Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  The guards led him straight across the foyer and through a rear door. The back wall gave way to an outdoor patio that stretched most of the length of the home. Made to match the rest of the spread it was done entirely in white, extending out over twenty feet before changing to plush green turf. Less than a hundred feet away, the lawn ended abruptly on the edge of the bluff. The moon reflected off the ocean visible in the distance.

  Two brass fire pits were situated on the patio, twenty feet apart, both filled with glass fire rocks with flames rising above them. Between them were two white outdoor sofas, separated by a glass table.

  As Pavel made his way out, a man in blue linen pants and a striped Oxford shirt stood, an oversized smile on his face. His brown hair hung in two stiff arcs from a part that split his head down the middle, framing blue eyes. His expression revealed a gap between his two front teeth, his veneers flashing white against his bronze skin.

  At first glance, Pavel sized him up as a beach bum turned entrepreneur, a child of fortune who had eschewed the family business for a chance to make fast money.

  Exactly the kind of man he had encountered frequently, despised every time, since coming to North America.

  “My friend, how nice of you to stop by,” the man said, extending a hand to Pavel. Pavel accepted the shake, noting the weak grip, and tried not to crush the man’s hand. “Wyeth Mender.”

  “Pavel Haney. Thank you for having me,” Pavel said, his English as usual a bit stilted, but passable. He chose to stick with the alias name just in case; he wasn’t sure how much these people knew. “You have a very nice home.”

  Mender released the grip and stepped back, holding his hands wide and motioning to the place. “This old place? Aw, it ain’t much, but you’ve got to live somewhere, right?”

  Images of the hovels Pavel had lived in growing up, with their lack of heat, running water, and beds, passed through his mind. Already he could feel his dislike for the man growing, held in check only by the half-dozen guards that now loped nearby, all within easy firing distance.

  “That is very true,” Pavel replied.

  “Please,” Mender said, extending a hand down toward the sofa opposite him, “have a seat.”

  Pavel nodded in appreciation and lowered himself down, the soft white padding cocooning around his legs and back, undoubtedly by design, meant to make movements difficult for him.

  “Can I get you anything?” Mender asked, playing the perfect host. “Coffee? Water? Vodka?” He added a wink and a smile at the last one, pointing a finger in Pavel’s direction.

  “No, thank you,” Pavel said, forcing his mouth to curl upward without showing any teeth.

  After the previous few days he was not in the mood for pleasantries, even less so for blatantly false ones. Hoping to move things along, he swung the plastic sack up onto the glass table, letting the weight of it hit with an audible thud. Dried, congealing blood could be seen smeared along the inside of it, and a few tufts of short brown hair protruded from the top.

  All mirth, and color, bled from Mender’s face as he looked at the bag and up at Pavel again. He worked his mouth twice through an exaggerated motion in an attempt to conjure moisture, fear plain across his features.

  “Just like that?” Mender asked.

  Pavel nodded, keeping his face impassive, wanting to appear as unimposing as possible. “I am led to believe you are a very busy man, so I came here to talk business and to get out of your hair.”

  Again Mender looked from the bag to Pavel and back again. “OK?”

  “My employer was told that you still have some trepidation about joining the network,” Pavel said. The story was rehearsed, and he was quoting directly from what Sergey had told him hours before. “That there was still some concern about backlash from the Juarez cartel.

  “We are here to show you there is nothing to fear from the Juarezes, nor will there be anything to fear from any competitor moving forward.”

  The words felt odd in his mouth, a type of syntax he never would have chosen for himself. Still, he rattled them off as practiced before reaching out and pulling back the sides of the sack. The thin material slid down without opposition, bunching up at the base of the table, its contents obvious to all.

  Around them, the guards inched forward, weapons held at the ready. Each one seemed to glance at the object before looking to Mender, waiting for some sign of how to react.

  A long moment passed as Mender stared down at the head of Carlos Juarez, his mouth curled down in an open frown, his face twisted away. He seemed to look at the grisly offering through only one eye, his head twisted to the side, his mind fighting for the proper response, his body wanting to flee.

  “What . . . what the hell is that?” he muttered, his voice cracking, his face contorted.

  “That,” Pavel replied, “is Carlos Juarez. Mateo Perez has also been taken care of, though his body is not so easy to provide proof of.”

  “Mateo?” Mender mouthed, terror crossing over his features. “So, you mean he’s also—”

  “—dead, yes.” Pavel felt the guards inch ever closer, but he forced himself to remain still. He knew before entering that this would be the most difficult part, the moment when they would either shoot him where he sat, or be so repulsed by what they saw, so fearful of what might happen to them, that they would allow him to leave and be under Blok’s control forever.

  “But I thought . . . witness protection?” Mender managed, prying his gaze from Carlos and looking up at Pavel.

  “Mr. Mender,” Pavel explained, speaking as if a teacher talking to a child, “we have known the location of both men since the day they entered witness protection, just as we know that Manny Juarez is inmate number 546708 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center not twenty miles from here.”

  “How . . .” Mender began, his thoughts apparent on his features, trying hard to catch up. Ten minutes before, he’d thought he had the upper hand, armed with his men and the home field advantage. With one simple move Pavel had turned the dynamic on him, letting it be known where the power in the meeting resided.

  “The minute we took control,” Pavel said, “we began keeping tabs on them. For a long time there was no need to act against them, so we let them live in peace. Recently, both men left the program, and you started to show reservations about our arrangement.

  “Needless to say we couldn’t have that, so steps were taken.”

  Pavel made sure his demeanor stayed neutral, his tone noncombative. His goal in the meeting was to issue a threat without appearing threatening, to make Mender believe this was done in the best interest of business, to put him at ease over any lingering uncertainties about the new arrangement.

  In truth, it was a none-too-subtle kick in the ass for Mender to fall in line, and fast.

  “And this arrangement,” Mender asked, looking down into the face of Carlos Juarez, his eyes locked open wide, a thin tendril of blood snaking down from a nostril. “Mr. Blok is looking to get started on this right away?”

  “Yes,” Pavel said, offering a curt nod, making sure not to let the humor within him show through.

  It wasn’t the first time he had met with a Wyeth Mender. No less than half of the men they dealt with were just like him, just like Viktor Blok, sons of privilege that insulated themselves with faux security but crumbled at the first sign of actual peril.

  Even sitting on a sofa on Mender’s patio, surrounded by a half-dozen men with weapons, Pavel knew he was not in danger.

  The fear that his presence incited, the terror at what would happen if he didn’t walk out of there in one piece, was too much for a man like Mender to fathom.

  “Good,” Mender said, nodding, again trying to work his mouth up and down. “I apologize that you had to come out here like this. Just can’t be too careful with undertakings this big, you know?”

  “I do,” Pavel said, nod
ding, agreeing with the young man in an attempt to allow even the slightest shred of dignity to remain. “And that’s why we’re here. Anything else comes up, don’t hesitate to let us know.”

  “I will do that,” Mender said, snapping to his feet, the rubber soles of his white deck shoes slapping against the patio. He extended a hand and said, “Like you said, we’re both busy men. I won’t keep you any longer.”

  Pavel made a show of standing slowly. He accepted the handshake, squeezing a little tighter, allowing his host to feel the power within it. “Like I said, anything else comes up, don’t hesitate to let us know.”

  At that he turned and walked back through the house, leaving the head of Carlos Juarez perched on the patio table in his wake.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Back to finish the job?” Manny Juarez asked, shuffling one foot at a time, neither ever leaving the floor. They scraped across the tile, the sound echoing through the small room.

  Without the light of day pressing in through the closed blinds on the wall, the overhead bulbs seemed much brighter, harsher. They reflected over everything, casting an orangish tint on the room. The smell of cleaning solution was in the air, something citrus, most likely used to clean up the bloody spittle left behind after our last visit.

  Diaz waited until Manny was seated in the same chair across from us before raising her chin toward the guard behind him, a wiry guy with blotchy tattoos on both forearms. “You can take the chains off him.”

  The guard stared at her a long moment before glancing over at me, a barely perceptible nod my only response. He gave each of us another look before shrugging his shoulders and extracting a key ring from his belt, starting at Manny’s feet and moving up to his wrists. The chains jangled loudly as he unlatched them and pulled them free, looping them around his left hand as he exited the room.

  “You guys have any problems, we’ll be right outside.”

  “Thanks, but we’ll be all right,” Diaz said, settling into a chair.

  “Yeah, we’ll be all right,” Manny said, glaring across at Diaz. His face was twisted up into a scowl, his breath coming in short bursts as he fumed. Once the door was closed and the guard gone, he shifted his gaze to me.

  “That how this trip works? You guys come back, you the nice one, put him in the corner to threaten me?”

  I met the stare, peering into his eyes, the same face I’d seen twenty, a hundred times a day while I was on the job. The rest of him might have aged, adding a few pounds, a couple of gray hairs, but those eyes were exactly as I remembered.

  “Considering what you did to my family, what I would like to do to you, I’d say you got off easy,” I said. “So quit your bitching.”

  At that Manny snapped up onto his feet, his hands clenched into fists in front of him. “Man, if you were going to get in here and start running your mouth, you shouldn’t have let her take the chains off.”

  “It was his idea,” Diaz said, rolling her eyes up toward Manny.

  The words drew his attention back down at her, the scowl still in place. “Yeah? Why’s that? So you two could attack me and it go down as a fair fight?”

  For the first time since he’d entered, I pushed myself away from the wall. I made sure he watched as I walked into the corner of the room and pulled a plastic chair off the stack, sliding it across the floor and taking a seat beside Diaz.

  “Sit down and shut up,” I said, extending a hand across the table, motioning for him to take a seat.

  Manny remained standing, peering down at us, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Man, why the hell should I?”

  “Because Carlos is dead, you dumb son of a bitch,” I spat, venom rising in my voice. “Sorry for your loss, asshole. Now sit down.”

  The scowl faded from Manny’s face, his arms sliding down to hang by his sides. Again his hands curled into fists, veins filling with blood along the backs of them, running up his forearms.

  “First you come in here and punch me, then you make up some shit about my cousin?” he managed, so much hatred in his tone he could barely speak. “I ought to—”

  “What?” I yelled, snapping upward onto my feet, sending the chair skittering across the floor behind me. I dug my phone from my pocket and held it at arm’s length in front of me. The images I’d taken just hours before were already pulled up for him to see. “What are you going to do, Manny, besides sit your ass down here, the safest place on earth for you right now?”

  His jaw fell open as he looked from me to the phone, shock, horror, disbelief on his face. “That’s not Carlos, that can’t be. He was just here.”

  “Yeah, wearing those clothes, right?” I countered. “And you see that ring on his right hand? That’s his too, isn’t it? Recognize the building that’s in? Any of it look familiar?”

  As I spoke I scrolled through a series of photos, each one of them taken in anticipation of this very moment while Diaz called in for backup. Every shot was meant to rebut whatever objections Manny might have, to provide definitive proof that his cousin was gone.

  One at a time he watched the images scroll by, his mouth working as if he might speak, but no sounds coming out. His body began to quiver as his eyes glassed over, his lips pressing tight together.

  “That dumb bastard,” he whispered. “I told him . . . I sat right in that room and I told him.”

  “And now you’re going to tell us,” I said, dropping the phone on the table, leaving the last picture up and visible. I walked back and grabbed my chair, pulling it forward, and took a seat beside Diaz, who was still staring at Manny.

  It took him almost a full minute, but eventually he lowered himself back into his chair as well. When he did, he seemed different, his body slouched, his spirit broken. His face twitched as if he might break down at any moment, his lower lip quivering.

  There was no joy for me in delivering the news to him that way. After what he’d done to my family I didn’t give a shit about saving his feelings, but we just didn’t have the time to waste on him stomping around about one little punch.

  If the prick had any idea what I would have liked to do to him, one shot to the jaw would be the least of his concerns.

  “Start at the beginning,” Diaz said, reinserting herself into the conversation, taking the lead. Compared to me, her voice was soft, soothing, leading him right where we wanted him to go.

  Manny kept his attention focused on the picture of Carlos a long moment, the shot taken from the doorway, the entirety of his headless body splayed out on the floor, nearly all of his blood spread on the concrete around him. When he finally began to speak his voice was distant, detached, void of emotion.

  It was a feeling I knew all too well.

  “Shit all started six years ago when you guys started coming around,” Manny said. “Until that time things were good. I was the head man, Carlos my right hand, Mateo ran the books. We had a sweet spread, bringing the product up from the south of Mexico, running it across the border on boats. Once it was in San Diego, a network of local distributors shifted the stuff up and down the coast, LA and beyond.”

  This much I knew already. It was their entry into the LA market that first got our attention, brought our team onto the case. By the time I had bowed out they were in Bakersfield, and apparently by the time they were apprehended they were clear to Fresno.

  Saying they had a sweet spread was an understatement. Still, I let him continue without interrupting.

  “It wasn’t the first time we’d had heat down on us,” Manny said, shifting his gaze away from the picture, staring at the blank steel table in front of him. “Federales, Coast Guard, even the LAPD. Every time, we managed to grease a few palms, or change how we handled things for a while, the problem went away. Then, two things happened at the same time.

  “A third party wanted to partner up, and your sorry ass started dogging us.”

  On the la
st part he flicked his gaze up to me, his eyes void of any life, nothing more than dark pools.

  Ignoring the stare, I focused in on the front half of his statement, feeding it into the frenzy of information already swirling through my mind. For the first time a major piece seemed to fit into place, a dawning within me.

  “The Russians,” I muttered.

  If Manny was surprised I knew, he didn’t show it. He simply nodded and continued, “They came to us and said they were developing a new product. Claimed to have heard we were feeling the squeeze from you guys, said they’d help us lie low for a while, keep our goods moving.

  “Once their stuff was ready to go, we could push it through the same network, everybody share a piece of the pie.”

  So many questions came to mind, I had to force myself to sit still and not jump ahead. Snippets of a former life started making their way to the surface, bits and pieces I had long ago buried. Faces, names, details from the case, all part of something I had sealed off long ago.

  “So you made the deal?” Diaz asked.

  “Hell yeah, we made the deal,” Manny said, his voice rising just a bit. “Your boy here was close, and moving in fast. We knew we had to go underground for a while, clear our tail, but if we did, our distributors would find product from somewhere else.

  “The Ruskies solved that for us. Within weeks they had boots on the ground, were pushing our stuff up the coast. It was beautiful. For a while.”

  “Then you got busted,” Diaz said, prompting him forward, keeping the story on track. Seeing the picture of Carlos had set free an uninhibited Manny, information flowing from him.

  Maybe he figured he no longer had to protect anybody. Maybe he no longer thought he had anything to lose. Whatever it was, we weren’t about to derail it.

  “Ha!” Manny intoned, his head rocking back in a smirk. “Busted my ass. After your bulldog here took his ball and went home, there wasn’t anybody looking for us anymore. We could have gone back to doing things exactly the way we wanted.