Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery) (26 page)

He inhaled the musty air of the decrepit office space before heading to the stairs. Closing the door behind him, he paused, recycling Amber’s shot across the bow, and realized he’d been harsh. He reopened the door and poked his head in.

“I’m sorry...I didn’t mean to react like that,” he said, shaking his head. “Please don’t quit,” he added.

“No worries,” Amber voiced, still sheltered in her cube. Her head emerged timidly. “I know things have been difficult here, but I’m sure it will get better, especially since you’re...you’re going to have your own place, you’ll be done with them.”

Jonathan paused and nodded.

“You’re an amazing lawyer. Just the way to speak with clients; manage their crises; remember their children’s names; make them feel strong; and your near-magical sense of predicting every move from opposing counsel. Do you hear what other lawyers say about you? You’re what every attorney in town wants to become. And you know I’m not exaggerating. But even the best lawyer’s sometimes fall on tough times. What makes them great is that they can get back on their feet faster than anyone.”

“You’re too kind, Amber,” he replied, taking a deep breath, but then worried about Mariya, realizing he didn’t want her to show up here and involve Amber in any way. “If Dino’s out, why don’t you close up early?”

Amber looked surprised. “It’s ten in the morning.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m serious, lock up early and take care of things in case Katrina’s headed this way.”

He sighed and left, his head now bursting from the anxiety of Mariya’s message and Linda’s earlier tirade. This was not the morning he’d wanted, nor the Friday he’d longed for after a grueling week with difficult clients and a judge’s ruling that severely weakened his most promising lawsuit. Then he remembered the radio announcers’ warning. Hurricane Katrina was the last thing he needed, but by the time he’d descended to the darkened lobby, he sensed it would pale in comparison to the storm Mariya was likely to cause if he allowed her to find him.

He stopped at the glass doors that also served as the entrance to a run-down salon full of Vietnamese girls who Jonathan was sure, judging from the demeanor of their male clientele, gave cures to more appendages than simply toes and fingers. Two of the beauticians turned, waving and smiling.

Jonathan now had only Mariya on his mind. He imagined she was back to cause trouble. He could think of no good reasons. He peered through the glass and scanned the street for any sign of her. Looking further down, west and east, he eyed a few pedestrians—none of whom looked like her.

Two blocks
, he thought. That’s where he’d parked his car, in an open lot. The shortest path was through an alley across the street, but he’d avoided it since a jewelry store owner got stabbed in broad daylight two months back. He leaned on the door but stopped short of opening it. He had a bad feeling, but he couldn’t let Mariya set the rules. She’d tried long ago, and now, on his turf, he would not allow her to taunt him without paying a price. He’d find her at the Monteleon, he thought. He’d confront her there. She’d likely not do anything stupid in public.

2

Moscow, Russia—Three weeks earlier

“Not on the seventh,” the man whispered his rule alone, unmoved that it was mere superstition. There was no mistaking it. The date leapt from the dial of his watch. But fallacy had so many rules: wear black—anything black—before each hunt; sleep facing east; touch the fallen’s blood after the crimson madness has been splattered—often with strangely chaotic beauty—and calmed; the Bible placed face down under the bed, a virgin bullet resting across Proverbs 6:16.
Rules
. For justice, for pardon, for survival—all concocted over two decades at the friendly end of a barrel.

Huddled in the driver’s seat, eyeing the nearly empty street, Sal continued to deliberate over the date. Seven had cursed its way into his trade like no other omen. A dagger had gone through his bicep on the seventh of January, the night he’d cleansed the world of a Colombian “horticulturist,” if you will; he’d been trapped in a rat infested tunnel under the Berlin Wall for an agonizing seven hours; his father passed away on the night of his seventh birthday. He sighed and glanced at the wires that dangled from the steering column, searching for anything to dispel the wicked prophecy. He’d started on the sixth, he told himself, but it wasn’t convincing. Now was nevertheless the seventh, and blood would spill today.
This can’t be good.

The cell phone began to vibrate loudly, trembling its way across the dash toward his side. The man’s gaze panned to the device as it continued its unanswered path along the molded plastic surface, past the center vents, behind the wheel, which he gripped firmly, his hands perspiring in their motionless state. An assassin’s hand is quick and steady only when things are crystal clear, but they hadn’t been since his botched hit in the seedy Cairo slum of Manshiet Nasser. Then again, things hadn’t gone well for some time, he thought. Not in Damascus, not in Yerevan, not in Tashkent. The phone’s subdued rattle competed with the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s
Symphony No. 4
that filled the stuffy, cloistered space of the Volga sedan he’d hot-wired the night before. He didn’t answer. The device rumbled a little further, butted the windshield and went quiet.

Cold sweat oozed down his chest. He scrounged his blazer pocket for pills. He unwrapped the wadded tissue, picked his potion, tossing three tablets down his dry tongue, and swallowed. But they did nothing to stop him from plunging right back into his pool of thoughts, a grim mosaic of diffuse images: the cryptic instructions from CONTROL crumpled up and aflame over the logs of his furnace; a fresh cigarette burn on the armrest of his leather chair, the one by the windows, the one he’d sit in for hours before and after each kill; the flag-draped coffin being wheeled out of the back of a plane; the stone-faced doorman slouched over the front desk of his apartment bloc as he departed, weighed down by lead, gun metal and bewilderment. He knew the flickering from reality had long become resistant to the downers, no matter the dose, the frequency, or his sporadic delusions of a cure. He understood without believing.

He gazed ahead at the sooty pavement of the bleak street that bordered an area of shoddy brick warehouses and dilapidated Soviet-era tool shops. Dark smoke spewed from a distant power plant, its funnels piercing the gray morning sky above the nearby rooftop of Clinic Number 14, a pricey medical facility strangely thrown into this unglamorous corner of Moscow.

Another call came in. He shook his head, dispersing the haphazard mental footage that had clouded his vision. His palm greased the steering wheel as he checked his watch. He shook his head again and stared intently at the rattling phone. He didn’t expect any calls, and there was no caller ID, but this time he answered.

“Sal.” The woman’s voice was as cold as this place in January.

“Jesus,” he muttered and then lined up forceful words in her native Russian, his American accent nearly hidden. “I told you never to call this number.”

“I have no choice. I left you many messages, and you haven’t replied. Not a sign. Nothing! What am I supposed to do?”

“Isn’t
that
a sign?” he mumbled.

He felt a rage accompany Irina’s exaggerated sigh.

“I’m no fool,” she spat out. “You promised me...just last week. You swore you’d tell her. And I’m sure you didn’t.”

Sal instantly replayed his own words that audaciously clumsy night when he’d pledged to her the world as their bodies frolicked in miasmic eroticism, the escape soothed by barbiturates and inebriation, with the one woman who could—and who did—take him to Shangri-La as often as his unrepentant soul meandered her way.

He swallowed hard. “You’re right, I didn’t...”

He anticipated her next rant. She’d warned him enough. And he cursed himself for having made the promise in the first place, not because it wasn’t what he wanted. God, no. He’d long craved to catapult his wife out of his life, and to set her on fire doing so. But he preferred to fuel his grotesque lies over surrendering any admission or giving up the charade. A divorce was the last thing he’d wanted to get dragged through. A man in his position couldn’t risk a scorned, vengeful wife. Lying was easier, then and now, no matter the price—easier because his wife was across the pond, a figure of distance, rather than a demanding, pestilent creature at his side, though now it all mattered less.

“I’ve given you everything,” he said. “Look at your damn wrist. What do you think that cost me? And look in your living room. What’s there that I haven’t paid for?” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his pack of Marlboro Reds, plucked a cigarette out and brought it to his dry, chapped lips. “And your mother... her car, her new teeth?” The scent of bourbon rose from his wrinkled shirt. “What more do you want?” He flicked the lighter, his hands shaking slightly, enough to alarm him.

“Your devotion, your honesty.”

Sal snorted. “Fidelity is for the dim and the dead.” He then siphoned a long drag of his tobacco. “And honesty, my dear, is something you’ve never known yourself.” He replayed one of the first things she’d told him some eight months earlier—that she twirled from a brass pole to raise money for her sister’s surgery and for no other reason, only to discover that for years she’d tramped the tables of nearly every gentleman’s club in Minsk.
There is no honesty among whores
, he thought.

“You don’t need me,” Irina said, her words crawling to a mere whimper. “It’s clear. I...I give up.” The line went dead.

A glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror hit hard. His eyes were swollen, red and glassy, a raggedness worse than he’d ever put himself through. A killer in repose shouldn’t look like a corpse, he thought, the remnants of the pride he’d once carried with his gun withering each second he met his reflection in glass and in spirit. But he knew it wasn’t fatigue alone. His demise, as the doctor had said, would surface in many forms: pain, disorientation, weakness, gauntness. That’s what being terminal meant, no matter his effort to block this reality from his mind.

He counted the hours he’d been awake: thirty, thirty-two, maybe, nearly the same number of years he’d been scouring the planet for someone else’s filth, without question, without remorse.

The cell phone vibrated again.

He’d always despised Irina’s feistiness, her condemnations, her relentless, futile search for concreteness, for certainty well beyond what he was capable of delivering. But it was not like him to back down. He’d allow her to be right, but she could never win. He reached for the phone and let it pulsate in his palm for a moment, his hesitation nearly accidental, until he flipped the cover and answered, his mind prepped to resume the duel.

“What?”

“Dad, it’s me.”

His jaw dropped. “How the hell...?”

“Please, hear me out. I need help.”

Sal had heard those words before, and it stirred him up with disgust to witness another plea, and especially now when all that mattered was one important trophy—Yuri Chermayeff—about to roam the halls of Clinic Number 14 bearing the future resting place of his 9 mm hollow point bullets. He thought of hanging up.

“Dad?”

“I can’t talk now.”

“Please, they arrested me.”

Sal’s heart sank. His son had failed him once more. “This isn’t the time.”

“I’m at the Sheriff’s. I can’t get ahold of Mom.”

“Stop!” Sal fought his instinct to want to hear more. It seemed easier to hang up. He clenched his fist.

“They’re saying I stole a ’Lex.”

“A what?”

Paul sighed. “A Rolex. At the mall.”

“What do you mean
they’re saying
? You stole it, I’m sure, right? Didn’t you?” Sal slammed his fist on the door and kicked the brake pedal. He kicked it again. But the shock suddenly felt oddly artificial, morphing quickly into the same wrath he’d felt so often before. His voice hardened. “Why? Why the hell are you destroying yourself, your future? It’s wrong. You steal, you cheat, you lie...I didn’t raise you this way.” But Sal knew it wasn’t so clear. He was like so many neglectful fathers playing the blame game. He hadn’t been there much for Paul, not for many birthdays, even fewer Christmases. So many lost opportunities.

“Help me; I’m begging you.”

“No.”

Sal’s heart raced as he suddenly remembered the countless unfriendly stares: the neighbors, the principal, the school bus drivers, the old woman at the convenience store, the whole pack of them armed with some tale of his son’s mischief, and he’d appeased them all as a father must. There was no more innocence left in Paul’s youth, not a thread of it for Sal to cling to. And it made him angrier to recall the past. But it also tore him apart to speak to Paul so harshly. A disarmed, disjointed part of him wanted to leap through the phone lines and embrace his son. It had been months since they’d been face-to-face, back in tranquil Pensacola, but even then they’d simmered over another disconnect. “Find your own way out of this mess,” Sal added. “You’re paving a horrible path for your life.”

“Don’t preach to me, Dad. I know all about you now, what you do, what you’re hiding. I’ve known for longer than you think.”

That’s impossible
. He’d prided himself on his shroud, the elusiveness worthy of acclaim and infamy in the darkest corridors of power. His son was no smarter than any of the governments and syndicates he’d deceived. Sal didn’t answer. He didn’t believe.