups for killers. If he didn’t do it, he might be next on the kill list; surely would be, if he didn’t show up at the motel parking lot, and it wouldn’t be a gentle death. Some display of bravery and resolution was critical, but the quicker he could get back to his regular job in Chicago, the happier he’d be.
He pulled a black ski mask over his head and took off.
• • •
Orlov couldn’t seeout of the truck, but Nikitin could, and he feared that Abramova was going to kill them with speed, if the bullet wounds didn’t do it first. She was cutting through traffic like a great white shark going through a pod of sea lions. Three minutes later,just as she’d said, she cut into a motel parking lot and yanked the truck to the left into a parking slot.
Abramova: “I don’t see…Yes! He’s here!”
