Devoted(116)
After Rodchenko snatched up two half-empty duffel bags and a suitcase, and headed along the hall toward the front of the house, Verbotski conducted a quick search of the kitchen drawers until he found interesting cutlery. He selected a meat cleaver.
He hurried along the hallway, intending to stand concealed to one side of the front door and chop the Russian rat as he returned from the Suburban.
Rodchenko, however, had not gone outside. As Verbotski entered the living room from the hallway, the dog-fearing puke lunged at him from the left, wielding a switchblade as he would have a dagger. He plunged the blade into his senior partner’s side, burying six inches of razor-edged steel in descending colon and small intestines.
Shock and pain did not prevent Verbotski from swinging the meat cleaver with his right hand. Steel met neck, and steel prevailed. As he collapsed, Rodchenko spouted blood like a fire hose in Hell, but by the time he hit the floor, the stream had already stopped, for he was as dead as he deserved to be.
As Verbotski dropped the cleaver on the corpse and gingerly withdrew the switchblade from his side, his vision darkened at the periphery, though he didn’t pass out. The wound was small but deep. A sharp but tolerable pain wrung a light sweat from him. Less blood than he expected. He clamped the puncture closed with one hand. He needed medical attention. In a few hours, acute peritonitis would set in. He was confident he’d be able to drive to Sacramento in the Escalade and get treatment there in a first-class hospital, under the protection of Tio Barbizon.
He returned along the hallway to the kitchen. At the open door to the cellar, he took a deep breath, steadied his voice, and called down to Knacker and Speer. “Are you about done with that?”
“Finished!” Speer shouted as a hard thud rose from below.
“Just one more kick,” Knacker promised as Speer appeared at the foot of the stairs.
Verbotski closed the cellar door and slid the latch bolt shut. He stepped to the thermostat, which was fixed on Heat, and adjusted the temperature-setting slide from forty degrees to eighty.
The thermostat was essentially the trigger for the device they had installed in the furnace. A standard HVAC system like this had maybe a five-or six-second delay between the call for heat and the ignition of the electric pilot light. Flame would at once erupt around the oil-fed ring wick, instantly burn away the trigger string, and detonate the explosive.
Speer shouted angrily as he ascended the last of the cellar stairs, and Verbotski started across the kitchen toward the back door with four or five seconds to go, plenty of time.
Knacker was shouting, too, and Speer pounded on the cellar door. They were never the quality of partners that Verbotski needed to reach the very top of his profession. Knacker was just too thick, and Speer was creepy, with his snake tattoos that, as rumor had it, weren’t limited to his arms. There were better associates out there, waiting to be found.
Verbotski was one second away from the exterior door, with at least two or three seconds remaining, an acceptable margin, when something inside him tore. Pain intense beyond his experience robbed his legs of all strength. He collapsed to the floor at the threshold of the back door.
Acid and something worse washed into his throat, and he gagged it down. The furnace blew, the floor leaped under him, the entire house shook, part of the ceiling collapsed. It seemed as though fate—Atropos herself—decided that his paralysis was insufficient to guarantee that he would burn and, to seal the deal, pinned him in place with ceiling joists and other debris.
As he lay there waiting for the flames, he thought of the hard rain drenching the night, but he could take no hope from it. He knew the intensity this engineered fire would quickly achieve; it could not be easily quenched. He heard the flames below, rushing upward, and felt the floor warming under him.
In one of his psychology classes, he’d been taught that, as a person lay dying, the brain produced hormones intended to induce a sense of well-being. This supposedly explained why some on their deathbeds hallucinated ministering angels and why those who briefly died and came back often spoke of a tunnel leading to a welcoming light and a world of wonder beyond.
He saw no angels, no tunnel leading to a light. But as tendrils of smoke began to slither through the room, a long-repressed memory returned to John, and his heart raced with unexpected delight as images from the past flooded through his mind. He was six years old when his father brought Daisy home, a two-year-old golden retriever that he had rescued from the pound expressly for the boy. Daisy and young John enjoyed many adventures together, and for a while there was a reliable source of joy in a house that otherwise was filled with suspicion, contention, and loud arguments. The marriage didn’t last, and one year to the day after Daisy came into the Verbotski home, she died in young John’s arms. To his alcoholic mother, Daisy was an avatar of her hated husband, and that was sufficient reason for her to poison the dog. What had been a year of wonder became, with the death of Daisy, too painful for him to recall. Now the fire reached for him, and with the blaze were memories brighter than the flames, memories repressed no longer, recollections of tenderness and laughter and love that he had never experienced before that long-ago year and had never known again in the days that followed.
129
Amory Cromwell, estate manager of the five-acre property in Tiburon, was not a stupid man, quite the opposite, and neither was he a coward.