Page 10

CHAPTER 10

D mitri refused to answer any more of my questions as we rumbled down unplowed Highway 441 until we arrived at the locked gate at the closed Sugarlands ranger station. Tanke adroitly drove the snowcat around the gate and into the parking lot where there was a large pickup truck with a trailer. Dmitri and I got out while Tanke loaded the snowcat onto the trailer and chained it down. Dmitri started the pickup to warm up the engine. The road leading from here to Gatlinburg had been plowed.

“Shall we?” Dmitri asked, indicating the back seat of the pickup truck.

“One moment.” I pulled out my cellphone, which had been off to conserve power and also because there’d been no service for the past week deep in the mountains. I turned it on and got a faint signal. I went to text messages, scrolling back through. It was a burner and the only person I’d given the number to was Rose. However, she’d shared it with others on Thanksgiving, obviously, because there were numerous texts from various denizens of Rocky Start, all sending Thanksgiving greetings and best wishes with an underlying theme of “Why are you there and not here with us, dumbass?”

The flurry of messages a week ago had damn near broken me just before I lost cellphone service going deeper into the mountains. I’d never had a real Thanksgiving—a traditional one—that I could recall. Most as an adult had been spent overseas and had gone unnoticed because of important/pressing happenings/events. Some received the barest of acknowledgement while on boring duty somewhere. But now I could imagine Rose standing at the head of a long table put together in Ecstasy, passing good food down to the family she’d made in the nineteen years she’d been in Rocky Start: her daughter Poppy, Coral Schmidt, Pike Bernard and his foster sons Marley and Reggie, Luke Granger and his son Darius, her best friend Lian Kwan and her daughter Mei and now probably Rowan Masters since he was living with Lian, and Betty Baumgarten, of course. And as I understood holiday dinners from the movies, there’s always at least one annoying relative, so probably Hermione Witch, irritating everybody. Maybe Dottie and Lionel Ferrell, our postal service, fighting their way through the day as usual. Maybe Bea Handler bringing fresh honey from her bees. Maybe even the local femme fatale Louise Hedley; if she was alone on the holiday (doubtful), Rose would invite her even though Louise would try to charm all the men and annoy all the women. But it would be warm and everybody would be laughing and Coral would have made pies . . .

Enough of that. There were no new messages or updates on what was going on in Rocky Start. Of course, Rose had no clue I was back in cellphone range.

Tanke put the truck in gear and we drove out of the parking lot onto where 441 was plowed and led to Gatlinburg, and eventually Rocky Start. I could feel Dmitri staring at me.

As we drove through the mountains, I probed Dmitri for more information. “Tell me about the treasure.”

He glanced over at the driver, then back at me. “My friend here, Tanke, is deaf, but he reads lips. Bear that in mind in the future, please.” He said the name like “Thonkye” but I knew it meant “tank” in Russian. “Tanke knows enough to do what I need him for, but no more. And he knows nothing of treasure.”

Tanke was a big man, a massive blunt object in the driver’s seat, focused on the road.

Dmitri turned in the passenger seat to face me.

“Right,” I said. “Did you find Tank at Muscle-for-Hire?”

“No,” Dmitri said. “We met long years ago in the Gulag. I owe Tanke my life.”

“And Tank—Tanke—is his given name?” I asked.

“It was given to him there. He earned it. Appropriate, is it not? Who we were before then mattered little.”

“Being ex-KGB probably didn’t go over well in the Gulag,” I pointed out.

Dmitri nodded. “Thus why I owe my life to Tanke.”

With the doors shut, it felt extremely warm inside. I blinked, feeling faint, and ripped open my parka.

“Acclimatized to the cold, eh?” Dmitri reached back and turned down the hot air blowing into the back. “I remember the cold of Siberia. The Gulag. Tanke had already been there for years by the time I arrived. The American cold is nothing compared to that.”

I wasn’t going to argue Siberian cold with Dmitri.

He looked me in the eyes. “I was in Gulag because your Oz and Pike stole my SCIF. I was not happy about being punished.” He shrugged. “But such is war. They could have killed me but didn’t. The scales are even regarding that. But I want my treasure back. That is not even.”

“Your treasure?”

“A Soviet dug it up. Thus, it is Soviet. There is no more Soviet Union, thus I claim as one of last remaining Soviets who served his country.”

I think the Gulag had loosened a few bolts in Dmitri’s brain, but that was pretty understandable.

I shook my head. “I searched Oz’s place and didn’t find any indication he had treasure. He had a bunch of cash stashed away from trying to buy back Stinger missiles. And that money belongs to Rose, the woman who runs his shop and took care of him. But there’s no indication he or Pike had any of this treasure you claim was stolen from you.”

“I do not ‘claim,’” Dmitri said. “I was there. And Oz and Pike certainly took the treasure.”

I remembered the maps in Oz’s back room, with the grid pattern overlaid on them. “I think he was looking for something in the mountains,” I said. “But?—”

Dmitri cut me off. “Stop denying. If he did not have treasure, how can he give a piece of it away?”

“What?”

“At the reading of will,” Dmitri said. “He gave Coral Schmidt a brooch from the Bactrian hoard.”

The term “Bactrian hoard” rang a bell; definitely connected to Afghanistan. I remembered Barry passing Coral something wrapped in blue panties. No one had asked her what was inside, because really, at the time, who wanted to? “How do you know that?”

“Why do you think I’m here?” Dmitri asked. “The lawyer, Mason, he speaks too much.”

Fucking Barry. He must have steamed open the envelope and checked everything out when he got it to take down the names before he gave it back to Pike.

“Who else do you know in Rocky Start?”

Dmitri looked at me, surprised. “Pike, of course. And the woman who calls herself Coral Schmidt now. In Berlin. We met many years ago when the Wall was still up. Before Afghanistan. I was lucky to survive the meeting.”

I decided to see where his feelings lay. “Coral was attacked this morning.”

He lost his smile. “Is she hurt? Is she . . .”

“Rose just told me I was needed.”

Dmitri tapped Tanke on the shoulder and waited until the man was looking at him.

“Go faster,” he said.