Faces in the Fire (29 page)

Odd to get keys. Usually, he didn't have such quick access to his targets. More often, he was simply given an address and trusted to find a way inside. Maybe an unlatched window or an inadvertently unlocked door, maybe a scheme as a deliveryman, maybe a tail that let him follow the target to an office or location away from home. But he almost never had keys or other means of easily getting into homes. Or hotels, as was the case here.

He placed his head against the door of the room and listened to a conversation on the other side, recognizing it immediately as a daytime television program. He sighed, considering. Take off the gloves now, or wait until he was inside? Tough choice, but he decided not to think too much about it and peeled the gloves off his hands, taking care to make sure the latex didn't snap, and stuffed them into his pocket with the other key.

Fingerprints weren't a worry. They were never a worry, because he'd never had his prints taken. For that matter, the scenes of his hits were never treated as homicides, because his victims seemingly died of natural causes. If you wanted to call it that.

Stan put his right hand on the doorknob as he slid the key into the deadbolt. In most movies and books, people breaking into homes always moved slowly, creeping into the place without being noticed. Stan knew better. This wasn't a game of stealth, but of power. You made less noise, created more surprise, by moving decisively.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, took a deep breath, turned the key in the lock, and swung open the door. Without pausing, he closed the door behind him and walked in, past a short wall that opened into the main room on the left. A
couch sat on the far wall as he walked into the room.

And on the couch sat a dark-haired man, nervously pointing a gun at him.

Stan continued walking toward the man, as if this were the most natural thing in the world for him. And maybe it was.

“Stop!” the dark-haired man said, his voice rising a bit.

Stan was skilled at picking out changes in voice inflection, what those inflections meant. He'd had a couple years of practice at reading people in extreme situations.

The man narrowed his eyes, turned off the television with the remote he held in his left hand, put both his hands on the stock of the revolver.

Stan stopped, waited. The man's hands threatened to start shaking, but remained steady for the moment. Stan noticed his bare feet, his black, thick-soled shoes neatly sitting beside the bed even though the man was fully dressed in a suit and tie. Maybe a bit of a neatnik, didn't like people wearing shoes inside his apartment. Stan could identify with neatniks.

“Viktor sent you?” the man asked.

Now Stan was able to pick out an accent in the man's voice, an accent that sounded eerily similar to Viktor's.

“He did,” Stan said, holding his hands up in the air to show he was unarmed.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody important.”

The man grunted. “I know this feeling well.”

They stared, regarding each other, for a few seconds.

“So what now?” the man on the couch said. His voice wavered a bit as he said it, almost as much as the tip of the gun he pointed at Stan.

Stan shrugged, partly because he himself didn't know what was going to happen. Not that it mattered. The end result would be the same. He'd been through this kind of thing too many times to worry much about the details.

The man pointed his gun toward a single wooden chair across from the couch. “Take off your shoes,” he said.

Stan cocked his head to the side, unsure he'd heard the man correctly. “What?”

The man motioned to the chair again. “You will sit down and take off your shoes.”

Stan stared for a few moments, then went to the chair and sat. He bent and began unlacing his shoes. Okay, this guy really was way too worried about dirty shoes in his apartment.

“Aren't you going to ask why?” the man said. His voice was cracking a bit, but Stan pretended not to notice.

“Why?” Stan said, humoring him.

“You're American. You know the phrase ‘die with your boots on.'”

Stan removed his first shoe, set it to the side. He looked at the man, shrugged. “Yeah.”

“This—this is one thing we have of America, Viktor and I, when we are young. Our mother wants us to learn English, yes? So she smuggles illegal things to teach us. Mostly books. We love torn books about cowboys and Indians.”

“Dime novels?”

The man seemed excited by this. “Yes! Yes! In these books, the cowboys say to die with your boots on, and that becomes—what would you say?—something special between two people.”

“A pact?”

“A pact, yes. We promise we die with our boots on.”

Stan glanced at the man once more. “Viktor's your brother,” he said, although he'd meant it as a question. Viktor had obviously practiced his English a bit more.

“Viktor does not tell you this?”

Stan shrugged, shook his head. Killing his own brother. Hell probably had its own circle reserved exclusively for Viktor Abkin. Right below his own circle. Or maybe they'd be roomies, which would be oddly fitting.

“Those aren't boots,” he said, jutting his chin at the man's black-soled shoes on the floor.

“And you are no cowboy. But Viktor understands. I take off my shoes, because I do not die without my boots on, you see?”

“Kind of a superstition, then.”

The man's eyes narrowed for a moment, and Stan saw a bit of anger flare. “No superstition. It just is,” he said simply. He gestured with the gun again. “Other shoe, please.”

Stan bent and began untying his other shoe. “So you're making me take off my shoes as a message to Viktor.”

“Yes. He finds you dead, with no shoes, he knows I send a message. He knows he cannot decide to remove me simply because I make problems for him.”

Stan nodded, continuing to stare at his now-untied shoe. He knew what his next move was, had known it ever since he'd been told to take off his shoes.

He slowly slipped off his second shoe, stood and hurled it at the man's face, then dropped to the floor and rolled, coming up in a crouch even as Viktor's brother ducked and slouched on the couch. He saw fear in the dark eyes as the man tried to swing the gun back around toward him, but Stan was already grabbing the wrist with his hand.

His bare hand.

A very good thing he had decided to remove the gloves before entering the hotel room.

Instantly the man's eyes rolled back into his head and he went into convulsions. The gun dropped, allowing Stan to step back and release his grip. Viktor's brother, his body still heaving with tremors, slid to the floor in front of the couch, a bit of foam escaping his mouth.

Stan stared for a few seconds, watching the man's hand spasm as it tried to grasp one of the black-soled shoes he'd neatly placed in front of his couch. Only minutes before, probably.

Like most of his victims, the man wasn't dying quickly; usually, it took a minute or two of thrashing and convulsing, and Stan had to stand there and watch. It was part of the curse.

Stan gave a deep sigh. Well, what of it? Was there any real harm, letting the man die with his shoes on? He could do that, couldn't he? A small act of rebellion against Viktor.

He dropped to his knees, picked up one of the shoes, noted the tag on the inside of the shoe's tongue: an oddlyformed letter that looked like a reversed numeral 3. Beneath the three he saw other characters he guessed must be Russian. Made sense. This guy, Viktor's brother, was wearing shoes from Russia, or Eastern Europe, or wherever they were from.

Kneeling beside the quivering form, he began to put on the left shoe. No skin-on-skin contact. Not that it mattered; he'd already touched this man, already killed him.

The man's limbs were stiff, the muscles of his legs quivering as he convulsed, so Stan had to concentrate to get the shoe on the inflexible foot as he—

“Hello?” a woman's voice blurted from the short hallway behind him.

Stan stood and half turned, looking at the woman who had spoken.

Her eyes flickered, looking first at Stan's face, then at the shoe he still clutched in his hand, then at the form of Viktor's brother, half on the couch, half on the floor, body quieting from heaving convulsions to mere twitches.

He tried to think of something to say, but really, what could he say that would make sense of this scene? And in the end, what did it matter? He'd done what he came here to do. His target was dead (okay,
dying
), and he could simply move on to the next hotel or apartment, sequester himself for a few weeks with a few bottles of painkillers, kill the dreams that tried to seep into his conscious world.

He let the shoe fall to the floor, put his hand in his pocket, feeling the latex of the gloves brush against his fingers. All he had to do was get these gloves on, get to the door, and get away. No need to explain anything to this woman.

She
moved quickly, coming across the floor and dropping to her knees next to the man on the floor. Viktor's brother. Didn't even know his name.

Stan paused for a moment, pulled the latex gloves from his pocket, pulled one of them on, lifted his foot and stepped over the man's legs.

But as he did so, the woman did something unexpected. Without looking up, she grabbed his hand—his bare hand—and began pulling. “Come on,” she said, her voice sounding eerily calm. “He's gonna die if you don't help me.”

That statement might have made him smile in other circumstances, the irony of it all (he's gonna die if you don't help me), but all he could concentrate on was his hand. Her hand.

Touching.

(You got the dead blood, child) And nothing happening.

The mild electrical itch was there, but the words were new, something he'd never experienced before.

(You got the dead blood, child)

He tried to get a glimpse of her face, but her head was down, concentrating on Viktor's brother. Those words weren't spoken, he knew, but he heard them, loudly and clearly, in his mind. And he knew, as her insistent grip pulled him to his knees, that those words were somehow being pushed to him by their touch.

“You know CPR?” she asked.

(No, it wasn't her voice; the voice in his mind was older, scratchier.)

“Yeah,” he said, his brain feeling muddled. “I mean no.”

She resumed the compressions on the man's chest. “How about a cell phone? You got one?”

“No.” Wait; he did have one, but . . . but his mind wasn't working. The voice in his mind, the woman's touch, had rattled him.

“Figures.” She stopped a moment, pulled a cell phone from the back pocket of the jeans she was wearing, shoved it toward him. “Here.”

He looked at the phone as if it were poisonous. He still didn't have both gloves on, and he couldn't risk another touch; something had obviously gone wrong the first time, but—

“If you don't know how to do chest compressions, you gotta make the call,” she said, waving the phone a bit.

He took the phone, being careful to avoid contact with her hand, and dialed 911. Then he cradled the phone against his shoulder, pulling on the other surgical glove.

The operator answered, asking the nature of the emergency. “Heart attack,” he said. And what was the address? He gave it to her, recalling it instantly from his memory. And what was his name?

He hit the end button on the cell phone and set it down on the floor, returning his attention to the woman repeating chest compressions, counting silently to herself.

“They're on the way,” he said.

She continued the compressions as he watched a drop of sweat form on her forehead. He needed to get out of here. He'd done his job, killed this man. He'd never see this woman again in his life, and all he had to do was get up and walk out the door. She'd stay and do the CPR; even though Stan knew it was hopeless, she didn't. And so she would try.

That thought was abruptly pushed to the side by another: she had touched his bare hand and lived. Why?

“It's not hard to learn,” she said. “I can teach you.”

“I—” he began to protest, but she cut him off.

“Three fingers up from here,” she said, demonstrating as she placed her hand at the junction of the man's rib cage. “Hands together, steady pressure, kinda like kneading bread, when you think about it.”

Not that he'd ever kneaded bread.

“You try it,” she said.

He tried to think of the catfish, the comfortable image that swam in his mind and calmed him after his assignments. But the fish refused to come.

Barring that, he wished for sleeping pills or pain pills. Or both.

He started to protest, but she grabbed him again, this time on the arm. His long sleeves prevented any skin-on-skin contact, and at least she couldn't touch his hands now. That was when he noticed, for the first time, that she also wore long sleeves. A fellow traveler.

Uncomfortable, he clasped his hands the way she'd shown him, trying a few tentative pushes on the man's chest.

“Harder,” she instructed. “You're massaging the heart, keeping the blood flow going.”

Blood flow.
You got the dead blood, child.

He pushed harder, and after a few more compressions, the man's eyes actually fluttered open. He looked lazily at Stan, then at the woman, then closed his eyes again. His mouth opened, and his lungs sucked in a deep breath.

“Stop,” she said, putting her fingers on the inside of the man's wrist.

Now, now, now,
his mind screamed at him. Now was the time to leave. Except . . .

Except he'd just killed a man, touched a woman without killing her, and brought a dead man back to life in the span of two minutes. He was adrift on an ocean of confusion.

“He's back,” the woman said, looking at him again and blowing the unruly strand of hair away from her face. She leaned back, and a pack of cigarettes appeared from somewhere. One of her sleeve cuffs shifted with the movement, revealing scars that looked like old cuts.