VOLOVOI DROVE THE SPEED LIMIT away from the wreck. Beside him, the girl slept in the passenger seat. Slept or was unconscious, he wasn’t sure, though judging by the gash on her head, she’d been lucky to survive when the Escalade crashed.
Bogdan had flown through the windshield. Volovoi had discovered him on the grass in front of the Escalade, his head nearly torn off, his face smashed and bloody. He’d lost control of the truck somehow. He’d driven straight into that tree.
Volovoi muttered a silent prayer. Somebody was looking out for him. It was about time he experienced a little good luck for a change.
He’d stripped the plates from the Cadillac. Removed the registration, wiped it clean of fingerprints. Hunted around for something flammable to set the truck on fire but found nothing. He had to leave the truck as it stood, but no matter. The thing was registered to a shell company, anyway.
The girl had stayed unconscious while Volovoi tidied the scene. While he had fussed over the truck, and over Bogdan Urzica. He’d taken Bogdan’s identification. Put a bullet through his face so the first responders wouldn’t recognize him from the police sketches on the news. They would trace his identity soon enough—Volovoi didn’t have a hacksaw to remove the man’s fingers to avoid fingerprinting—but they would not follow him back to the trafficking operation, not at first.
The girl hadn’t moved when Volovoi climbed back in the dead woman’s Subaru. She was very young, he noticed, filthy and bruised, her clothes no more than rags. He’d dug around in the rear of the station wagon, found a T-shirt and shorts in the dead woman’s suitcase. The girl would be swimming in them, but she would be covered.
Volovoi drove east into darkness. Ditched the Subaru outside Brookville, hot-wired a beat-up old Honda Accord and carried the little girl to the passenger seat, his wounded shoulder stinging from the exertion. It was barely a flesh wound, though. Volovoi decided he would survive.
Just get the girl to the Dragon. Then deal with your problems.
The girl looked around sleepily as he lifted her from the car, whimpered when she saw his face.
“Hush,” he told her. “Go back to sleep.”
Her eyes flashed defiant for a moment, her muscles tense, but Volovoi held her tight and the moment passed quickly. He deposited her in her seat and slipped behind the wheel, drove a couple miles in the Accord and swapped the plates with a rusty old Ford F-150 parked in an empty warehouse lot. Then he drove back to the interstate and pointed the Accord toward Manhattan.
The car smelled like mildew and rotten eggs, and the radio buzzed, but it drove okay, and there was plenty of gas in the tank, and as the miles passed beneath him, Volovoi relaxed a bit, even smiled a little. Whatever else had gone wrong, he’d recovered Catalina Milosovici. The Dragon would get his prize after all.