Her body and brain told her it was well past one in the morning, no matter what time it was in this frigid hellhole. She pushed the button to let her seat recline and let her head fall sideways to look at Quinn. His deep and rhythmic breathing was barely audible above the hiss of the aircraft ventilation. She couldn’t tell if he was relaxed or just completely exhausted.
She shoved the pack in the seat beside her, trying to remember what she’d stuffed inside it when she’d gotten her orders. This was a dead-end mission anyway, and you didn’t need much gear for that. It was just make-work for a brand new “breast-fed”—what her bastard ex and his cronies called female agents. She’d be in and out in a couple of hours, ready for some other no-action assignment.
Chapter 14
The UN dinner broke about the same time Bowen got permission from higher authorities to leave the assignment, flooding the already choked streets with armored vehicles as he and Thibodaux left the DoubleTree on Lexington. Snaking motorcades of over a hundred delegations — each blipping their sirens and flashing emergency lights to jockey for position — turned Midtown Manhattan into a honking, stagnant sea of black sedans and yellow cabs. Native New Yorkers stood bunched up at each intersection supremely unimpressed by the red and blue lights. Bordering on angry mobs, they glared at every passing Town Car and Suburban as if they were part of an invading army. Tourists lined the teaming streets with no idea of what was going on. They hoped, no doubt, to see someone famous when a motorcade pulled up in front of a hotel. Instead, they got the foreign minister of Togo — who turned out to be a very gracious, if not famous, personality.
Thibodaux had the rental car, so he drove, nosing his way through traffic toward the Battery Park Tunnel and Brooklyn, Petyr Volodin’s last known address. Bowen had changed into a pair of jeans and a navy-blue cotton polo, happy to be out of the monkey suit. He left the tail out to help conceal his pistol. A brown jacket of distressed leather gave him some protection against the chilly morning fog.
It was nearly two in the morning when they finally reached a shabby, five-story walk-up apartment building four blocks off the boardwalk in Brighton Beach.
The big Cajun pulled the rented Ford Taurus next to the curb half a block from the apartment building, across the street from a Russian grocery. He chewed on a flat wooden stir stick he’d swiped from the hotel kitchen and used it to gesture when he spoke, reminding Bowen of the way his grandfather chewed a sprig of hay on the family ranch back in Montana. Steam rose from a sewer grate in front of the car, entwining the beam of the headlights and giving the dark night an otherworldly feel.
“How do you want to do this?”
“Same way you would do it, I’d guess,” Bowen said.
“Okay,” Thibodaux tossed the wooden stick over his shoulder into the backseat of the rental car. Voices carried on the quiet street, so he began to whisper as he exited the car. “You knock. If our guy gives us any trouble, I’ll shoot him in the face.” He pressed the door closed instead of slamming it. Then turned to walk toward Volodin’s apartment as if that was all there was to planning.
“Hang on now,” Bowen said, trotting to keep up with the Marine. “You might want to modify your community policing style. We’re in the U.S., not driving insurgents out of Fallujah.”
“You think I’m bad.” Thibodaux grinned, bounding up the stoop and pushing open the glass doors. “You should try workin’ with Quinn.”
Bowen rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. He’d faced Jericho Quinn in a boxing ring in college — and been assigned to hunt him when he was wanted for murder. Bowen trusted the man, even respected him, but it was hard to like someone who’d done such a good job of breaking your nose. “How about we just show Petyr our credentials and see where that takes us.”
“Flash him your U.S. Marshals creds,” the big Marine said under his breath. He ran a thick forefinger up and down the lobby mailboxes, studying the names written on peeling masking tape. “Marines don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”
“I thought Palmer had worked it out so you were on loan to OSI,” Bowen said. “Didn’t they give you a badge?”
“I got one, but I don’t like to use it.” The big Marine gave a mock shudder. “It makes me feel… I don’t know… all Air Forcey.”
Apartment 307 was located at the end of a short and dimly lit tile hallway to the left of the stairs.
Thibodaux stopped when he got to the top and sniffed the air.
“What?” Bowen said.
“Blood,” the Cajun said, closing his good eye while taking a deep breath through his nose. “And other stuff.”
Bowen nodded. Thibodaux was right. Amid the decaying smell of mothballs and peeling paint, the unmistakable copper tinge of blood stung his nostrils. Only someone who knew the smell of slaughter would recognize it, but the presence of “other stuff” hung heavy in the air. Bowen found the first blood smear half a minute later on the chipped tile floor outside of Petyr Volodin’s apartment. There was no more than a teaspoon worth, dark as chocolate syrup, pooled in the shadows below the mouth of the garbage chute. On the tile beside it was something more sinister, a fragment of bone, moist and pink, and about the size of a dime.
“Wonder if that’s a chunk of our guy’s skull?” Thibodaux whispered, tossing a look over his shoulder at apartment 307.
Bowen stepped to the side of the frame to take himself out of the line of fire should anyone inside decide to shoot through the door. Thibodaux took up a position on the opposite side, back a step. When the Marine nodded that he was set, Bowen reached across and pounded three times with the heel of his left hand, expecting a neighbor to come out at any moment to confront them for the noise at this time of night. If anyone was upset, they kept it to themselves.
“Want me to huff and puff?” Thibodaux said when no one answered, backing off another half step like he was going to boot the door.
Bowen shook his head and took a black leather pouch from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it to reveal a half dozen slender metal shims — his lock-picking tools. “Watch my six,” he said and had the door open in twenty seconds.
There is a particular stillness to a vacant house or apartment. For safety’s sake, Bowen assumed there was a bad guy hiding in some closet waiting to blow his brains out, but he could almost always feel it when there was no one home. Both men entered with pistols drawn anyway, rolling around the doorframe and doing a quick sweep for threats — stepping over and around the copious pools of blood and bone as they moved.
Petyr Volodin was long gone — judging from the carnage, probably long dead.
The overwhelming odor of dirty gym socks and the dead-animal flatulence of a gym rat on a steady diet of protein powder hung in an invisible cloud. Someone had done a cursory job of cleaning up, but there was enough blood and what Thibodaux called “spatter matter” on the tile floor to lead to the logical conclusion that Volodin — or someone — had been killed just inside the door. A bloody baseball bat lay on the floor next to the radiator, encrusted with matted hair. Bone does a lot of damage to wood and jagged shards were embedded up and down the business end of the bat. There was a divot in the tile where the killer had overshot his mark and hit the floor instead of his intended victim.
Bowen looked at the bat and closed his eyes, remembering too many bloody scenes from his time in the Middle East. Rage did terrible things to people. He’d once seen one man beat another with so much vigor he’d broken the handle off a claw hammer in the process.