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Watching this gentle, determined cleanup, Boris felt nothing. Sophie was pretty, and so was the boy, but he had killed prettier, and this was his job. There was a time, back in Moscow, when he had to murder a person a day. At age twelve, he had started to work for the gang, stealing fur coats, and he killed for the first time at Nikolai’s age. He had no mother, and no father. He became an enforcer, part of the death squad, trained as a sniper in Chechnya. Contract killing became his living. Andre had paid him fifty grand for the boys, all in an effort to punish his wife for running away. It was just a job. Like cleaning homes.
The pool house alarm was clearly connected to the main house alarm, and this was a problem, Boris thought, as he moved from window to window. Could they get in, murder a boy, and get out of Bel Air in time? If the alarm tripped, the police would take at least seven minutes, but a Bel Air private security patrol might get there sooner and spot the van.
He moved back to the hedges to think it through.
Meanwhile, Sophie knelt and wiped the floor with a wet paper towel to pick up the glass. A grain of glass is like sin, she mused. Sometimes she’d feel an invisible shard stuck in her foot and have to dig it out with a blade. It had to be removed and only then would the tiny wound heal. Just like sin. She wished she could make Masha see this.
She finished the job, turned off the light, and moved into the living room to pull out the sofa bed for Nikolai. Together they peeled off the sofa cushions. Then something started to cry from outside. High-pitched, distressed, it sounded like some kind of forlorn monster crying for help. In pain or in horror. They looked at each other and froze.
CHAPTER 15
THE COYOTES WERE up in the hillside again.
Their cries were a terrible mournful sound, and the doctor sat there and shivered in fright. It was base, existential, like grief sobbing, a terrible warble that seemed to get closer by the week.
They started that night around ten o’clock. The doctor was sitting at the kitchen island, poring over files, trying to figure out which of her patients might be at risk.
The poor dogs were howling because of that golf course, she thought. Builders had raised an entire ravine on Stradella Road. They probably dug up a whole coyote den without knowing. Without caring. Displaced the whole pack.
She rose and moved to the mudroom door, checking that it was shut tight. Bandit, she knew, would want to head out. If the pack breached the grove wall, Bandit would head out to put up a fight, to defend his turf. Recently, she’d heard, a pack had jumped an eight-foot gate at the Stoneridge Estates. They dragged a house cat into the woods, never, of course, to be seen again. Her privacy gate in the front was nine feet high, but the property wall in the back was six.
Bandit would stay indoors tonight.
An hour later, the hillside fell silent.
In the backyard, Boris turned away from the pool house and snuck through a divide in the bushes. He headed left into a thicket, reached for the chaparral, hand over fist, and pulled himself through. It was prickly and dark, but he knew where he was. He was headed up the hill along the periphery of the grove. At the top, he descended through a wood and walked the street back to the van.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled a baseball cap over his head, pulled on a jacket, and pushed a shopping cart into the Ralphs on Weyburn Street.
A fully cooked rotisserie chicken, or maybe two, would buy them a full fifteen minutes, but the bones might shred the dog’s internals, its bowels and belly, and bleed it out.
Boris had a soft spot for dogs. So tonight, as he looked around the brightly lit market, scanning all corners for security cameras, he decided to use only nonlethal methods. No slug pellets. No poison. He chose two watermelons, perfectly ripe, raw T-bone steaks, a deli tray of cooked hamburger patties, which he’d sprinkle with a stinky blue cheese for good measure, twelve jars of peanut butter, and six bags of pretzel nibs stuffed with fake cheese.
This was the kind of dog with a nose.
They’d scatter treats around the yard, and this handsome mutt would seek and peck like an Easter egg hunt for half an hour. Boris knew this. With the right temptations strewn on the grass, the dog would eat until it vomited and then eat again.
Boris chose aisle three, away from the exit, where his brim would obscure his face from the cameras, and started to unload his cart.
“Having a party?” the cashier asked through a polka-dotted mask as she scanned the heavy white parcels of meat. “Whoa. This is a ton of burger. It’s like a baby!”
Boris nodded, pulled cash from his wallet, all real fifties, and handed them over.
“Birthday?” she asked. He shook his head no. “Anniversary?”
Was she flirting? My, she was chirpy. He shook his head a second time and forced a smile while she scanned the jars of Skippy and Jif.
“Somebody likes peanut butter…”
Boris didn’t hear her yammering. He wasn’t paying attention. He was wondering about the two cameras perched on the patio over the doctor’s back side door. Did they have the paint pistol in the van? He thanked the cashier, loaded the shopping bags into the cart, and headed out to the parking lot.
A nineteen-year-old, ex light-welterweight boxing champ climbed from the van and helped Boris. The gang called him Shev.
“You didn’t get fish?” Shev said.
“No, this is a red-meat dog.”
“I thought I said salmon. Cooked salmon. Bone out.”
