SHORTLY AFTER NOON, THE hard case with the clenched face came out of the BerPac building and climbed down into the Cobalt powerboat. He started the engine and cast off the lines and drove the boat north, up the channel and out of sight.
There was no sign of anyone else around the building. Not Reuben, nor Elana. They had been inside BerPac for twenty hours. She had walked in on his arm. Practically with a spring in her step.
So why did I feel so uneasy about her?
I dialed Leo, in the Saab. “Any movement?”
“I’d have called.”
“The big son of a bitch just drove the boat away.”
“You going to follow him?”
“We want the Tovex. Or the girl.”
“Better decide on which,” Leo said. “We can’t stay here forever.”
No we couldn’t.
“Hold position,” I said. “I’ll bring the boat across.”
Clouds had been slowly rolling in from the west all morning, black and heavy with intent. The temperature at noon was colder than it had been at midnight. February was determined to go out fighting.
I met Leo at the car. He sat in the driver’s seat, watching the front of the BerPac yard. He didn’t look fatigued, or bored. He looked positively sharp. I realized I felt the same.
“They’re waiting,” I said. “For the feeder ship to deliver the metal late tonight. I don’t know why they’re waiting. Or why they had to be here for so long beforehand. But they’re here, and it’s coming.”
Swallows nested in the unconquerable thickets of blackberry bushes that grew alongside the roads and between the towering columns of the overpass. The dropping air pressure had them on edge. They swooped in and out of the brambles at top speed, never losing a feather.
“When it’s dark,” I said, “I’m going in.”
Leo was very still. “I got faith, man, but—”
“No fireworks. I just want a closer look. The Tovex takes up a lot of space. If it’s in the building, I’ll spy it through a window, or at least figure out where it could be stashed. If I get eyes on it, we call Guerin and he brings the whole damn world down on BerPac.”
“What about Elana?”
“What about her?”
“Come on. I’ve seen the girl. Guys would belly-crawl naked through scorpions for less.”
“We weren’t like that.”
“Then what?”
I thought about it. “Our childhoods were both pretty twisted, in similar ways. I always figured she and I were more alike.”
“And you’re hanging on to that.”
I looked at him. He shrugged.
“If this was just about retaliation, what would we do, Sarge? We’d set up in one of those old shacks across the water, wait for the Russian dude to walk by a window, and bam. Simple. But we aren’t doing that.”
“That’s a line I don’t want to cross. Unless I have to.”
“So obviously there’s something else you want.”
There was. I wanted Elana to tell me how. How she’d gotten so tangled with the Kuznetsovs that she could see her friends dead. How we had gotten our lives so fucked up.
But I wasn’t going to get that chance. The best I could hope for was visiting her in prison. Again.
“If you’re going in there tonight,” Leo said, “you’ll want spare magazines. And some darker clothes.”
He was right, the workout gear I was wearing wouldn’t cut it. I had some black jeans and a jacket as spare clothes in the speedboat. The right costume for the job. If Elana Coll could dress to kill, so could I.
Oh.
A realization, so stark and solid that it trapped my breath in my throat.
Damn.
“Leo,” I said. “I think I’ve made one king-sized hell of a mistake.”
He turned.
“Elana isn’t a killer. But she’s aiming to become one,” I said. “She’s going to kill Reuben.”
ELANA HAD RUN FROM the murder scene, and Willard had lied to me. Those two facts added together had poisoned my thinking about the whole situation from the start. Every move that Elana made, I had been working on the assumption that she had helped to steal the explosives, and was trying to stay one jump ahead of whoever was after her. The cops. Rusk. T. X. Broch. But none of them even knew Elana was part of the equation. I was the only one who had been chasing her.
She had gone to ground, after fleeing from the cabin. She had used Trudy’s credit cards for money and Trudy’s studio to hide in because it was better if everyone thought that Elana Coll was dead, for as long as she could pull it off.
Camouflage. Concealment. While she tried to find out who had murdered her friends.
Elana had been surprised when Luce and I had told her that Broch was dead. She knew Kend was a compulsive gambler. She had been looking for his loan shark. When she found out he was already dead, her first impulse had been anger, at me, thinking I had stolen her revenge.
Luce and I had told Elana something else, too. We’d told her about Haymes, and the Tovex. She’d been confused about why Haymes and his attack dog Rusk would be trying to find her. I’d said the word explosives, and she’d replied with a blank stare. Perplexed. She hadn’t known about the theft at all.
But she’d put some pieces together, right there in Luce’s kitchen. A dead loan shark plus explosives, and a mental lightbulb had switched on. Elana had left immediately. Gotten herself looking fine. And ventured out to find Reuben K.
“If she wants him dead,” Leo said, “should we leave her be? Let her do it?”
I looked at BerPac. In the gloom of the overcast sky, it looked isolated and forsaken.
“She been in there for a full day,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”
“Back to Plan A.” He looked at the low ceiling of clouds. “Weather’s for shit.”
“Snow, or rain, or both. Maybe winter works in our favor for once. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have everyone huddled inside that building.”
He grunted. “Gotta love your optimism, man.”
I turned to Leo. “I’ll be breaking laws. If this goes sideways, maybe I’ll have to break some big ones. You’re not an accessory, not yet. And you don’t have to be.”
There was bright amusement in the tightening of skin across his cheekbones. “Kinda forgetting they tried to blow me up, too.”
“That is a fact.”
The wind pressed harder outside, making the swallows launch into another frenzy of loops and spirals.
“We’re at the party,” Leo said, “so we might as well dance.”