Ice Cold Kill Read Free Page B

compact and pulled away.
    *   *   *
     
    About twenty minutes later, in an elegant Rodeo Drive wine bar, a waiter brought Daria Gibron a goblet of Montepulciano and professionally ignored her spandex attire and just-showered hair.
    She sipped. “That’s lovely.”
    “Nice.” To Ray Calabrese, all red wines tasted more or less alike. He played with his glass a moment, avoiding eye contact. “Look, I’m sorry to dump this on you but … I’m no longer your handler.”
    Daria let a few beats of silence pass. “No?”
    He looked up and approximated a smile. “The bureau decided. You’re a citizen. Your work for us, for the DEA, for ATF has … um … this seems crass, sorry. It’s bought you citizenship. You’ll ace the test. Then you’ll be an American. One of us. Congratulations.”
    Daria sipped her wine. Ray seemed really proud. But also sad. In his own Ray Calabrese way, he seemed to be saying “hello” and “good-bye” at the same time.
    Daria thought an appropriate response from a normal person might be something along the lines of, This is marvelous news! So she went with that.
    “Okay! Well…” Ray lifted his glass.
    Daria did, too. They toasted.
    “All right then. Welcome to America, citizen. What’s next for you?”
    Daria thought about the bled-out importer in the rundown office building, the bullet-riddled bodies of the narco soldiers, and the burnt husk of the fat man in the van. And she thought about the message she had just sent the Juarez cartel. Would they heed the warning?
    No way to tell.
    She mulled the offers for translation work that were on the table. She considered the job awaiting her in Costa Rica. “A vacation, I think.”
    “Good for you,” Ray said. “You deserve a break.”
    Daria thought long and hard about taking Ray to bed that night but, in the end, decided it was a bad idea. He was genuinely one of the good guys.
    And she genuinely wasn’t.

One
     
    Desert, South of the Sea of Galilee
    The prisoners lay in their cots. It was one cot per cell. The cells were slightly larger than a bad room at a youth hostel or a kibbutz. Each had its own heater, a little partition between the cell doors, and a toilet. Really, as cells go, these weren’t bad.
    Asher Sahar lay on his back, ankles crossed, hands steepled on his chest. He wore a ratty sweater and ratty jeans and slippers. He spoke with a soft, sibilant whisper. “‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
    In the next cell, a grizzly bear of a man lay in the same posture, ankles crossed, hands steepled. His feet hung off the end of his cot. His name was Eli Schullman. He replied, “Irving Kahal.”
    “No.” The other man reached up to adjust his round, wireless glasses, forgetting that he had taken them off for the night. He’d worn glasses since the age of fifteen. “Irving Berlin. But, to your eternal credit, you were incredibly close. I mean, close in a wrong sort of way. Both, simultaneously, wrong and close to right but mostly just very wrong. It was—”
    The lights in the cells and in the corridor and in the guard station blinked on. They were aging, low-efficiency lights, phosphorescents, and they blinked on intermittently: this one first, then off, then that one, then the first one again. Harsh, unforgiving. They buzzed. Both men shielded their eyes. Schullman, the bear of a man, said, “What the fuck?”
    It was night. In the nearly four years they had been prisoners, they had rarely seen the lights come on at night.
    “Asher?”
    Asher Sahar lay still.
    When the big man realized Asher hadn’t risen, he didn’t either. But they could hear other prisoners up and down the row of cells gathering at their bars.
    The ticktock clang of the outer iron doors reverberated. Someone from the World was walking into the cells. At night.
    This, too, happened only rarely. Except when someone was about to be executed.
    The outer iron doors had never opened for a priest or a rabbi. Or for an envoy from the governor’s