Rasputin's Shadow (24 page)

C
all him,” Koschey ordered Ae-Cha.

He kept checking the rearview mirror of his Yukon while he drove on without a particular destination. He’d quickly swapped cars less than three blocks from the restaurant, dumping the Bureau car and hustling Ae-Cha into the SUV he’d left there. It had been a calculated gamble that had paid off. Bureau cars and police cruisers had trackers on them, complications he preferred to avoid if given the choice.

He didn’t know where Jonny was at the moment, but his mind was already thinking ahead, evaluating possible venues for what he was planning. He selected a couple of options as Ae-Cha pulled out her iPhone and called Jonny.

***

J
ONNY WAS HAVING TROUBLE
processing the astonishing sight he was witnessing.

Lolita had descended into a mad frenzy of extreme, unbridled violence. The huge thug—seemingly oblivious to the knife wound in his side—had beaten Neck Tattoo’s face to a bloody purple mess and had started pounding the back of his head into the sidewalk.

A table had smashed through the right-hand window, followed by two young guys trading blows with broken bottles.

The long-haired guy had staggered to his feet only to be knocked down again by the Uzbek. The two of them were rolling around on the ground—a blur of gouging, biting, and punching.

The tall woman had removed her heels, dragged herself upright, and begun to rain down stiletto blows on the pimp’s bald head, which already looked like a ball of vanilla ice cream covered in raspberry sauce. Then a miniskirted woman wearing a cheap fur coat emerged from the bar, took a snub-nose from her purse, and shot the young guy in the stomach at point-blank range.

Bon was ecstatic—reveling in the kind of sustained excitement he usually reserved for watching Chan-wook Park’s vengeance trilogy back-to-back. He was laughing hysterically and pounding away at the steering wheel.

Jonny was mesmerized, but not by the blood and the violence. He was already thinking about all the things he could do with this technology at his disposal. Then he noticed Bon’s pounding of the wheel—the big man was now really having a go at it.

“Hey,” Jonny called to him, tapping his helmet.

Bon turned, his face twisted in a ferocious look of aggression that startled Jonny, so much so that it pushed aside his empire-building fantasies. It also made him fail to notice the incessant vibrating and pulsing blue-white light of his Samsung smart phone as it sat on the cabin floor by his feet and rang away.

***

“H
E’S NOT PICKING UP
,” Ae-Cha told Koschey, fear raising her voice to a higher pitch.

“Try him again,” he rasped, his eyes resonating with deadly intent.

Ae-Cha nodded tensely, and hit the Call button a second time.

***

A
N ONSLAUGHT OF QUESTIONS
battered me as I surveyed the chaotic aftermath of the shoot-out at the Green Dragon.

A team of paramedics was already here and tending to Jaffee, who was going to be all right. Gaines, on the other hand, was probably dead before he hit the ground. The waiter, too. Some patrons had been injured in the mad scramble to get out of the place, but none seriously. And, of course, Ae-Cha was gone, which had caused her aunt and several of her relatives who worked there to freak out with worry.

I tried to block out the cacophony and focus on what had just happened and why it had happened. I hadn’t expected our shooter to show up. He had Sokolov. Why had he come here? Why this late, this urgently? What the hell else did he want?

He had to be here for Jonny. But Jonny wasn’t part of this. He’d only helped Sokolov. He wasn’t a threat to him, in the sense that he couldn’t ID him. I didn’t think Ivan was petty enough to come out here for revenge, either. And he took Ae-Cha. Only reason for that would be leverage over Jonny.

Had Sokolov given Jonny something to hang on to for safekeeping? Something Ivan was after?

Then it hit me.

The van.

Jonny had lied about where he’d dumped it. Then he’d gone out soon after we’d questioned him about it. And now this.

It had to be the van. Sokolov had hidden something in it.

I grabbed my phone and called Kanigher.

“That APB on the van. Send it out again, priority one, tristate. That’s what our shooter’s after. We have to find that goddamn van before he does.”

***

T
HE SOUND OF AUTOMATIC
weapon fire punched through Jonny’s ear protectors, forcing his mind away from Bon’s sneering face and back to the side street off Brighton Beach Avenue.

There were now at least a couple dozen people out on the sidewalk, all involved in one, large, messy, lethal fight—either one-on-one or locked in a Grand Theft Auto version of a bar brawl. Inside the bar was no different.

Jonny was enjoying the spectacle, the sensation amplified by the cocaine lighting up his neurons, but Bon was getting too agitated. Jonny knew it was only a matter of time before the cops arrived and that the wise move was for them to leave before that happened, but he was finding it hard to tear himself away from the show.

He scanned the street ahead and checked the van’s mirrors, scrutinizing the night for any telltale sign of spinning lights, when the blue light inside the van caught the corner of his eye.

His phone was glowing.

The display said:
AE-CHA.

Jonny stared at it, uncertain about whether or not to take it. This was really going to mess up his high and kill the moment. He felt a chill as he imagined what she was probably calling about, this late at night: Jachin. Maybe she knew. Maybe she’d heard. And if so, he could just imagine the state she might be in, given how she felt for his now-dead friend.

He hesitated, then decided not to take the call.

He stared at it with a heavy heart as it droned on in silence, its blue light coming on and off hauntingly inside the dark cabin of the van, its ringtone muted by the big ear protectors on his head—then Bon lashed out, twisting around and slamming his big fists into the partition wall behind his seat like a caged animal on a rampage.

Jonny flinched and shouted to Shin, “Kill it!”

Shin punched in the first preset, the one that hadn’t had a discernible effect, just as Jonny grabbed the phone. And at that same moment, a police cruiser came around the corner, lights spinning.

“Get us out of here,” Jonny barked at Bon.

The big man looked at him with a dazed expression.

“Pulgarasi, we need to move.”

Bon stared at him for a second, then sat back down, threw the van into gear and floored the pedal.

Jonny looked back, watched as the police car pulled in outside the restaurant, then breathed out and answered his call. “Ae-Cha.”

It wasn’t Ae-Cha.

It was a voice he’d heard before, out on the docks that night, with Sokolov.

“Where are you, Jonny?”

O
fficers Kaluta and Talaoc pulled in across the street from Lolita and scrambled out of their squad car. Kaluta froze in place as his mind registered the sheer horror of the scene outside the restaurant.

It was unlike anything he’d ever witnessed before.

People were trading blows or facing off with one another with knives and broken bottles in their hands, but they were outnumbered by those who either lay dead or dying on the sidewalk. Men and women who’d clearly dressed up for a night on the town were on the ground, writhing pathetically or limping away, their clothes ripped to shreds, their faces locked in expressions of confusion and silent terror. Blood was everywhere and on everyone, a tableau from a zombie movie come to life.

“What do we do?” Kaluta asked his partner as he drew his gun.

Talaoc didn’t answer immediately. Something else had caught his eye, just as they were rushing up to the restaurant. A van had just stormed away and was turning off onto another street. A white panel van, with a refrigeration unit on its roof. Same kind of van that was on the priority APB that had just flashed up on the squad car’s computer screen.

Talaoc hit the Call button on his radio just as two other squad cars swarmed in.

“Y
OU HURT ONE HAIR OF
—”

“Shut the fuck up and listen,” the Russian hissed. “I don’t care about her. You’ll get her back in one piece. I just want the van.”

Jonny’s mouth dried up.

The Russian didn’t leave him time to even think about how to handle it. “I know you have it. Don’t lie if you want her to live. I can make things very long and painful for her. Then I’ll come for you.”

The Russian’s words, the coke, the emotions of the whole damn night—Jonny’s mind was frazzled. He could barely think straight. Yes, of course, his first instinct was a desperate urge to hang on to the van, at any cost. But this was Ae-Cha the bastard was talking about. Ae-Cha, his aunt’s only daughter. His Ae-Cha.

He couldn’t lie.

“I’ve got the fucking van here.”

“Where are you?

“Brooklyn.”

The Russian went silent for a moment, then said, “Drive to Prospect Park. You know where that is?”

“Yeah, I know where it is, motherfucker.”

“Good. When you get there, go in from the Ocean Avenue side. Take the drive down to the ice rink. I’ll meet you there, in the lot.”

Then the line went dead.

Jonny cursed, shut his eyes to try to let some clarity seep back into his brain, then ordered Bon to change direction.

***

I
WAS ALREADY MOVING
for the exit, with Aparo hot on my heels.

“Put me through to the cruiser,” I blurted as I hit the sidewalk. “We need eyes on that van. Don’t let them lose it.”

Within seconds, we were pulling away from the mess outside the Green Dragon when the dispatcher put me through to the squad car.

“Who’s this?” I asked, switching the phone to speaker.

“Officer Mike Talaoc, Sixtieth Precinct. I’m riding with Officer Kaluta. You?”

“Reilly and Aparo, FBI. You got the van?”

“We’re about two blocks back from it,” Talaoc told him. “It just turned right on Neptune.”

Aparo hit the gas harder now that he had a clear idea of where we were heading.

“Okay, stay back but don’t lose them,” I told Talaoc. “Just tail them and don’t let them spot you. I’m gonna call in some backup. Our shooter’s coming after the van, and I want to be there when he does.”

***

T
HE
S
LEDGEHAMMER WAS SAVORING
a tumbler of limited-edition Iordanov Vodka when his prepaid cell phone rang.

“Chyort voz’mi,”
he cursed to no one in particular before he grabbed it and took the call.

Mirminsky hated to be interrupted while enjoying the rewards of his efforts. He felt he’d earned the glass of five-thousand-dollar-a-bottle vodka, what with all the bullshit he’d had to suffer from the SVR enforcer—Afanasyev, or whatever the hell he’d called himself—as well as the accompanying increased heat from the feds. If he were entirely honest with himself, he couldn’t taste the difference between what he was drinking and a glass of Russian Standard, but appearances counted for almost everything in his world and if he was unable to savor the taste, then he could at least savor the price.

Appearances also meant that he didn’t enjoy being seen as someone’s lackey, especially in the eyes of the cops and the FBI.

“You need to hear this, boss.”

“Put it through,” he groused.

After a couple of clicks, the incoming call was connected to Mirminsky’s cell, which he knew was clean because it had been removed from its packaging less than three hours ago.

“Ditko here. We’ve got trouble.”

Mirminsky’s mood went from dark to pitch-black. Ditko was with the vice squad at the Sixtieth Precinct, out in Brooklyn. He’d been on the Sledgehammer’s payroll for seven years now, helping keep Lolita and Mirminsky’s crew out of trouble.

“The lines are going crazy here. Some major bust-up at Lolita. It’s bad. We’ve got some dead, Yuri. I’m on my way there now.”

Mirminsky’s veins flared, then settled back. There had been brawls at the place before. Even a death or two. Lolita had navigated through the turmoil before, and it would do so again. Mirminsky’s lawyers would see to that.

“Is that it?” he grumbled.

“You’re not listening, Yuri. This is really bad. You need to get down there and see it. And that’s not all. The feds are involved.”

That made Mirminsky sit up. “Why the feds?”

“I’m not sure. We got a report of a white van at the scene. Some kind of meat wagon. The feds have a priority APB out on it.” The line went quiet for a moment as Ditko tapped a few keys on his computer. “Wasn’t there a refrigerated van in the shoot-out at Owl’s Head Park? When your guys were gunned down?”

The Sledgehammer’s blood was boiling now. “And I lost two more at Red Hook. All because of the same
súka blyad
.”

Mirminksy knew most of what had happened at the docks. He had sources on his payroll at other police precincts throughout the city. This sounded like a definite lead on the bastard who had cost him six men and set the feds breathing down his neck.

He wondered why no one at the bar had called him. It wasn’t a good sign.

“Where’s the van now?” he asked.

“I can find out. We’ve got a squad car tailing it, but the fed in charge told them not to intercept.”

Mirminsky was already in full tactical planning mode. “I want to know where the van is. Call me direct with updates. Petr will give you the number.”

He hung up and knocked back the rest of the Iordanov, then he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a Desert Eagle .50 Action Express. On each side of the customized handle, a sledgehammer had been embossed in gold.

He’d had enough of being told what to do. Of assholes destroying his property and treating his foot soldiers like they came off a production line.

Why Lolita?

The bar was close to his heart. It was his very first place. It was where his business grew from. His niece’s fiancé ran it.

What if he were among the dead?

He tried Stefan’s cell. It immediately went to voice mail.

He tried the bar. It rang out.

That sealed it.

This is America, not Russia.

The
sluzhba vneshney razvedk
—the SVR—didn’t run the show here.

Enough was enough.

He was
kuvalda
. He was the Sledgehammer.

And it was high time he showed those
ebanatyi pidaraz
why they called him that.