by Chuck Dixon
“What kind of school was it?”
“A very special school. A very hard school. My job was to teach men how to be smart even when they were hurt or scared or tired.”
“You scared my daddy?” She pulled her hand from under his.
“Not so’s you’d know it,” he said and left his hand hovering over the mane of the knight until she slid her hand to the piece once more and moved it to threaten his queen.
“Your daddy was my best student. He taught me as much as I taught him. You want to hear a story about your daddy?”
“Mm-hm.”
“We had your daddy locked up in a kind of jail. He had a secret and his orders were to not tell us his secret. No matter how hungry or tired or thirsty he got. It was like a game, you see. Only after a few days it doesn’t feel like a game any more. Most men hold out a week or maybe two. You know what your daddy did?”
“Unh-uh.”
“He escaped the first night. We locked him up and the next morning he was gone. And so was one of our trucks. And he took parts from all the other trucks so we couldn’t chase him. He broke our radio so we couldn’t call out for help. There we were, a whole school full of soldiers and marines stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way out and no way to tell anyone the trouble we were in.”
“Wow.”
“You bet wow. You know what happened next?”
“Unh-uh.”
“Your daddy drove back the next day with a box of Mexican takeout. Must have drove all night and all day back and forth to the closest town.”
“Was he in trouble?”
“Hell, no. He did what he was supposed to. He kept his secret. Only maybe four other men made it through my class without giving up his secret. Your daddy is the only one who ever escaped on me.”
“Are you best friends, Gunny?”
“We’re brothers, little girl. You know what that makes me?”
“No?”
“Your uncle.”
“Cool,” she said and he felt her hand slide a bishop across the board to take his queen.
“I did not see that coming,” Uncle Gunny said.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Only one person hates a coward more than me and that’s God Almighty Himself.”
47
* * *
Joe Bob was freaking.
All alone in the shower, mud streaming from his legs, he was quietly falling apart. The mud was from digging a grave for Mojo in the early morning hours. The dog’s skull was crushed. The Rottweiler weighed in at sixty pounds and needed a big hole.
He sank to the floor, face in hands, and let the needle spray of scalding water beat down on him. He let himself cry. He allowed the pain welling up in his chest to come out in a bestial wail. The all-around glass walls misted to hide him from the world.
Delia was already gone. She’d packed two bags and took off for her sister’s place in Tulsa. She wasn’t staying in this house one more night. If he believed her, she might never come back. Delia demanded he pay for a charter and Joe Bob didn’t argue. Twenty grand for a deadhead flight to Oklahoma. He paid for that and the car that came and picked her up and took her away.
Joe Bob ran through his own options for heading for cover. He had responsibilities, people who relied on him, obligations. None of that meant anything if those two men came back.
And now he had to run.
There was no way to call off what he started when he called Levon Cade into his office.
He phoned Levon on the only number he had. He left messages until the voice mail was full.
Joe Bob didn’t know what Levon had done that brought those men into his home. He only asked Levon to find his daughter. He never asked how that would be accomplished. It hadn’t mattered to Joe Bob then. It sure as shit mattered now.
The men who came to see him knew why Levon was in Florida. They knew about Jenna. They knew where she was. They knew what happened to her. They were the ones Levon went to find. They offered him no solace, no answers, no hope of ever seeing Jenna again. All they did was promise that they would return if the search for Jenna continued.
That scared him. With the fright came shame. A father’s shame at his own helplessness to help his child. A man couldn’t turn from his flesh and blood to save his own skin. No man does that.
He raised his face to the spray and let the water wash his tears away then stood up and turned off the taps.
Joe Bob made up his mind. He wasn’t running and he wasn’t calling off what he’d started even if he could. Fuck these assholes. He’d unleashed Levon Cade on them and they’d have to deal with that. He hadn’t started this shit. They had. Whatever kind of hell Cade was raising down in Florida, they’d called it down on themselves.
Sometimes doing nothing at all is the best revenge.
48
* * *
It was a matter of trust, Dr. Jordan Roth told himself as he sat gagged with wrists duct taped to the hanging bar of a closet in room twenty-seven of the Golden Chariot Motor Lodge.
He thought he had an understanding with the two men who took him from the shelter of his old life and into a world of movement and chaos. They were accomplices now. He had cooperated with them willingly and with no resistance. But they insisted on treating him like a captive, like a child, still.
Something made them stop their pharmaceutical shopping spree. They quickly found a motel where they could pull their car directly up to the room. The place was run down, a hideous remnant of the ’50s. Loud music was playing from one of the rooms that was being used to house a party. They’d deposited him here in the closet and left.
His hands were tingling from blood loss. He tried shifting in the tight confines of the closet but found no relief. His legs were tired. His feet hurt from standing. But if he relaxed then his weight pulled the tape tight on his wrists and brought new pain.
The music and shouting and breaking glass stopped after a few hours. A strip of light beneath the closet door turned from watery blue to muted white as the sun filtered through the blinds over the windows in the bedroom outside.
A knock at the door followed by another. The jangle of a key ring, the turning of a lock. Someone was in the room and it wasn’t his captors. Lights were turned on outlining the closet door in a corona of yellow radiance. Water ran in the bathroom. A vacuum cleaner droned. A shadow grew to block the strip of light on the floor. The closet door swung open.
A diminutive woman in an over-sized smock raised her eyebrows in mild shock. She was a Latina with almond eyes that regarded him without interest. He made mewling noises at her through the tape. Her only response was a sad shake of her head.
She reached up past him to retrieve a pair of fresh toilet paper rolls from the shelf above his head. After a prim nod she turned away and shut the door.
The wheels of the vacuum cleaner squeaked away. The lights went out. The door closed and the lock snapped back in place.
He was alone again.
The doctor was awakened by noises from the room. The door opened and the big man was there. Jordan was cut free. They had McDonald’s breakfast takeout. He drank two cups of orange juice and wolfed down a greasy egg and bacon sandwich.
“Take a shower. We are leaving here,” the younger one with the pop star looks and predator eyes said when they were done eating.
The two men were taking him with them. It sounded like a long drive ahead.
They’d decided to keep him. He rushed to the bathroom to take his shower. The days ahead held adventures for him unimagined.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Like Ty Cobb said, ‘Hit ’em where they ain’t.’”
49
* * *
An explosion at a pawnshop in Seffner, a blue collar/no collar town south of Tampa, reduced the building to a scorched shell. It went boom at three in the morning. A standalone store, the only outside damage was a spray of glass on the street before it.
The first suspect was a gas explosion
. One of the firemen hosing down the smoldering wreckage called bullshit on that. He’d done three deployments in Iraq and knew the stink of discharged C-4 when he smelled it. Someone was pissed at somebody and letting them know it.
Just in case that somebody missed the point, a second pawn shop, this one in Port Richey north of Tampa exploded. Another standalone blasted hollow within twenty minutes of the first explosion.
The following morning, Symon Kharchenko received a FedEx package addressed to him at his condo. Inside was a cellphone with a note on a Post-It in marker.
CALL ME.
Symon hit send.
“Yeah.” A male voice. An American.
“You have balls, my friend. I tell you that,” Symon said. He paced the great room of the condo.
“You know what I want. Give me the girl and this ends.”
“This is never going to end. Not for you. We know who you are.”
“And I know who you are, Kharchenko. I know what you have. I know how to take it away.”
“You have already taken my sons.”
“Give me the girl and this ends. Keep this phone so you can tell me when you have her.”
“You give me orders? Tell me what to do? Fuck your mother!” This last was shouted in Ukrainian as Symon strode out onto his balcony and sent the phone flying out into space to fall into the water of the marina many stories below.
It was still early morning. He was dressed in a silk robe only. His own house phone rang. He snatched it from his dresser. It was Soshi with the latest he’d heard. The Georgian had special contacts inside the county sheriff departments where the two pawnshops once stood. Both were brought down by strategically placed charges. Officially the motive was robbery and the blasts were meant to cover any evidence.
“Robbery?” Symon said.
“The under counter safes are both gone. Torn out and carried away,” Soshi said.
Together over a million dollars in cash at least.
Both pawnshops were money laundries for the Vor. It was easy to move ill-gotten cash through a shop that bought and sold items using cash; items that were all aftermarket. The meticulously kept sales records of each store were almost entirely fiction. On paper they were going concerns. In reality the only car on the lots most days belonged to each shop’s manager.
They were separately owned through two different holding companies with no connection to one another. Even the managers, and paper-only owners, of each shop had no idea their businesses were connected in any way. This Levon Cade knew they were connected and struck at them to send a message. He knew more about the brotherhood’s operations than they knew about him.
“He has no family but a young daughter and she has disappeared,” Symon said.
“The man is alone? What man is alone?” Soshi said.
Symon did not tell the fat Georgian about the missing girl and her building contractor father who’d paid this Cade to find her. Soshi would be on the phone to everyone. There was no need for all to know what had brought this curse upon them. And the father-in-law. Symon needed to think on that one.
“We should give Cade’s name to the police. Let them find him,” Soshi said.
“No. We will not do that. That is not our way,” Symon said.
“How do we find him?”
“We are many. He is one.”
“Exactly, Symon. How do we find one man in a city? It is like finding one louse in your bed. Remember the lice in the camps?”
Symon grunted that he did.
“This man knows where to strike us, how to hurt us. We can use all our men to look for him and leave our interests unguarded.”
“Then what do I do, Soshi?”
“Give him what he wants and be rid of him.”
“And let Danya and Vanko’s deaths go unanswered,” Symon said.
“Give him Dimi. It is Dimi who brought this on us. Let Dimi pay for all.”
Symon ended the call without a farewell.
50
* * *
The driver stood well away from his semi as the gantry lowered the Conex over his truck bed. The sun was warm but the wind off the bay waters had a chilling effect on the Port of Tampa. The driver was not used to this kind of cold. Florida was supposed to be warm, hermano.
He was up from Honduras with papers that identified him as a fully licensed transport driver named Isaac Birnbaum of Circe, Arkansas. He worked for Don White Freight. He didn’t know who Don White was. He didn’t know Don White was a total fiction created as the founder for a company owned by Bayside Transit through a Delaware corporation called Morgantown Trucking and all of those bodies a part of Stoneforge Ltd, a closely held limited partnership in which all the partners were named Yuri Baghdasarian, a member of the same Vor brotherhood as the Kharchenkos and Kolisnyks.
The container inched lower and lower onto the chassis until it was in place and secured.
The import manifest described the contents of the container as organic fertilizer. According to its paperwork, the forty foot cargo container was filled with stacks of bagged primo cattle feces from Brazil.
In truth the steel box was packed floor to ceiling, back to front, with cases of counterfeit Marlboros from China. Manufactured in a hidden factory in rural and remote Yunxiao province, each pack cost under twenty cents to produce. Even with shipping, bribes and distribution there was a two thousand percent profit to be made. And the profits got sweeter the further north the cigarettes travelled. The taxes on a carton of butts rose astronomically depending on where the truck wound up. The contents of the container on Isaac Birnbaum’s truck was worth twenty million dollars in New York.
The truck pulled away from the gantry area and made its way around to the checkpoint where it stopped for radiation scanning as ordered by Homeland Security. Isaac’s paperwork was glanced at by a customs agent and waved through. The load of Fauxboros was on its way to New Jersey and then into delis, drugstores, convenience stores, hotel lobbies and markets all over the five boroughs.
The driver geared up and took the truck down the long lane lined either side by a mile of stacked Conex boxes rising either side of the road like steel Matterhorns.
He was out on a surface road heading for the on-ramp that would take him to I-4 and then I-75 for the two-day straight haul north.
A Range Rover pulled out from the lot of a derelict Tire Kingdom and fell into the truck’s slipstream. The truck driver, bouncing to the Garifunka coming from his radio, never saw the SUV following at a discreet distance. Not even when the Rover followed him into a rest stop north of Wesley Chapel.
Hours later, county deputies and state troopers responded to calls about an explosion and fire out at the end of an unpaved road above Dade City. A truck and Conex container sat in a sandy area far from any houses yet the blast was heard and felt for miles around. The whole mess was burning now, sending a thick pall of white smoke into the sky.
The cops sniffed the air. The smokers among them recognized the smell. Even the committed ex-smokers felt the old cravings returning.
The registered driver was found duct taped to a toilet in a stall at a rest stop down on 75. The two staties who took his statement understood enough of his frantic Spanish to understand that he didn’t see anything. Isaac “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” Birnbaum swore that he was taking a piss at the urinals and that’s the last thing he remembered before he came to bound and gagged on the cold porcelain of the excusado.
51
* * *
Symon Kharchenko received another FedEx box with another cell phone inside. No note this time.
“Yeah.” The voice on the other end answered. The same man.
“All you are doing is digging a deeper grave for yourself,” Symon said. He bit off every word.
“You have to ask yourself how much Dimi Kolisnyk is worth to you. My guess is that he’s already cost you too much.”
“You are a dead man.”
“Give me the girl. Or give me Dimi.”
“You think you will walk away from this?”
“Will you?”
The call ended.
Symon gripped the phone in his fist until the blood drained from his hand. He then set the phone down on the kitchen table.
His own phone rang. He keyed the cordless to talk. It was Yuri.
“We must meet. Now.” Yuri was speaking between clenched teeth.
Yuri disconnected.
The meeting was in a private dining room at the back of a diner near the Clearwater causeway. About the table there were only old men this time. Soshi, Yuri and Oreske were already there when Symon arrived. There was a chair for Wolo. A glass of vodka set at the empty place.
They dispensed with the usual etiquette and niceties.
“How will you pay me?” Yuri demanded, a fisted hand on the table.
“I will buy you a new truck,” Symon shrugged.
“Fuck the truck! I am down fifteen million! Where is that? Where is my money?”
“You will get it. You have my word,” Symon said.
“Your word!” Yuri struck the table top. Vodka sloshed from the glass before Wolo’s chair.
“Give this man what he wants,” Oreske said, his voice like stones grinding together.
“I would give him what he wants. What then? He goes away? We will never find him again.”
“Who gives a fuck?” Yuri said in English.
“He killed my sons!” Symon protested.
“Were your idiot sons worth fifteen million? Or your pawn shops? How much did he take from you? How much more will he take from us?”
Symon’s vision went white. He rose from his chair, palms flat on the table top.
Fat Soshi stood to press him back into the chair. The Georgian remained by him, a ham-sized hand on his shoulder. The man spoke slowly and deliberately, his voice resonant behind Symon.
“Call him, Symon. Give him the girl. Give him Dimi. The money is bad to lose. Worse is the police. They will connect these explosions and fires. They will not connect them to this Cade. They will connect them to us. This must end. It is what is best for all.”