Silver Justice (19 page)

“No more than half an hour.” The sinking feeling in the pit of Silver’s stomach was becoming a kind of free fall.

“And she mentioned that she does homework every night? How long does that take, do you think?”

“Perhaps an hour or two.” Silver saw where the math was going. “Sometimes she doesn’t go to sleep until nine thirty.”

“Right. And sometimes you don’t pick her up until well after closing time. I’m just trying to get an idea here. Whoever your husband has working on this will be doing the same math. The way it looks to me, you spend an hour in the morning with her, and an hour or two in the evening. An entire day on the weekend is gone, so assuming she’s up at seven on Saturday and spends all day with you, no computers or friend visits or anything, you spend something like twelve hours a week with her during the week, and twelve on the weekends – although she did mention that you often bring work home with you on the weekends.”

Silver didn’t respond.

“When he picks her up, say, on a Saturday,” the doctor looked at Silver with a calculating expression, “does he generally get her before, or after, dinner?”

“Lately, he’s been taking her to dinner the night before.”

“And when he brings her home?”

“After dinner the next night.”

“I think Kennedy’s father could truthfully state he spends almost as much time with her already in one day as you do in an entire week. If she gets picked up before dinner time the night before and gets back after dinner the next evening, he’s spending, oh, a total of fifteen to sixteen hours of total quality time – three the night before, and twelve the next day. Looking at your numbers, you spend around twenty-four – a grand total of eight more hours a week with Kennedy than he does.” She took another sip of her tea, and might as well have said, ‘I rest my case’.

“But that’s so unfair. It doesn’t reflect reality.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Silver fought a feeling of sudden claustrophobia. “Doctor, what is your report going to say? Because you know they’re going to need one.”

“Yes, I expect they will. I’ll try to be as fair as possible, Silver, and skirt the weekly hours issue unless directly instructed to address it. But you might want to take a look at the hard numbers and consider your life with your daughter in that light. I’m saying that for both of your sakes.”

Back on the street, Silver felt like she had just gone ten rounds wrestling a bear. She’d been shot yesterday and had killed a man, and yet this was more traumatic. She was beginning to see why Eric thought he had a better than fair chance of prevailing. And she knew that if they took statements from Miriam, which was a given, even if she stretched the truth in Silver’s favor, she wasn’t crafty enough to know whether she was helping or hurting. That meant that the court might compute that Silver was spending more like twenty hours a week with her daughter, versus her ex’s sixteen. And Eric would certainly hammer home how devoted he and his new wife were, and what a stable, consistent routine they enjoyed…

Silver waved down a cab and gave him the office address, shaken from the realization that she could lose this case, and with it, her daughter.

~ ~ ~

Vaslav Korienkov sat at a sidewalk table of one of the chain of cafés he owned, sipping espresso while smoking his thirty-seventh cigarette of the day, watching the young women walk by on their way to the late afternoon dance class in the building on the corner. He was forty-eight years old, but still appreciated a bouncing breast or well-turned leg, and enjoyed this time of day for the opportunities it offered to admire New York’s magnetic pull on some of the most beautiful females in the world. Four of his bodyguards sat at two of the other tables, eyes roving over the passing traffic, ever on the alert for threats.

As one of the top Russian mafia bosses in Manhattan, Korienkov ran the lower East Side’s thriving prostitution and drug distribution businesses, as well as a variety of protection and gambling rackets. He wasn’t picky about how he made his money – generally the entrepreneurial type – the quintessential new Russian that had emerged since the Berlin wall had come down and the Soviet Union had collapsed.

He’d been in his mid-twenties at the time, already a mover and shaker among the Moscow street soldiers, having grown up there after being born in the Ukraine to parents with enough resources to make the move. He’d always been amused by the American read on why the creaky communist empire had self-destructed, which varied from a triumph of capitalist war spending that had overloaded the regime’s ability to compete, to the inevitable victory of the free market ideology. He’d been there, and his bosses, who comprised most of the KGB, knew differently. The Soviet Union had collapsed because the communist infrastructure had been too burdensome for the mob’s purposes – it had become too big a drag on profits. It was far more efficient to become an overnight capitalist society, where the same power players could divide up the nation’s wealth in the open and leave the running of the country to a less expensive system.

Tales of oligarchs becoming billionaires within a few years of the Wall coming down were commonplace, and every industry that was worth anything was immediately placed in the hands of mob cronies and bosses. Freed of its expensive war machine, the nation openly became a kleptocracy, operated entirely for the enrichment of a few special interests. Most of the movers and shakers were the same ex-KGB criminals who’d operated the thriving black markets during communism, and even the top positions in the government went to familiar faces. The usual suspects.

Those had been heady times, and because of his craftiness and his ability to speak passable English, he’d been sent to New York. Within a decade of establishing the infrastructure for a now burgeoning Russian syndicate’s presence, he was one of the top bosses in the city. Unlike the Italian mob, the Russians were centralized – possibly a throwback to their centrally-planned heritage during communism – and he answered to the boss who ran the whole state, as well as New Jersey. Originally based in Brighton Beach, Vaslav had been moved to the South Bronx and put in charge of several key neighborhoods before ultimately winding up in the Big Apple.

His main entrepreneurial concerns involved prostitution and drugs, but he was also open to money laundering through his network of strip clubs, white slavery via his Russian mail-order bride business, shakedowns of other immigrants, and retribution killing. These were relatively low-level pursuits compared to the really big money-makers over the last decade, namely stock manipulation schemes.

But Vaslav was old school, and for him the old ways were still good ways – the profits from selling young, willing-or-otherwise flesh or a silenced bullet to the brain were also an important part of the mob’s income, even if more problematic to launder. Vaslav didn’t run any of the higher-end white-collar stuff, preferring to stick to what he knew and leave the market gamesmanship to the Canali-decked young MBAs who arrived seemingly daily from Moscow. He was too old to change, and his workmanlike appreciation of the merits of providing two sixteen-year-olds for a fun-filled frolic over the weekend or grinding a slow-paying deadbeat’s hand in a thresher still more than ensured he could pay the bills.

When two gray American sedans pulled up to the café and six obviously government-employed men got out, his bodyguards visibly relaxed so as not to provide any reason for a confrontation. This wasn’t NYPD – they knew all the locals by sight, some of whom were enthusiastic consumers of Vaslav’s wares. No, he recognized the lead figure and murmured the three letters that were guaranteed to chill his entourage’s protective blood lust.

“FBI.”

The group approached him, and the agent he recognized pulled up a chair opposite him.

“Vaslav. We need to talk,” Special Agent Bill Heron said in passable Russian.

“For this you need to bring a football team and scare my friends?”

“You’re about ten seconds away from being taken in and interrogated,” Heron said, switching to English, “and I can ensure that your evening goes poorly – it could take hours, or days, for your attorney to get you out of the system.”

“And why would you want to hassle a law-abiding member of the business community like myself instead of catching criminals? To what do I owe this undeserved attention?” Vaslav asked innocently.

“You know about the shooting at headquarters yesterday morning. No,
shh
, don’t pretend you don’t. Of course you do. This is your turf. You know everything that goes on here.”

“I think I might have heard something on the television. But what could that possibly have to do with me?” Vaslav asked, genuinely puzzled.

“The shooter was Russian. Covered with tattoos – you know the kind.”

Vaslav recoiled. “Are you out of your mind? You think I would have anything to do with going after an agent? Do I look insane to you? Please. Go find someone who actually might know something. I can’t help you.”

“Vaslav. Let’s go for a walk, okay?”

Vaslav nodded and stood, gesturing to his men to stay put. Heron motioned to him to accompany him down the sidewalk, and they set off at a steady gait, Vaslav spewing smoke into the sky.

“Those things will be the death of you.”

“Yes. I suspect if I don’t die in some angry husband’s bed, my foul habits will eventually catch up with me.”

Heron slowed his pace. “Vaslav, don’t bullshit me. I have a very short fuse. This was an ex-spetsnaz soldier working for a Brooklyn meat company. That couldn’t be more Russian mob if he’d been wearing a sign around his neck.”

“Honestly, I know nothing about it.”

“I believe you don’t. I don’t think you’re stupid enough to jeopardize your entire operation here for the commission off one lousy hit. But someone in your crew was involved, and since I don’t know every lowlife in Brighton on a first name basis, I figured I’d come over and see my old pal, Vaslav. Mainly, to tell him that if he can’t come up with solid information that will lead me to whoever was responsible within the next twenty-four hours, that every one of his sketchy businesses will be getting a full proctology exam by immigration, the DEA, NYPD, and of course, my group, which is feeling particularly vindictive given that one of our people was targeted. I can guarantee we will find plenty of ways to make your life miserable, and it will cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to fight – and that’s assuming we don’t come back the next week and do it all over again.”

“Heron. Come on. What the fu–”

“I don’t think you’re reading me, Vaslav. One of your own tried to kill an agent at headquarters. That kind of act is like throwing a rock into a quiet pool. It will cause ripples that will continue for a long time. Someone on your side made a horrendous error in judgment, and there will be a price paid for that. We can start with you. If you really want the full weight of the federal government coming down on you starting tomorrow then simply do nothing, or protest your innocence, and you will soon be spending two dollars for every one you take in trying to stay out of prison. Just the sheer number of underage Russian pros who will need bail will be staggering, and the number of felony charges arising from your prostitution rings will read ten pages. So don’t fuck with me, Vaslav, even the slightest bit, because I am in a really, really foul mood, and I’m looking for someone to take it out on…and you’re it.”

“That isn’t fair. I did nothing.”

“Correct, my friend. It’s completely unfair. Just as hooking sixteen year olds on heroin so you can sell their bodies to old perverts isn’t fair. It’s a fundamentally unfair planet. There’s only power and money and the desire to crush the weaker by the strong. I believe Tolstoy captured the essence of it in
War and Peace
. That being so, you’re in the cross hairs, and if you don’t find out who did this, I’ll grind your bones into jelly and leave you a smear on the sidewalk. A delicate equilibrium has been disturbed, which will cause collateral damage. You will be the first of that damage. Next, your other friends here in the city will suddenly find it impossible to do business. And then Brighton will get its own special task force, hundreds of agents if necessary, to make it impossible to move without being arrested.”

“But–”

“I am not bullshitting you, Vaslav. Twenty-four hours. I know you can make this happen.” Heron turned and began walking back to the café.

Vaslav spun and accompanied him.

“You’re an ugly, bad man, Vaslav. But you’re a known quantity. I would prefer not to have to deal with another ugly, bad man, but you will lose your position of prominence if you don’t help me on this. You can pass that up the chain of command. They will understand. Because you will be just the first of many in their organization – and the cost to them will be massive.” Heron reached over and patted Vaslav’s shoulder, brushing some dandruff off his leather jacket. “Massive, Vaslav. You don’t want that.”

Chapter 14

Rodney Everin sauntered down the sidewalk in Orange, New Jersey, carrying a plastic bag containing a late lunch – a six pack of beer and a sandwich from the corner market. The balmy afternoon sunshine warmed his rugged features as he meandered back from the store. The hangover from the prior night’s festivities was a dull pounding in his frontal lobes – he was hoping the first or second of the frosty tall boys would dampen the worst of it. Even sleeping till one in the afternoon hadn’t blunted the throbbing. But a little hair of the biting dog worked every time.

He passed a pair of women standing outside a beauty salon, smoking, and nodded at them with a smirk, taking care to flex his considerable upper body muscles so they could appreciate his physique.

“Yo. Howsa bout you and me take a load off and have a little drink?” he shot out at both of them. “Someplace cool and private?”

“Drop dead, lowlife,” the little brunette suggested before returning to her conversation with the blonde about how she was going to kill someone named Tanya if she came anywhere near her again.