Krokodil

by Dustin Stevens

  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 his 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 before. 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, nodding, 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 ground. They scraped across the tile floor, 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 towards 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 alright,” Diaz said, settling into a chair.

  “Yeah, we’ll be alright,” 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 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 you’re bitching.”

  At that Manny snapping 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, her head facing forward, rolling her eyes up towards 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, 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, images taken just hours before 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 while Diaz called in for backup, anticipating this very moment. Every shot was meant to refute whatever objections Manny might have, providing 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 breaking 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 the real reason behind my actions were 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’d like 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 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,” Man
ny 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 last 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 lay 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.

  “You guys weren’t the problem.”

  Just like that, another chunk of information fell into place. At the same time, a massive piece of the dam holding my own emotion back split away, a roiling ball of vitriol threatening to spill out at any moment.

  “The Russians started taking over,” I muttered. “The DEA didn’t catch you, you turned yourself in for protection.”

  Manny cast his gaze up at me a moment before leaning back in his chair. He looped an arm over the back of it and ran his opposite hand down the length of his face, his focus never far from the phone still sitting on the table.

  “I agreed to do the time, give up a dozen of our major providers, even assist things moving forward, so long as you guys took care of Mateo and Carlos. So much for that shit.”

  I could feel Diaz’s stare on me as she glanced my way, shaking her head. My own attention was aimed on the opposite wall, no longer looking at Manny, letting his words sink in.

  “Why did Mateo come to Yellowstone?”

  Manny shifted his eyes up to me, drawing my own gaze over to him. We sat in silence, each sizing the other up for a long moment, before he sighed.

  “We knew you were on our ass. We also knew that you would never let it go, you were always going to be on our ass. Mateo always said if they somehow found him, he would go find you. Even if they got him in the end, he knew it would set you out after them.”

  It was exactly the answer I’d been expecting. It fit with everything else he was telling us, from the introduction of the Russians to the hostile takeover.

  There was no way the Russians could just let Mateo and Carlos walk, not knowing everything they did. They would never stop looking for them, not until they were found and silenced.

  My involvement, right from the start, was no coincidence. I had been placed intentionally on the sideline by warring factions, taken out of the game only to be pulled right back in when they needed me. I was simultaneously a thorn in their side and a saving grace, something they hated, but needed.

  There were still so many questions, so many holes that needed filled in, but there would be time for that later. There was something bigger at play here, some reason Mateo and Carlos had both been killed within a couple weeks of each other.

  “Who are the Russians?” I asked.

  The eyebrows on Manny’s face tracked up a fraction of an inch as he sat there, once again moving his gaze away from me, back to staring at nothing.

  “Some cat named Blok. Viktor. A real pretty boy, second or third generation guy, born with a silver-spoon and a lot of attitude. He runs things on this side of the ocean, a real asshole, nothing but a front for the real muscle back home.”

  “Where?” Diaz asked, her body rigid beside me.

  Manny spread his hands wide and said, “Last I heard he had moved the operation down into Baja somewhere, but I’ve been here. I can’t do your entire job for you.”

  Despite the barb, he wasn’t entirely wrong. We had been operating with so much less than the whole story, a fault starting with Hutch and extending all the way to Carlos, that we had been doing little more than fumbling around in the dark. Now we had a clear heading, a way to put everything together, have it all make sense.

  I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest, letting the new information meld with what I already knew. There had to be a reason Mateo came to find me when he did, a reason Lita showed up right after and tried to gun me down as well. It had to be more than just dredging up an old rivalry or trying to tie off a loose end.

  That simple fact lodged itself in the front of my mind for a full moment, sitting there, marinating, before a single statement Manny had made a moment before fit into place.

  “The product the Russians wanted to bring over, it’s finally ready.”

  Sensing it was a statement more than a question, Manny looked up at me, his head rocking up and down in agreement. “Only thing I can figure. Some new stuff they call Krokodil.”

  Diaz snapped her attention over to me, alarm in her eyes. “You’re shitting me.”

  “What?” I asked, making no attempt to mask my confusion.

  “You’ve never heard of that stuff?” she asked. “The papers call it a zombie drug because it has hallucinogenic effects. Makes people do all kinds of crazy things like walk off bridges or try to eat human flesh.”

  I had vaguely heard of it when it first came onto the market, but never had I researched it too closely or taken a case involving it. When bath salts originally surfaced in America, I had heard that this was being developed as an even more potent version overseas.

  “And Mateo knew all this, didn’t he?” I asked. “He knew what they were making, what it was capable of. Knew they would be coming after you guys, wanting you taken out before they started moving it.”

  “So he went to find you,” Manny finished.

/>   So he came to find me. Somehow they too knew where I’d been, what I’d been doing all this time. They’d watched as I created a life for myself, left all this behind, only to pull me back in when the time came to do their dirty work.

  Deep within me, another bit of my resolve broke away. No matter how angry I was, how much the craving for blood was growing within me, this was not my fight. I had made promises, walked away years ago, for a reason.

  Mateo Perez showing up one day was not about to trump that.

  My right hand slid out and pulled the phone back to me. I took the picture down off the front screen and put it in my pocket, rising to leave. This entire ordeal had awakened a darkness in me I had worked long and hard to tuck away. No matter how hard it would be, I was going home to bury it back where it belonged.

  Nodding once at Diaz, I slid my chair towards the stack in the corner and walked to the door, making it almost there before Manny called out.

  “Hey, Hawk,” he said, his inflection even, void of any taunting or sneer. “The cat that did that to Carlos is a guy named Pavel, big son of a bitch that works for Blok.”

  I stopped by the door, processing the information. It was the same first name Hutch had given us after returning from Yellowstone, the man that had gone up in search of Lita. Like most everything else he had told us, the information fit.

  The Blok’s were cleaning house, getting ready to set their vicious new toy on the west coast.

  “You know how I know that?” Manny asked.

  Something about the words he used, the way he asked the question, resonated deep inside me. I knew what he was trying to say, where he was going with it, even before he said it.

  He stood, retreating towards the door and knocking on it. The sound of his knuckles connecting with hollow metal echoed through the room, a moment later answered by the same wiry guard.

  “I can tell by the look on your face that you think you’re out,” he said, staring right at me. “But let me tell you why you’re not. Let me tell you why Mateo was right, why you’re going to drive out of here and not come back, why you’re going to go to Baja and get these motherfuckers, and then go to Russia afterwards if you have to.