Vanity, Vengeance And A Weekend In Vegas Part 25

He's the third person I've seen die in the last five minutes.I should be horrified, hysterical, throwing up, crying...

I turned to Dena and Anatoly. "I think maybe we should just try our luck with the front door."

I would worry about the possibility that I was a sociopath later. Right now we just had to get out.

Anatoly nodded and checked the chamber of his newly confiscated gun. "d.a.m.n it, he's out too." He knelt by the body, ready to search him for bullets.

"This is not how I planned our first meeting," Alex said as he entered the room. And of course he had a gun too...not the handgun he had waved at me before but a semiautomatic weapon.

Anatoly stopped searching the dead man.

"I imagined I would come to you," Alex went on. "I thought you'd be holed up somewhere with Natasha drinking cognac or something..."

"Where's Margarita?" I asked.

Alex turned to me, as if noting my presence of the first time. "She's upstairs. She'll stay there for now...I wouldn't have let her hurt you, Sophie."

I sucked in a sharp breath. "Oh my G.o.d, you are just such a typical man."

Alex looked down at his gun, then at the dead people on the floor and finally back up at me. "Excuse me?"'

"You're just telling me what you think I want to hear without any way to back it up! If Margarita wanted to hurt me you'd be the last person to effectively stand in her way. You're like those guys who tell you they'll support you five minutes after the credit agency has repossessed their car!"

"She's right," Dena said, finally lowering her cane away from the window, "you're pretty typical."

"You have to trust me, Sophie--" Alex started, but I cut him off by breaking into hysterical laughter.

"Do you see these dead people? They work for your partner in crime and they just tried to kill me. It's not the kind of thing that inspires trust."

"Did you think she was stupid?" Anatoly muttered, but I whirled around and glared at him.

"Shut up, I don't trust you either at this point." I turned back to Alex. "Look, you want Anatoly because he has information, well guess what? I've got that information now too. If you want me to think you are anything short of a completely repugnant monster then you'll take it and let us all go. Then you can talk to me about trust!"

"You don't have the information," Alex said, but I could tell he wasn't sure.

"Dena, do you still have your iPad?"

Dena looked around the room. "I dropped it somewhere...oh." She approached the body of the man who had crashed against the window and pulled her iPad out from underneath him. She looked a little sick to her stomach as she handed it to me.

I stared down at the body as I took the iPad from her. Perhaps I didn't feel upset about these men dying because they didn't seem like men to me. They were predators, weapons, nothing more than embodiments of a threat. Seeing their lifeless bodies was a relief. If that's what it meant to be a sociopath then it was probably a pathology I could live with.

At that moment I wouldn't have minded seeing someone blow Alex's brains out either.

"What's on the iPad?" Alex asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

"Evidence that the Ignatovs sent people down to Mexico the day those drugs were stolen from Los Tres Seises."

Alex's eyes widened and he took a step toward me but I leaped away from him, toward the fireplace. I held the iPad over the fire. "If you shoot me now this will fall into the flames. Maybe it'll survive enough for you to retrieve the files or maybe it won't."

"I don't want to shoot you," Alex said quietly.

"That's good, because I don't want to die."

"I wouldn't mind shooting him," Alex said moving the gun to point at Anatoly. "Maybe we can do a trade here."

I needed to stay calm. My ability to lie while staying cool was the only weapon I had at my disposal. "I told you, I'm done with him. But if someone was threatening to destroy evidence that I needed I probably wouldn't shoot the only other person who was able to confirm that the evidence ever existed."

Alex considered that before moving the gun to point at Dena. "What about your friend here? Seems to me there are three people in this room who can give me the details of what's in that file."

"If you shoot her I'm definitely going to destroy this thing and I will never tell Margarita or anyone else what was on that file. Not ever, Alex."

"Sophie," Alex said, almost pleadingly, "Margarita will have you tortured for it."

"And I still won't talk," I said, completely serious this time.

"So it seems we're at an impa.s.se."

"It would seem."

I glanced at Anatoly. His back was to me. Dena could see his face and she seemed to be watching him intently. He was being awfully quiet. Maybe he was strategizing an attack? But I couldn't focus on that now. I had to play out my own hand.

"Any suggestions on how we get past this?" Alex asked.

"I know," Dena said. "We could start by letting me pour myself a gla.s.s of that cognac."

I blinked in surprise. That was such a me thing to say. Of course I would have asked for the vodka, but someone had died on it.

Alex chuckled, his eyes still on me. "I can see why you like her." He nodded at Dena. "Help yourself."

Carefully, Dena made her way across the room to the bar.

"What exactly is in the files?" Alex asked.

"Copies of airline tickets and records," Anatoly answered, even though he wasn't the one being addressed. "It proves that Vadim Ignatov purchased tickets for several of his men to go to Cuidad the day the drug s.h.i.+pment was taken. I can even show evidence that more income was coming into the Ignatov's coffers during the months that followed than there should have been considering that the s.h.i.+pment supposedly didn't arrive."

I hadn't seen that and I wondered if Anatoly was lying. I can't imagine that the drug dealers working for the Ignatovs kept receipts, but what did I know? Maybe the mafia had their own electronic inventory system.

"You want to start a war?" Anatoly continued. "I can give you that war. But I won't until the people I care about are safe."

"You're the only reason the people you care about are in danger," Alex countered. "But I'm not going to hurt Sophie. You however, are a liability."

"I can help you," Anatoly said.

Alex stared at him. For a moment the only sound in the room was the crackling of the fire and that of cognac being poured into a tall gla.s.s.

Who the h.e.l.l pours cognac into a tall gla.s.s? How drunk was Dena going to get? I tried to make eye contact with her but she didn't look up from her task.

"You can't help me anymore," Alex said. "And even Sophie doesn't seem to care that much about protecting you. In fact," again Alex pointed the gun at Anatoly.

"Don't be stupid Alex," I hissed, but I knew my facade of cool was thinning. There was something in Alex's eyes. As far as I knew, Alex had never even met Anatoly before but for reasons beyond my understanding he hated him enough to kill him.

The iPad was getting hot from being so close to the fire. It was getting harder to hold. I glanced nervously at Dena...was she pouring herself a second gla.s.s of cognac?

"Think before you act, Alex," Anatoly said, his voice low and almost menacing. Impressive when you considered his position.

The sound of the front door opening and the urgent Spanish being called out in a male voice got all of our attention.

"Quick," Alex said in a hushed voice as he moved toward me, "give me the iPad now. I can protect you."

"Don't get closer or I drop it!" In a second I was going to have to drop it anyway. The metal was burning my fingers.

Alex hesitated and started to turn toward the door.

It was while he was turning that Dena leaped forward with a guttural cry of determination and pain and threw her two drinks in Alex's face.

He was drenched in alcohol, the right sleeve of his s.h.i.+rt was now dripping with it, but It was the cognac that got into his eyes that made him cry out, and it was the distraction that gave Anatoly the opportunity he needed to dive into him, knocking Alex backward. I saw the glint of a broken piece of gla.s.s from the vodka bottle as Anatoly cut Alex's arm with it.

As they both fell in my direction Alex's gun went off in the air and I jumped out of the way, accidentally dropping the iPad in the fire.

But Alex still had the gun. He pulled the trigger again and I saw Anatoly's blood. I fell helplessly to my knees.

Anatoly tried to continue to fight but he was weakened. Alex twisted away from him and using his sleeve as a kind of oven mitt tried to quickly retrieve the iPad from the fire.

But here's the thing about cognac, it's highly flammable.

By the time Margarita's latest thug entered the room Alex was running around in a panic, screaming as he waved his now flaming arm in the air. He ripped the s.h.i.+rt from his body and threw it off of him...which set the curtains on fire.

In the chaos, Margarita's man didn't even notice that Dena was standing behind him. The silver jaguar on her cane proved to be much more effective on his head than on the window.

Alex was screaming in pain as Anatoly, Dena and I were running out of the room. Blood coated the right side of Anatoly's s.h.i.+rt but he was up and moving as if he was suffering from nothing more than painful cramps. Dena tried to help him, running forward to get the door even though I could tell that her own physical acts of self-defense had caused her to aggravate old injuries. What would be their condition when the adrenaline ran out? But I couldn't think ahead right now because I too was running on that same adrenaline.

And maybe that's why I barely registered the pain when Margarita came out of nowhere and grabbed me by the hair. I stomped on her foot and was able to turn around but she hit me with the blunt end of the fake gun Alex had given me. In her other hand was the knife. She lifted it and from the corner of my eye I could see Anatoly rus.h.i.+ng toward me.

What I didn't see was Alex coming from the other side. He got there first and tackled her just as the knife was being lowered. I heard her scream. I smelled Alex's burnt flesh.

No one in my party had any interest in hanging out long enough to find out how the fight turned out. The room was already filling with smoke and both Dena and Anatoly were hurt. We rushed out the door into the yard. Anatoly took my hand as we approached the gate. I could hear the fire now as it consumed more of the house.

It was about then that we heard the sirens. Not just of the fire trucks but several police cars, black & whites as well as unmarked vehicles. In fact there were already police cars all around that must have come in silently earlier on in the evening. It was from one of those unmarked vehicles that Bo-Bo the gay, Russian thug jumped out with a gun and screamed, "FBI, everybody get down!"

If I hadn't been so scared, frenzied and exhausted I think I would have laughed.

CHAPTER 24.

"I'm not a big fan of happy endings. They're too neat and too final. But I absolutely love happy new beginnings."

--Death Of The Party The chaos that ensued was almost as harrowing as the chaos that proceeded. The fire fighters ran in to try to save the house and the neighborhood and then Anatoly was whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance. They wouldn't let me go with him. That right there was more than enough to make me hysterical and Dena couldn't calm me because she was taken away to be examined by an EMT. It was Bo-Bo (AKA Agent Pearson) who took me aside to question me.

"You got yourself into a real mess, didn't you?" he said.

"Look, if you're going to book me with something then book me," I growled. "Otherwise let me go to Anatoly."

"I could book you with all sorts of things. What were you thinking, not reporting that body you found in The Hotel Noir?"

I bit down on my trembling lower lip. How did he know? Marcus? I would kill him.

"The thing is, the FBI has an arrangement with a friend of yours," he said.

"Who? Marcus?"

Bo-Bo gave me a look.

"Okay, then who?" I snapped right before the obvious dawned on me. "Anatoly?"

"He should have let us put him in protective custody from the get go." He glared at the smoldering house. "Then none of you would have been in this mess, but he was sure he could get the mafia to allow him to walk away from it all. The way he introduced our agent into the family...it was subtle. He arranged for what seemed like a chance meeting between our guy and this guy Innokenty Kinsky."

"Kenya."

"That's right. He gave our agent all the information he needed to get close to Kenya and it worked. It made it seem like our agent was actually being brought in by Kenya. Anatoly's hands were clean."

"How did you trick Natasha into hiring you?" I asked. I was cold...colder than I probably should have been based on the weather.

"Can't really get into that."

The smoke had gone from black to light grey as the flames died beneath the power of the firefighters' hoses. Out of the front door a slightly singed Margarita was being led off in handcuffs.

"Anatoly told us about what happened between the mafia and Los Tres Seises too," he said, following my gaze. "But our goal was not to start a war between the Russians and a major drug cartel. We want to bring both crime organizations down but in a way that doesn't involve so much indiscriminate bloodshed."

"Well, it's all going to come out now," I said ruefully. So cold. I hugged myself for warmth.

"Yeah, but now Margarita has had several men attempt murder on her order, on American soil, while she was on the premises. And we have that all on tape."

"There's no way you were able to bug Alex's house. That place has a crazy security system."

Bo-Bo s.h.i.+fted his weight and examined his nails.

My mind was beginning to work again. "You didn't bug his house...you bugged my purse when Natasha tried to kidnap Marcus and me. Wow, that was smooth...wait, if you could hear what was going on in there, why the h.e.l.l didn't you come in earlier!"

"Well we couldn't hear much. You left your purse in the room with Alex and Margarita. All we knew was that we had a hostage situation. We don't just burst in on hostage situations without figuring out what's going on."

"Yeah, well I think you might want to rethink those tactics! My friends and I were almost killed like, two dozen times!"

"You look like you did okay for yourself."