Kings of Brighton Beach Bundle

by D. B. Shuster

  Artur’s gut churned with the raw burn of hatred. He despised these mobsters. The Georgians, the Chechens, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Italians, it didn’t matter. He loathed their violence and posturing, their egos and entitlement. Artur had been forced to make his life here in Brighton Beach’s Little Odessa, coerced into becoming one of their leaders. It was never what he had wanted. The deals and the deceit, the secrets and favors, the evasions and maneuvers—all so that money could flow from one dirty hand to the other. Now Inna had paid a terrible price.

  His deal with the Devil was only supposed to cost his soul, but not Inna’s; never Inna’s. She had been the prize for the trade he had made, the freedom he had sacrificed.

  Now the contract had been breached. The deal was null and void. There would be no more stealthy diplomacy, no more sly bargaining, no more quietly manipulative tactics.

  There was only one deal now: Anyone who threatened Inna died.

  Artur surreptitiously drew the pen from his pocket, pointed the tip at Goga, and clicked the end to shoot. The dart was smaller than a mosquito, and its sting had a similar bite. If Goga felt the sharp, little projectile penetrate his skin, he showed no sign, but Artur had aimed true. In moments, the pellet would dissolve and Goga would have a heart attack. A flick of his thumb, a clockwise rotation, and the dart gun was a regular ballpoint again. Artur slipped it back into his pocket. Sleek, stealthy, and deadly.

  Now to stall.

  “You came here on my invitation and did this! This! In the next room. While you made your show with your knife and gun.” Artur yelled at both of them, distracting them with their own farcical script of honor and justice, while he waited for the poison to take hold. “Is this how you treat my hospitality?”

  “Hospitality!” Dato spat. “We came here to meet you on your turf. On your terms. And our man is dead.”

  Dato pretended as if they hadn’t come to tonight’s meeting with the sole intention of making threats and demanding Artur pay krysha, protection money, for whatever operation was taking place at Troika. The Georgian gang would be diminished if Artur had bested them the way they claimed, killing one of their men while they conferred—unless they struck back twice as hard.

  Inna continued to cry, and Artur feared they had broken her. Worry squeezed his chest as if he were the one having the heart attack.

  “Drop your weapons! Hands where we can see them.”

  Four officers burst into the room. About time! Goga winced, the pain hitting. Artur noticed the slight shaking of his arm. Twenty seconds, he thought. Still, too much time.

  Artur shielded Inna’s head and torso with his body. Anything could happen in twenty seconds. Vlad could be disarmed before Goga or, only seconds before his heart stopped, Goga could make good on his threat to claim Inna’s life in reparation for his comrade’s.

  Over his shoulder, Artur watched Goga and Vlad match each other inch for inch as they bent to put their guns on the floor, neither willing to disarm before the other. No one dared interrupt the slow-motion mirror game. Artur anxiously counted the seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five.

  Then Goga made a sudden jerk. With the onset of gripping chest pain, he spasmed and fired a wild shot. The officers responded with a hail of bullets, and Goga crumpled to the ground.

  Dato also fell to the floor, howling with pain. Goga’s final shot had hit him in the leg.

  “I said drop your weapons!” one of the officers shouted again.

  With Goga down, Vlad quickly dropped both guns to the floor and stepped back, both hands open and up in the air.

  “Hands up!” one of the officers shouted at Artur, but Artur couldn’t bring himself to let go of Inna. “Up!” the asshole demanded, pointing his drawn weapon at Artur.

  “We need an ambulance. She needs help.” Artur’s voice cracked on the words, and Inna suddenly stopped sobbing, only to turn catatonic. As the EMTs rushed her and Dato, she slipped into a trancelike state. Artur waved his hand in front of her eyes, but her pupils didn’t even track his movements. She was slipping away. How far? Would he be able to get her back? He couldn’t lose her, wouldn’t lose her. Not like Sofia.

  The EMTs bundled Inna onto a stretcher, but an officer restrained Artur when he stayed by her side as they moved into the hallway. “She’s my daughter. She needs me,” Artur protested.

  “This is a crime scene. You have to stay and answer a few questions.” The officer in charge, Tony Marano, a thickset man with a grizzled moustache, was unmoved by Artur’s pleas, despite his being on Artur’s payroll. He blocked Artur with his bulky body, making a good show for his fellow officers, pretending to run things by the book.

  “You don’t understand,” Artur said as the EMTs rolled Dato’s stretcher into the elevator beside Inna, his intended kill. Artur pulled away from the officer, but Marano grabbed him by the jacket and shoved him against the wall in the hallway. Artur fought him off and shouted his objections. “He tried to kill her! You can’t take them to the same hospital. In the same ambulance.”

  “Calm down, Koslovsky. Don’t make me arrest you,” Marano warned. He threw his body weight into pinning Artur against the wall. “You’re coming with me to the precinct detective squad. An officer will accompany her to Coney Island Hospital. A female detective will meet them there and stay with her.”

  As if that were enough to save his daughter from a man intent on spilling her blood.

  Artur knew he could fight Marano off, but he slumped against the wall as if he had crumpled under Marano’s threats. Getting arrested would solve nothing. He couldn’t protect Inna from inside a jail cell.

  NICK

  KATYA AND NICK were supposed to have been on their way to Aleksei’s club more than an hour ago. If they had taken the subway as Nick had advocated, they would already be there, seated and having drinks with Inna. But no.

  Aleksei had insisted on picking Katya up at the office. Not so bad. Nick might even have given him points for chivalry had he not been a full hour late. Even Katya, with her usually sunny demeanor, had exhausted her arsenal of ready excuses and sunk into glumness. She checked her watch repeatedly and tried to raise him on his cell. No answer. “Frankly, I’m not sure whether to be irritated or worried,” she said.

  When Aleksei pulled up in his gleaming silver Ferrari FF and slid out of the car as if he were the star of the hour, Nick was officially irritated.

  Aleksei left his silver sports car double-parked across the street and started toward them. With a wave to the guard in the lobby, Nick pushed open the heavy door to the glass-front building where his law firm occupied the seventh floor. He held the door for Katya. The fall night was crisp and cool, and a breeze off the Hudson ruffled Katya’s golden curls. She paused on the sidewalk and turned to him, her bright green eyes filled with apology and apprehension.

  “No worries,” Nick preempted, lest she offer him an out. He had too much riding on tonight’s double date. For good measure, he added, “I’m looking forward to meeting Inna.”

  The words were the right ones. The tension in Katya’s face eased, but before she could respond, Aleksei caught her in an embrace.

  “Hi, Babe,” Aleksei greeted Katya and dipped her back into a showy kiss.

  For his own part, Nick stood riveted. Seeing Aleksei was like stepping back into the past. He had seen pictures, knew that Aleksei strongly resembled his father, Artur, sculpted and attractive. But seeing Aleksei in person, he remembered Artur’s magnetism, the flair for romance. With little more than a longing glance, Artur had made Nick’s mother’s cheeks flush and had lured her into sin.

  “You’re late,” Katya chided, but quietly, as if she were dazzled by her own husband.

  “Traffic,” Aleksei said—no apology, as if the one word explained everything.

  Nick bit his tongue. Yes, there was traffic. It was Friday night in New York City. Of course, there was traffic. What idiot didn’t plan and leave extra time for traffic?

  “You didn’t answer your ce
ll. I was getting worried.”

  “Dead battery. I forgot to charge it,” Aleksei said with a nonchalant shrug.

  Seriously?

  Aleksei snaked an arm possessively around Katya’s shoulders and then shook Nick’s hand. He reeked of Drakkar Noir, as if he had bathed in the stuff, and his platinum hair was stiff with spikes. In his tight leather pants and white silk shirt, he looked more rock star than business owner, although Nick grudgingly supposed the look worked for the owner of a trendy nightclub.

  “Good to finally meet the other man,” Aleksei said with a touch of humor, but Katya elbowed him in the ribs. “What?” Aleksei protested and dropped a kiss into her hair. “You spend more time with him than you do with me.”

  “It’s called work,” Katya said with uncharacteristic irritation. Nick supposed Katya’s hours were a point of contention in the marriage. Likely Aleksei wanted a worshipful woman at his beck and call, but Katya was an attorney in Manhattan, where an eighty-hour-minimum workweek was industry standard for young associates.

  Aleksei shrugged. “Enjoy her while you can,” he said to Nick. “She’s got baby fever.”

  Katya bit her lip, clearly uncomfortable with her husband’s lack of tact, but said nothing, while Nick’s opinion of Katya’s husband dropped even lower. He already disliked Aleksei, by simple virtue of his resemblance to the villain of Nick’s childhood. Artur, whose last name had been Gregorovich in the Soviet Union, must have been even younger than Aleksei was now when Nick had known him, but Aleksei looked exactly as Nick remembered the man.

  Artur. The man his mother had loved. The man who had destroyed Nick’s family. The man Nick had vowed would pay for what he had done.

  Katya’s silence, a confirmation in Nick’s mind that she hoped to start a family and likely planned to leave the law firm, made Nick even more determined to get on with the date with Artur’s daughter. He had a time-limited window to make his move. He needed to leverage his connection with Katya to get close to Artur.

  “Ready to get this party started?” Nick asked and squeezed himself into the backseat of the Ferrari. Granted the car was beautiful, sleek on the outside and appointed inside with wood trim and rich leather, and did actually have four seats, but it could barely accommodate Nick’s long legs. Why had Aleksei insisted on picking them up if the fit were going to be so tight?

  Aleksei pulled easily into the slow-moving traffic of midtown Manhattan. He drove aggressively, dodged between cars whenever there was an opening and gunned the motor for short sprints from one lane to the other.

  They made little progress despite Aleksei’s jolting zigs and zags. At a red light, Aleksei sighed dramatically. “I’m almost out of gas. We need to find a gas station before we head over to Brighton Beach.”

  “There’s a station on 47th,” Nick said and leaned his head back against the headrest. He despised being late and resented this newest delay. Worse, he hated losing control of a situation, and he had a feeling Aleksei bred chaos, whether by accident or design.

  What was Katya doing with Aleksei anyway? She was so cheerful and empathetic, and he was so… entitled and inconsiderate, as if life owed him something and had defaulted. As far as Nick could tell, Aleksei wanted for nothing. He certainly hadn’t struggled the way Nick had.

  Nick supposed he should be grateful for Katya’s poor taste. The wedding announcement, in the Jewish newspaper of all places, had reinvigorated a hunt he had thought had reached a dead end. With Aleksei a ringer for his father, Nick had immediately recognized the family connection and figured out that Artur Gregorovich, the notorious KGB agent who had persecuted Jewish families in the Soviet Union, had changed his name to Koslovsky and, irony of ironies, become an upstanding member of the Russian Jewish community in Brighton Beach. Artur had even donated a wing to the local synagogue, complete with a foundation stone naming it in his and his wife’s honor.

  Another man might have dared believe that Artur had changed, but Nick didn’t believe in happy endings or redemption. He had been in the legal world long enough, prosecuted and defended enough criminals. Rotten was rotten. People didn’t change. They stayed true to their natures. Artur, no matter how honorable and good he appeared now, would always be callous and opportunistic, a murderer or a politician, a lover or a philanthropist as the situation demanded, but always a dangerous liar.

  Katya regularly told Nick he was too cynical—although she had no inkling of Nick’s secret obsession with her father-in-law. Nick always countered that she was too optimistic, too soft-hearted and willing to believe the best, to extend a second chance, to imagine that the next encounter would be better, different—no matter how many times she was disappointed. Sometimes he wasn’t sure whether to pity or envy her. One thing was certain: he hadn’t expected someone like her to be connected to Artur Koslovsky.

  He had never expected to like her, but he found he couldn’t help himself. And he also found himself worrying. How much was Aleksei like his father, and how would Katya handle the truth when she learned the true nature of her husband’s family—a truth that had destroyed Nick’s mother?

  Aside from the delay inherent in detouring to the gas station and then crawling back into traffic, filling Aleksei’s tank didn’t take long. After a few more minutes, Aleksei had them on the Williamsburg Bridge, and traffic cleared as they left Manhattan for Brooklyn.

  Just as Nick began to relax in his cramped position in the backseat, thinking the evening was back on track, the car started to list. Aleksei pulled onto the shoulder of the highway. “I think we’ve got a flat.”

  The three of them spilled out of the car to inspect. Aleksei ran his hand over his face as if confronting a tragedy. “This could take a while.”

  “You have a spare, don’t you?” Nick asked, no longer able to hide his impatience with Katya’s husband. Part of him wondered if Aleksei had caused the flat himself. Maybe Aleksei didn’t want Nick to go on a date with his sister. Maybe his late arrival, his empty gas tank, and now this flat tire were all passive-aggressive attempts to thwart Katya’s matchmaking. But why?

  “There should be one in the trunk,” Katya said.

  Nick ducked around Aleksei, reached into the driver’s side of the zippy silver sports car, and popped the trunk. Then he marched to the back to inspect what resources he had at his disposal.

  A flat tire and Aleksei’s seeming ineptitude were the only things standing between Nick and the revenge he had plotted for so long. Neither would stop him.

  He would woo Inna, worm his way into the Koslovsky family, learn their secrets—and he had no doubt there were vicious, ugly secrets—and bring Artur down from the inside.

  Despite the trunk’s small size, he half expected to find a dead body decomposing as he peered inside, if only because he had had more than twenty-five years to weave stories about what kind of monster Artur was. What he found was the spare tire and flat kit, exactly what he needed.

  “Should I call for roadside assistance?” Katya asked.

  “No,” Nick said, stripping off his suit jacket and folding it into the trunk, “I can do it.” Grabbing the kit in one hand, he hoisted the spare tire out of the trunk then rolled it toward the rear driver’s side. He knelt in the damp gravel on the roadside to switch out the flat. Aleksei, in his tight leather pants and silk shirt, only watched, arms folded. He didn’t offer to help. Afraid he might get himself dirty?

  “Can you see?” Katya asked. Before Nick answered, she opened the door beside him and scrambled into the car, gracing Nick with a flash of leg and a view of her skirt clinging tightly to her enticingly round bottom. Nick yanked his gaze away.

  He focused on cranking the jack as Katya, on hands and knees, rummaged in the car and opened and shut various compartments. “Sweetheart, where’s the flashlight?” she called.

  Aleksei answered on a yawn. “Try the middle console.”

  “Aha!” She backed out, triumphant, flashlight in hand, and shone it on the tire. “Look, there’s a slash,” she
said, and leaned close enough that Nick could smell her perfume, light and clean, a blend of citrus and flowers that suited her. “What do you think caused it?”

  “It’s New York. Anything could cause it,” Aleksei said. “Maybe someone thought it would be funny to knife my car while I waited for you,” he said, but Aleksei presented the night’s events incorrectly. They hadn’t kept him waiting. They had waited for him.

  “Maybe,” Katya said. She didn’t correct him, and Nick wondered why not. Katya was no pushover, at least not at the negotiating table or in the courtroom. She sighed. “Well, at least Nick will have us on the road again soon.”

  Nick grunted with the exertion of loosening the lug nuts. The last one was stuck, screwed in tight, and he leaned into the wrench, using his weight to free it. When the nut started spinning easily he said, “Just a few more minutes.”

  He slid the flat off the bolts before lifting the spare into place. Katya moved closer and shone the flashlight so that he could see the bolts as he replaced the nuts. Behind them, Aleksei shifted restlessly.

  “It’s getting late,” Aleksei said. “Maybe we should try this again another time.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Katya said. “I texted Inna and told her we’d be late. She said she’d wait for us at the bar.”

  Aleksei kicked at the gravel with his pointy, Euro-chic loafers. Katya moved to his side and stroked his arm, while Nick loaded the flat into the trunk. “Oh, come on, Aleksei. I know you think of her as your annoying little sister, but she’s not a little kid anymore. You’ll see. We’ll have fun together, the four of us.”

  Aleksei bent to kiss Katya on the head. “Whatever you want,” he said, but he sounded a bit distracted. Nick couldn’t shake the feeling that, despite the jewelry he showered on her, Aleksei didn’t fully appreciate what he had in his wife.