Naturally, her sister was concerned. She asked Naomi three questions.
The first question was, 'is this a joke?'
Naomi swallowed hard and told her it wasn't.
The second question her sister asked was, 'does it involve drugs?' She asked it in a firm, but worried manner.
Naomi said no, again. This time, a lot quicker and in a more firm intonation with extra emphasis to relay the fact that she wouldn't have been so stupid.
Her sister calmed down a little and said, "OK." Then, paused a long moment while wrapping her mind around what was possibly going on. The third question she asked came next. It was, 'should I be scared?'
Naomi wanted to say 'no' for a third time, but she knew she couldn't. It was her sister and she knew she had to be straight with her, so she answered, 'very.'
Her sister took another long pause to process what Naomi had told her, allowing her answers to sink deep into her mind. Then, her survival instinct kicked in and she did exactly as Naomi had asked. She laid the phone down on the oak sideboard in her hallway and ran upstairs and quickly packed two travel bags. One for her. One for her husband. Then, hurried back down and threw them in the trunk of her car. A white Toyota Sienna minivan parked up on their grey stone drive. She came back into the house and realized Naomi was probably still on the phone. She lifted it, apologized in a rushed-sounding voice and thanked Naomi for the warning, told her that she loved her and asked her to promise her she would keep safe and call her when everything was all right.
Naomi said that she was sorry and that she would, now weeping into the phone, then ended the call. She sucked a breath and composed herself, then sat in a dazed silence in her car, feeling disconnected from her surroundings, the world around her seeming like it was just a distant blur. She began to feel nauseous. And she felt a dull, aching pain developing behind her right eye. Her sister was tough. And smart. She knew she would be fine. She could handle herself. She knew it. She realized she didn't have to worry about her. She managed a half-smile, then thought back to what Beck had said and frowned, realizing he could be right. Her life could be on the line. It was a harrowing thought. She knew she had to go into hiding. She had to find a place off the beaten track. She opened her Google search app and typed in 'cheap motels Detroit' and hit the search button.
The results popped up a second later.
She flicked through a list of cheap and tacky-looking places with prices ranging from $25 per-night to upwards of $59. All of them looked seclusive. The sort of place Beck was talking about when he said to pay in cash and not to worry about ID. The sort of place where people hide out without anybody ever knowing they've been there.
She picked one called the Ambassador Motel from the list. It was a $39 per-night place off West Jefferson Avenue, situated near the bank of the Detroit River in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge.
She threw her phone onto the passenger's seat of her RCZ, then set off, thinking about what else he had told her to do.
'Pay in cash,' she recalled, thinking she had next to nothing in her purse. She had cards, lots of them, but no cash. She took stock of where she was. Woodward Avenue. And, then, thought about where the nearest gas station was that had an ATM and set off toward it.
She headed west along Grand Central Boulevard until it turned into Tireman Avenue, looped left onto Livernois Avenue and pulled onto the frosty forecourt of a Sunoco on the corner of Livernois and Warren.
She nosed the white RCZ into a slot by the kiosk, killed its engine and stepped out to the cold. She used the ATM by the kiosk's door, withdrawing the last four hundred and sixty dollars she had in her checking account, all the free money she had left, then ducked into the store.
A blast of warm air from the heaters above whipped over her face and the door chimed.
Ding-dong.
The clerk behind the counter looked up.
But Naomi was careful. She didn't make eye contact with the guy or anyone else in the kiosk. She walked toward the refrigerators, opened the door and lifted an ice cold two-gallon bottle of water. Next, she ducked down the medicines aisle and picked up a small two dollar box of aspirin. Her head was thumping and the inside of the store felt like it was spinning around her. She also grabbed some band-aids, a toothbrush, some toothpaste, some feminine hygiene products and a change of underwear. After that, she grabbed some packets of salt and vinegar potato chips, and the first fashion and style magazine she came across. She walked to the counter, cradling it all in her arms, and laid it down. It all spilled out over the glass.
The young guy behind the counter asked her if she had everything she needed, then tried to sell her a limited edition foot-long Tootsie Roll for two dollars. It was massive.
She quickly answered that she had and shook her head, speaking in a way that conveyed she had some place to be, ushering him along.
He lifted each item and scanned it with a handheld barcode scanner, moving at a slower pace than perhaps necessary, then bagged it into a thin white plastic bag and told her the cost.
"That's eighteen dollars and sixty-two cents," he said, speaking with the enthusiasm of a vegan at a steakhouse. He obviously hated his job.
She nodded and handed him a twenty from her wad of cash, grabbed her plastic bag of supplies and left the kiosk without waiting for change.
She backed the white RCZ out of its slot, rolled it across the forecourt and pulled back out onto the road. She drove the ten-mile journey at a steady forty miles-an-hour and arrived a quarter-hour later, at the Ambassador Motel, with no recollection of how she got there. The drive was a steady, dizzy blur. Her head was pounding. And she felt ragingly sick, as if she could hurl at any moment. She opened the car door and sat in the motel's parking lot, taking deep, slow breaths of the icy cold air.
The cool breeze and chill air helped ease her nausea and began to numb the pain in her head. She took a deep breath and stepped out of the car to go check in. She grabbed her handbag and plastic bag of supplies and made her way inside.
The reception was dated, but bright. The bright warm white lights pulled at her eyes. An old burgundy carpet covered the floor. It was littered with small black circular burn marks from dropped cigarettes of old. The walls were white and the reception counter and surrounding wood was pine. A sandy-haired man dressed in charcoal grey pants, a white shirt and burgundy tie welcomed her in with the energy of an undertaker at a funeral and asked if she wanted a room.
She said that she did and that her name was Gemma Scott, recalling somebody she once worked with, and checked in to room twenty-one, no questions asked. She paid in cash, handing over two twenties for the $39 per-night rate and took her single buck of change and asked where her room was. But, otherwise, made no other conversation. Just as Joe Beck had said.
The young guy handed her the key and a tatty, stained laminated sheet of motel policies, then gave her directions to the room.
She took the key and worn sheet of A4, the words on the page almost illegible, the ink underneath the plastic, having faded through time and water damage, nodded her understanding, then made her way out front and down the open corridor to room twenty-one. It was only four doors down from the main reception as the room numbers, oddly, seemed to start at twenty-four and work backward.
She opened the door and stepped inside, briefly glancing around. It was basic. A silver television with old-style back sat atop an old mahogany table with chipped edges. A light bulb hung from the ceiling free from the confines of a shade. The light flickered when she flicked the switch. There were two bedside cabinets. They were wild pine, but looked beaten and tired. A double bed sat in the middle. It had just two pillows and a thin and faded-looking yellow duvet cover that was lined with small round black cigarette burns. The mattress was thin and low, so low it looked like it was closer to the floor than the cracked pine wooden skirting boards that flanked the bottom of the walls around the room.
She sighed and closed the door behind her and took a few paces into the
room, then collapsed on the bed and dropped her handbag and plastic bag of supplies on the burgundy carpet. The mattress wasn't comfortable. It felt hard and springy. She preferred it thick and soft. But it would have to do. Like it or not, it was her bed for the time.
She leaned down the side and reached into the plastic bag, lifted out the bottle of water and box of aspirin. Opened the water and took a drink, but not without spilling some on the duvet first. She popped two aspirin from the blister pack she had drawn from the box, slung them into her mouth and took another drink of water, washing them down her throat. Then, paused and took another drink, before re-capping the bottle and allowing it to slowly slip from her hand. She lay backward, flat-out on her back, gazing up at the ceiling. It had some sort of ugly, dimpled artex effect done with the end of a hardened paint brush. The dimples merged in and out of each other and in and out, and in and out, then, eventually, became nothing more than a white blur as she passed out of consciousness.
She came back to maybe a moment later, though, opened her eyes and took a deep breath, glancing around, feeling the water bottle and pack of aspirin against her arm. Strange duvet cover. Water. Aspirins. Beaten furniture. Motel room. She gathered her thoughts, realized where she was, then remembered what else Joe Beck had told her to do.
She reached down and lifted her handbag. It felt heavy. She undid its gold buckle and drew out her cell phone and unlocked its screen. She still wasn't thinking straight. Her head felt light and dizzy. Maybe it was the aspirin? Maybe it was her headache going in a new direction? Or, maybe it was her nervous system's reaction to what had happened and being overcome with panic and fear from the thought of the men being out to get her. She stared at her cell phone's screen, dazed and disorientated, and did as he had instructed. She opened the text messaging app and typed in his number from her calls log and sent him a message. It said, 'Ambassador Inn. Riverside Park. Room 24.'
She took a breath and lay back with her cell phone in her hand, staring up at the ceiling. Her head felt even fuzzier and lighter. The room was spinning. She felt disoriented, but she remembered what else he had said: turn off your cell phone. She slipped her finger down the side to the power button and pushed it in.
Her cell phone's screen went black and the device powered down. She passed out thinking it had gone off. But it hadn't. She had held the button in for too long and it restarted back up.
EIGHTEEN
Polanski was sitting in the back of his limousine on his way to pay Jim McGrath a visit at the construction site of his fourth new nightclub, to convince him that every man has a price. He was holding his iPhone in his hand. Its screen was lit up. He was nodding slowly, looking at a photograph of McGrath, his wife, their daughter and their son.
The photograph looked like it was taken when they were on holiday. They were all standing side by side, their arms interlinked around each other's backs, and they were wearing pastel-colored shorts and t-shirts. Jim and his wife were on the left. They had big, ostentatious sun glasses across their eyes and big, cheesy smiles across their faces. They also had bottle green fanny packs across their laps. Their son and daughter were on the right. They had navy blue baseball caps on their heads. Just like his wife, his daughter wasn’t all that attractive.
Polanski smirked, sinisterly, imagining how the soft, naive-looking family might look once beaten to a pulp and wrapped in chicken wire and left to drown at the bottom of the Detroit River.
His malevolent fantasy was interrupted by an email notification. It was a message from Malenko. He looked at it and opened it up. There was one line of text and an attachment. The text said, 'The list of details you wanted - private detectives and security personnel.' He looked at the attachment. It was a PDF. He tapped the icon.
It downloaded and opened. It was a collection of biography pages, each featuring the name, nationality, date of birth, and home and business address of registered private eyes and licensed security guys. Each individual's bio was accompanied by their photograph. There were forty-nine records. Polanski flicked through them and grinned, thinking that the odds were in his favor, that the guy working for the hairdresser was somewhere in the pack.
That was when his phone vibrated, again, and Arshavin's name popped up on screen as an incoming caller. Polanski swiped right and answered the call.
"The hairdresser," he said to him, disdain in his voice. "Did you her?"
"No, Boss. She's not here."
Polanski frowned.
Arshavin continued. "We broke in, just like you said, but the apartment was empty. There was nobody around."
Polanski grunted. "Did you turn it over? See if there was anything that we could use?"
"Yes, Boss. We found some financial records. She's practically penniless. Over one hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars in debt. The bank has even sent her a final payment demand.”
"I don't give a shit if she doesn't have two cents to rub together. She's operating in my territory. Which means she owes me four thousand dollars. Now, what else did you find?"
"A photograph," Arshavin answered.
"A photograph?"
"Yes, Boss. A photograph of a boy. He appears to be her son."
"She has a son?" Polanski asked, intrigue creeping into his voice. “Why didn’t you three find out about him earlier?”
“There was no record of him, Boss. None at all.”
“OK. Then, what do you know now?”
"Well, Boss, his name appears to be Josh Hefter and he seems to be six years old. He was born April seventh two thousand and nine."
"How do you know this?"
"Because, Boss, it was written on the back of the photograph."
Polanski nodded, looking out of the limousine's window at the derelict, fenced-off buildings that lined Michigan Avenue in the shadow of the city skyline up ahead, a malignant gleam in his eyes. "Did you find out anything else? Anything that would confirm where he is?"
"No. Just the photograph. It looked like he didn't live there, Boss. So, we don't know where he is. And there's no way to be sure if he's alive or dead. But Salenko, going through her documents, said he never found any death certificate."
The limousine drove into Detroit city center, cruising past high rise concrete parking lots, and skyscraping office blocks that were occupied by America’s titans of industry like AT&T and government agencies like the DEA. It passed underneath the tracks of the city People Mover transport system and carried on to Campus Martius Park. It was white and snowy and congested. People walked past wearing winter coats and wrapped up in gloves and hats and scarves.
Polanski nodded. "Good. Very good."
"What do you want us to do?"
Polanski drew his iPhone from his face and brought up Malenko's email. He forwarded it to Arshavin as the limousine continued onto Larned Street and passed through Bricktown on the east side of town.
"Boss?"
"Malenko has sent a list of Michigan’s private dicks," Polanski said. "I’ve forwarded his email to you. I want you to look through the pictures and identify the asshole who was in that salon. And, then, I want you to go pick him up and bring him to Amaranth. And hold him there until I get back."
"Yes, Boss. But what about the boy?"
"Leave that with me. I’ll have Malenko look into it and get a location. You three concentrate on the security guard. And call Adamczuk. Have him come down there with you. I don't want a repeat of what happened last night."
"Understood, Boss."
"And keep the photograph of the boy. It'll prove useful later on," Polanski added, then ended the call.
He laid his iPhone down on his lap and sat in silence for a brief moment, looking out of the window as the limousine crawled in the slow stream of congested traffic nearing the nightclub construction site that sat on the snowy white river bank.
He saw a frosted pathway that led through to Ralph Bunche Cooperative Park on his left and the empty parking lot of a shuttered wedding store on his right. The store's wind
ows and doors were boarded up with plywood that had been spray-painted with the word 'Foreclosed' across them in red capital letters. The parking lot was piled about knee-high with snow and there was a gathering of bearded scruffy hobos in the middle of it. They were all wearing dark waterproof parka coats with the damp fur-lined hoods pulled up over their heads, faded dirty blue jeans that looked like they hadn't been washed in years and boots that looked like ten-year-old cast offs from the Salvation Army. There were about eight of them, all standing together huddled around a rusted steel oil drum rubbing their cold-looking bare hands while exhaling in a way that looked like they were blowing out candles, trying to gleam what heat they could from a fire looked like it was long reduced to nothing more than a pile glowing orange embers. They would have to find another source of heat or risk dying of hypothermia.
Arshavin, Salenko and Zurawski not finding the hairdresser at her apartment meant it was time to pursue the other avenues. Polanski relifted his cell phone and made two more calls. The first call was to Kanchelskis.
He answered after just one ring.
"Boss?"
"The money," Polanski said. "Has it all been put into storage?"
"Yes, boss. The latest haul is all at the cabin."
"And are you still down there?"
"No. We're back up in Detroit. Do you want us to back?"
"No. I need you to go up to Bloomfield Hills. There's somebody who lives in the area I want you to scoop up."
"Who?"
"A woman named Kathleen Westin," he said and gave them the exact address. "It's the sister of a woman who owes me money, a hairdresser who never paid up on the collection run. I want you to go knock on her door. Grab her and her husband on sight, and anyone else who's in the house. Let me know when you have them."
"Consider it done, Boss," Kanchelskis said before Polanski killed the call.
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