I finally trusted myself to speak. “And you think—”
“No think. I know. That little girl has it. Or that fucking card-junkie doctor. Oh, you tell him to get back to work. You tell him we need him so much we won’t take a finger. We take a toe. He don’t need a toe as much and he need his finger. So, yeah, he’ll limp. People limp. Get me that cross, get me that baby, man. I’ll—”
“No deal.”
“I just told—”
“I know what you just told me, you fucking hump. You threaten my wife? You threaten my daughter? One thing happens to them, or my friend calls and says he saw one of you Stallone-in-Nighthawkslooking motherfuckers at the strip mall? I’ll burn your whole fucking organization to the ground. I’ll-”
He was laughing so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“Ho-kay,” he said finally, still chugging out a trail of soft giggles. “Ho-okay, Meester Kenzie. You funny guy, my main friend. Funny, funny guy. You know where my cross is?”
“I might. You know where Sophie is?”
“Not anymore, but I can find her plenty fast.” He chuckled again. “Where you come up with ‘hump,’ man? I never hear that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Old tape, I guess.”
“I like it. I can use it?”
“Help yourself.”
“Say to some guy, ‘You pay me money or else, you, you hump.’ Ha.”
“All yours.”
“I find Sophie. You find cross. I’ll call you later.”
He laughed once more and hung up.
I was still shaking when I got back into the house, the adrenaline swirling at the base of my skull so badly I got a headache.
“Tell me about the Belarus Cross.”
Dre looked like he’d hit the flask a few more times while I was out on the porch. Angie sat in the armchair closest to the hearth. She looked so small, for some reason, so lost. She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read but it was pained, even forlorn. Amanda sat at the far end of the couch, a video baby-monitor on the end table beside her. She’d been reading Last Night at the Lobster and she put it on the coffee table, spine bent, and looked at me.
“Who were you talking to?”
“The Belarus Cross,” I said.
“You were talking to a cross?”
“Amanda.”
She shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The what?”
I didn’t have time for this. Which left me with two options—threat or promise.
“They’ll let you keep the baby.”
She sat up. “What?”
“You heard me. If this genius over here”—I nodded at Dre—”can come up with another baby pronto, they’ll let you keep Claire.”
She turned on the couch. “Can you?”
“It’s possible.”
“Fucking Dre,” she said, “can you or not?”
“I don’t know. There’s one girl who’s close. I mean, she could be in early labor or it could just be false labor. With the equipment I have at my disposal, it’s an inexact science.”
Amanda’s jaw clenched and unclenched. She used both hands to pull her hair behind her head. She slowly twirled it into a ponytail and took a band off the side table and tied it off.
“So you talked to Yefim.”
I nodded.
“And he was explicit.”
“Couldn’t have been clearer—give them the cross and a baby, and they forget all about you.”
She’d pulled into herself, her knees up to her chest, bare feet clutching the couch cushion. Pulling the hair off her face should have made her features sharper and less vulnerable, but it managed to have the opposite effect. She looked like a child again. A petrified child.
“Did you believe him?”
I said, “I believe he believed it. Whether he can float it past Kirill and his wife, that’s another issue.”
“This all started because Kirill saw a picture of Sophie. That’s one of the”—she looked down the couch—”services Dre provides, the pictures. Kirill and Violeta saw Sophie, and I guess she looked like Violeta’s younger sister or something and, from that point, they wanted Sophie’s baby, no one else’s.”
“So it might be more complicated than Yefim lets on.”
“It’s always more complicated,” she said. “How old are you?”
I gave that a small smile.
Amanda looked down the couch at Dre, who sat there like a dog waiting for her to say “park” or “supper.”
“Even if he could supply another baby, wouldn’t we be doing the same thing—giving a child over to two psychopaths?”
I nodded.
“Can you live with that?”
I said, “I came here to find you and get Sophie out of their hands. That’s as far as I’ve thought.”
“How nice for you.”
“Hey, Amanda? People who live in glass houses with kidnapped babies shouldn’t throw stones.”
“I know, it’s just that it sounds so much like the kind of logic that sent me back to Helene twelve years ago.”
“I’m not playing this record right now. You want to hash all that shit out at some quieter time, I’ll be your Huckleberry. But right now we need to get them this Belarus Cross and, if possible, convince them we’ll get them another baby.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Get them another baby?”
She nodded.
“I don’t have a clue, but I do know the cross will buy us time. It’s supposed to be on display in Kirill’s house by Saturday night. If it’s not there, I have no doubt they’ll kill all of us, my family included. We get it to them, though, it’ll buy us another couple of days on the baby issue.”
Angie’s eyes had widened and she glared at me.
“Sounds good to me,” Dre said.
“I’m sure it does,” Amanda said. She turned back to me. “What if they renege? All Yefim has to do is figure out where I am, and there’s not too many places for me to hide. You found us in one morning. What’s to stop him from getting the cross and then coming right up the road for the baby?”
“His word that he wouldn’t is all I got to go on.”
“And you’d take it—the word of an assassin who goes all the way back to the Solntsevskaya Bratva in Moscow?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” I said.