Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  “Michael Tiranno is my career, Agent.”

  Slocumb shook his head, making a face like he’d swallowed something bitter. “You know what I hate? When innocent people go down with the likes of your boss. They all sound exactly like you at first. Loyal to a fault and convinced we’ll never be able to make our case. By the time they realize they’ve fucked up, the deal’s off the table and their get-out-of-jail-for-free card has expired. So we’re not here today and I never made this offer to you.” Slocumb paused briefly. “But here’s what I’m putting on the table: Turn state’s evidence, come clean with everything you know about Michael Tiranno’s past and illicit dealings, and you walk away from this free and still a member of the bar with a future.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I can’t tell you about something that doesn’t exist. And you seem to forget that we’re talking about a man whose heroism resulted in having a street named after him. Or maybe you don’t care he saved the city of Las Vegas from terrorists.”

  “It takes one to know one, Ms. Burns.”

  “So now Michael Tiranno is a terrorist, on top of everything else you allege?”

  “Ever since your client arrived in this city, sand storms have been replaced by shit storms. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence any more than I believe your client is traveling right now on ordinary business. Michael Tiranno is a cancer that’s infected this city. And like all cancers, sometimes the diagnosis comes too late, after the infestation has become so pervasive that there’s no treatment.”

  “So you’re the cure, is that it?”

  “Where’s your boss, Counselor?”

  “En route home now.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “The question was inevitable. I thought I could save us both some time.”

  “Like twenty years federal time, maybe. I figure that’s what you’re looking at just for being Michael Tiranno’s CEO.”

  “His board’s, actually. The by-laws of corporate entities in Nevada are very specific when it comes to such things.”

  “Glad you’re keeping to the rules,” Slocumb told her, smirking. “This normally goes quicker when the target has a family. But you’ve given your life to Michael Tiranno instead and he fucked you in return.”

  “Your information is entirely wrong, Agent. Michael Tiranno has never fucked me.”

  Slocumb’s smirk widened into a tight smile. “As soon as he gets back to Vegas, I’m going to arrest your boss.”

  Naomi feigned indifference. “Max Price again, Agent? Here’s some free legal advice: You really should let that go.”

  “Oh, I assure you I have, Counselor. No, I’m going to arrest your boss for the murder of Amanda Johansen.”

  * * *

  “This would be the former Seven Sins Elysium performer who was found dead in Turkey,” Naomi said, trying to keep her thoughts straight.

  “The very same. And you forgot to mention she was also found pregnant.”

  “Because it’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to that Interpol agent Pierre Faustin, it wasn’t.”

  “Former agent, you mean.”

  “Faustin came to Las Vegas in the guise of Edward Devereaux to nail a monster. He already had his suspicions, thanks to a pendant found in the victim’s stomach.”

  “Pendant?”

  “I thought I told you,” Slocumb said, even though it was clear he didn’t. “It was found during Amanda Johansen’s autopsy, one of those pendants worn by all your boss’s female employees.”

  “You mean, the casino’s employees, Agent.”

  “His casino, Counselor. The pendant keyed Faustin to the Seven Sins and the fact that the victim was pregnant told him he had the evidence he needed.”

  “This would be the same Pierre Faustin, aka Edward Devereaux, who Interpol fired for cause.”

  Slocumb stepped out of the light splashed by floods against the Kefauver Hearings mural. “That cause was the pursuit of an international criminal no one else believed existed.”

  “And you believe that criminal to be Michael Tiranno.”

  “I believe Faustin came to the Seven Sins to nail the murderer of Amanda Johansen.” Slocumb gazed fondly up at a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover. “Otherwise, I prefer to reserve judgment and remain objective.”

  “You—objective about Michael Tiranno? Please spare me the bullshit, Agent.” Naomi moved the center of the exhibit hall, finally getting her bearings. “It was from right here in this room that lawyers for a number of alleged mob associates told members of the Kefauver Committee that they didn’t have anything. Seems like the perfect spot for me to say you don’t have anything either.”

  “When’s your boss due back in Vegas, Ms. Burns?”

  “Asked and answered. And, by the way, Kefauver never brought charges against a single individual he paraded through this room. You’re finished, Agent, you just don’t know it yet.”

  “It’s your boss who’s finished, Counselor. See, we’ve given that portable DNA analyzer Faustin brought with him to the Seven Sins the real once-over. Turns out Faustin left Turkey with a sample of Amanda Johansen’s fetus’s DNA with him. Turns out that DNA is a match for Michael Tiranno’s.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  SARDINIA

  Aldridge Sterling stood at the deck of his yacht looking out at the majestic view toward Porto Cervo, waiting for the cell phone clutched in his hand to ring. Better to take the call out here himself than to risk one of his assistants again hearing the voice on the other end of the line, as to leave no trail whatsoever between him and the client who was about to make him the richest man in the world.

  The phone rang. Sterling steeled himself with a deep breath and answered.

  “Buna pritene,” he said in Romanian. “Hello, my friend.”

  * * *

  “I’ve sent you a gift,” Dracu said over his satellite phone, from the private section of his jet’s cabin. “It should be arriving soon.”

  “Should I be worried?” Sterling asked, warily.

  “Consider it a token of my appreciation for your recent successful maneuverings. And a reminder.”

  “Of what?”

  “That the press is misleading the world by lauding your genius. That the world has no idea of the truth behind your fortune. That everything you possess—from your yacht, to your estates, even the women you sleep with—you owe to me. That I can take it all away and break you as easily as I made you.”

  “You sound like my father once did.”

  “You mean the father who disowned, disinherited, and disgraced you? Are we talking about the same man?”

  Sterling was glad Dracu couldn’t see him turning red with rage, fighting to retain his composure from being treated so disrespectfully. “We serve each other’s needs, Vlad,” he started, feeling the need to claim that respect back. “You’re hardly the only one of my VIP clients who has special requirements that present unique challenges.”

  “Really?” Dracu asked him. “And did you meet all these other VIP clients the same way?”

  * * *

  It was fifteen years ago now. A disgraced Aldridge Sterling, scion of a famed family and son of one of modern history’s greatest men, was down almost literally to his last dollar. His father, the great hero Harold Sterling, had managed to survive the Holocaust to become one of the most esteemed senators of his generation. He’d hoped for similarly great things from his lone son, but Aldridge had found the life of a playboy much more to his liking. Any number of failed business dealings had damaged the family fortune enough for his father to threaten cutting him off on numerous occasions. But his latest threat had proven real and Aldridge had no idea what the future held in store for him now that his father ordered him off the yacht he intended to put up immediately for sale.

  So Aldridge, or “Aldy” to his fawning friends only interested in spending his money on booze, drugs, women, and lavish parties featuring a combination of all three, decided to throw a final bash. They brou
ght a host of beautiful women back with them from the mainland, applauding the soon-to-be-broke Aldy as he paraded around the deck in nothing but boxers and a bathrobe and barely noticing a speedboat approaching his yacht anchored off Monte Carlo Bay.

  A few minutes later he was snorting coke off the breasts of three gorgeous women in his stateroom bed when the lights went out. A door burst open and a tall, dark figure entered.

  “What the fuck?” Sterling managed, excess cocaine blown from his nose as he jerked upright in bed, squinting to get a better look at a man who clung to the shadows, silhouetted by the light from the hall beyond.

  The dark figure ignored him, running his eyes from one girl to the next instead. “Get dressed,” he ordered them, as Sterling glimpsed a second man, a massive hulking figure, toss the women the clothes strewn about the floor. “Then get out.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Sterling managed, trying very hard not to sound scared even though this man had scared him enough to utterly break his high.

  “A friend.”

  Sterling stumbled off the bed, as the second figure retreated and the women quickly put their clothes back on. “Do we know each other?”

  “No, but we will,” the dark man said from the shadows. “Now, put your clothes on and meet me on deck.”

  By the time, Sterling reached the deck, his party guests had been ushered into waiting launches already en route back to port. Pissed off, Sterling stormed to the gunwale where the stranger was standing but found his bravado gone by the time he got there. All the deck lights had been turned off, leaving them in near darkness. Sterling glimpsed dark hair and skin that looked pasty in the dim glow radiating from the lights of Monte Carlo. He also noticed none of the yacht’s crew in evidence, leaving the deck all to themselves.

  “Where’s the crew?”

  “With my men. Still alive. Whether they stay that way, whether you stay that way, depends entirely on the next few minutes. Your friends call you Aldy,” the stranger continued, not looking directly at Sterling to deny him clear view of his own face. “I’m not your friend so I won’t call you that.”

  “And what should I call you?”

  “Your savior.”

  “That’s not a name.”

  “Then call me daddy,” the dark man said, bursting into laughter. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself. But that’s what I’m going to become for you—everything your real father wasn’t.”

  “And what makes you my savior?”

  “Money. I have tons of it, literally, that I’d like you to invest on my behalf, enough so that soon you’ll be able to buy a yacht twice the size of this one.”

  “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

  The dark man explained that he’d already accumulated a vast amount of cash with the likelihood of making far, far more in the future. For that reason, he was in search of someone of Sterling’s investment daring and acumen to figure out how to legitimately launder the vast fortune.

  “You’re describing profits gained from some sort of criminal enterprise, aren’t you?” Sterling asked him.

  “Do you care?”

  “Not particularly, so long as the funds are in no way traceable to me. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “No, of course not,” the stranger said sarcastically. “You’d rather be broke.”

  No stranger to the fringes of the investment world, and desperately wanting to separate his interests from the father he despised, Sterling embraced the opportunity.

  “I do have one question for you, though,” Sterling asked, still not having gotten a good look at the man’s face. “Why me?”

  Dracu flashed a smile that glistened through the night. “Well, you do have excellent taste in women. I should know, since I arranged for the whores you were with tonight.”

  “You what?” Sterling snapped, starting toward the dark figure until the man’s stare left him backpedaling. The first close look he got at the figure had left him recalling only eyes so black they seemed to have swallowed the whites.

  “I know your weaknesses, but I also know your strengths. And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “You hate your father as much as I hate mine.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  ANKARA, TURKEY, 1964

  “Someday your father will come back for us, Vlad,” he recalled his mother saying in one of his earliest memories on a frigid night he was shaking so hard he couldn’t sleep “Someday we will be free of all this. He promised.”

  Years later, though, when his father had still failed to keep that promise, his mother used every penny she’d ever saved to take Vlad and flee Romania. The plan was to reach Sicily, homeland of his father, through Albania. But they’d never even gotten close, snatched by human traffickers from the Port of Durrës while waiting for a ferry. In the hellish days that followed, they were taken to Turkey where his mother had been forced into the sexual servitude she’d resisted all those years in Romania. The cruelest of ironies. Dracu’s memories of those months that stretched into years was hazy at best.

  “Someday your father will come back for us, Vlad.”

  They need only be patient, she insisted, and take solace in the certainty that things could only get better, since it was inconceivable they could get any worse.

  But they did.

  “Your father loves us very much, Vlad, and he will come for us. I’m sure this time. He’s going to find us.”

  His mother had spoken those words of typically false hope just days before she was murdered by a customer a few weeks past Vlad’s sixth birthday. Her body was taken away while he screeched and wailed, trying to tear free of the men holding him. It was his last memory until the jolt of being thrust into the back of the truck that stank of urine, vomit, and fear. The utter darkness hiding sight of the other boys, but not the sound of their plaintive wails and cries. Vlad ended up squeezing himself into a space on the truck floor amid a pool of piss from a boy nearby who was cold and stiff.

  Dead.

  Vlad would remember that clanking, clamoring ride over rocky, pit-marred roads with crystal clarity no matter how hard he tried to forget it. Sometimes even today he would awaken from a deep sleep drenched in a sweat, and nauseous from the sense of the bouncing journey inside the blackness of a truck riddled with bad shocks and tires that provided no cushion whatsoever. Vlad thought he remembered the dead boy’s stiff body rolling up against him and the feel of his dead fingers digging into his arms, trying to drag him along to hell, too.

  And if he’d known what awaited him at the end of the truck’s journey, he would have gone.

  Especially on stormy nights when winds slammed the mountain beyond and the halls of his fortress forged from the former Soviet bunker grew black and frigid, Dracu would feel the agony caused by the men who found pleasure in his pain. He tried to make his mind go somewhere else when they hurt and abused him, but there was nowhere else to go save for the last home he’d known, where his mind could only conjure thoughts of his mother’s blood-soaked body and the coppery stench that had clung to his nostrils ever since.

  Dracu should have been dead many times over, like the other boys who’d shared the confines of the truck with him, but he endured. With no happy place to go in his mind, he busied himself instead with the face of the man who’d emerged from his mother’s room covered in her blood. Instead of joy, he lost himself in hatred, in a rage he was powerless to vent, believing that looking toward a time where he would no longer be powerless was what kept him alive through the unspeakable ordeal.

  Even with the disease that was slowly killing him.

  Vlad had no conception of who had infected him, or when exactly he realized he was sick. Feeling that way had been the norm for him for as long as he could remember. Trembling in the hall in the cold of winter and barely ever feeling warm, racked by chills even in the height of summer.

  He was fifteen when he decided to mount an escape. If the attempt failed, he’d likely face death, but Vlad had
come to prefer that over what barely passed as life. He hated waking up in the morning, because it meant the whole day was in front of him. Another day of pain and heartache with nothing to look forward to or look back upon. For years, the only thoughts that took his mind off that pain and heartache were of escape; first fantasizing about it, then planning. To make escape a reality, he needed to be strong. And to be strong he used the hate that had festered inside him for so long.

  Hate for his keepers, hate for his abusers, hate for the world that allowed them all to be, but especially hate for the father who’d abandoned him and his mother and left them to this wretched life. And that hate made him more than strong; it spurred a vision of having enough power so no one would ever be able to hurt him again.

  So he resolved to eat whatever was shoved in front of him and clean the plates left behind by others, too. His closet-size, windowless room was just long enough to allow him to do push-ups, so many he’d lose count both in the morning upon waking and then again at night before surrendering to blissful sleep in which there were dreams toward which to look forward.

  At thirteen, he was still fantasizing. At fourteen, he began to plan. And at fifteen, Vlad celebrated his birthday in the surety that the time had come.

  He was cursed by his dark, brooding looks. Vlad had inherited his mother’s beauty except for the warm smile he so remembered when she’d assure him things were going to get better. Holding him in her lap while telling him tales of the way their life would be when his father finally came for them. Dracu believed her because that’s what children do. Now as a young adult he resolved to make the life his mother envisioned for both of them a reality for at least himself. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror he expected a six-year-old’s face to peer back, instead of the shaggy hair and big black eyes that made him the groapă’s most treasured commodity.

  Groapă was Romanian for “pit.”