Page 39

“I don’t want Chicago.”

“Then what do you want?”

I stop in front of him. Close enough to see the sweat at his hairline. I hold out my hand.

“The laptop,” I say.

He gives it to me. His hand shakes.

I open it. It isn’t even password-protected. Arrogance, or panic. Folders, neatly labeled. Maximov — Residential. Maximov — Port District. Maximov — Transport. Buyers’ names, prices, dates. Every Rusakov operation run against Yaroslav’s family in the last six months, all in one place.

I open the residential folder.

There’s the floor plan. Three floors of the house where I fell in love with my wife. Every room labeled in neat type.

Including one on the second floor, at the back, overlooking the garden. Bedroom 4: G. Maximova.

I close the laptop and hand it to Ivor.

“Where’s Rusakov?” I ask Riddings.

“Gone.” He’s almost pleading now. “He flew out to Miami last night after the harbor. He’s not coming back for a while, I swear, he’s cutting his losses, he won’t...”

“Selin?”

“With him.”

Rusakov walks away again. He always does. Garick warned me he would. He’ll be back one day. Men like Oleg Rusakov always come back.

But not today. And not with anything in his hands.

“You sold a family’s home,” I tell Riddings quietly. “To men who were going to kill them in it. You walked past five women sleeping in their beds and wrote their names on a map.”

“It was business,” he whispers.

“So is this.”

Ivor turns his back. He’s always had a sense of occasion.

I drive home as the sky’s going gray over the lake.

Ivor’s men will take care of the hangar. Arina and Garick have Riddings’s laptop, and everything on it, by five a.m. Leo took Andrik to a doctor who doesn’t ask questions. Dasha wants a new hat. I’ve promised her a new hat.

Rusakov’s people are dead. Brenner was one of the eight in the parking lot. I checked his face myself. Geoff’s dead on his boat. Riddings is dead in an airplane hangar in Indiana.

Nobody left alive has a map of that house.

It’s over.

I pull into the drive in Winnetka at six forty-two in the morning and turn off the engine. And I sit there in the car, in the silence, with my hands on the wheel, and I find that I can’t let go of it.

My hands are shaking.

They don’t shake. They haven’t shaken since I was nineteen. I’ve stood in rooms full of guns and fired more rounds than I can count in a single afternoon, and walked away and slept like a child.

They’re shaking now. Badly.

I keep hearing it. The line going dead in my pocket. The sound she made when she answered Leo’s phone.