“Nice try,” Beaudine said. “We followed her into town.”
“Well, look for yourself,” Polina said. “She’s not here. Whatever you do, I gotta sit down. My back hurts.”
Quinn checked the bathroom and the two small bedrooms as soon as he walked in and found nothing but piles of clothes on top of old mattresses laid out on the linoleum floor.
Polina lowered herself onto the tattered orange couch and told them her story. According to Polina, her mother was Siberian Chukchi, Native cousins to Alaska’s Arctic people. Her father had been a Russian schoolteacher who immigrated to the United States when Polina was still young. She’d known Kaija in grade school, and the two had hooked up again recently over the Internet via ICQ.
“But you haven’t seen her?” Quinn asked, fighting the urge to sleep brought on by the enveloping heat of Polina’s oil stove. He kept his mind awake and busy studying the girl’s face for the micro-expressions that would tell him if she was lying. Her almost constant swaying movement and apparent discomfort from her pregnancy made reading her all the more difficult.
“She sends me packages sometimes,” Polina said. “To the lodge where I work. But I haven’t seen her.”
“Why doesn’t she just send them here?” Beaudine asked from a wooden chair from the nearby dinette. Quinn could see from her heavy eyes that the warm confines were getting to her as well.
“My husband gets jealous of Russian friends,” Polina said. “He’s a teacher at the school.”
She had an answer for everything. It was either a well-rehearsed lie or the simple truth. Quinn had yet to make up his mind.
“You have no idea where she’s going?” he said.
“Sorry,” Polina said, stuffing a hand between her lower back and the couch.
“It would be better if you kept your hands were we could see them,” Quinn said.
Polina pulled her hand back but she said nothing.
Beaudine moved forward to the edge of her seat. “We’re going to need—”
Prone to the jerkiness of the completely exhausted, both she and Quinn jumped when his cellphone rang in his jacket pocket.
Quinn answered the call.
“Is this that FBI guy?” a tentative voice asked. It was Clarence, the VPO.
“Go ahead,” Quinn said.
“I got someone here you’re gonna want to talk to,” Clarence said.
Quinn shook his head to focus. “We’ll be down there in a few minutes.”
“Okay, bye,” Clarence said.
“Hang on,” Quinn said before the VPO could hang up. “Who is it that we’ll want to talk to?”
“Tell me your name again?” Clarence asked the person he was with. His voice muffled as if his hand covered the phone. “Okay, I got it,” he said when he came back on the line. “He says his name is Kostya Volodin.”
Chapter 59
August Bowen tipped his rickety wooden chair against the wall of the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant and took a sip of his bubble tea. Outside, East Broadway seemed to overflow with a flood of wide-eyed tourists. A gaggle of a half-dozen blue-haired women in matching sweaters stopped under the glare of the evening streetlights to peer in through a large picture window at the split pig’s head and smoked duck carcasses hanging on metal hooks. Bowen was pretty sure two teenagers were buying heroin from a tout selling knockoff designer purses right outside the door.
Ronnie Garcia sat across the table chasing a pot sticker around her plate with a pair of bamboo chopsticks. Thibodaux looked up over a steaming bowl of noodles, his visible eye blinking as if in deep thought. None of the three were the type to sit with their back to the door so they crowded in at the wooden table, yielding the actual “gunfighter seat”—the chair with its back to the wall — to Bowen since he was the only bona fide lawman of the group.
“You know you’re not fightin’, right?” Thibodaux said at length, pointing at Bowen with his chopsticks.
“What do you mean?” Bowen said.
“I mean tapioca bubble tea ain’t a meal,” Thibodaux said. “It’s a damned dessert. Since you’re not actually gettin’ in the ring it’s okay for you to eat real food.”
“I guess,” Bowen said, letting his chair tip forward so it was flat on the floor. “I thought I’d better be ready just in case…”
Garcia’s eyes narrowed, all judge-like. “I get the impression you want to fight this moron.”
“I kind of do,” Bowen said, “if I’m honest. It would give us a chance to draw out whoever it is that’s after him.”
“He knows who’s after him,” Thibodaux scoffed. “We’ll get that info from him directly. You gotta try some of this soup.” He waved the elderly waiter over and ordered another bowl of hand-pulled noodles, this one for Bowen. He dug into his own bowl again once the waiter had shuffled off with the new order, talking in between bites and slurps, using his chopsticks to drive home his points. “We got no obligation to the Ortega brothers for this. I mean, what the hell is a mismatch anyhow? It ain’t a fight, it’s a circus, and Daux Boy worked out too many hours in the gym to be part of some sideshow.”
“You’re more fired up than I am,” Bowen said.
“I doubt that, Gus Gus,” Thibodaux said. “Cause I’m thinking you can’t stomach what you saw goin’ on with the poor girls back at that titty bar and you’ve done assigned a shitload of righteous blame for all of it to Petyr the Weasel.”
“Maybe so,” Bowen said. The big Cajun had a point. Cheekie’s was nothing more than a front for the modern slave trade. There was no gray area in an operation like that.
“I get it,” Thibodaux said, apparently reading the deputy’s mind. “I really do. Somebody’s gettin’ a boot in the ass and it might as well be our boy, Pete. But MMA’s different than boxing, cher. There’s rules, but you don’t want to be screwin’ around in the octagon. You liable to find yourself with your jaw wired shut and eatin’ nothin’ but your damned bubble tea.”
“I can take care of myself, Gunny,” Bowen said.
“No doubt,” Thibodaux said, pointing to Bowen’s split lip with his chopsticks.
Garcia heaved a heavy sigh, and when Garcia heaved a sigh, Bowen thought, it was a magnificent thing indeed.
“You could take him,” she said. “He’s big, but he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.”
“That ain’t the point,” Thibodaux said, slurping a big bite of noodles. “We’re grabbin’ him as soon as he shows. That’s all there is to it.”
“If Maxim would ever let us know where the fight is supposed to be,” Bowen said. “‘An undisclosed location in Chinatown’ doesn’t give us much to work with.”
“I gave him the number for my burner.” Garcia checked her watch. “He’s supposed to call anytime.”
“Makes sense with an illegal fight,” Bowen said. “They call and let us know the when and where at the last minute. Nearly impossible for law enforcement to pull a raid together.”
The waiter brought Bowen’s noodles and another can of Diet Dr. Pepper for Garcia.
“Once he calls,” Thibodaux said, “we’ll set up outside the location and grab Petyr while he’s still on the street. You’re not even gonna see the octagon.
Bowen tore the paper off a pair of bamboo chopsticks and pulled the bowl closer. The soup did smell good, and if he wasn’t going to get the opportunity to put some hurt on Petyr the Wolf, he might as well see what had Jacques slurping so loudly.
The Cajun’s phone rang, causing everyone at the table to freeze.
A wide smile spread over Thibodaux’s face as soon as he answered. “L’ami! She hasn’t killed you… Yeah… Okay…”