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Her heart was broken.
“You take this gun. Learn to shoot it. Teach Niko.”
“He already knows how to shoot a gun. Ivan taught him. Andre taught Ivan.” Sophie was worried about Bel Air. “Dr. Parks, and her husband and son? Did you ask them already if we could stay?”
“The husband is gone,” Masha said, and shook her head. She turned and pulled her purse to her lap and fished for a cigarette.
“Because of you?”
“No, no,” Masha said in a singsong way, finding her pack. “We had our fun, but that was for Christmas. For holiday tip. He had one special girl from the bank. Young. Twenty-three. Last month, he moved to Westwood. And the boy is away at a place for drugs. To get clean. All she has left is the dog and me.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“But what if the doctor uses the pool? She’ll see us in the pool house.”
“No. She never uses it. She never goes back there. Only the front. Only the gardeners go back there. And sometimes the dog.”
Masha took out her lighter and flicked it. Lit up her menthol.
“But how will we get in if you don’t ask?”
Masha paused. That was the question. She thought a moment. She had an idea.
“We put your things in the back of the Chevy.” She indicated the plastic bags. “And stuff you and Niko into the trunk.”
The trunk?
But Sophie didn’t have time to respond. From down the hall, she heard her son:
“Mama! Open the door! The door!”
Sophie and Masha ran to the door and flung it open. Nikolai burst in, out of breath. He turned, shut the door again, locked the deadbolt, and strung the chain.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” Sophie said, looking him over.
Someone had beaten him up.
“They chased me! They followed me!”
“Who?”
“Boris!” Nikolai shouted. His cheek was scraped pink and bleeding, with bits of embedded asphalt, his hair was a mess, T-shirt ripped where a thug had grabbed it and held on tight. “They followed me here!”
Boris and his men waited until three o’clock that day, and then chased Nikolai into an alley behind the school.
They laid him out with a backhandedthwackthat twisted his neck and sent him soaring to the pavement.
Then they attacked him with boots and fists, three against one.
Men versus boy.
But Nikolai knew, Ivan had taught him, to guard his groin, cover his stomach, protect his head, and he curled his body up like a worm, facing the ground.
He managed to press to his hands and knees down, like a starting sprinter, then thrashed and kicked like a horse from behind, and took off running.
“My backpack is gone,” he said to Sophie, ashamed to have dropped it and left it behind.
