by Dave Stanton
“What do -” he started, but the words froze in his throat when I grabbed his arm and cranked it hard behind his back. I shoved him out the door, into the dark night. “Go back to your seats,” I said to the girls, as the door swung shut.
“You take your hands off me, you bitch motherfucker,” he said, right before I slammed him against a concrete pillar. Standing behind him, I punched him hard in the lower back, right in the kidney. He gasped, and a cry escaped his lips.
“Your night’s taken a turn for the worse, pimp.”
“That right?” he said, and then I heard a click and saw a switchblade in his left hand. He threw his right elbow at my face, but I moved laterally, and before he could turn I hit him in the back of the head with my palm. His face bounced off the concrete, then I hit him again in the kidney. His knees buckled, and I stepped back to let him fall.
I thought I’d taken the fight out of him, but I’d underestimated the man, because he rolled to his feet and lashed out with the knife. He had long arms and I felt the blade nick my elbow. I kicked at his hand, but he was quick and my foot caught nothing but air. Then he sprang forward, jabbing at my gut.
I jumped back, watching as he crouched and moved toward me. He was bleeding from the nose, and his eyes had a murderous gleam. I could have thrown a right cross, probably knocked him out, but in doing so I’d leave my ribs undefended, and would likely get stabbed. As we circled each other he jabbed, catlike, at my midsection. He had a significant reach advantage, and I had to continually back up to avoid his thrusts, but now I was up against a wall.
He lunged once more and this time I anticipated it and grabbed his wrist. He had a split second to realize he was in trouble, then I threw a snap-kick, the heel of my boot driving into his solar plexus. His eyes went round, his jaw fell open, and he staggered back. I kicked his hand, and the knife went flying behind him.
Temporarily unable to breathe, he was defenseless. I tripped him to the ground and dropped a knee onto his back. After cinching a zip-tie around his right ankle, I yanked his left arm back and zip-tied his wrist to the ankle.
A young couple walked past and stared, openmouthed. “Police business,” I said. “Keep walking.” They went into the terminal and I knew I had to finish quickly. I dragged the pimp behind a row of cars, his clothes skidding and tearing on the pavement.
“What do you want?” he hissed. He lay face down on the coarse tar and gravel surface.
“A ten-year-old girl’s been kidnapped. Who has her?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
I pulled his wallet from his back pocket and found his Nevada driver’s license. His name was Jerome Glincey.
“You’re in the business, Jerome. You pimp out children, you know all the angles.”
“I never dealt with nobody that young.”
I straightened and stepped on the side of Jerome Glincey’s face. Then I lifted my other foot and balanced my weight on one leg, my boot tread crushing into his skin. He tried to yell, but all he could manage was a muted garble. I counted to five, then stepped off.
“Start talking or this will get worse. You’re smart enough to figure that out, right?”
His lip was cut and a frothy dribble of blood ran through his beard. His eyes were squeezed shut and when he opened them, he blinked hard, as if trying to comprehend his pain.
“The Russians,” he croaked. “They’re the only ones take on girls too young to breed.”
I felt my brow crease. “Russians? I need names.”
He paused, and I put my boot on his neck, pivoting the sole into his flesh.
“Don’t! The Volkovs, damn it.”
“Where do I find them?”
“There’s a Russian restaurant in the Mandalay Bay. Another one off Tropicana.”
I opened his wallet again and removed a thick stack of cash. A couple hundreds and some twenties.
“Here’s the deal, Jerome. Your career in Vegas is finished. It’s time to relocate. You don’t get to abuse women here anymore, not on my watch.”
“Who the hell you think you are?”
“Wrong answer,” I said, and reared back my leg and kicked him as hard as I could between the buttocks, my steel toe ramming into his testicles. He screamed, and a moment later a puddle of urine spread from beneath his body.
I cut his ties, and he curled into the fetal position. I dropped his wallet onto his face.
“I’m serious about you hitting the road, Jerome. I’d hate to have to tell the Volkovs you sold them out.”
He didn’t reply, which was the smartest thing he’d done all night.
******
After giving Jerome’s bankroll to the two teenage girls, I drove them to a decent hotel away from the casinos. I didn’t ask them about their circumstances, and they didn’t offer to explain how they ended up in a Vegas bus terminal near midnight in the dead of winter. I only imparted one bit of advice, and that was to be wary of men offering help, unless they were interested in a career in the sex trade. When they didn’t respond, I added, “By that I mean becoming a whore.” Neither appeared shocked or very interested in my warning. That made me a little sad, and made me wonder about the nature of what they were running from. It also served as a reminder that I can’t solve the world’s problems. Best I focus on doing my job and solving my own.
******
When I got back to my hotel, I sat in my truck for a minute. Even though it seemed a long time since I had woken in Long Beach, I didn’t feel tired in the slightest. Not only was I wide awake, I was energized, because the altercation with the pimp had produced a real lead. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have felt enthusiastic about a coerced scrap of information from a career criminal, but as soon as the pimp said, “The Russians”, I remembered Melanie’s comment about her attacker’s Eastern European accent.
I headed to the freeway and drove five miles south on 15, skirting The Strip until I exited on Flamingo and turned south on Las Vegas Boulevard. I drove by the Bellagio and Paris, and then past the CityCenter and Cosmopolitan, the two newest additions to Las Vegas’s mega-hotel-casino industry. At the Tropicana intersection I waited at the stoplight and looked up at the 150-foot tall Statue of Liberty in front of the New York-NewYork’s faux cityscape. A rollercoaster weaved through the hotel’s superstructure, the red tracks brightly lit.
Mandalay Bay was at the far southern end of The Strip. It was a massive complex with two hotel towers. I found a spot on the second story of the parking structure and went into the casino. Most of the restaurants, including one called Red Square, were right off the main casino floor. A five-minute walk took me to a statue of a headless man aside a rectangular portico supported by square gold columns. Above the columns was Russian lettering.
I walked through the doors and past a hostess. The interior was brown and red and had a brooding feel, but the dining tables were packed and lively, even though it was past midnight. Waitresses in skimpy black dresses attended to the patrons, some whom would no doubt be partying and gambling until dawn. The music from the bar was loud, and I wondered if those dining could hear each other.
I walked the perimeter, looking for a hallway leading to a back office. I came to a door where a man stood at a podium.
“What’s in here?” I asked.
“It’s our vodka vault. It’s full now, but I can put your name on the list. Here,” he said, handing me a leather bound folder. I opened it and looked at prices for 360 different vodkas, sold by the bottle or in shots. The paragraph above the price list described the interior as zero degrees Fahrenheit, and assured patrons that fur coats and hats were provided to those willing to pay thirty dollars for an ounce of common vodka. It also mentioned that the statue out front was that of Vladimir Lenin, and his missing head was kept preserved in the vault. Visitors were invited to ‘Come “join the party” and do shots off Lenin’s head.’
I moved on, past the kitchen and to the bar. A large hammer and sickle symbol above the shelved bottles overlooked a row
of barstools and a dozen cocktail tables. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood off to the side, looking around as if waiting for someone.
The crowd was mostly under thirty and in nightclub attire. Most of the men wore button-down shirts with thin neckties, or tight V-neck short-sleeved shirts to show off their physiques. The women strutted on high heels, and their short skirts or pants looked painted to their figures. Three bartenders poured drinks and were hustling to keep up with the demand, as were a trio of cocktail waitresses.
Two couples in their early forties came into the room, searching for open seats. They went to the bar, the men frowning and trying to get the attention of a bartender, while the woman chatted obliviously.
I stood against a wall for another few minutes, trying to play the role of a man waiting for his date, but feeling increasing conspicuous. Then two men entered the bar.
The first wore a dark wool coat with buckles. The coat was thick and so was the body beneath it, but the bulk was fat, not muscle. The man was perhaps fifty, and his torso was shaped more like a pear than a barrel. He had a full head of black hair going gray, and his heavy jowls were unshaven. His face looked puffy, and I may have discounted him for a harmless tourist, except for his half-lidded eyes. They were still and hard, and when he spoke I was reminded of men who gave orders that were rarely disobeyed.
The second man was taller and twenty years younger. He wore a suit that fit his musculature poorly. His facial features were blunt; the nose flat at the tip, the jaw square. He looked classically Slavic, except his hairline was unusually low on his forehead, which made his face seem oddly out of proportion. But it was his eyes I paid more intention to, for they were cold and uncompromising, the same as his counterpart’s.
They came my way, and I made a pretense of playing with my phone while I took their pictures. When they reached the bar, one of the harried bartenders immediately climbed a ladder and took a bottle from a glass case. He poured a pair of shots, set them on a tray, then came around and served the two men, bowing slightly.
I moved away from the bar and stood behind some folks who were waiting for a table. Within a minute the two men tossed back their vodkas and headed toward the exit, apparently having fulfilled the purpose of their visit. Whether they had stopped in solely for a quick drink, or for something else, I didn’t know. I fell in behind them, walking out of the restaurant and into the casino. They strode the opposite direction from which I’d come, and we crossed the casino floor and entered the hotel lobby. They went through the front doors and out to the sidewalk where valet attendants and bellhops milled about. A white Cadillac limousine promptly arrived at the curb, and the driver got out and opened the rear door.
I waved for a taxi parked outside the reception circle, but the cabby either wasn’t looking or chose to ignore me. The pair I followed got into the limo. I managed to take a picture of the license plate as they pulled away.
“Need a cab?” an attendant asked.
I watched the limo exit the resort and disappear.
“Not anymore,” I said.
******
When I got back to my truck, I drove out to The Strip and turned right on Tropicana. Once I passed the airport entrance and crossed Paradise Road, the neon glow from Las Vegas Boulevard was swallowed by the abyss of the desert. Away from the casinos, the night was dark and silent.
I found the establishment I was looking for a mile up the road, to my left. The Café Leonov was a standalone building with stucco facing and shuttered windows. An unlit sign over the entrance was badly weathered and needed repair. The restaurant was definitely closed for the evening. The parking lot was large, and empty except for three vehicles. Two were sedans, and the third, parked parallel in front of the building, was the white limousine.
I drove by, tapping my steering wheel. The pimp had fingered a Russian crime family as involved in prepubescent girls, and told me where to find them. Of course, he might have named the Volkovs solely because it was the first name that came to mind as he lay with his face ground into the pavement. But Melanie claimed she heard an accent that could have been Russian. And now two men in a white limo show up at both restaurants named by the pimp. It definitely was worth looking into.
I hung a U-turn and drove past the Café Leonov, then turned off my lights and steered into the office complex next door. I backed my truck into a dark area aside the building, stepped out, and removed a few items from the steel box in my truck bed. The limo was fifty feet to my right. I blew out my breath, hopped a short fence, and sprinted forward, sliding to a stop at the limo’s rear bumper. I shimmed under the gas tank, holding a flashlight in my teeth, and attached a magnetized tracking device to the frame behind the rear axle. When I pushed myself from beneath the car, I held my stun gun at the ready.
Seeing no one, I repeated the procedure on the second car, a black Dodge Charger. The third car was an older Ford, but I only had two tracking units. I grimaced, mad at myself for being unprepared. The devices were expensive and top-of-the-line, and once deployed they usually were not recoverable. But that was no excuse for not having at least three on hand.
I quickly took photos of both cars’ license plates, then ran back to my truck and drove across the street to an apartment complex on Tropicana. I was able to find a spot in the shadows, directly across from the Café Leonov.
It was a little past one a.m. I sat staring at the restaurant through binoculars. It was too dark to make out much detail, but little things like the untrimmed shrubs and litter near the front steps made me question whether the place was actually in business. No light shone from the windows, and I hadn’t heard any sounds from the interior when I was close to the building. But people were definitely inside, including the two men and the limo driver.
I set down the binoculars and spent a few minutes making sure the app on my cellphone was syncing with the tracking devices. My screen showed a map with two blinking lights. The next time either of the cars were driven, I would receive an alert and I could follow their movements. The batteries on the devices would last for roughly seventy-two hours.
I refocused the binoculars on the dark restaurant, expecting the front doors to open at any moment. After an hour I started wondering if they planned to spend the night there. I became drowsy to the point that I got outside and stood in the cold and jogged in place until my heart rate quickened. When I returned to my driver’s seat I turned the radio up loud and did isometric exercises. When nothing happened by 2:30, I was ready to pack it in.
The front doors opened just as I was reaching to start my engine. The same two men I’d seen earlier walked out with the limo driver, followed by three women in furry jackets, short skirts, and high heels.
They all got in the limo and took off toward The Strip. I tailed them, lights off, until we neared Las Vegas Boulevard. But they didn’t turn toward Mandalay Bay, like I suspected they would. Instead, they continued through the main intersection and got onto northbound I-15.
I followed them for five miles on the freeway, until they took the 95 exit, less than a mile from where I was staying at the Plaza. Then they drove east for another five miles, before turning into a tract of apartments and duplexes. It wasn’t as bad as some neighborhoods I’ve seen, but it was worse than most. The darkness couldn’t hide the dismal quality; graffiti scrawled on fences, parked cars that obviously weren’t operable, dead lawns, and iron security bars on windows. This was a place where rents were cheap and the standard of living was somewhere between ghetto grade and lower middle-class. Gang activity and a high crime rate were a given.
The limo stopped in front of a duplex and the three women climbed out and went to the front door. From my spot down the street, I could see them in the porch light. One had long, curly, orange hair, definitely a wig, and looked middle-aged. The other two were younger.
After the women went inside, the limo drove back to the freeway and I followed it all the way back to The Strip. At three in the morning there was still plenty of tra
ffic on the main drag, and I didn’t have to worry about being spotted. I tailed them to the reception circle at Caesar’s Palace and watched the driver open the door for the two men, who went into the lobby. Then the limo driver had a quick conversation with an attendant, passed him a few bills, and pulled forward and parked in a temporary zone.
I considered if there was anything to be gained by chatting with the driver, and quickly decided against it. My mind was dull with fatigue and I didn’t want to do anything rash. If these men were the Volkovs, alerting them to my presence would be a dumb move. Staying in the shadows made far more sense for now. Besides, I could easily pick up their trail tomorrow.
“Goodnight, assholes,” I muttered, and hit it back to my hotel.
CHAPTER 9
The piercing ring of my cell phone jolted me from a dead sleep at nine the next morning. When I saw it was Lillian McDermott, I declined the call and tried to fall back asleep, but a minute later she called again.
“Hello,” I mumbled, lying on my back, eyes closed.
“Good morning, Mr. Reno.”
When I didn’t respond, she said, “I was expecting you to email me an update, as we discussed.”
“Been busy,” I croaked.
“And I’m sure your bill will reflect that. However, if you expect to get paid, you need to let me know exactly what kind of progress you’re making.”
I sat up on the edge of the bed. “Fine. I’ll send you something by noon.”
“Make sure you do.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“Yeah.”
“What, if you don’t mind me asking, are you still doing in bed at nine a.m.?”
I felt a surge of impatience in my chest, and for a moment I held the phone away, trying to resist the temptation to answer with a string of profanities.
“Mr. Reno?”
“I was sleeping. I was up until three-thirty last night.”