Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  It took Ned some time to work up the courage to ask Ludmilla where he could sleep. She smiled and took him into a room with two empty twin beds. Ned couldn’t remember if he’d traveled into another time zone, so just to be safe, he set the alarm on his cell phone for seven o’clock.

  Just as he was falling asleep, he saw Semyon—shirtless and drunk—stumble into the room. The first thing Ned noticed was how many tattoos Semyon had and how intricate they were. Semyon fell into the bed beside Ned and put an arm around his neck. “We are friends now,” Semyon said and Ned noticed that his accent was much thicker. “So we keep each other’s secrets.”

  “Sure, man, sure.”

  “And even though Ludmilla calls my friends ‘gangsters,’ she does not know,” he said. “She thinks I sell used, maybe stolen, auto parts, but she knows nothing about drugs or guns or women or nothing, you know?”

  “I understand.”

  Semyon rubbed Ned’s hair affectionately. “I know, I know, you are good man, you are not like us, but you are one of us, you are okay, I love you.” And at that, he worked very hard to stand up and stumbled out of the room. Ned could see that he had a large handgun in his right hand. In fact, he accidentally banged it against the door on the way out and giggled his now-familiar giggle.

  Ned drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Six

  Ned felt the vibration before he heard the “peep peep peep” of his cell-phone alarm. He really wanted to shut it off and roll back over and go back to sleep, but he knew how important his next call would be. As he straightened up and rolled over, he accidentally stepped on one of the two young children who had fallen asleep on the floor of his room some time during the night. The kid didn’t wake up, just rolled over and let out a long sigh.

  Ned headed for the kitchen. The house was quiet. Ned leaned against the fridge and hit the contact for “Shithead.” After a couple of rings, Ned felt relieved when he heard the phone transfer over to voice mail. He waited through Neil’s long and overly complicated message, then said, “Neil, it’s Eric, I can’t come to work today . . . uh . . . I’m really fucked up, terrible headaches and vomiting . . . I really shouldn’t come in.”

  He hung up, rubbed his eyes and looked for an unoccupied place to go back to sleep, as one of the floor children had since invaded his bed. He curled up on the living-room sofa and fell back asleep. About thirty minutes passed before his phone rang. The display said “Shithead.” Ned hit ignore. Five minutes later, it rang again, flashing “Shithead.” Ned picked up. Before he could say hello, he heard Neil, his boss at the mailroom, screaming. “Eric, you ignorant fuck, get your ass into work today,” he raged. “I don’t care how bad your hangover is. I have a department to run and I don’t need your laziness to get in the way.”

  Ned waited for him to finish. “Neil, I really am sick, there’s literally no way I could come in today,” Ned said. “I may have something contagious.”

  “Maybe I should be the judge of that,” Neil said. “Why don’t you come in, and I’ll decide how sick you are . . . send you home if you’re telling the goddamned truth.”

  “Are you nuts?” Ned was angry now, and his head really was pounding. “What kind of slave-driver are you? It’s the law that you gotta allow me a sick day from time to time—and it’s not like I’ve ever asked for one before.”

  “Listen, you lying bag of crap, you could be replaced by a fuckin’ monkey,” Neil scolded. “And if you don’t come in, I’ll think about doing that.” He hung up. Ned couldn’t help thinking that Neil had enjoyed their little fight. He tried to go back to sleep, but his headache wouldn’t let him. Instead, he lay on the living room couch with his eyes closed, rolling and stretching in a fruitless effort to find a comfortable position on the short sofa.

  When Ned showed up for work Tuesday morning, Neil Bird, the manager, was there to greet him outside the front door. He was a small man, prone to wearing denim in unconventional ways. He shaved his head to hide his baldness, but had a reddish mustache and wire-framed glasses. He had his arms tightly crossed over his chest and he was pacing.

  He gave an angry smile when he saw Ned. “You don’t look sick to me, Eric,” he snapped.

  “I’m not anymore,” Ned tried to stay upbeat. “Just needed a good day’s rest.”

  “You’re a liar,” Neil said. “I’m keeping my eye on you, and if you slip up . . .”

  Ned was exasperated. “What is your fucking problem, man?” he asked, shaking his head. “One sick day and you’re making a federal case out of it—and you really shouldn’t talk to me that way.”

  Neil grinned. “I’ll talk to you any way I want. I’m the boss,” he said. “And you have to do everything I say.”

  Ned put his face in his hands. “You know what? Fuck you, Neil.”

  “Fuck me? Fuck you, you’re fired.”

  “Thank you, Neil,” Ned said, shaking his hand. “You’ve made me the happiest man on Earth. Tell Chuck or Bob to grab my stuff.” Then he turned and left. He could hear Neil shouting angrily behind him, but didn’t care what he had to say.

  Back at home, Ned got a phone call from Dave. “You got fired? You got fired from the simplest fuckin’ job in the entire world?” he asked. “What kind of a moron are you?” He didn’t wait for Ned to answer. “Wait . . . here it is. You were fired for ‘massive insubordination’—so you’re an asshole, not a moron.”

  Ned sighed. “Dave, let me explain . . .”

  “Explain when you see me at Walt’s—tonight.” He hung up.

  Ned thought for a moment and called Semyon. He told him that he’d been fired and that he needed to see the Swede that day.

  “So see him,” Semyon said. “You have the address.”

  Ned was really taken aback. “You mean I should just go . . . with no introduction or anything?”

  “Yeah, man, he knows who you are.”

  After thanking Semyon for letting him stay over at his house and praising Ludmilla and the kids, Ned hung up and took a shower. He no longer owned a suit, but put on a pressed shirt, tan trousers and a sports coat.

  The Hawkridge factory was not too far from where Ned lived. Officially in the city of Wilmington, but really out in the boonies, the factory didn’t look like what Ned had pictured. Instead of a huge gray building with smokestacks like he remembered from the Midwest, Hawkridge looked very much like a warehouse. It was a rectangular red brick building with tinted windows and a few dozen cars of varying value parked out front.

  When he went in he greeted the receptionist. When she asked him why he was there, he pulled the paper out of his jacket pocket and said, “I’m here to see Thor Andersson.”

  “Take a seat, he’ll just be a few moments,” she smiled. “And, if you want to impress him, he pronounces his name like ‘Tor’ not ‘Thor.’ ”

  “Thanks,” Ned said and smiled back. “I’ll remember that.”

  He was leafing through the old magazines when the office door opened. Two men came out, obviously still discussing business. Ned correctly surmised that the man in the suit was selling something, but the big guy in the jeans wasn’t buying. He was about Ned’s height but thicker. He had closely cropped graying hair and small blue eyes with high-set eyebrows that gave him something of a surprised look, no matter what his expression.

  He smiled at Ned and asked if he was there about the shipping and receiving job. Ned said he was and Andersson led him in. The office was nice and well lit, if somewhat stark. The furniture was small, modest and wooden but comfortable. Andersson shook Ned’s hand and introduced himself. Ned actually had to stop and think about what name he was going to use with Andersson. Then he reminded himself that he was going to try to clear it by Dave, so he introduced himself as Eric Steadman.

  Andersson explained that the position was as shipping and receiving manager. Ned would oversee a couple of other employees whose job it was to receive shipments from suppliers, sign for them, get them to the right people and to make sure outgoing shipmen
ts were picked up by the right people at the right time. And he would also be personally responsible for any shipments coming from one major supplier—Envoglobal Bucuresti, which Ned correctly surmised was Grigori’s brother’s factory.

  Ned studied the Swede’s face for any hint of conspiracy—a nod, a wink, a raised eyebrow or even a sideways look—but saw none. He realized that he had finished talking, and responded by saying, “Sounds like a great job, and I know I can do it.” They discussed pay, benefits and hours, and the Swede gave Ned a tour of the factory and introduced him to Juan and Katie, the two clerks he was to supervise.

  Ned was impressed by the whole operation, and would have looked forward to working there even if he wasn’t part of Grigori’s plan. After Neil and the mailroom, working at Hawkridge seemed almost idyllic. He expressed his gratitude to Grigori.

  Andersson smiled, shook his head and sighed. “Years ago, Grigori was a very important man in Romania,” he said. “And when I went to Romania with the idea of building and exporting things to the West, he’s the one that made it happen—he is responsible for where I am today.”

  Ned smiled.

  “I know he has some bad friends, but that’s just the way it is over there,” the Swede continued. “But he also helps people, and he told me you were a good kid who just needed a break. My instinct tells me he’s right—let’s hope he is.”

  On his way home, Ned stopped at the library to use the Internet. He looked up Hawkridge and Andersson and even found out that the chairman of Envoglobal Bucuresti was Fedor Radulov. He searched for Grigori Radulov with many different spellings of Grigori, but only two sites were returned and both were in what might have been Romanian. When he clicked on both of them he saw that they had been blocked by the library’s firewall.

  He left and went to the coffee shop Dave had arranged to meet him in. Ned hadn’t eaten all day, and was starving. His pockets were full of cash, but he didn’t want Dave to know it, so he didn’t order anything more than coffee while he waited.

  When Dave finally arrived, he had a very stern, almost parental look on his face. “What am I gonna do with you?” he asked Ned.

  “Nothing,” Ned said with a smile. “I’ve already taken care of it.”

  “I’ll say you have,” Dave snapped back. “But the company, my company, is not going to pay you to sit on your ass. You are going to work.”

  “No, really,” Ned said. “I already have a new job.”

  “What the fuck?” Dave was even angrier upon hearing that. “You can’t just go and get yourself another job without my approval.”

  “I know, I realize that now,” Ned said, hoping Dave would feel sympathetic. “But it was such a great opportunity.”

  “Yeah? I’ll be the judge of that,” Dave had clearly softened. “And if you think I’m gonna let you be a bouncer or bartender or some other job that puts you in contact with the lifestyle I’m protecting you from, I’ll see if they have any openings at the sewage treatment plant or the chicken slaughterhouse out on Route 45.”

  Ned laughed. “How does shipping and receiving manager sound?” he said proudly. “At Hawkridge.”

  “Hawkridge? Wow, I know that company,” Dave sounded truly impressed. “Very good to their workers, benefits, profit-sharing, even mortgage guarantees for long-term employees.”

  “Yeah,” was all Ned could say.

  “So how did you get to know someone in management there?” Dave sounded suspicious now. “And why would they want you—for a management position, no less.”

  Ned took a moment. “Well, there’s this sweet lady at the credit-assessment company, Dolores.” Ned grinned at his choice of names because he, in fact, hated Dolores even more than Neil. “She told me that Hawkridge was expanding and looking to hire, so I gave them a call.”

  Dave, terribly out of character, was at a loss for words.

  That night, Ned bought himself a laptop and a big-screen TV.

  Chapter Seven

  Ned’s first morning at Hawkridge was largely uneventful. He had no formal experience in shipping and receiving, so he asked Katie—the woman he was supposed to manage—to show him the ropes. He could tell she knew that he was bullshitting her about any experience in the field, but she played along anyway, and he was surprised that he could sense no resentment from her.

  At noon, Katie asked him if he wanted to go to lunch with her, Juan and some of the other office staff. Ned declined. He didn’t want to appear as though he needed to be with them all the time. But he did feel like a bite to eat and he hadn’t packed anything, so he walked outside after they had left.

  He wasn’t even out the door when he heard it: Semyon’s crazy Russian (or maybe Uzbek?) disco blaring through the open windows of his now-familiar neon green Lexus. Immediately, Ned walked as quickly as he could to the car. When Semyon saw him, he pushed hard on the horn as though his audacious car and deafening music had somehow escaped Ned’s notice. He was all smiles as Ned opened the passenger door and jumped in. He was less pleased when Ned’s first move once inside the car was to turn the music down to a thumping and blipping murmur.

  “Hey, hey, man!” Semyon shouted. “You could get killed for that in Moscow.”

  Ned gave him a look that he hoped contained the message for Semyon to get serious. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Semyon didn’t answer, instead he pulled away from the curb with smoking tires. “Subtle,” Ned said.

  “What does that ‘subtle’ word mean, anyway?”

  Ned was about to explain when he sighed and said, “I would tell you, but I still don’t think you’d understand.”

  Semyon smiled passively and drove them to a small public green space with a picnic table. Semyon took a canvas bag out of the trunk. When he got to the table, he brought out two orders of cheeseburgers and fries from a fast-food outlet Ned had never heard of before, a big bottle of vodka, a glass, a can of cheap beer and a small metal object. He tossed it to Ned as soon as he pulled it out of the bag.

  “What is this thing?” Ned examined the device. It was a matte black metal tube with a straight six-inch shaft. The tube then doubled back over itself again and again until it formed sort of a square. Two metal rods had been welded to it which Ned guessed were to keep it rigid. It had some tiny white letters and numbers on it, probably a product code. Each end of the tube had a silver-colored stopper stamped onto it.

  “You should know; it’s your job to ship and receive them,” Semyon smiled. “It’s a coolant coil from an industrial-sized air conditioner . . . well, it’s part of one, at least . . . Hawkridge can make air conditioners any size because coolant coils are modular. They can use one or a million, turn them on or off. Saves energy somehow.” Then he dove into his cheeseburger.

  Ned turned the coil over in his hands. It was a simple thing, really, but he could tell they required some work to manufacture. “So what do I have to do with them?”

  “Well, you will order double the number of coils Hawkridge needs from Envoglobal in Romania,” he said between bites. “Then you will ship half to a subcontractor called Premier Solutions in Detroit.”

  “Grigori’s company?”

  “A mutual friend of ours.”

  Ned liked the simplicity of the plan. “So, how do I know which ones to send to Detroit?”

  Semyon put up his index finger to indicate that he would answer after he was finished chewing. When he did, he reached back into the canvas bag and pulled out another coil, which appeared to be identical to the first. Then he tossed it to Ned who caught it without dropping the first one. “Notice anything different?”

  “No.” Ned was spinning it around to inspect it and then stopped. “Yeah, yeah I do, this one has yellow letters and numbers on it and the other one has white.”

  “Very smart.”

  “Very subtle.”

  “I thought you’d say that.”

  Back at the office, Ned was about to start his job in earnest when the phone on his desk rang. He
wasn’t sure what the correct protocol for answering it was, so he just said hello.

  A heavily accented voice on the other side responded without saying hello. “Roman is having second thoughts,” It said. “He says he will have to meet you.”

  “Who’s Roman? Who are you?”

  “It will be arranged,” the voice continued. “Semyon will have the details.” Then he hung up.

  That evening, after Ned left work, he was surprised to see Semyon’s car parked outside his apartment building. Semyon was sitting inside and appeared to be asleep. Ned tapped on the window close to where his head was pressed against it and was shocked that Semyon had drawn a gun and pointed it at him for a second or so.

  After he realized what was going on, Semyon apologized and asked to be invited in. Ned accommodated him but did not appreciate his friend’s constant patter about how shitty and low-rent all of his possessions were.

  When they were finally both sitting down, Semyon told him that Roman was having second thoughts about him and would have to meet him.

  “So I’ve heard,” Ned answered.

  Semyon smiled. “This is serious, man,” he said. “Roman is key, he’s important, you have to do this.”

  “Or what?”

  “You will lose your job,” he answered. Then after a long pause, he added, “At the very least.”

  Ned chuckled mirthlessly. “Okay, let’s go meet Roman.”

  “Okay, I’ll put together a meeting in the next few days and you can take a couple of days off work . . .”

  “A couple of days?”

  “Yeah, Roman is in New York—Brooklyn,” Semyon said. “It’ll be an overnight trip.”

  Ned didn’t think getting time off from Hawkridge would be a problem, but keeping it a secret from Dave would prove harder. He thought about it for a second, and realized the best way to stay out of trouble would be to limit Semyon’s involvement. “Well, I have two conditions.”

  “You are in no position to make conditions.”