Vasily’s gaze shifted to Meyers noncommittally.
The man who’d walked into the back returned carrying a large wooden box. An electric trouble light hung off the side, the cord slithering along behind it. The flat blade of a large wood-burning iron also poked up above the side of the box, looking like the tip of an enormous screwdriver. Meyers tensed. He thought of the hookers fished out of the river.
“So,” Drozdov said, “I’m inclined to send you home. Unless you would like to stay. I hope to learn something about the fate of Cody and Kid Willette, myself.” His thug set two of the irons, one small like a pencil and the larger one the size of a leek, down on the table beside him.
Yuliya Lukachova implored Meyers with her eyes and shook her head. He read the look as a plea: She must be shaking her head no, that she didn’t want him to leave her here. He couldn’t see a way out for her, though, and much as he wanted to, he couldn’t walk away. Maybe he could help her, but maybe—and the thought unsettled him—he would hear finally what he wanted to know. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll stick around.”
“No!” she barked. Everyone looked at her, but she stared at Meyers. “You leave here. Now.” Turning to Drozdov, she said, “Get rid of him and I tell you what you want.”
Drozdov casually picked up the smaller burner, touched it to the table. After a moment a tiny curl of smoke rose from the tip. “Not ready,” he said to no one and put it down. “Yuliya, believe me when I tell you, you’re going to give me everything anyway. I have found out some interesting facts about you since my dear friend Cody Aldred met you and his fate. And you know what I’m talking about.” He waited then, to see how she would answer.
Her eyes closed as if she’d dozed off. But then she drew a deep breath, and quietly said, “Liisu.”
“There. That’s what I like—when you tell me things.”
Still not looking at him, she replied flatly, “You killed her.”
Drozdov’s bonhomie peeled away like a mask; the face of the shark returned. “Actually, I didn’t.” He raised the large iron. “This did. Would you like to know where I applied it? Ah, you know, I think I won’t tell you. But I will let you find out.”
Meyers’s body was pumping adrenaline. Unable to act, he flexed his muscles, shifted his feet. The guy next to him eyed him sidelong, alert to the pent-up energy.
Yuliya Lukachova bowed her head, and her lips moved as in prayer. Drozdov frowned with disgust. Her breathy syllables grew slowly, steadily, into words, phrases, all of them alien to Meyers. Drozdov’s brow creased. The words perplexed him as well. He looked as if he had run out of patience with her, and his hand closed around the larger iron. She snarled strange words at him, and her hand came out of her pocket and flung blackness into his face. Small objects struck him and rained down onto the table, rolling, some of them, onto the floor. Meyers recognized the odd oily coins he’d seen in her apartment.
Drozdov began to laugh. One coin had stuck to his face, and he flicked it away.
The woman started to rise, and the goons behind her grabbed her by the arms. Drozdov sneered at her and picked up the iron.
The spill of coins didn’t settle. They jittered and rolled, off the table, across the floor as if downhill. In seconds they’d collected in a single spot and begun to spin in place. Only Meyers and his guard seemed to notice. Everyone else was watching the red-hot iron.
Drozdov plucked hairs from her head and touched them to the iron’s tip. They vanished in a puff of smoke. “She wants to be on the table now,” he told the men.
A breeze erupted through the huge space. From all around, loose objects started to skitter across the floor. They flew to where the black lump spun—broken splinters from the pallets, broken glass, papers, empty bottles, cardboard and tape, baling wire and small stones, mousetraps drawn out of corners, bricks that crumbled as they reached the spot. The box on the table flipped and the tools in it shot away from Drozdov. A trash container crashed. Its contents sailed across the floor. The air howled like something alive. The cage of the trouble light collapsed, and it whipped across the room. Drozdov reacted an instant too late, and the iron snapped from his grasp and flew behind it. The cord on the light whipped like a tail, and by the time the irons joined it, the thing had formed.
It stood like a man. For hands and fingers it had pliers, screwdrivers, nails, and the wood-burning irons that smoked and glowed. Black buttons punched the crumpled material of its face into eye sockets. The woman growled, “Nuku-surnud,” and the thing lunged at the table.
Vasily had his gun out. He fired repeatedly at the creature. It rammed the arm ending in the large iron straight into his skull. Flesh and brain sizzled. Its other arm buried in the chest of the second man holding Yuliya Lukachova, spinning, bursting out the back of him. It cut up and down, splitting him in half, and then went for Drozdov. He squealed and dodged aside. Meyers’s guard had run forward to help, and Drozdov grabbed him and threw him in the creature’s path, then barreled around the table.
The creature tore the man apart like it was opening an envelope.
Yuliya Lukachova screamed at Meyers. “Get out of here, idiot!” she yelled. “It won’t stop now. Run from here!” She stood proud, tall, as pitiless as stone.
Drozdov clawed at him and Meyers punched him, smashing his nose. Drozdov fell against the table. He lunged for Meyers again, but jerked back so fiercely that his neck cracked. The creature had caught his collar. It slammed him onto the table. The large iron swept once around his throat, and suddenly his head was flying back into the depths of the warehouse while the body kicked and spasmed.
Meyers ran.
He dodged past the car and down the ramp to the open lot. He hesitated for only a second before racing toward the river—long enough to glance back and see the thing wedge itself around the Packard. It left a wet smear on the car.
He bolted across the open lot. The thing lumbered after him undeterred.
Soon he was in the grass, up a gravel slope and over the rails of the tracks that ran past the warehouses. When he looked back next he could feel the creeping edge of vertigo from his ear injury. He listened instead of looking back then, sure that swinging his head once more would tip the world over on him, and for certain if he fell the dingus would catch him.
It crashed noisily through the brush behind him, and that propelled him ahead. He thundered out onto the disused loading dock made of old wooden ties as the creature crossed the tracks and descended the bed.
Reaching the edge, Meyers dove into the blackness of the Delaware. Ships had taken on cargo here. It had to be deep enough to dive. He was depending on it.
He hit the icy water and swam for his life. The current clutched at him but he kicked furiously out into the river, refusing to be dragged under. He thought of the girls Drozdov had tortured and dumped, their corpses down below. He swam harder.
The creation of wood and glass and paper and metal leaped in after him. He heard the splash, dared a look back as it vanished into the black water. It surged up once, thrashed like a crazed animal at the surface, and then sank. This time it did not reappear, but Meyers turned and kept going, driven by the fear that any second, monstrous hands would snag him from below and pull him to his death.
He didn’t stop until he’d crawled up on the rocky Camden side. He was shivering. His breath steamed. He made himself get to his feet and go on, up and into the weeds. He stumbled and shuffled and kept moving, and maybe half a mile up found a service station by the side of the highway that was open and pumping gas. He went inside, pulled out a sodden five-dollar bill and begged the most expensive cup of coffee he’d ever had. The attendant eyed him as if debating whether to call the cops, but Meyers told him to keep the bill, and that settled that.