The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

The sick bastards in the well-protected-but-not-protected-enough chat room were all older men, and they were gross and despicable. They liked to talk incessantly about women’s private parts and having vile sex with anyone and everything that moved—any age, any gender, human or animal. The men were beyond disgusting; they made her want to puke. Only then it got a lot worse, and Lili wished she had never even heard of the Wolf’s Den, never hacked into the highly protected chat room. They might be murderers!

And then the leader, Wolf, actually discovered Lili was on the site with them, listening to everything they’d said.

So now Lili knew about the murders, and the kidnappings, everything they fantasized about and possibly did. Only she didn’t know if any of what she heard was real or not.

Was it real? Or were they making it all up? Maybe they were just nasty, sicko bullshitters. Lili almost didn’t want to know the truth, and she didn’t know what to do about the stuff she’d already overheard. She had hacked onto their site, and that was illegal. If she went to the police, she’d be turning herself in. So she couldn’t do that. Could she? Especially if the stuff on the site was just fantasies.

So she sat in her room and pondered the unthinkable. Then pondered it again. She felt so bad, so sick to her stomach, so sad, but she was also afraid.

They knew she’d hacked onto the Wolf’s Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she were them, she’d know how. So were they already on their way to her house?

Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed.

When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. “Holy shit, holy mother! It’s them!”

Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering.

Domino’s Pizza! Jesus!

She’d forgotten all about it. It was pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn’t going to die after all.

She opened the front door.

Chapter 42

THE WOLF HAD SELDOM been angrier, and someone had to pay. The Russian had a long-standing hatred for New York City and the smug and overrated metropolitan area. He found it filthy, foul beyond imagining, the people rude and uncivilized, even worse than in Moscow. But he had to be there today; it was where the Couple lived, and he had business with them. The Wolf also wanted to play some chess, one of his passions.

Long Island was the general address he had for Slava and Zoya.

Huntington was the specific one.

He arriv

ed in the town just past three in the afternoon. He remembered the one other time he’d been here—two years after he had arrived in New York from Russia. Cousins of his owned a house here and had helped set him up in America. He had committed four murders out “on the Island,” as the locals called it. Well, at least Huntington was close to Kennedy Airport. He’d be out of New York as soon as possible.

The Couple lived in a typical suburban ranch house. The Wolf banged on the front door, and a goateed bull of a man by the name of Lukanov opened it. Lukanov was part of another team, one that worked successfully in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Lukanov had once been a major in the KGB.

“Where are the stupid fucks?” the Wolf asked, once he was inside the front door.

The bull Lukanov jerked a thumb toward a semidarkened hallway behind him, and Wolf trudged down it. His right knee was aching today, and he remembered a time in the eighties when members of a rival gang had broken it. In Moscow that kind of thing was considered a warning. The Wolf wasn’t much for warnings himself. He had found the three men who’d tried to cripple him and broken every bone in their bodies, one by one. In Russia this gruesome practice was called zamochit, but the Wolf and other gangsters also called it mushing.

He entered a small, sloppily kept bedroom and immediately saw Slava and Zoya, his ex-wife’s cousins. The pair had grown up about thirty miles from Moscow. They had been in the army until the summer of ’98, then they emigrated to America. They’d been working for him for less than eight months, so he was just getting to know them.

“You live in a garbage dump,” he said. “I know you have plenty of money. What do you do with it?”

“We have family at home,” said Zoya. “Your relatives are there too.”

The Wolf tilted his head. “Awhh, so touching. I had no idea you had such a big heart of gold, Zoya.” He motioned for the bull to leave and said, “Shut the door. I’ll be out when I’m finished here. It might be a while.”

The Couple was tied up together on the floor. Both were in their underwear. Slava had on shorts patterned with little ducks. Zoya wore a black bra with a matching bikini thong.

The Wolf finally smiled. “What am I going to do with you two, huh?”

Slava began to laugh out loud, a nervous, high-pitched cackling. He had thought they were going to be killed, but this would just be a warning. He could see this in the Wolf’s eyes.

“So what happened? Tell me quickly. You knew the rules of the game,” he said.

“Maybe it was getting too easy. We wanted a little more of a challenge. It’s our mistake, Pasha. We got sloppy.”