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He was just getting started.
* * *
The sun was high overhead by the time he was done at the shack. The wound in his leg was starting to hurt, although the bullet had only grazed his thigh, and he stepped onto the porch and stretched, moving his shoulders this way and that, flexing and un-flexing his sore hands.
He’d been at work all night. He was ready to go home.
Alek stepped onto the porch and lit a cigarette. “How do you want to handle disposal? Lake?”
“No,” Lyon said. “Let him be found. Let him be ID’ed.”
“You sure?” Alek asked.
In most cases, it wouldn’t be smart. The bratva’s M.O. was always to keep the cops from sniffing around their operations.
But this was a special circumstance. The rest of the organization needed to understand: he was boss now, and anyone who crossed him would die a slow and painful death.
Musa, absent his feet, his eyes, his tongue, would be a fine delivery mechanism for the message.
He still had his teeth. Or some of them anyway.
He stepped off the porch and turned to face his friend. “Can you get a ride back to the city? With the other men?”
Alek nodded. “I’ll need help with the body anyway. And I’ll have to wait for Boris.”
Boris Buslik headed up their cleanup crew. He would make sure no evidence was left behind in the shack.
“Good,” Lyon said. “I have a stop to make on my way home.”
“Uh…” Alek looked him up and down, taking in his blood- and sweat-stained clothes, his bruised hands. “Do you want to shower here first?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Lyon said. He was eager to attend to his errand.
He got in the Rover he and Alek had driven from the city and started down the dirt road, remembering one of his last moments with Musa, before he’d cut out Musa’s tongue.
Musa had started to laugh, an unsettling, maniacal sound that had wormed its way into Lyon’s bones. “You have no idea, do you?”
Lyon had affected boredom even though every nerve in his body was on alert. “You should probably say what you have to say before I cut out your tongue.”
“Come closer,” Shapiev had said. “No reason to make me shout.”
Lyon had crouched beside him.
“Closer.”
Musa couldn’t use his hands, couldn’t use his legs. What danger was he to Lyon now?
Lyon had leaned in and listened.
It had only been one word, one name, but it was enough.
44
Lyon walked into the house without knocking. He wasn’t fool enough to believe his arrival had gone unnoticed, but it hardly mattered now.
The strains of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade broadcast dramatically from the study. Lyon followed the sound, stopping in the doorway, studying the man sitting in his favorite chair by the fire.
Ivan looked at Lyon, standing in the doorway. He didn’t seem surprised in spite of the fact that Lyon was still covered in Musa’s blood, not to mention his own from the wound in his thigh.
