Then silence.
We pressed against the side of the car, waiting for him to fire another.
But the shooting had stopped.
The only sound was the soft hum of Andrei’s idling engine. The wind rustled the cedars behind us. Shaky breaths steamed from our lips. Neither of us dared to move.
After a long moment, I peered around the hood of the car. Exhaust from his tailpipes blew over the hole. Andrei’s legs sprawled on the dirt at the edge of it. The rest of him disappeared inside of it, as if he’d fallen in.
Vero clutched the back of my hoodie, hugging me like a shadow as I crept cautiously toward his body. Andrei’s gun glimmered, limp in his hand. I lowered myself into the hole, towing Vero behind me, trying not to think about the sticky dampness soaking through the thin knees of my yoga pants as I crawled toward him. As we inched closer, we both flinched. Andrei’s face had been blown clean away, a dark puddle fanning out from what was left of his head.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, fighting the urge to be sick. “He shot himself.”
“On purpose?” Vero sputtered.
I blinked down at the gun in his hand. He’d been waving it around like a lunatic, thrashing and clawing at his eyes between his blind shots in our direction.
It hurt so bad, I couldn’t think straight … I was lucky I didn’t kill myself.
“I don’t think so. I think it was an accident.”
“What do we do now?”
The pile of bodies Andrei had buried loomed in the shadow of the hole. On top of them, the cherry of his abandoned cigarette dimmed and burned out.
“Turn off his car,” I heard myself say as I patted his pockets, fishing out his wallet and stuffing it inside my coat. “Don’t leave any fingerprints.”
Vero scrambled out of the hole and ran to Andrei’s car. The field went dark as she killed the engine. I took a moment to think. To breathe. To process what I knew, as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight.
The police were going to dig up this field in the next twenty-four hours.
They would find all of Andrei’s victims inside it. Harris, too.
Nick had already assumed Feliks was connected to Harris’s death. As far as they knew, Harris was just one more body.
“We’re going to leave Harris here,” I said, infusing the words with as much confidence as I could muster.
“Leave him?” she whispered, as if she were afraid he might hear us. “We can’t leave him!”
“If we take him, the police will only keep looking for him.”
“But if they find him with Andrei and all the others—”
“They’ll probably assume the mob killed them all.” It was a gamble, but moving Harris seemed far riskier. “Help me put Andrei with the others.” I grabbed his corpse under the arms, Vero grabbed his boots, and with a grunt, we lowered the rest of him into the hole. When the police came tomorrow and found a mass grave, they would find his freshly smoked cigarette and his gun. It would look like someone—probably Feliks—had met Andrei here, watched him bury the bodies, then executed him and dumped him with his victims, ridding his organization of the sloppy enforcer who kept thrusting his dirty business in the public eye.
Nick wouldn’t be here to take credit for the bust, but he would get the satisfaction of knowing he’d solved the case that finally put Feliks Zhirov behind bars. Patricia and Irina would be free of their husbands, Patricia and Aaron could come out of hiding, and Vero and I could get on with our lives.
Without a word, we shoveled all the dirt back into the grave and returned the shovels to the trunk, careful not to leave any traces of ourselves behind. When it was done, I got behind the wheel of Andrei’s car, and Vero followed me in the loaner to an overgrown field about a mile down the road, where we abandoned Andrei’s car and left his wallet in the glove box.
On the way home, we stopped at Ramón’s garage, switched out the loaner for Vero’s Charger, and headed the rest of the way to South Riding in silence, too shocked and exhausted to speak.
We reached the park just before sunrise. Vero pulled over, checking to make sure nobody was watching as I climbed into the trunk. With an apologetic smile, she slammed it shut, closing me inside.
Curled up beside the shovels, I listened to her tires roll back onto the road. Her engine wound down to a soft purr as she slowed past Officer Roddy’s car, making sure he and Mrs. Haggerty both saw her return home alone.
I rocked as the car swung into the driveway. It idled while the garage door groaned open. The car pulled forward a few feet, then the engine died. Through the walls of the car, the motor hummed as the garage door lowered again. Vero’s door slammed, her sneakers squeaking on the smooth concrete as she rounded the car. The trunk flew open to her weary, grime-coated smile as she reached in to help me climb out of the dark.