Swift Edge (29 page)

Dmitri’s head swung toward his mother, and he whipped the pistol toward the Zamboni, hauling Kendall around with him. In that moment, I leaped, pushing forward with all the strength in my legs. The ice stole some of my traction, but I slammed into the pair of them with a satisfying thud, tearing Kendall from Dmitri’s loosened grip and shoving her across the ice before I landed—
bam
—on my elbow and shoulder, the ice scraping my cheek. Pain zinged through my right butt cheek and tailbone, still sore from when Bobrova tripped me. Dmitri skated backward, still on his feet, gun wavering indecisively between me and the Zamboni. Irena, apparently out of bullets, flung her guns at the Zamboni and turned to run, taking only one step before Gigi clipped her with the Zamboni’s front corner and sent her sprawling on the ice, out cold. The Zamboni’s ice-shaving blades snagged on the duffel bag and dragged it, spewing money all over the ice.

“Mom!” Dmitri started toward his mother, but I had half crawled, half slid forward until I could reach his ankle. Wrapping my forearm around it, I jerked.

He toppled, the gun sailing out of his hand, as loud voices shouted, “Police! Freeze! Put down your weapons.”

“Are you okay?” I asked Kendall as she stalked toward me. The girl was part penguin, I decided fuzzily, to be able to stay upright on the slick ice.

Ignoring me, she stopped beside Dmitri and launched a small foot into his rib cage.

“Oof.”

“You tried to shoot my mother! And you didn’t even know my name!”

He stared up at her, confused by the vision of petite, blond, scorned fury, as police officers swarmed him, flipped him onto his stomach, and cuffed his hands behind him, letting Kendall kick him a couple more times before gently pulling her away. When an officer yanked him to his feet, Dmitri flashed his engaging smile and started explaining how he was working with the feds to stop an identity theft ring. Two other officers enthusiastically began collecting the money that coated the rink’s surface like a papery lichen.

Gigi dismounted awkwardly from her metal steed, still wearing the pink dress, which looked considerably the worse for wear, like an ’80s bridesmaid gown battered in a mosh pit. Her champagne-colored hair was mashed flat on one side, and a bruise discolored her cheek, a souvenir of her fender bender, I guessed.

“Kendall!” Southern accent wringing at least three syllables from the name—“Kay-en-dall”—she kicked off the green pumps and staggered toward her daughter, who hurtled into her mother’s arms and promptly burst into tears. “Are you hurt, baby? Are you okay? Where does it hurt?”

It wasn’t Kendall who was hurt, I realized, feeling a dull ache spreading from my right buttock. Cold seeped through my jeans, numbing my thighs where they contacted the ice. I reached a hand down to my hip, and it came away streaked with blood. Damn. I’d been shot. And it hurt.

“There, there, baby,” Gigi said, stroking the girl’s blond hair. “I’m so, so grateful you’re all right. Because I am going to kill you for making me worry like that!” They moved toward the side of the rink, paying no attention to me. No one cared that I’d been shot making sure the spoiled teenager didn’t get a bullet through
her
perky posterior. I poked out my lower lip and indulged in a little pity party.

I had about decided I needed to make an effort to get up, because the ice beneath me was melting and I was soaked from shoulders to ankles, when Montgomery appeared above me. I stared up into his face in a detached sort of way, thinking how handsome he was, even upside down.

He stretched down a hand, and I reached up with an effort to put my hand in his. His fingers closed over mine, strong and hard and warm. “Are you going to nap there the rest of the evening, Swift?” he asked, a smile slanting across his face. “Come on, get your lazy ass up.” He tugged on my hand, and I let out a yelp.

“Wha—?” He stared at the smear of red that became visible on the ice when I shifted. “You’re shot! Why didn’t you say—? Medic!”

33

I’d have gotten more rest at a Blue Man Group percussion concert than I got in the hospital that night. I lay awake after the surgery to patch up my derriere, gritting my teeth with pain and trying to sort through the events that led to the shootout at the ice rink.

“You’d feel a lot better if you’d take your pain meds,” a sickeningly cheerful nurse said, opening the blinds the next morning. I squinted as the sunlight striped my face. I lay on my left side facing the door, some sort of bolster behind me propping me up so I didn’t roll onto the butt cheek with the bullet hole in it.

“I hate drugs,” I muttered. “They make me feel all … not me.”

She muttered something that might have been “And that’s a bad thing?” as she checked my vitals and scratched notes on my chart. “Breakfast’ll be here in a minute,” she chirped on her way out, “and I’m sure Dr. Tuckwell will be by before long.”

“When can I get out of here?” I called after her, but she was gone. I sipped water from the plastic tumbler on the swing-arm tray beside the bed and discovered the TV remote. I aimed it at the TV, turning my head at an awkward angle, hoping to find some news related to last night’s happenings. Nothing but traffic updates, an
Everybody Loves Raymond
rerun, and a yoga class. I clicked it off.

A brief knock sounded on the door, and I looked up, expecting to see breakfast—probably a bowl of soggy cereal and that orange juice that comes in little plastic cups and leaves a funny aftertaste. I didn’t suppose there’d be a Pepsi on my tray.

“Charlie, you’re awake. How can I ever thank you?” Gigi came in with a bright smile, hair recoiffed to stiff perfection, bruise minimized with makeup, royal blue velour pants and matching jacket replacing the pink dress. She bore an arrangement of yellow and white daisies tucked into a smiley-face mug, which she placed on my tray table. “Kendall, say thank you.”

Only then did I notice Kendall behind her mom, glowering. “Thanks,” she muttered with all the enthusiasm of a child expected to be grateful for a heaping plateful of boiled eggplant. “Everything was copacetic—I was going to rescue Dmitri and he was going to be so grateful—”

“I’m not sure Dmitri needed rescuing,” I said wryly, “and I missed the gratitude. Did he thank us before or after he shot at us?”

“He was only pissed off because you got him arrested,” she flashed. “Besides, he didn’t shoot! All the shooting was Dmitri’s mom and that other guy, the one trying to—”

I stared at her. Last night she’d been kicking him, but today she was defending him? The teenager’s capacity for self-delusion, or for sticking to a position in complete disregard of all evidence, awed me.

“Kendall!” Gigi said in a much sterner tone than I was used to hearing from her. Apparently, it was new to Kendall, too, because she stopped with her mouth open and stared at her mother. “Wait in the hall.”

The girl left, scuffing her pink boots over the hospital’s shiny linoleum.

“I’m glad I wrecked his car,” Gigi said when Kendall had gone, giving a decisive nod.

That surprised a laugh out of me.

“Well, I am,” she said defiantly. “When I got to the rink—I got the Mustang started again, but it was making a really ugly grinding noise—and saw him aiming that gun at Kendall, I froze. I couldn’t scream or move or anything. Then I saw the Zamboni and … well, it seemed like my only shot, so I snuck out of the tunnel and climbed onto it. Then—”

“Tunnel?” What was she talking about?

“There’s a tunnel from the Ice Hall to the arena that brings you out at ice level,” she explained with a “you didn’t know that?” expression.

“That would have been useful to know,” I said, figuring Dmitri and Irena probably accessed the World Arena through the tunnel and then opened the door I’d come through from the inside for Aguilar and his minions to use.

“I thought Dmitri was going to shoot my baby, but then you pushed her down and saved her life, and I will be grateful to my dying day.” Gigi sniffled, and I gestured at the tissue box on the windowsill.

“I don’t think he would’ve shot Kendall on purpose,” I said. “She startled him.” Irena, however, was a whole ’nother kettle of fish.

“Well, dead is dead whether it’s on purpose or not, and I’ll never forget you saved her, and got shot doing it. I’ll take care of everything while you’re in the hospital and convalescing. You don’t need to worry about a thing. And I’ve got a good mind to make Kendall come to your house every day after school and run errands for you until you’re up and about.”

I blanched. I didn’t know who’d hate that more—me or Kendall. “I plan to be up and about by tomorrow,” I said, “so don’t worry about it. Did Kendall tell you how she came to be at the rink?”

“I’m not deaf, you know,” Kendall called from the hallway. She edged back in, leaning against the jamb. “Mom refused to look for Dmitri even though he was in
danger,
so when I saw Mrs. Fane taking the Hummer keys, I jumped in the back and covered up with the blanket, thinking she might need my help. She did, too,” she said self-righteously, jutting out her lower lip. “If I hadn’t been there, at the rink—”

“Where did you go before the World Arena?” I cut into her heroine fantasy. Squeaking wheels and the scent of scrambled eggs announced the arrival of the breakfast cart. An orderly walked past the door bearing two trays.

“I’m not sure where all we went,” she said, “because I was afraid to look half the time, for fear Mrs. Fane might see me and … and misinterpret. She drove around for a while—I’m not sure where—and then stopped at some restaurant for dinner,” Kendall said. “In a strip mall. It took her, like, two hours to eat. I was freezing in that dumb Hummer and starving, too. All I had to eat was a stupid Snickers bar.” She glared at Gigi as if it were Gigi’s fault they didn’t have food stashed in the Hummer for stowaways. “Then I know we went to Old Colorado City, because she got out there and I was able to sit up and look around. It was dark, though, so I couldn’t see much.”

“Where did she go?” I tensed and then clenched my fists on the blanket as pain zinged from my ass all the way to the sole of my foot.

“Some tattoo place,” Kendall said.

Gigi leaned down and whispered in my ear, “The police found a body there. Shot.”

Shocker. Irena tidying up loose ends. I wondered if it had, indeed, been Graham who killed Boyce, as Dmitri implied, or if his mother had, once again, stepped in to keep Dmitri safe. No, it couldn’t have been Irena, because she was in Detroit when Boyce was murdered. The police would figure it out.

“I think it’s really cool that someone that old would get a tat,” Kendall said, looking at Gigi with an expression that said her mom would never do anything half so cool. The girl’s eyes lit up. “Mom, can I—?”

“No.”

The sullen look clouded Kendall’s face again. “Well! You could at least say we’ll talk about it.”

“No.”

I gave Gigi an encouraging smile; she was getting the hang of using the N-word.

Then she went and spoiled it, crossing to the teen where she slouched in the doorway. “Honey, you’re beautiful just the way you are. Why, I know dozens of girls who would kill for your lovely skin.” She cupped Kendall’s face in her hands.

“Where did Irena go after that?” I interrupted before Kendall harangued Gigi into driving her to the nearest tattoo parlor.

“She went to the hospital.”

“Memorial North?”

Kendall nodded. “I got out and did a few jumping jacks to keep warm … she was in there maybe twenty minutes.”

So she’d gone to see her sister. The suspicious side of me wondered if she’d gone to comfort her or tie up another loose end. Either way, I guessed Bobrova was still alive since neither Gigi nor Kendall had said otherwise. I bit my lip, thinking. An orderly sidled past Kendall, tray held high, and laid it on my table after moving the flower, tissues, and tumbler to the windowsill. “Breakfast,” he announced.

“Can I get a Pepsi with that?” I asked, peeking under the metal dome at eggs, toast, and applesauce.

He laughed, thinking I was joking, and left.

“We’ll go so you can eat,” Gigi said, hooking her pink leather tote bag over her arm.

“Wait,” I said, in no hurry to eat the rubbery-looking eggs. “Did Irena go anywhere else?”

Kendall shook her head. “She got the phone call pretty much as soon as she got back to the car after visiting the hospital and we went to the World Arena. She drives like Dexter,” she added in a noncomplimentary tone, “and she almost wrecked making the turn into the lot. My face banged against the seat, and I got a bloody nose.”

That explained the blood droplets in the Hummer’s cargo area.

“Poor baby,” Gigi said, brow crinkling.

Kendall had gotten off pretty lightly, in my opinion. I thought about what might have happened if Irena had discovered her, and got the shivers.

“What you did last night—trying to warn Dmitri—was brave,” I told Kendall. Stupid, but brave. I remembered the heroine daydreams I’d invented at about her age—fantasies of helping people exit an airliner after a crash, or single-handedly tackling an armed bank robber to save the hostages—and I empathized with her desire to impress someone, anyone, but preferably the object of her crush, Dmitri. Who had been markedly unimpressed.

She flushed at my words, crossing and uncrossing her arms over her chest. Her eyes met mine for a fleeting second. “Come on,” she told Gigi. “We’ll be late. I’ve still got to do my makeup and get my costume and skates, and you know I like to be at the arena a couple hours before I skate.”

“Are they going ahead with Nationals at the World Arena?” I asked, surprised.

“Duh,” Kendall said with an eye roll. She tugged at her mom’s sleeve and headed impatiently for the door.

With a waggle of her fingers, Gigi followed her daughter into the hall.

After forcing myself to eat half my breakfast, I lay back against my pillow. I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes, Dan was sitting in the chair at my bedside, studying me. His bulk shrunk the hospital room, and I was damned glad to see him, even though his presence made me conscious of my undoubtedly ratty hair, my unbrushed teeth, and the skimpy hospital gown that was sagging down my shoulder.