He grinned, and I abruptly shuddered.
“Don’t worry, he has his girls. We’re not animals, even decent guys, I’d say. Ivan coaches a youth hockey league, and Roman drives his elderly neighbor to her doctor’s appointments twice a week. You know Roman?”
I shook my head.
“Ah, well, you know Roman. You just don’t know it’s Roman. You’re his job security. Big guy.”
Big guy blowing out people’s brains in the street…
“Anyway. Enough people know you now that it’s problematic. Sergei has to meet you. He’ll saddle you with some not-so-fun information, then tell you that he’ll kill you if you ever tell anyone. You and everyone you love. That’s loyalty, you see? Everyone goes down together, so it’s in everyone’s best interestsnot to go down.”
I realized I’d been twisting my mitten into a now-fraying knot in my lap. I was too tired to be shocked by anything he said. This was all just a quiet descent into hell. A cold, cigarette-smoke-filled hell.
“Don’t worry,” Misha reassured me, “it’s not as scary as it sounds. Just remember that everyone’s a businessman. There’s only a handful of problematic…” He scrunched his nose. “Well, no, you know the problematic one, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re seeing him.” He grinned, and we pulled onto the curb of a pharmacy. A faded poster of a woman holding up a tube of Colgate smiled at me from behind the metal bars on the windows.
“Why do you keep saying that?” I hurried as he swung his door open.
“Sit and wait here, I’ll be right back. You sure I can’t get you an antiseptic or something? Aspirin?”
“No, thank you.”
I sat with my eyes forward and my hands neatly folded in my lap until he returned with a large leather duffel bag and threw it in the back seat.
“Anyway,” Misha said, and the cold air smacked across my bare skin as he got back in behind the steering wheel. “Don’t sass Sergei, and when he asks a question, answer it honestly. You’re shit at lying, and you’re just going to get yourself and Vitali in trouble. And only one of you can handle trouble.”
“Why are you telling me all this? Isn’t it all supposed to be… I don’t know, not out loud?”
“What’s not out loud?” He snorted. “You don’t see the assholes with the red jackets and golden chains? Don’t see theMercedes? It’s practically being screamed at you, and somehow it’s surprising.”
“Misha,” I said, and took a deep breath because this wasn’t something I actually wanted to know, but God, he kept dancing around it so much that my stomach was just one big twisted mess of knots, and I either threw up the question or my breakfast. “Why do you keep saying that stuff about Vitali? I know what happened last night was… it was awful, but you make it sound like he’s somehow worse. What does it mean that he’s a ‘hungry dog?’”
“You think he has Roman follow you just to protect you? Watch, pay attention, Katienka. Pay attention to how many things about Vitali make no sense. I’ve known him a long time. Knew him before he was shipped off to New Zealand. He was a bright boy—brighter than me, that’s for sure. But he came from a bad family. Parents were drunks and used to beat on him and his sister.”
I heard my voice come from a numb place, a place that didn’t really feel, just wanted to gather information for when things made sense again, and I could process something. Anything. “I thought they died when she was a baby?”
“Not that one. His older sister. I heard rumors, but can’t exactly ask Konstantinov about it; he doesn’t like his family mentioned, probably because he shot his parents.”
“What…”
“Yeah, shot them dead in the kitchen. I think he finally snapped after his papa broke his arm with those army-issued boots. Those things are heavy-duty, you know? Hurts likehrento fire a pistol with a broken arm, but he did it. Can you be a friend and reach back there, check the inner pocket?”
I twisted toward the duffel bag and had to climb halfway overmy seat to reach it. There was no doubt my butt was right in Misha’s face.Vitali shot his parents.The bag was full of money and hard, pillow-shaped bundles wrapped in shopping bags. “What am I looking for?”
“There’s a baggie of bright yellow tetracycline tablets. A bottle of vodka is in there somewhere—get that too.”
I did. My first thought was that the vodka bottle was sealed. I handed him the pills and thought he’d wash them down, but he just swallowed them dry—like some kind of maniac. He lit another cigarette and held it clenched between his teeth as he let go of the steering wheel to pull off his coat. I had to squeeze against the door to avoid getting punched as the big guy fought to free himself of a sleeve.
The roads were icy. I could still die that day.
“Do you mind?” he said through his teeth as he took hold of the steering wheel with one hand and pulled up the side of his shirt with the other.
I stared at the thick, crude, bloodied bandage over his ribs.
“Just pour however much on there. I need the clots to loosen before we get there so I can have someone redo the whole thing. Boris is shit with medicine, and the girl who usually does it went to visit her parents in St. Petersburg for the holidays. Her papa is an orchestra director. Interesting guy.”
