by Chris Culver
If Bukoholov knew what went on at Sunshine, he knew more than I did. I wasn’t going to say that, though.
“Fine. Karen Rea killed my niece and her boyfriend. She also killed a friend of mine. That’s why I was there.”
Bukoholov nodded and squinted at me.
“So you’re taking care of your family. I like that. We can work together.”
Before I could ask what that meant, Bukoholov shouted something to the Hulk in Russian, and we made a U–turn so sharp that two of the Pruius’s tires might have actually come off the road.
“I need you to see something so we can understand each other,” he said.
“Whatever.”
We drove for another fifteen minutes and ended up outside a nightclub occupying an old Masonic temple downtown. The exterior was gray limestone and had columns out front, making it look like an old courthouse. A line stretched halfway around the block, which, in my experience, meant there was more than likely a cop somewhere within shouting distance. I had the option to run, but at the same time, I wasn’t exactly replete with allies at the moment. If Bukoholov wanted to help, I wasn’t in a position to turn him down.
I crossed in front of the car and met Bukoholov on the sidewalk. The Hulk drove off. The frail Russian held his hand in front of him and gestured for me to precede him inside.
“After you, my friend.”
I didn’t know we were on friendly terms, but I nodded. Bukoholov apparently knew the bouncer because he let us inside without even having money exchange hands. That got us some angry stares from people in line. They were easy to ignore, though.
The club’s interior was big enough that there were activities for just about everybody. There was a burnished concrete bar along one wall with video games and electronic dartboards beside it. I couldn’t see it, but I figured there was a pool table amid the people there, too. If patrons were more interested in dancing, there was a raised platform in the middle of the room and cages suspended a few feet above the ground. The music was so loud I couldn’t even understand Bukoholov when he leaned into me and yelled almost directly in my ear. He put his hand on my upper back and guided me past the bar to a hallway in back.
At first, I thought he was leading me to the bathroom, which would have been strange, but we pushed past them and turned a corner. It was so dark that I could barely see the guy standing in front of me or the door he was standing in front of. The walls muffled the music enough that we could speak.
“The restrooms are back that way. Nothing but offices back here.”
“I realize that,” said Bukoholov. “Open the door.”
“Oh, sorry, Mr. Bukoholov,” the bouncer said, knocking on the door behind him. A peephole slid back like at a 30s–era speakeasy, and the bouncer had a quick conversation with someone on the other side. The door opened a minute later, and Bukoholov and I were waved in. The back room looked like a men’s lounge at a long–forgotten resort. There were high–backed leather chairs against the wall and cigar smoke in the air. My skin prickled as goose bumps formed up and down my arms. Six men huddled around a card table in the middle of the floor. Surprisingly, I recognized one. Jack Whittler.
Bukoholov stepped in and greeted the men at the table before waving me over and introducing me as a friend of his. Whittler never took his eyes off me, and I only took my eyes off him to greet the other players. Alongside Jack, the highest–ranking law enforcement official in the county, I met two reps from the Indiana House of Representatives, a circuit court judge, the deputy mayor, and the CEO of a regional bank headquartered in the city. I was totally out of my league.
Thankfully Bukoholov didn’t linger around the table, and we stepped into his actual office a few minutes later. Unlike the card room, the office was pedestrian. Bukoholov had an antique–looking desk in the middle of the room as well as a couple of chairs and a small couch. There were no windows and little ornamentation. It was absolutely silent.
“How much do you know about cocaine, Mr. Rashid?” asked Bukoholov, taking a seat behind his desk. I took that as my cue to sit down.
“Never tried it.”
“You should. It might loosen you up,” he said, leaning over and reaching into one of his desk drawers. He pulled out two sandwich bags and dropped them on the green felt blotter that covered his desk. Both bags held white powder, but one sparkled like snow while the other had dull yellow tones in it.
“This is mine,” he said, holding up the bag with the yellowing powder in it. He then picked up the bag with the sparkling white powder. “This is Miss Rea’s. My stuff is good. It's seventy–percent pure, and it has no harmful additives. Ms. Rea’s stuff is too good. It's ninety–five, ninety–seven percent pure. Customers take their usual amount and overdose. There’s no room to screw up.”
I nodded. That told me something new about Bukoholov. I hadn’t heard he dealt with drugs. Murder and prostitution, but never drugs.
“Why does this concern me?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest.
“Because it concerns me. That bitch is destroying a market that took me fifteen years to develop. And I’m not the only one she’s hurting. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville. It's the same thing everywhere. I know my competitors. We talk and set prices together. It keeps us all safe. This crazy bitch doesn’t talk to anyone. She moves in with her cheap shit, and prices go through the floor. We’re losing money and market share.”
Bukoholov leaned forward and picked up one of the bags. He held it to the light before throwing it down.
“And her goddamn dealers are children,” he said. “It’s disgusting. We caught one a few weeks ago. She was fifteen. She called me a slayer, whatever that means. Karen Rea has no principles. You don’t work with kids. It’s wrong.”
You might sell them coke, though.
I kept the thought to myself. If Bukoholv was telling me the truth, it told me something else important.
“Did you see the news tonight?” I asked.
Bukoholov sighed and made the sign of the cross over his chest.
“If you're referring to the two kids at the high school, I heard,” he said. “Some of my competitors lack the moral constraints that I possess. They believe they can put Miss Rea out of business by destroying her network. I’m not willing to do that, which is why I need your help. You’ll stop her for me.”
“I’m not a killer, and your men destroyed every piece of evidence I had against her when they lit that warehouse up.”
Bukoholov smiled. Rather than setting me at ease, it chilled me. He reached back into his desk and pulled out an IV bag full of a brownish–yellow liquid.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
Show and tell?
I shook my head no.
“It’s blood plasma,” he said. “My nephew followed one of Miss Rea’s employees to work one day, and he gave us a cooler full of these.”
Bukoholov handed the bag to me; the liquor was thicker than I expected. I raised my eyebrows and looked up.
“So Sunshine is a legitimate business?”
“Yes and no. This man told us they brought in a lot of plasma and blood from poor people in South America. They brought in more than that, though. Have you ever heard of agua rica?”
“It’s a diluted sulfuric acid solution containing cocaine sulfate. It’s a step in the production of cocaine base.”
Thank you, Mack.
Bukoholov looked at me and smiled knowingly. I handed him the bag.
“That’s how they’re bringing their stuff through customs. It looks like plasma, they refrigerate it like plasma, they even mix it with a legitimate shipment. They process it at that warehouse. We took care of that. Your job is to take care of the rest. If you do that, you’ll have your revenge, and I’ll have my business. We both win.”
“I’m not after revenge.”
Bukoholov’s eyes were cold.
“Bullshit. You call it justice, but we all know what it is. She hurt you, so you want to
hurt her. It's revenge. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll understand the world you live in.”
I nodded as if I agreed. People in law school made the same argument for the death penalty. They called it the retributive theory of justice, which is a pretentious way of saying eye for an eye. The old adage is that it makes the world blind. In reality, it makes the world bitter and empty.
“If I do this, if I stop her, I don’t want to hear from you again.”
Bukoholov stood up. He was smaller than I was, but he seemed to tower over me.
“I appreciate your intestinal fortitude, but you shot my nephew. You live by my leave. Collect your possessions from Nicolai outside and tell the bartender to call you a cab.”
I didn’t think staying and arguing the point was a good idea, so I stood and took a final look around the room before departing. Bukoholov slipped the bags of cocaine back in his desk, seemingly oblivious of the county prosecutor twenty feet away.
I felt dirty, scared, and more than a little conflicted. Like it or not, I was going to do as he asked. It may not have been my intention, but I was going to help a drug dealer solidify his position in my city. While Bukoholov’s competitors went after each other directly, he’d sit on the sidelines until it was over. After I took out Sunshine and the people who ran it, he’d pick off any weakened competitors still surviving. It was a plan straight out of the Art of War.
I didn’t stay long in the back room, but I noticed Jack Whittler and one of the Indiana House representatives were gone. They probably had late–night trysts with prostitutes. The Hulk must have come by because the bouncer guarding the back door had my gun, ID, and wallet. I put everything back in its proper spot and hailed a cab in front of the club. I gave him the address of the animal hospital at which I had parked. Memorizing the street names turned out to be the only good thing I had done that day.
Chapter 18
When I got back to my motel, I fell onto the bed and was out before I even thought about taking off my clothes. Not that the bed was that comfortable. I probably could have fallen asleep on a concrete slab. I woke up at about noon when a clap of thunder slammed through the building, shaking the furniture and causing me to jump. When I regained my senses, I closed my eyes again and breathed deeply. It sounded like the first good thunderstorm the city had seen in the past few weeks. Most people in town were probably pleased for some relief from our month–long drought, but I would have gladly traded the rainfall for another hour of sleep. I tried closing my eyes and drifting away again, but a second rumble reverberated through the room as soon as my eyes were shut. Apparently God wanted me up.
I swore under my breath and swung my legs off the bed. My head throbbed, and I winced as pain lanced down my spine. I ran a hand along my side. My ribs felt tender from landing on the flashlight the night before, but nothing felt broken. I’d live for a while longer. I stumbled to the sink and made a cup of complementary black coffee in the room’s single–serving pot. I doubted it would live up to my wife’s black–as–pitch coffee, but hopefully it’d wake me up.
While the coffee brewed, I cleaned myself up and had morning prayer. I felt a little calmer after that. Once my prayers were done, I got off my knees and sat on my bed. Aside from summer work when I was in college, I had never been anything but a cop. I went to the police academy when I was twenty–two and never looked back. My investigation into Robbie and Rachel was my first foray outside the public sector. Already, I had burned a building to the ground, shot a guy, become indebted to a drug dealing Russian gangster, and uncovered a major drug trafficking ring with ties to a vampire cult. No one could say I didn’t get shit done, at least.
I rubbed my scalp and turned the television to a noon broadcast of the news on one of the local stations. While the reporters talked about the mayor’s latest proposal to fuck up my morning commute by 'fixing’ some downtown roads, I got my coffee. It was thin but nearly boiling, so I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t get a horrid disease by drinking it. That was all I could hope for from a motel coffee maker.
About ten minutes into the newscast, the reporter finally stopped talking politics and mentioned the fire at the Hadley Business park. The actual story had scant details, but the accompanying video told me everything I needed to know. Sunshine's warehouse was gone. The reporter said the business park had improperly laid water mains, so firefighters had to truck in water instead of using the on–premise hydrants. No one mentioned shell casings or gunfire, but that’d come eventually when the arson investigators sifted through the ashes. With luck, though, I still had a few days.
I was about to turn off the TV when the studio anchor came back and updated us on that morning’s breaking story. The Chief of Police had released the names of the bodies dumped near Rachel and Robbie’s school the day before. Alicia Weinstein and her boyfriend Mark Patterson. The Chief confirmed that both had been burned repeatedly. No matter what those two were into, neither deserved to be tortured to death. Maybe helping Bukoholov eliminate his competitors wasn’t such an ignominious activity after all.
I turned the TV off and paced my small room. Olivia wasn’t going to like it, but she needed to hear what I had found out at Sunshine. She put her life in her colleagues’ hands every time she went to work. If one of those colleagues was willing to sell my information to drug dealers, they’d probably do the same to her without hesitation. My hope was that she’d actually let me finish speaking before sending a patrol car to arrest me.
I sipped my coffee and thumbed Olivia’s desk number into my cell phone. She answered on the second ring.
“Olivia, this is Ash. We need to talk.”
“I’m sure we do, but not right now.”
“I only need a minute. You need to hear this. Somebody in your department–”
“Stop,” she said, interrupting me. “This is not the right time. If you want to talk about work, meet me at The Park in half an hour.”
“You’re serious? The Park?”
“Of course I’m serious,” said Olivia. “I love The Park. If you have something to say to me, meet me there.”
“Can you make it an hour?”
Olivia agreed and hung up immediately after our conversation. I ran my tongue along the front of my teeth. Indianapolis has a lot of parks, but only one has significance for Olivia and me. Our park was a patch of grass and dirt on the city’s near–North side. We caught a homicide there a few years back that bothered us both. The victims were four teenage boys. Each of them had been castrated and shot multiple times. None of them had ID, and none were ever reported missing. We buried them as John Does. As far as I knew, their case was still open.
Olivia wouldn’t have suggested meeting me in The Park unless she had a damn good reason. I took a deep pull on my coffee and mulled the situation over. I was already hip–deep in a pile of rancorous shit, and for some reason, my old partner had asked me to step into the sewer.
***
I took a shower and brushed my teeth before heading out, sure that Olivia would appreciate both. Even though I hadn’t been to The Park in a few years, it wasn’t hard to find. I drove to the worst neighborhood in town and followed the sirens. After about twenty minutes of driving, the bars started posting signs outside requesting patrons leave their gang colors outside. That’s when I knew I was getting close. A couple of minutes after that, I hung a left at Three Little Pigs Ammo and Supply and saw Olivia’s car parked about half a block up.
I parked behind her and stepped out. The neighborhood stunk like sewage, probably because there was an open manhole on the sidewalk not ten feet from my car. In most parts of town, that would indicate someone was working underground. Near the Park, though, that meant someone had probably stolen the manhole cover and sold it for scrap. It was downright entrepreneurial.
I looked around quickly as soon as I got out of my car. The police department didn’t go into that area very often, and when they did, they went in force. The hackles on the back of my neck stood up.
The saddest part of that neighborhood was that most of its denizens were good people. They had jobs, they went to school, they raised their kids as well as they could. They happened to be poor and live in a neighborhood infested by drugs and gangs. It was unfortunate, but there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.
As I stepped forward, I saw movement in my peripheral vision and shot my hand to the firearm inside my jacket. A heavyset white guy stepped out from behind a bush and onto the sidewalk, pulling his pants up. He saw my weapon and froze, his hands in the air. A woman followed. Her fishnets were torn, her hair was in disarray, and her gaze was glassy and absent.
“Get scarce,” I said, inclining my head towards the street. The guy scampered away, but the prostitute he was with didn’t move. She looked high, so I doubted she comprehended English at that moment. There was little I could do for her, so I ignored her and walked towards some picnic tables beside a rusted swing set a dozen yards away. It was eerie being in that place again. After my last visit, I didn’t think it could get much worse. Evidently, I had been wrong in that belief. The hookers didn’t use to show up until dinnertime.
Olivia was sitting at one of the tables. She wore an orange, sleeveless shirt and dark jeans. Her purse was slung around one shoulder and open. Even if I hadn’t known her, I would have known she was a cop. Her head never stopped moving as she observed her surroundings, and nor did her hand stray too far from her purse, where I presumed she kept her service weapon. I called her name so I wouldn’t startle her and walked over.
“You’ve got a tap on your cell phone,” she said, sniffing. “And by the way, you smell like burned plastic.”
I looked down at my jacket. It was the same one I had worn the night before to Sunshine.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you it some other time. The cell tap. Is it Bowers?”
Olivia nodded.
“What’s he looking for?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s covering the body dump at the High School, so he’s got every politician in the state pressuring him to find a suspect. My guess is you were convenient.”