Chapter 151 Into the Wolf's Den

Chapter 151 Into the Wolf's Den
"This is a really bad idea, Si."

Sylvia said it somewhere around the George Washington Bridge. She said it again as they merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike. She said it a third time, with added emphasis, as they passed the Delaware Water Gap, the Pocono ridgeline bruised purple against a fading sky, and several more times in between those.

"I hear you," Sierra said, both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Do you, though?" Sylvia shifted in the passenger seat, Sierra's phone propped against her thigh, the blue GPS line snaking westward across Pennsylvania like a vein. "Because hearing me and listening to me are two very different things, and right now you're doing a whole lot of the first and none of the second."

"I'm listening."

"Then turn the car around."

Sierra said nothing. The rental, the same one she'd driven to Chloe's wedding, back when the world still made a kind of sense, hummed along at seventy-eight miles per hour. The highway was mostly empty this time of night. Just long-haul truckers and the occasional pair of headlights drifting past like ships.

"Si."

"I just need to see. That's all. I just need to see the place."

Sylvia exhaled through her nose, a slow, controlled breath that Sierra recognized as her friend's way of swallowing something sharp. "You got a text from a man you've only met with in secret, whose real name you don't even know, with an address in Pittsburgh tied to a man named Viktor Sobol. And instead of handing that information over to the police, you decided to drive six hours across three states in the middle of the night."

"It's only ten o'clock," she responded. "Detective Ruiz would've sat on it for days while he figured out how to pass off the case to the police in Pittsburgh. You know that."

"And maybe there's a reason for that! Maybe sitting on it for a few days is the smart play! Maybe the professionals who carry badges and guns should be the ones walking into a stranger's address in a city neither of us has ever been to!"

Sierra's jaw tightened. "Maybe Ryder doesn't have a few days."

Sylvia didn't have an adequate response for that.

The GPS chimed. In four hundred feet, take exit 57B toward Pittsburgh.

Sierra took the exit.

Pittsburgh at ten o'clock at night was a city of bridges and shadows. They crossed the Monongahela on a steel span that groaned under the wind, the river below black and sluggish, reflecting nothing. The downtown skyline rose briefly, steel and glass towers lit in corporate gold, and then fell away behind them as the GPS directed them south, then east, then into streets that grew progressively narrower and darker.

"This is a really, really bad idea," Sylvia said quietly.

She wasn't wrong. The neighborhood they were entering had the look of a place that had died and no one had bothered to bury. Abandoned factories lined both sides of the road, their windows punched out like missing teeth, chain-link fencing sagging around lots choked with ragweed and rusted machinery. A water tower listed to one side, its tank stained with decades of oxidation. Streetlights, where they existed at all, threw weak amber circles that illuminated nothing useful.

You have arrived at your destination.

Sierra pulled to the curb and killed the engine. They both stared through the windshield.

The address belonged to a bar. A squat, flat-roofed building wedged between a shuttered welding supply shop and a vacant lot. A single neon sign buzzed in the window, just the word OPEN in red, one letter flickering, and a hand-painted sign, barely readable above the door read The Wolf's Den in faded white letters. Two vehicles sat in the gravel lot beside it: a black SUV with tinted windows and a panel van with no plates.

Sierra's stomach tightened.

"Okay," she said, more to herself than to Sylvia. "Let's just check the place out and then we'll go to the police station. I just want to see if…"

"No." Sylvia turned in her seat, her dark eyes fierce. "We go to the police station first. We find a nice, well-lit bar somewhere in a civilized part of town, we order drinks like normal human beings, and we let the police do their job. That is what we do."

"Yeah. We will. I just want to check the place out first."

"Sierra." Sylvia grabbed her arm. "Look at this place. Look at it. Does this look like somewhere Ryder is sitting in a corner booth drinking a beer and waiting for someone to come find him?"
"You don't know that."

"I know that this," Sylvia gestured through the windshield, at the crumbling facades and the dead factories and the bar with its sickly neon pulse, "is not a place two women walk into…" she started to say the time, then changed it to a stronger word, "…EVER, and expect to walk out of again."

Sierra stared at the building. Every rational part of her brain was screaming the same thing Sylvia was saying. But behind that rational voice was another one, lower, more desperate, and it sounded like Ryder's, and it was saying I'm here, come find me.

"Five minutes," Sierra said. "We walk in. We have a look around. If there's nothing, we leave and go straight to the police."

Sylvia closed her eyes. Her lips moved, and Sierra suspected she was praying.

"Five minutes," Sylvia finally said, exhaling a long, defeated sigh. "We walk in. Have a look around. See if Ryder is sitting in a corner booth. And then we go."

"Exactly," Sierra said, already opening her door, only half-hearing the words.

The gravel crunched under their shoes. The air smelled of river silt and old iron. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistle moaned.

Sierra pushed the door open.

The interior was dim, narrow, and reeked of cigarette smoke and something chemical she couldn't identify. A bar ran along the left wall, its surface scarred and sticky. A television mounted in the corner played soccer, not football, not baseball, soccer, the commentary low and rapid in a language that wasn't English. Bottles lined the back wall, labels she didn't recognize, displaying Cyrillic text she couldn't read.

There were six men inside. Maybe seven. They turned as the door swung shut behind Sierra and Sylvia, and the room went very still.

One sat at the bar, thick-necked, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Two others occupied a booth near the back, their conversation dying mid-sentence. A fourth stood near a doorway that led somewhere deeper into the building, arms folded, watching with flat, appraising eyes. The bartender, heavyset, head shaved clean, set down the glass he'd been polishing and didn't pick it up again.

Nobody spoke.

Sierra felt Sylvia press close behind her, fingertips finding the back of Sierra's arm. She tugged on it.

The man nearest the door moved. Not toward them. Toward the door. Behind them. Sierra heard the lock engage with a sound like a bone snapping.

Then the thick-necked man at the bar smiled. It was the worst smile Sierra had ever seen.

She had read the name on the Scotsman's text and her mind had anglicized it, smoothed it out, filed it alongside Victors she had known, Victor at the office, Victor the sommelier at Le Noir. She hadn't stopped to hear the name for what it was.

A Russian name.

The men in the booth stood. One of them was holding something. Sierra couldn't see what. Didn't want to.

"Si," Sylvia whispered, her voice barely a breath against Sierra's shoulder. "Si, we need to leave."

Sierra Quinn, senior partner, ranch owner, survivor of wildfires, rape, a plane crashes and being shot, stood frozen in a dead steelworker's bar in Pittsburgh understanding, with a clarity that arrived far too late, that Sylvia had been right.

Every single time.