Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (50 page)

They were talking and laughing about Semyon's annoying habits when Aleksei shouted: “Enough! Time to relax!” He stood up. As though signaled, so did about a half-dozen other men, including Semyon. Those who had shirts on took them off. A different (older and heavier) waitress walked up to all of them with a basket into which the men put their cell phones, watches and wallets. Semyon signaled for Ned to follow suit. Some of the men finished their vodka before stepping outside. They all followed Aleksei off the patio, across the boardwalk and into the Atlantic Ocean. It was cold at first, but Ned didn't dare hesitate, although he did keep his pants on.

Chest deep in the water, surrounded by big, tattooed Russians, Ned felt like an idiot. Then Aleksei turned around, looked at him, took the cigar out of his mouth, smiled and said, “This is good, Macnair. We don't have to bother Roman.”

Ned had never been in such a fancy restaurant in all his life. Everything was red velvet, dark mahogany, crystal, silver or gold. The waiters wore uniforms with cropped red jackets and black bow ties. Aleksei had led his group to a big round table that already had four women at it. They were all tall and rail thin with hair dyed a dirty blond and all in their early twenties. They stood when Aleksei and his group arrived and then arranged themselves in a boy-girl, boy-girl mode with Aleksei, Ned and two others. The remaining men went to another nearby table.

Aleksei beamed at Ned. “I will order for the table,” he announced pompously then said something brief to the waiter in Russian, who nodded and hurried away.

The girl to Ned's left leaned in and whispered breathily into his ear. “I am Petra, I am a model.” Ned noticed that her accent was probably the thickest of all the people he had met so far. He took out his hand to shake hers, and withdrew it when he saw the look on her face.

“I'm . . .” he began, but she put her long-nailed fingers over his lips.

“We all know who you are. You are motorcycle man from America,” and she imitated turning the accelerator on a huge pair of imaginary handlebars and made
vroom-vroom
noises with her mouth. The other girls laughed. “But you do not look like motorcycle man. Where is your beard, your long hair and your big belly?” She sounded almost disappointed that Ned looked like any mundane young American.

Ned couldn't help but chuckle a bit. “Yeah, some of the old guys look like that,” he said. “But most of them look like me now . . . good for business.”

Petra smiled and winked. “After dinner you must come to the Frying Pan with us,” she said.

“What's the Frying Pan?”

“A nightclub with dancing on a boat,” Petra smiled. “You will love it.” She had a hard, cynical look about her and, though Ned was convinced that her only interest in him was professional, he couldn't help liking her anyway. Good looks aside, she also looked like she liked to have fun.

Aleksei interrupted. “Tonight, Macnair, you will have real Russian food,” he said boastfully. “Not the goats' heads and dog meat that idiot Uzbek has most likely been giving you.” He motioned to Semyon who was happily telling stories at the secondary table full of men. Ned couldn't help but think that they had been separated on purpose.

Although most of the night's conversation was in Russian—or whispered between the girls—Ned had a good time. He learned that Roman lived in a big house on Long Island near the beach and only came into the city when it was absolutely necessary. Aleksei said it was because he had everything he wanted out there, but Ned suspected there also might be dangers lurking in the city for such a man. Roman trusted Aleksei to handle things in his absence and his word was as good as truth to him.

Unlike many of the Russians—and Semyon—Ned had been careful not to drink too much. He was looking forward to going to the Frying Pan with Petra and her friends and told Aleksei as much.

Aleksei smiled widely, revealing a gold tooth. “I thought you would say that—she is very sexy,” he said. “But there is one little, tiny roadblock in that plan.” He saw the expression on Ned's face drop. “Aw, don't worry, you can go see Petra on that leaky old tub,” he said. “But you just have to do one little tiny job first—Maxim and Artur will go with you—and then you have plenty of time to dance with Petra.”

Maxim and Artur, the two other men at the table, laughed. Maxim was short and stout and had that round-faced Russian look Ned was becoming used to, while Artur was maybe six-foot-four with high cheekbones, blond hair and blue eyes. They laughed at what Aleksei said and nodded almost in unison at Ned. “Don't worry, they know what to do,” Aleksei said. “They will help you, make sure you do the right thing.”

Artur and Maxim escorted Ned outside where there was a black Lincoln and driver waiting for them out in front of the restaurant. They drove out of Manhattan over a bridge. On the ride, he learned that Maxim was from Rostov-on-Don, a big city in Southern Russia he said was warmer in the winter than New York. He had worked in a fish cannery until it closed down, so he moved to Moscow to earn his fortune. One thing led to another and now he was living, as he called it, “a nice life” in Queens. Artur said that he was from Estonia—which he pointed out in a boastful voice was closer to Sweden than it was to Moscow. His dad had been a police lieutenant before Estonian independence from the Soviet Union, and was considered by many of their neighbors a collaborator and an enemy of the new state. They emigrated to Moscow where his father struggled to find a decent job, and worked at a supermarket delicatessen until he died of a stroke. Artur, it seemed, had done no work other than being a gangster. Ned told them the story he knew they expected to hear.

They had driven out of New York City for quite some distance and Ned saw exit signs for suburbs with names like New Rochelle, Mount Vernon and White Plains. They finally turned into a nice-looking little town called Cortlandt Manor. The driver pulled up in front of a gated entrance and spoke to the men in the backseat in Russian.

They thanked him and exited the vehicle. Ned noticed that Artur had brought a large bag, suitable for hockey equipment perhaps, along with him. He looked at the intercom system on the gate and sneered. “Cheap piece of shit,” he told Ned as he tore the cover off. He took some snippers out of his bag, cut a couple of wires and reconnected them. A section of the wrought-iron gate swung inwards under its own weight. Its creaking sounded very loud in the otherwise quiet night. “Come on,” Artur said.

They stayed low as they approached the house. Ned could see flickers in the front window that indicated someone was watching television. He was surprised when he saw Artur and Maxim avoid the house entirely and run around the back. Maxim motioned to a smaller building at the back of the property. In the moonlight, Ned thought it looked like a garage or maybe a stable, but he could not be sure.

At the front of the small brick building were two big swinging doors meant for something large like a car, or a boat or horses. Off to one side was a smaller door, typical of a house, but wooden and windowless. Much to Ned's surprise, Maxim pounded on it. There was no response. He pounded again. From inside, Ned could hear an annoyed “yeah, yeah, yeah.” About a minute or so later a boy of about eighteen, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and briefs, answered the door. He looked stoned and sleepy and took a moment to realize the men at the door were not the people whom he expected them to be. He let out a tiny squeak of a scream before Artur held a gun to his throat. Artur said something to Maxim who was searching in his bag. First he handcuffed the boy and then he put a big piece of duct tape over his mouth. He grabbed the boy by the back of his t-shirt and then frog-marched him to the big house's back door.

“Get us in,” Artur demanded, his gun now at the boy's temple.

The boy cried and moaned, shaking his head. Maxim took a small, folding knife out of his jacket pocket. The boy's eyes got very large and Ned could hear his muffled screams from under the duct tape. He struggled and managed to break free from Artur's grasp, but skidded in the wet grass and fell down. As he was unsuccessfully trying to get up without the use of his arms, Artur turned to Ned. “Bring him back,” he ordered. Ned could see that Artur's gun had swung around in such a way that it was pointed at him. Artur hadn't done it in a threatening manner, but a shot would have hit Ned if he had squeezed the trigger.

Ned approached the boy, trying not to look in his desperate eyes, and lifted him by the handcuffs. Apparently resigned to his fate, the boy stopped struggling. They rejoined the other two. Artur repeated his order to get them in the house. The kid nodded. Artur took the duct tape off. The boy approached a window that had been open just a slit and yelled into it. “Ma, Sarah, it's me. Lemme in . . . please!” The boy obediently tried not to sound desperate.

Before long, Ned could see a small figure appear behind the stained-glass window. Then he heard a couple of locks disengage. The door swung open inwards and a tiny, dark-haired perhaps Japanese woman started yelling. “Jake, I told you not to . . .”

She was interrupted by Maxim and Artur who bull-rushed her out of the way and onto the floor. She was screaming and kicking until she saw Ned bring Jake inside and shut the door behind him. There was a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Jake, I told you getting mixed up with the drugs was a dangerous thing,” she said while looking down and shaking her head. “So, do you think they're your buddies now? Are they great guys? Huh?”

Artur said something in Russian to Maxim and he laughed. “We are not drug buddies,” Maxim told the sobbing woman. “We are business associates of your husband. Where is he, may I ask?”

The woman composed herself. “He's out, he's at the . . .”

At that moment a balding man with glasses entered the room. “Jesus Christ! What's all the . . . ” He fell silent when he saw what was going on. He gathered up his wife and held onto her. “I don't know what you people want, but . . .”

“Yes you do, Mr. Weathers,” said Artur.

“What my friend means to say is that we'd like to know if you have reconsidered Roman's business opportunity,” Maxim said.

“What? No, I told your boss, I couldn't. It's totally illegal. In the wrongs hands, it could . . . and the feds would have my ass in a minute.”

“That's too bad,” Maxim shrugged, looked over at Artur and nodded. Artur handed his gun to Maxim. Then he approached Jake—who was standing in the middle of the massive kitchen, still held by Ned. Artur steadied the boy with his left hand, and fished something from his jacket pocket. Ned saw a flash and then a spout of blood cascading from the boy's head. He immediately fell to the ground and turned involuntarily in pain. He was screaming and bleeding.

His mother rushed to his aid, screaming even louder.

The boy's father looked horrified, and said, “You cut his fucking ear off! You cut my boy's ear off!”

Artur grinned and held up a chunk of grayish-white skin. “Not all of it,” he said. The father lunged at him, but stopped when he saw Maxim aim Artur's gun at his wife's head. Instead the man grabbed a towel and held it against his boy's head. He held his screaming family in his arms as the stream of blood from his son's mutilated ear finally began to ebb under the pressure of the towel. He swallowed. “Okay, okay,” he said without looking up. “I'll see what we can do.”

“There!” Maxim said, as though they were old friends talking about a fishing trip. “Was that so hard? Why do Americans always complicate everything?”

The woman stopped screaming and held her boy. The father stood up and looked at Maxim with utter contempt.

Maxim, whose facial expression did not change at all during the entire incident, looked at the man with an otherworldly calm. “You'll do more than ‘see what you can do,' ” he said. “You will get Roman what he needs. Because we also know that you have a young daughter—hiding in the house right now, I think—who you like enough not to banish to . . . how do you say it in English again? . . . horse house.”

“Stable,” Artur offered.

“Yes, she lives in here with people,” Maxim said. “And I hate to sound like movie gangster here, but it would be a terrible shame if something were to happen to her.” He said the last bit while rolling his hands dramatically and delivering the line as though he was embarrassed to even say it. “Besides, we are nice people. This one here is even American.” Maxim gestured at Ned. “You don't want me to have to turn this matter over to Vasilly, do you?”

The man, already terrified, lost even more color. “Vasilly. Vasilly is real?”

Maxim smiled and nodded.

“I'll call Roman's man tomorrow.”

“I thought you would,” Maxim said. “But there's just one little problem.” The room fell silent as Maxim turned towards Ned, who had been doing nothing but standing and watching since the boy collapsed out of his grasp. “Our new associate . . . no, our friend . . . he is our friend,” Maxim said with what Ned thought was implied warmness. “He is new and we need to know we can trust him. So . . . how do I put this delicately? . . . he's going to have to hurt either your son or your wife.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Choose.”

“Do it to me.”

Maxim made a disappointed noise with his tongue and teeth. “I'm sorry, I can't do that. It would be pointless. Choose between the two. Or maybe we should involve Sarah?”

The father didn't hesitate. He looked down and said, “My wife.”

The woman screamed and tried to run, but Artur caught her. He pinned her arms behind her back. Maxim sidled over, his gun still aimed at the father's face. He handed Ned his knife. The woman looked at Ned, staring deeply into his eyes. The look on her face was of pure hatred. It was clear she expected no mercy.