Johnny Wylde

by Wynne, Marcus

  Chapter Thirty Three

  “So what do you figure is left of their machine?” Marcus said.

  Deon shrugged as he worked a rifle cleaning rod up and down the barrel of his Galil. “They have a handful of soldiers, probably out at their farm. And Irina.”

  Joe laughed, a harsh sound. “What is she going to do? She’s just a woman…”

  Deon looked up at that. “Don’t underestimate her. She has been the power behind Sergey for a long time. She is by far the more dangerous of the two.”

  Marcus and Joe stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

  “How so?” Marcus said.

  “She’s the brains, always was,” Deon said. “But who in this business will deal with a woman? No one. Hence Sergey, hence the gone but not lamented Mr. Darko. Where is she going to go? They have money, yes, but she has product that is worth more money, and some soldiers. We can’t count her out.”

  “Easy enough,” Joe said. “Let’s go out there and get her.”

  Deon laughed. “I was thinking maybe I’d just go and talk to her. She will be needing a new business partner…”

  Marcus and Joe exchanged glances.

  “That’s cold,” Marcus said. “Her husband is still smoking in the street, and you’re already moving in on the widow?”

  Joe laughed.

  Deon shrugged, continued to clean his gun. “She is not an ordinary woman.”

  “I’ll say,” Marcus said. “So what now?”

  “After the battle, tighten your helmet straps,” Deon said.

  “Fucking Obi Wan Kenobi I got here,” Joe said. “Hand me some more patches, will you?”

  Deon tossed over a bundle of rifle cleaning patches. They were working in the extension he’d put on the three car garage of the safe house he maintained in the quiet Oak Manor neighborhood of west Lake City. Cars in the front, but then through the heavy metal door at the back of the garage you came into an extended workshop and armory that was where Deon kept most of his on-hand product. The house was held in trust by a local bank, and the paper trail led back to a holding company, with no connections back to Deon. He spent time here, kept to himself, spoke little to neighbors who knew that he traveled a lot. On the other side of town was another smaller unit, that had the entire basement converted to a storage facility.

  But this was what he called home.

  Or the closest thing to a home he kept.

  Deon washed his hands at a large metal sink at the back. “Beer?”

  “Always,” Marcus said.

  Deon opened up the ice box and pulled out three long neck Budweisers, handed them around. The three men sat together in companionable silence, sipped their beers.

  “I think I’ll have to find a way to give Mrs. Komorov a call today,” Deon said. “Express my condolences.”

  “Here’s to odd attractors,” Marcus said.

  “Odd attractors?” Joe said.

  “Chaos theory, my friend. Chaos theory.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Marcus laughed. “You need to read something besides action novels and comic books, my friend.”

  “Who’s got time to read?”

  Deon and Marcus exchanged glances.

  “Philistine,” Marcus said.

  “Don’t start with me,” Joe said.

  “It’s like a thespian,” Marcus said.

  “That’s like a lesbian?” Joe said.

  Marcus laughed and laughed. “You’ll get it one, day, brother.”

  ***

  “Holy fuck, Batman,” Nina said.

  She stood next to her cruiser and surveyed the block long crime scene taped off with yellow banners and surrounded by cruisers, ambulances, forensics vans, television vans with their masts extended fully, and the obligatory heard of gawkers and on-lookers. LT Fabruzzi looked over at her and shook his head.

  “Your boy Darko was in the middle of all this shit,” Fabruzzi said. “He’s the third crispy critter from the left over there by the meat wagon. Sergey Komorov and some assorted soldiers from his crew round out the barbeque menu today.”

  “What was all this about?” Nina said.

  “I’m thinking this is Act 2 of the epic that was played out in Viet Town the other day,” Fabruzzi said. “You got Steep Ride and his crew got, in the drive by of all drive bys, along with a very hard core bunch of the Hmong Ghost Riders, just about all their main shooters, including a guy named Ho who was seen in the company of your pal Darko, and who is affiliated with the whole Komorov machine. Or what’s left of it, I should say.”

  “So who’s the missing player?” Nina said.

  “That’s what you got that shield for, Detective. Go out and detect for me. Darko is done, well done by the looks of it, but this here ties in with that big time shooting of yours yesterday…”

  “Darko’s dead. So Sex Crimes is done with this. You want me working with Homicide?”

  Fabruzzi considered her. “Nina, not to blow smoke up your ass, but you’re probably the best detective in this department. Yes, I know that Homicide would poach you in a minute, as would every body else. And I know you’re the queen prima donna when it comes to how you want to work, exactly the way you like to work. So no, you don’t have to work with Homicide. Go over and talk to them…I just want you to do what you do best -- wander around and find shit out for me. And then Homicide can run or you can run, hell, I don’t care. Just go out while the trail is hot, and find me the missing party here. This is open warfare, and we don’t know all the players, but there’s somebody behind the scenes who is very, very good at this shit. I want to know who it is.”

  Nina considered him back.

  The lone gun woman? She kind of liked that idea.

  “Sure, Oozy,” she said. “I’ll sniff around. I think I know just where to go…”

  ***

  Jimmy stared at the ceiling, Lizzy pressed up against him, her breathing a gentle sound in his ears. This was the longest they had ever stayed together; most of their visits were short, punctuated by sex.

  And though he didn’t want to admit it, he liked it.

  He liked everything about it. Her in his bed, the coffee, the soothing calm of her presence. The smell of her.

  Outside, the rest of his world called to him.

  What made him resist this, the warmth of her, the ease he felt with her? He didn’t know, he only knew it was there. It was as though she shone a light on him, a light that exposed something dark within himself, something he didn’t want to face…or else maybe it was the fear of letting go of what he had been before, and changing into something new and different…of entering unknown territory.

  He lifted himself on one elbow, propped his chin in his hand, looked down at the woman sleeping next to him.

  Saw the possibility of change, of letting light into his life.

  Considered that.

  Did he want to go there? It was so seductive…

  Or was it better to stay where he was?

  He’d been a man in the shadows his whole life, and the prospect of being in the light with this woman, this woman who lived a life that was like his, so completely different, so completely compartmented…

  He didn’t know if he was ready for that.

  Or that she would be.

  But it felt right, and that was what he’d learned, the hard way, was the best guidance for him. Thinking through worked on one level, but when it came to action and the world of his relationships, his gut feelings were everything.

  And where would that take them? Living together? A dancer and a bouncer? Two people of the night time world…but when they were together, it was so different. That was what struck him. It was so different. Would her work bother him? He didn’t think so, it didn’t bother him now.

  A dream he’d had, a long time ago, after what happened in Afghanistan…

  …walking away from it all, and living somewhere quiet, a small town where no one knew him, maybe by the sea, or in the mou
ntains, like Montana…

  …living a quiet life with a woman…

  …this woman?

  He held his hand near her face, felt her breath stir the fine hairs on the back of his hand, the warmth of it stirring him.

  Warm.

  That’s what she was.

  She thawed something cold in him.

  And that felt as though it was where his resistance came from. That cold part wasn’t ready to go, or maybe it was and didn’t just know it yet…

  Too much thinking, too much ahead.

  Time to be in the moment.

  He touched her face.

  Just in the moment.

  ***

  Irina Komorov sat transfixed in the big front room of the massively remodeled farm house she and Sergey lived in. Had lived in, she corrected herself. Sergey.

  Sergey.

  The front wall had been knocked out and replaced with glass, a long living room with multiple couches and armchairs set up. The view was beautiful, stretching out over a long expanse of manicured lawn that fell into a pasture, then the Embarrass River wound through it, a long stretch of rolling hills…the city was behind them, and Irina liked to keep her back to the city lights when she had worked out the remodel.

  This was her favorite room.

  Her back was straight and rigid, her feet square on the ground, her hands folded in her lap.

  Sergey.

  They had been together since leaving Moscow ten years before, both of them twenty-five, on the run from one of the vlhodnys who nursed a grudge against Sergey. Sergey was fresh out of the Spesnatz, eager to put his skills to work in the marketplace of the New Russia. And he had, and the money they’d saved, from his work and from hers in a whorehouse, had brought them here to Lake City, among the first of the Slavic and Russian émigrés to settle here.

  Sergey.

  She had seen it on the television, that’s all she knew, and now the telephone call from the police, the officers on their way to talk to her, Sergey’s charred ID and cell phone leading them this way…

  So much to do.

  What was left of their soldiers had come here. Set up the beds in the converted barn behind the farmhouse that served as both their warehouse and their men’s quarters. She had to think about what to do with them, with what remained of their business, their product. What to do about this.

  She stared out the window, at the sunlight falling through a stand of oak trees that lined the lawn. Somewhere deep inside her, something stirred, rose to the surface.

  Sergey.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  “Hey, Nina,” Sergeant Oliver James said. He was a tall, muscled man with the look of a running back, restless eyes that fixed you fiercely, then moved on, always scanning. He favored cheap off the rack suits from J.C. Penney’s or Sears, since it seemed he was always getting torn up, though Homicide detectives weren’t supposed to be wrestling with suspects, they were supposed to be investigators, and not get their hands dirty in the same way as the patrol dogs did. But hey, once a street po-lice, always a street po-lice, and he liked the personal touch.

  He liked Nina, or Sergeant Capushek as everybody else called her, too, but he hadn’t been able to get her to give him the time of day. He’d even gone down to the range to hang out, since she spent a lot of her off-duty time drilling holes in targets and shooting for beers with the SWAT boys, and embarrassed himself by not being able to hit the target half the time. He preferred to put the fist and then the boot to his guys, all those years on patrol and he’d never fired a shot, though he’d waved his pistol around plenty. And despite the TV shows, homicide dicks didn’t get to pull their guns very often.

  Unlike Nina Capushek, who’d killed an armed robber when she walked in on a robbery in progress not a month into her new job with Lake City, lit him up with six rapid shots from that Glock 21 she carried, all of them in a group small enough to be covered with one hand. When she was asked why she shot him so many times, she’d replied, “He didn’t fall down fast enough to suit me.”

  What a woman.

  There was a certain challenge that appealed to Oliver, or Olly as his friends called him, to get next to the woman everybody agreed was hot as hell (though that nose had to go…) but wouldn’t give anybody on the PD any play.

  But some day…

  “James,” Nina said. “You learn how to shoot yet?”

  Olly looked off to one side, felt the flush climbing under his pale skin. “Maybe you’ll take me to the range some time and school me.”

  “You’d take some schooling. Oozy talk to you about me?”

  “He said you were working this guy Darko, the crispy critter we got mixed in with the rest of Sergey Komorov’s crew.”

  “Yeah. What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About what the fuck happened here. Why these guys? Why here? Who hit them? Where are they? Is this a turf war? Drug related? What?”

  “Don’t want much, do you, Sergeant Capushek?”

  “Just enough so I can get on with my job.”

  “Darko’s dead.”

  “Loot wants me to look into some aspects of this.”

  “You working with Homicide?”

  “No, I’m not working with Homo-cide, I’m working by myself. So give, or do I have to find a patrolman or junior grade to fill me in? You still running things, or just going through the motions?”

  “Jesus. Don’t you ever let up? Can’t we just have a conversation without you busting my balls?”

  “We’re not having a fucking conversation. You’re telling me what I need to know to get my job done. So speak, then move along, huh?”

  She punctuated that, surprisingly, with a big grin, lips thinning beneath the sprawl of her nose in a way that took Olly completely off guard. He laughed, cautiously.

  “Yeah, right. I never know how to take you, Nina.”

  “It ever comes to that, it’ll be me taking you, not the other way around, Olly. So give.”

  He referred to his notebook for a long moment, let her hang.

  “I think it’s guns,” he said. “Komorov is one of the big Lake City dealers, moves a lot of weapons. ATF has been looking at him for a long time, tried to run some undercovers in there, but that didn’t fly…he’s too cautious. We keep an eye on him but haven’t been able to tie anything to him. Russian with the usual clout and juice with the émigrés, involved in loan sharking, rumors of drugs and some white slavery with those nice eastern European girls.”

  “Like that, do you?” Nina said. “I always found eastern European porn a bit raw for my tastes. The production standards aren’t up to snuff. If you like that sort of thing.”

  His jaw dropped. “Jesus, Capushek!”

  Nina laughed. “Just funning you, Olly. Give.”

  He shook his head, looked around to see if anybody was listening in on their conversation. Two of the patrol dogs were grinning to themselves, heads carefully turned in the opposite direction.

  “Yeah, right,” Olly said. “Okay. So this gun store that got shot up? Belongs to Deon Oosthuizen, South African with a green card. We got a watch on him from FBI and State Department. He’s Mr. Law Abiding Citizen, real devotee of the Second Amendment. Sells guns, always on the up and up, no trouble, pays his taxes and his parking tickets, travels a lot. A lot, which is why the Feds been keeping an eye on him. Some rumors, all unsubstantiated, just gossip from some CIs that he might be a player in the gun biz as well, hooked up with some white supremacist groups from up north, you know the types, cry at Hitler’s birthday anniversary, that type. Our CIs don’t like to talk to him.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Hasn’t showed, no answer on his emergency contact number. The ATF form has a secondary form to his insurance agent, who’s been down here already, took some pictures, and asked me to fax the report to her.”

  “Where’s he like to hang? Got a residential address?”

  “POC address is his lawyer’s. Got a call into
him, he says he’ll try to get ahold of him. One of my CIs says he likes to hang out in Moby Dick’s, which is not exactly a testament to his good sense, his associates, or his taste in drinking establishments.”

  “I know Moby’s,” Nina said. “I like it down there.”

  “You been there?”

  “Yeah. I like the ambience.”

  “You’re fucking nuts, Nina. I wouldn’t go in that place without somebody to back me up.”

  “I don’t have any trouble in there. They got a good bouncer.”

  Olly looked at her in surprise. “You know that guy?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “He’s like this guy, Mr. South Africa. Mr. Law Abiding, nothing on record, just again talk from the CIs that he’s some kind of military hard guy, laying low. Supposedly some kind of commando, though he never talks about it.”

  “He don’t talk about it, how does your CI know?”

  “Probably bullshit. Says some military guys came in there once, he was there, they sat around, talked some war story trash.”

  “Huh,” Nina said. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I go down there. This Deon guy, what’s he look like?”

  “Tall, 6 plus. Real skinny, around 165 or 170. Blonde hair parted on the left, longish, blue eyes. 43 years old.”

  Nina stared into the distance, remembering.

  “I might have seen him around,” she said. “So he ain’t showed up?”

  “Unavailable, his attorney says. He says he’s trying to run him down.”

  “Okay. That gives me a start. So why the OK Corral out here? What’s your theory?”

  “Your Loot said that this guy Darko was in that other shooting in Viet Town, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he ends up dead over here. So pretty obvious it’s more of the same -- look at what’s similar: you got Steep Ride, Mr. Gun-Nut and Captain Drive-By, gets into a major battle with the Hmong Ghost Riders and this guy from Komorov’s crew…and everybody gets laid to waste in a military style ambush that puts out more firepower than Black Hawk Down on our fair streets. So, what the fuck?”

  Nina laughed. “Yeah. I see it.”

  “Guns and money, money and guns. Lawyers, guns and money. Hey, you like that song? You like Warren Zevon?”