by W. S. Greer
Mikey stared at Kelvin in confusion for a second, but then his face changed to something else. He understood. He knew that Kelvin had gone through something very traumatic, and this wasn’t the time for trying to argue with him. Not to mention the possibility of Kelvin actually being right.
“Okay,” Mikey replied apprehensively. “But, we’re getting you a private, home doctor who can come out and make sure that you’re okay, because I don’t know shit about bandaging shot up arms.”
Fifteen minutes later, Kelvin was dressed, and Mikey and I helped him silently and secretly walk to the elevator. We couldn’t tell the doctor or the nursing staff that we were leaving, because we knew they’d try to force us to stay, if not for the healthcare, then at least to talk to the cops.
When the doors opened, we quietly helped Kelvin inside the elevator, and I hurried to push the button to take us to the basement, where Mikey had parked. Just as our doors began to close, I heard the sound of the elevator doors next to ours opening. Just before our doors closed completely, I saw two officers step into the hall and walk past us without seeing that we were there, and I couldn’t help but notice the tattoos on one of them. They were the same style of tattoos as the ones on the man from my dream—the man Kelvin shot last night. The only difference was that these tattoos weren’t on his hand—they were on his neck. Nonetheless, they were the same.
It took us damn near an hour to get to Mikey’s house on the edge of South Side Chicago. Kelvin had asked for him to drive us back to the Red Chip, but Mikey insisted that we stay at his house until Kelvin was well enough to at least lift his arm. Kelvin put up a little bit of a fight, but it didn’t take him long to give in, finally accepting that it’d be much harder for him to protect us if he couldn’t even use his left arm.
Before heading to Mikey’s, we made a quick pit stop at my house so that I could grab some more clothes, because there was no way in hell I was going to leave Kelvin’s side. I had every intention of being there with him while he nursed his arm back to good health. When we were on our way, I called Lexy and told her that Kelvin and I were going to take a quick trip out of town for a few days before Christmas break ended, and that I needed her to look after Meghan for me while I was gone. After scolding me for not calling her sooner, she agreed to take Meghan to her house and watch her until we got back. Before leaving the house, I left the key in a little secret hiding spot between two rocks by the door, so that she could get in and get the cat while I was gone.
Thirty minutes later, Mikey’s all-black Escalade pulled through the gate of a lavish two-story house with bright red brick and perfectly white doors. Once we were inside, Mikey and I escorted Kelvin to the guest bedroom, and laid him down on the bed. I could tell the pain medication was starting to wear off, and Kelvin was beginning to wince every time his arm moved even a little bit.
“I’m sorry, Babe,” I said with a frown. “Did I hit it? I’m so sorry.”
“Nah, it wasn’t you. It’s just starting to hurt whether I move it or not. Maybe leaving was a bad idea after all,” Kelvin tried to joke with a half-smile.
“Hey, Lily,” Mikey jumped in, “if you go down to the kitchen, you’ll find some pretty potent pain medication in the cabinet next to the stove. On the right.”
“Okay, great,” I replied as I stood up. “Thanks. I’ll go get it now.”
I quickly made my way down the immaculate stairs, careful not to glide my feet on the spotless carpet. It took me a minute to actually find the kitchen, but once I did, I found the pain meds pretty quickly and ran back up the stairs.
When I stepped into the room, Mikey, who I could hear talking before I even got to the top of the steps, suddenly stopped talking and began staring at me like I did something wrong by coming back to the room so quickly.
I furrowed my brow and squinted at the two of them. “What? Why the hell are you looking at me like that?”
Kelvin jumped in before Mikey could respond. “It’s fine, Lilliana. Come in and have a seat. Uncle Mikey just thinks that what we’re talking about might be too much for you to handle. He thinks we’ll scare you away. I already told him he was wrong.”
I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed next to Kelvin and took his hand in my own. “Well, that sounds interesting. It’s obvious some of your family members fail to realize how much I love you. There’s no scaring me away. So, what are you guys talking about?”
Mikey and Kelvin glanced at each other, then Kelvin looked at me and spoke again. “We’re just trying to figure out how we’re gonna do it.”
“Okay.” I replied. “How you’re gonna do what?”
Kelvin glanced down at the bed momentarily, then his eyes popped back up to me. “How we’re gonna kill Ivan Baskov.”
When Nestor Gavlik walked into the dining room, he looked around and made sure he recognized every man sitting at the large dinner table. Once he felt comfortable, he realized that someone was missing.
“Ivan’s not here,” he said as he took his seat next to Ilia.
“No, he’s not,” Ilia replied with an intense glare. “And there’s a reason for that.” Ilia took his eyes off of Nestor and began making eye contact with all four of the men who were in the room. He wanted them all to know that he saw them—that he loved them. “Tonight, we stop disappointing Ivan. As you all know, we’ve had an ongoing problem lately, and it’s hindering our ability to grow as a family—our ability to expand. So, until this problem is taken care of, our family will stay stuck in the same place, and just like Ivan said, we’re all burdened with this now. So, even with Viktor down, we’ve been keeping tabs on our little problem, and little does he know, that the next time him and that little bitch of his makes a move, we’ll know all about it, and we’ll be ready.”
Ilia took a moment to draw in his audience, and then he stood up to help emphasize the importance of what they were about to do.
“We’ve waited a long time for this, brat’ya (brothers). Tonight, we’ll put an end to all the waiting. Tonight, we’ll advance our family forward and remove the shackles from around our ankles. Tonight, we stop disappointing Ivan.”
Then, Ilia reached down into his pocket and pulled out a disposable cell phone, waving it in the air for his family to see.
“When this phone rings, we’ll know exactly where he’ll be, and when he’ll be there. The time has come brat’ya (brothers). We end this tonight.”
It’d been two days since Kelvin and I had left the hospital, and we hadn’t stepped foot outside the house since we got here. Mikey and Kelvin’s Aunt, Lauren, had been especially hospitable and were seemingly going out of their way to make sure that we had absolutely everything that we needed. We barely even had a need to ever leave the room, especially since it had a bathroom in it already.
Lauren, who was the perfect combination of light brown skin and light brown eyes, seemed love the idea of having two houseguests, and was taking advantage and cooking for us for almost every meal. I felt like I’d gained ten pounds in just the couple of days we’d been in the house.
Kelvin was also starting to get some of his strength back in his arm. Lauren and Mikey had called a home nurse to come in and check up on it, and swap the bandages out. Now, Kelvin was able to move around for the most part, but the nurse told him to keep his arm in the sling she’d provided. Kelvin was extremely hardheaded, however, and seemed to want to prove to himself and everybody else in the house that he didn’t need the sling by taking it off as often as he could, only resorting to wearing it when his arm got tired and started to ache again. As much as I admired his attempts to “man up,” there was a much bigger part of me that wished he’d just wear the sling all the time until his arm was completely healed. Men and their egos.
I especially wanted Kelvin to heal because of what I knew was about to happen in the very near future. There’d been very little mention of the conversation we’d had two days ago about killing Ivan Baskov, but the topic did come up, it was obvious that Mikey and Kelvin
had schemed pretty deeply and had someone watching Ivan’s house, tracking his every move. Apparently, the plan was to track Ivan and eliminate him at their earliest convenience, but Ivan was a smart man. He never left the house at the same time every day, nor did he take the same route to the little Russian restaurant where he and his brothers would go to have meetings. Other than that, Mikey and Kelvin hadn’t been able to find anything on Ivan that they could use to try to set him up. But, I knew that wouldn’t last forever.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of killing Ivan at first. I suppose I felt fear initially, and then that fear turned into worrying about Kelvin or Mikey being arrested for murder. Then, however—after two days of thinking about it—I found myself coming to grips with it. No, I didn’t think it was right to murder anyone, however, this situation seemed to be a special case. Ivan Baskov and his family had already killed Kelvin’s brother, and now they’d tried to kill us both three times in the past two weeks. So, I came to the conclusion that it was either him or us. We all knew that Ivan wouldn’t stop trying to kill Kelvin until he finally did it, and that he didn’t care if I died in the process. So, were we supposed to just sit around and wait for the next time Ivan would try to kill us, and just hope that he‘d be unsuccessful once again? The truth was that the chances of surviving another attempted hit were slim to none, and if we didn’t do something about it, Kelvin and I were going to die. So, when I heard Mikey’s cell phone ring, I was prepared. I’d already accepted it, and I was ready.
After a ten minute conversation in his bedroom, Mikey finally came speed walking down the hall, into our temporary room. His face was completely serious, and he had a bead of sweat on his forehead like he was nervous. Kelvin and I looked at each other, signaling that we knew what was about to be said, then we both turned to Mikey.
“I just got a call from my guy,” Mikey said nervously. “He said he overheard something today, and I think we need to talk about it.”
Kelvin sat up in the bed and swung his legs over the side, resting his feet on the soft, white carpet. “Okay. What is it?”
“My guy says he followed Ivan out to Freeport today, where he stopped at a jewelry store. After Ivan was in the store about ten minutes, my guy got ballsy and decided to go in and see what was going on. When he got there, he saw Ivan at the counter, talking to the cashier about a ring he wanted to buy, so my guy steps closer—acting like he’s looking for jewelry himself—and starts to eaves drop on their conversation. He overhears Ivan telling the cashier that tonight’s his two year wedding anniversary for what is his third marriage. He says he’s buying the ring and plans to give it to his wife tonight when he takes her out to dinner at Alinea over in Lincoln Park. He even told the cashier that they had dinner reservations at eight, which is three hours from right now.”
Kelvin looked over at me with a worried expression. I could tell that he was waiting for me to say something about backing out, but I didn’t, and I knew I wouldn’t. Then, he leaned over and kissed me softly on the cheek.
“I never meant to get you involved in any of this crazy shit that we have going on with my family. I also never knew that I could love someone the way I love you. So, if you want to, we can decide against this right now. We can say that we’re above this kind of shit, and try to move on with our lives as normally as we can. We can say no. All you have to do is say the word, Baby.”
I thought for a minute about what Kelvin said. It sounded nice—the idea of saying no to this and trying to act as if this threat of the Baskov family didn’t really exist, but we both knew better. It would never end for us. The fear of someone coming out of nowhere and attacking us would always be in the back of our minds, no matter where we went, or how much time went by. They were after us, and they weren’t going to stop. Ivan Baskov had already made this decision for us.
“You know we can’t do that, Kelvin,” I replied, lifting my hand and rubbing his face gently with my fingers. “If we don’t do something about this, he won’t stop. He won’t stop until we’re dead. I refuse to lay down and wait to be killed. I never imagined being in this position, and this is something that I wish we didn’t have to do, but this has to be done. We have to do it, or we’ll never be free.”
Kelvin stared at me for a second, and it was like I could see pride in his eyes as he smiled at me, and then leaned over to kiss me once again. Then, he turned his attention back to Mikey, who was still standing in the doorway. “Can you get everything lined up in the next three hours?”
“Of course,” Mikey replied with a grin of his own.
“Okay,” Kelvin said. “Then let’s do it. Set it up, Uncle Mikey.”
“With pleasure,” Mikey answered as he turned on his heel and started to walk out.
“Oh, and Uncle Mikey,” Kelvin said again, stopping Mikey in his tracks. “Make sure this doesn’t get back to my dad. We’ll figure out what to do about him once this is done.”
I think it finally hit me the moment Kelvin zipped up the back of my dress. It was black, with very thin straps, and I thought for a moment that if I didn’t wear a pretty hefty jacket, I was probably going to freeze to death in this Chicago cold.
When I called Kelvin over, he stopped buttoning the sleeves on his white shirt to come help me.
“This dress is beautiful, Babe,” he said as he placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me around, which would normally prompt naughty thoughts—but not tonight.
I heard the zipper sliding up, and I felt the dress grow a little tighter around my body, then Kelvin rubbed my shoulder as he walked away and went back to what he was doing. That was when it hit me.
After tonight, my life would never be the same again. It was already seven-thirty in the evening, and our plan was for Kelvin and I to make it to the restaurant by nine, so that Ivan and his wife of two years would already be seated and eating. So, that gave me an hour and a half to go over this in my head for the millionth time, and remind myself that we absolutely had to do this if we wanted to be safe.
After my dress was secured, I sat down at the all-white vanity table on the side of the room. I looked at my hair in the mirror and made sure that it looked right, and that the pins that were holding it all in place hadn’t come loose and all my curls fallen out of place. Then, I applied a dark magenta lipstick to my lips, and inserted the black and silver dangling earrings that I always wore with this dress. The next thing I knew, I was just staring at myself in the mirror with a dejected look on my face. I looked myself in the eyes and asked myself over and over again—is this what you want for your life? Every time I asked myself that question, the same answer kept coming to me—I want Kelvin for my life, and I want us to be safe. But, what if doing this didn’t change anything? What if we killed Ivan, and somebody else just stepped into his place and continued to try to kill us to avenge him? Was there ever an end to something like this? Was there ever a way to get away from the danger of this mob lifestyle? Or, does it haunt you forever? Is this what you want for your life?
Suddenly, I felt doubt beginning to creep into my head. The sudden fear of Ivan’s replacement being even more dangerous than he is took a firm grip on my heart and I instantly felt overwhelmed. I felt tears slowly climbing their way to my eyes as I thought about it all. Yes, I wanted to be with Kelvin more than anything in the world, but what if being together meant that we could never be safe? What if we were only able to be together if we were having to run from mob bosses, and hoping that our car wouldn’t explode when we started it? What if it just wasn’t meant to be? And if it wasn’t meant to be, then how could we have made it this far? How could we have gotten through all the ridiculously crazy shit that we’d been through? There was no way in hell we went through all that for nothing. Is this what you want for your life?
“Are you okay?” I heard Kelvin say from behind me.
I looked at him through the mirror and marveled at how sexy he looked in his black tuxedo. He even switched it up and wore a black bow tie. He was gorge
ous.
“I’m okay,” I answered hesitantly. “I just have a lot going on in my head. All of this is just really intense.”
Kelvin sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward on his forearms. “I know it is, Babe, and I know you’re scared. So am I. This definitely isn’t something that I’m used to, and I wish we could just go on with our lives, and not have to worry about the Baskovs trying to sneak up on us, but we can’t. They’ll never go away, Lilliana. Not unless we do something to stop them.”
“But what if this doesn’t stop them? What if we kill Ivan tonight, and somebody else steps in his place tomorrow? What then?”
Kelvin took a second to glance down at the floor before answering me. “I’ve thought about that myself, to be honest. But, there really isn’t anything we can do to prevent that. Sure, somebody probably will step in Ivan’s place, but that doesn’t mean that they’re gonna want to kill me. I like to believe that this agenda they have is being ran by Ivan, and hopefully it’ll die with him tonight. All we can do is hope that after tonight, all this crazy shit comes to an end, and you and I can move on with our lives together. After all, that’s all I really care about. I just want to be with you.”
I looked into Kelvin’s beautifully dark eyes, and in them, I saw hope. He didn’t know if anybody would replace Ivan any better than I did, but all we had was the hope that after this—after we went this far—it would all be over. There really wasn’t anything else that we could do, except hold onto hope. I knew he was holding onto it, so when I smiled at him, it was my way of holding onto it with him.
“I have something I want to give you,” Kelvin said with a grin as he stood up and walked over to the nightstand on the side of the bed he’d been sleeping on for the past few days. I watched him open the drawer and pull out a black box, then he walked back over to me, and I couldn’t help but smile as I noticed his shoes. He was wearing the ones he wore on our first date together—my favorite pair.