He had taken hold of his emotions and locked them away somewhere. I could see him change, grow calmer, focus.
“Yes,” I said.
“She told me about how you helped that little girl.”
A year before, Molly Seabright, twelve going on Methuselah, had come to me, mistakenly believing I was a private investigator, to ask my help in finding her missing sister.
“You know these people she ran around with,” he said. “These rich American playboy sons of bitches.”
“No,” I lied. “I don’t know them.”
Kulak pinned me with a look that made me feel like an insect on a display board. The energy coming from him now was focused and intense. “You know them.”
I said nothing.
“I want to know which one killed Irina.”
“I’m not a private investigator, Mr. Kulak.”
He stepped into the bathroom, suddenly aggressive, intent on intimidating me. “I don’t care what the fuck you call yourself. I need to know who killed Irina.”
“That’s a police matter,” I said. I couldn’t back away. I was already against the vanity.
Kulak reached his hand up and grabbed me across the lower half of my face. I came underhanded with the small scissors and jammed it into his belly. I felt the blade hit a rib.
He howled and staggered back, looking down in astonishment as his shirt turned red with his own blood.
I clasped my hands together and swung at him from the side, hitting him hard in the cheekbone and temple.
Kulak staggered backward, stumbled, and fell.
I started to jump over him, but he caught me by one ankle, and I went down, my teeth biting deep into my lower lip. The taste of blood filled my mouth. I kicked at him to free myself. Arms and legs scrambling, I tried to pull myself forward, got to my knees, got my feet under me.
As I tried to lunge forward, Kulak caught me by the back of my neck, shoved me into a wall, and held me there with his own body weight.
“You bitch! You stabbed me!”
“Yeah. I hope you die of it!”
Kulak started to chuckle, then laugh, then laughed harder. “You are like Irina, I think.”
I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about water creatures nibbling at my face as I lay dead in a drainage ditch.
“You,” he said, dead serious once again. “You will be my eyes, my ears, my brain. They will accept you. You are one of them.”
“I don’t work for you,” I said. “I want to know who killed Irina, but I don’t work for you.”
He turned me around and held me up against the wall by my throat. My toes were barely touching the floor. He looked like it wouldn’t matter to him one way or the other if he crushed my larynx.
“Yes, Miss Estes,” he said softly. “I’m afraid that you do.”
I didn’t argue. His voice and demeanor made me go cold beneath the sweat of fear and adrenaline. His eyes were flat and black, like a shark’s. I swallowed hard beneath the weight of his hand around my windpipe.
He brought his face very close to mine and whispered, “Yes, you do.”
Chapter 17
The sun was not yet up when I left my cottage and went to the horses. I fed them, then went outside and sat on the same bench Landry and I had occupied the evening before. It seemed that weeks had gone by since then.
I had thought long and hard about Alexi Kulak. Most sane people would have called Landry and spilled the whole story, then got on the next plane to places unknown. Most sane people would have thought that the fact I didn’t want to do that spoke volumes about the state of my mental health.
Alexi Kulak was a criminal. He was volatile and dangerous. The fact that he had loved Irina only made him more so. I had done some homework on him after he left-as I sat at my computer with an ice pack wrapped around my throat.
The Russian mob was nothing to mess around with. The fact that relatively little had been written about Kulak told me he was smart. No one needed to tell me he could be ruthless.
Even so, my gut told me to keep it to myself. I wanted to find Irina’s killer. Kulak and I had that in common. If I could come up with results, he had no reason to hurt me. If I ratted him out to the cops, I was likely to end up in the trunk of a junker car going into the crusher at Kulak’s auto salvage yard.
If Irina’s murder had something to do with her connection to Alexi, then through him I would have access to a part of Irina’s life Landry wouldn’t be able to touch.
That’s what I told myself, even though I knew full well Kulak wouldn’t have come to me if Irina’s death had to do with him. That was the reason I gave myself for making a deal with a devil. There were others lurking in a dark corner of my mind. I refused to bring them to the surface.
I showered and dressed and made myself as presentable as I could. There was nothing to do about my fat lip but tell a lie to explain it. A short vintage Gucci scarf around my neck hid the bruises the ice pack had failed to prevent.
Billy Quint should have been a sea captain a hundred years past. It had been almost that long since I had met him when I was working Narcotics and he headed an OCB (Organized Crime Bureau) undercover team working the port of Fort Lauderdale along with the DEA. The teams from the individual agencies had a mutual agenda-to crack a drug-money laundering scheme that had been taking large sums of U.S. currency out of the country on cargo ships bound for Panama. The connection to Palm Beach County had been what had come back on the return trip: cocaine. Lots of it. Quint lived in a bungalow along the intracoastal waterway, south of Lake Worth. Retired, not by choice. He had refused to speak to me over the phone. OCB guys learn early on to take every precaution possible. They have to deal with deadly animals every day, and they don’t all survive. So I wasn’t surprised when Quint wouldn’t speak to me. Old paranoia dies hard. Especially for someone who almost didn’t make it out of the game alive.
“I thought you were dead,” he said gruffly as I got out of my car and walked toward him.
“I’m like you,” I told him. “I’m too mean to die.”
“Tough nut. You always were.” He rolled down the dock in his wheelchair and tossed some fishing gear into a beat-up dinghy.
“Is that thing seaworthy?” I asked, dubious.
He squinted up at me, one eye closed tighter than the other, a filthy old captain’s hat jammed on his head. It was impossible to decide where his sideburns ended and his ear hair began.
“What’s the difference?” he asked. His voice was full of gravel. He fell into a fit of wet, rattling coughing. When it passed, it took him a moment to get his breath back.
“Are you okay?” I asked like an idiot.
“Lung cancer,” he said by way of explanation, like it was nothing. Like he had a cold. “The devil will catch up with me sooner or later. I’ve dodged him one time too many.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Billy.”
He shrugged, waved it off. In that moment he looked ancient, even though he wasn’t more than in his late fifties. His useless legs canted off to one side as he slouched in his wheelchair. His skin had a strange yellow cast to it.
I didn’t have to ask him if he was in pain. I knew what it was to have your body broken in ways you shouldn’t have survived-and often wished that you hadn’t.
Quint’s legs had been broken with a sledgehammer by a couple of Russian thugs in the employ of an ambitious mob lieutenant. He had been allowed to live for his value as part of the media circus that followed the brutal attack. Free publicity, advertising to one and all that the Russians were not to be fucked with-by anyone.
Arrests had been made, but nothing stuck. The lieutenant and his henchmen had vanished off the continent, probably literally. No one in the Russian community would talk. The police, the feds-all had been powerless to protect even one of their own.
A middle-aged Filipino woman built like the corner mailbox came out of Quint’s bungalow and trundled to the dock. Her brows lowered and she started in.