It was chaos. Yet a huge man carrying a young lady in his arms, now both covered with soot, couldn't pass by without notice. Two paramedics ran toward Dmitri, insisting he let them care for the girl he was carrying.
“Don't touch my wife!” he yelled, holding her tight against his chest with just one arm and shoved them both aside.
A cop saw what happened and rushed toward Dmitri.
“Put the girl down and do not assault the paramedics!”
Dmitri scanned the area. He thought of the pistol pressed against his stomach, the bodies that could be traced to it, his arrest record. He couldn't stop and chat with a cop.
And more importantly, he couldn't turn Sonya over to them. The sheikh's men could be looking for her. There would be more of them soon. With their power, their connections, they'd find out which hospital Sonya was in, and they'd kill her out of revenge, and likely torture her first.
Dmitri counted the cops between him and the parking garage. He thought about how many bullets he had left in his gun. He didn't like the math.
Just then, the cop who had yelled at him and was coming closer got a call on his walkie- talkie.
Dmitri resumed walking. The cops yelled at him to stop, but he ignored them. When he stepped out of sight behind a fire truck, he broke into a full sprint, holding Sonya as tight as he could, so her head didn't bounce too hard.
The parking garage was blocked off. Dmitri couldn't get his Mercedes out. So he kept running.
He didn't even look over his shoulder to see if anyone was chasing him. He glanced down once at Sonya and noticed she looked almost peaceful now as she lay in his arms, eyes closed. But Dmitri knew he had not saved her yet.
Traffic was building up in the whole area. Several roads had already been blocked off because of the fire. They needed a vehicle, but it had to be a nimble one.
“Give me your bike, my wife is sick!” Dmitri shouted at a man waiting on a motorcycle in traffic.
“Fuck off, buddy! There's a bunch of doctors and cops right over there.”
Dmitri lay Sonya down on the hood of the car behind the bike.
“What the hell are you doing, asshole!” the driver shouted out his window.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you…” the biker said as Dmitri grabbed him by the arm and slammed him onto the ground with one hand.
Dmitri kicked in one of the car's headlights and picked up Sonya once more. He didn't know if she had enough strength to hold onto him from behind, or even to sit upright, so he sat her right between his legs as he hopped on the motorcycle.
“Stop or I'll shoot!” a cop screamed.
Dmitri opened the throttle and took off down that small space between two lanes of traffic, where only a motorcycle can fit. The cop had no chance to follow.
Once away from the madness around the hotel, Dmitri knew he should probably get a different vehicle again soon. There would be an APB out for a large man carrying a young lady on a motorcycle.
But he didn't want to draw even more attention by stealing another ride. And anything but a bike would be too hard to maneuver in traffic. So he kept riding. Through Manhattan, across the Brooklyn Bridge, then south all the way to Brighton Beach.
He had a safe house there. A little two-bedroom wooden shack three blocks from the water. Nobody knew about that house. His uncle had bought it years before and never used it, saving it for a time like this.
Dmitri wouldn't be sitting on the porch much, or strolling around the neighborhood, not with all the other Russian mobsters in Brighton Beach. But as long as he was cautious, he and Sonya would be okay there.
When you're a fugitive, the worst thing you can do is stay on the move, out in the open. The best way to hide is to lay low in some place nearby, a place nobody knows to look.