Gangsters with Guns Episode #3 (13 page)

“We’re not done ’til I say we’re done. And you’re not leaving here until I give the all clear. I have nothing better to do than sit and chat with you. All. Night. Long.” Hersh raised a bushy eyebrow in challenge.

Vlad sat back in his folding metal chair, lips pressed firmly together, letting Hersh know what he thought of his pronouncement.

“I’ve got dead bodies piling up,” Hersh said. “Firebombs at Troika, International Pharmacy, and Aleksei Koslovsky’s house; an attempted kidnapping and a gripe between Artur Koslovsky and the Georgians. Seems to me there’s a full-on mafia war.”

“They firebombed Aleksei’s house and businesses?”
 

A sense of imminent danger socked Vlad in the chest. A fear he hadn’t known before gripped him. Mikhail might be the least of his worries. He had to get to Inna and fast.

“I looked up your record,” Hersh said. “The most recent court proceedings from one of your cases. It took me a while, but I found what I was looking for. Hard to believe you’d testify with such conviction and then suddenly decide to play for the other team.”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

“Time might come when you need a friend.” Hersh’s voice was low. Did he know there were ears in this place?
 

Vlad tried to read the subtext, the emotional undercurrent. Was Hersh merely trying to reach the decent man he hoped was hiding deep down inside Vlad, or did he know something he shouldn’t?

“If I’m right about you, you’ll help us when the time comes.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Vlad tried to imbue his words with smugness.

“I’m not the only one watching you. You might appreciate knowing there are agents in the field. This is bigger than both of us.”

“They won’t last long if you announce their presence all over town,” Vlad said.

“Not just FBI,” Hersh said, in a way that emphasized he suspected strongly that Vlad was still with the Bureau. “CIA, too.”

Vlad knew about the feds, but the CIA? He had suspected they might be involved, but he hadn’t known for sure. Hersh had done him a favor, confirming a strong suspicion. If the CIA were watching, then whatever secret deal Artur and Victor were planning involved players and people from far beyond this little corner of Brooklyn.

If the CIA were interested enough to plant their own agent, then one, if not all, of Vlad’s suspicions had to be right: international money laundering, espionage and arms dealing, or human trafficking. He hadn’t ruled out the first two, but he was increasingly favoring the third as a real possibility.
 

Maybe this was why Artur had sought him out in the first place, luring him away from a similar operation out of a strip club in Miami.

He recalled the conversation with Victor and Artur, with Victor’s veiled references to the mysterious “merchandise,” his concerns about the time-sensitivity of the new deal, and finally the need to involve the Georgians. The Georgian crew in Brighton Beach dealt in drugs and prostitutes and had ties to Las Vegas and other flesh hot spots.
 

Vlad bet Artur and Victor needed the Georgians’ networks to distribute their “imports.” He knew what he should be looking for, but he hadn’t yet found it.

Should he demand a piece of the action? Just this morning, Artur had promised him anything he wanted—money, power,
anything
—so long as he kept Inna safe.
 

She’s safe. She’s safe. She’s safe.
He quickly recited the mantra again, but he didn’t believe the words. Artur wouldn’t have sent Mikhail to fetch her, not after the debacle this morning.
 

He needed to end the interview with Hersh and get to her. And whatever he did, he couldn’t let anyone—not Artur, not Hersh, not even Inna—guess what he was really after.
 

He wasn’t about to let a boneheaded move, like confiding to Hersh or pushing Artur too soon, undermine everything he and Svetlana had worked for.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Consider that I’m paying you forward. Someday you’ll return the favor.”

“Your intel would have to be a helluva lot better than that for me to owe you one,” Vlad said.

“So you already know,” Hersh said in an obvious attempt to fish for information.

“I’m sure I’m not the only one,” Vlad hedged. The question was, who else knew, and how much trouble would the information cause?
 

“But I’ll pay you back right now,” he said. “If you’re as smart as you think you are, you’ll disappear before Ivan gets out of prison and hunts you down. You’re at the top of his list.”

“No one ever said I was smart,” Hersh said. “You can tell Ivan I’m ready for him.”

“Are we done yet?” Vlad asked, growing impatient. “You’ve got nothing. And your days are clearly numbered.”

“You’re right.” Hersh gave a mild shrug, as if to say he had tried. “We can’t hold you. We don’t have enough to charge you with—yet.”

FROM HER PERCH in the basement crawl space, Katya listened intently for footsteps. Were those men coming for her? Would they find her?

She didn’t hear anyone coming, but she smelled smoke.
Molotov cocktails.

The house was on fire. Oh God, the house was on fire, and she was hiding in the basement.

The basement was an excellent hiding place, but not if the house was on fire. No one would find her—if help even arrived in time, if they even thought to look for her in a burning house.

She had to get out. She pushed aside the suitcases and slid herself to the floor in the basement storage room.

The smoke-tainted air was thick down here. She raced from her windowless closet.

No flames in the finished basement.
Sla va Bogu!
She ran for the stairs.

Then there was a sharp crack. In front of her, a floor beam crashed through the dropped ceiling and lit the carpet on fire. Flaming ceiling tiles dropped around her.
 

She shrieked and backed away from the flames and billowing smoke. A wall of roaring flames blocked her escape.

The fire seemed to chase her across the carpet. She ran to the farthest high window, the one above the sofa. Her eyes watered from the heat and smoke as she hopped onto the sofa and struggled to open the window. The frame was swollen and warped, and she didn’t know if she even could.

She pushed harder. Her feet sank deep into the foam sofa cushions, but the window didn’t budge. She tried again, pushing with all her might, even as the air around her grew thicker and threatened to suffocate her.

She could feel the heat of the fire at her back, but she didn’t dare spare a moment to check its progress. She had to get out, and this window was her only option.

She thought of the baby growing inside her and found a strength she didn’t know she had. She pushed on the window again. Her muscles strained.
 

Mercifully, the window groaned and the pane pushed outward.

The outside air was cold and wet, and she took a greedy, gasping, sputtering breath. She poked her head and torso through the window. Awkwardly, she shimmied through the narrow opening and into the window well outside.
 

She crouched behind the shield of corrugated metal that surrounded the window, trying to hide behind the sparse shrubbery at the side of the house while she surveyed the area for signs of the men she had seen earlier. Had they tried to smoke her out? Or had they lit the fire and then left?
 

If they were here, they’d be on her as soon as she showed herself, but she couldn’t stay in this hiding spot much longer, not with the flames and smoke building behind her. She couldn’t hold back her choking cough.

She momentarily closed her eyes and prayed as hard as she had ever prayed in her life.
 

She promised she would be brave. She would walk away from Aleksei if that’s what was required. She would do anything she had to do to protect her child.
Please let us survive this.

Seemingly in answer, she heard sirens in the distance. Then closer. Coming for her. And she knew they would both be safe.

ALEKSEI STUMBLED THE few blocks to his car. His stomach roiled. The brutal scene in the kitchen—all that blood—seemed tattooed on his eyelids. No matter how much he blinked, he saw Stan, face down in a still pool of his own blood.

The smell of blood seemed to stick to him. To follow him. He hadn’t killed Stan. Yet, he thought he might never wash the blood off of himself.

He hadn’t had to pull the trigger.
Sla va Bogu
. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to do it, especially now. Now that he’d seen the body up close. Now that he understood the aftermath. The violent permanence.

What had he been thinking?

Woodenly, he got in his car. Peeled off his gloves. Fumbled with the seatbelt.
 

Sirens blared from every direction. He clutched the wheel, suddenly afraid. They were coming for him. They knew what he’d done. He’d be arrested. Thrown in prison. His life would be over.

Police. Fire. Ambulance. The vehicles streaked past him.
 

They weren’t coming for him. They were responding to an emergency. See? Nothing to do with him. He exhaled and relaxed his muscles.
 

He could have lost everything, but he hadn’t. Wouldn’t. It was over now.
 

A sapling of true optimism began to take root, a tight bud of hope born amidst all the blood.
 

Stan was gone now, just as he and Mikhail had planned. If this plan had worked out, then the others could, too. Even better, a dead man had big shoulders. If there were any questions from his father or the Georgians or the police, they could blame the dead pharmacist for everything.

He started the engine and drove slowly away from Stan’s neighborhood, even though he could hardly wait to put as much distance between himself and Stan’s corpse as possible.

In a few minutes, he’d be home with Katya. Maybe he could pretend, even with all of the horrors of the night, that everything was fine. She would hold him. He would put his hand on her belly and imagine the baby growing there.

Stan, face down in blood that Aleksei had promised to shed. The image invaded, wouldn’t leave him. He could smell the blood as if it were on him, all around him. Would Katya scent it, too?

What if she asked questions? Would she believe the lies he would have to tell her?

He turned onto his street with an urgent sense of foreboding. Maybe he shouldn’t go home just now. Maybe he should wait a little, have a drink, and settle his nerves first. He didn’t want her to be suspicious.

He thought about turning around and heading to Troika, but then he saw the emergency vehicles—the ones that had passed him only a few minutes before—now gathered in front of his house.

Katya!
 

He parked in his neighbor’s driveway and ran toward his home, where a team of firefighters aimed a hose at his burning house.

He ran up the driveway, but someone grabbed him, pulled him to a stop. “My wife,” he said. “Let me through. I live here. I have to find my wife.”

Then he saw her near the ambulance and tore away to be by her side. She was sitting on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, an oxygen mask over her face. He climbed in beside her. “Katya.
Bozhe moi!
Katya, are you all right?”

She nodded, but she was in an ambulance getting treated for smoke inhalation. How all right could she be?

“Mr. Koslovsky?” A cop poked his head into the ambulance. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What the hell happened?” Aleksei demanded, as if this nightmare was someone else’s fault.

“Your brother-in-law called it in. Intruders. Firebomb. Same thing happened at your nightclub earlier.”

“My nightclub?” The Georgians had done this? He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t gather his thoughts. They’d come after him with far more violence than he had ever imagined, despite his cautious fear of Dato and his vicious knives.

Katya could have been killed.

“I should have been here,” Aleksei said. “I should have been here to protect you.”

“Where were you?” Her voice was scratchy, almost unrecognizable.

“Don’t try to talk,” the EMT told her.

Her gaze seemed to pierce him. He could plainly read the accusation in her wide green eyes. He felt all of his inadequacies and knew he deserved her sharpest indictment. He hadn’t protected her.
 

The oxygen mask covered her expression, but she stared hard at Aleksei as if she could see inside him, read his every thought and flaw.

He wasn’t a real man. Maybe she knew it.

She squeezed his hand, with enough pressure to make him believe she would forgive him for tonight, so long as she never learned the whole truth.

“I was on my way home from Troika,” he said. “I guess it was before the bombing.” He reached for the first convenient lie to flit into his head. “Then I got a flat tire and stopped to fix it.”

Katya squeezed her eyes shut. A tear slid down her cheek.

“Hey, I’m here now,” he tried to soothe her.
 

Too late, he realized he’d already used the flat-tire excuse the night they were supposed to meet Inna, the night the violence began. And Nick had been the one to change the flat, because Aleksei had pretended not to know how.

“Mr. Koslovsky, would you mind coming with me? I need to ask you some questions.”

Quietly, he followed the cop. He had survived tonight, but he might still lose everything anyway.

A BLACK CAR with tinted windows rolled to a stop in front of the precinct when Vlad came out. He jumped back as the window rolled down. Torpedo, the portly Russian who’d attacked him the other night in the street, greeted him with a leer. “Get in car,” he said in broken English.

“Fuck you,” Vlad said. He didn’t have time for his father’s men and their bullshit. He needed to get to Inna.

The driver’s door swung open, and Slim got out. “The
Pakhan
sent us.”
 

That title. Had Ivan really risen so high in the ranks of the
vor v zakone
that he was now a godfather?