Green Light (Sam Archer 7)

by Tom Barber

  Using the cash Leann had on her, Karen had checked into a motel, cleaned herself up, then picked up a pistol from a safety deposit box she kept in the city and went home to kill that son of a bitch. However, he was gone, along with everything of value in the house. Taking her gun, she’d gone to Bashev’s lieutenant’s home and confronted the man, who’d been minutes away from leaving himself, his entire house stripped bare.

  With the gun in his face he’d told her everything. Karen had already known the Feds were back in Pittsburgh on the hunt to crush any Mafia presence, which meant the Prizraki either had to keep an extremely low profile or get the hell out of there. Apparently the leadership had been watching Vladimir for a while, the success of their operation at the steel mill and the vast sums of money it was bringing in attracting their attention.

  When the leader of the New York faction had been killed the week before, Vladimir had been offered the position.

  For every Prizraki member, induction into the Little Odessa organisation was highly coveted; the chance to actually lead it was an unrivalled honour and responsibility. Prospective inductees were carefully observed for some time before any offer was made. If an inductee was later judged to be inferior, it wasn’t unusual for them to be killed along with the member who’d recommended them. It ensured only the most ruthless and successful survived.

  Bashev’s lieutenant then told Karen the reason why Vladimir had disposed of her as he had. She knew of course that in the Russian Mafia a prospect was required to shed blood to signify his allegiance, but the New York Prizraki were particularly brutal, demanding an extra level of proof of Bashev’s dedication. The Thieves Law they still adhered to stated that no true vor v zakone could have a family of his own, thus ensuring total loyalty, no distractions or providing an enemy with a potential means of blackmail.

  As a consequence, the Prizraki leadership had put a green light on Karen.

  If Vladimir wanted to join them, he’d have to get rid of her.

  Evidently this hadn’t posed a problem for her late husband. That ultimate betrayal after so many years of marriage and working together, coupled with the experience of being buried alive completely unhinged her, the professional killer who’d lain dormant for so many years, back with a vengeance. She’d dedicated years building up their operation with her husband and she’d been repaid by being buried alive, the only mercy he’d shown was not breaking her wrists, Vladimir not wanting to torture her but dispose of her. A cold, calculated business decision.

  In turn, she made one of her own. Her husband was going to die, but only after each and every member of his new team. She’d inflict the ultimate humiliation on him as leader of the uppermost Prizraki faction, knowing that by removing his crew, Bashev would appear completely inept to both the leadership and also all the men around him. Then and only then would Karen take her revenge on him, if the bosses didn’t kill him first.

  She’d started her campaign immediately, knowing she couldn’t leave Bashev’s lieutenant alive, so she’d shot him and taking Leann with her, headed for New York. As soon as they’d arrived, Karen rented an East Village apartment then called up two of her old pimps from Pittsburgh who she’d set up in Manhattan, Carlos Goya and Alex Santiago. They’d been forced to leave the Steel City due to police attention and owed her big time; they also had no idea what had happened to her and were extremely fearful of her powerful connections, no idea that they’d been severed. When she told them she was taking over their operation, they didn’t argue. It wouldn’t have been wise.

  The two men ran eleven women, twelve after Karen forced Leann to join the roster, the girl not a problem now Karen had gotten her addicted to painkillers and kicked her out of the house to find her own place. However, even though money started to roll in, Karen had stayed in her East Village apartment in order to maintain her cover, spending every waking minute meticulously planning her revenge.

  Her first task was to learn everything she could about the Little Odessa Prizraki, the structure, where Bashev and the other men lived and operated and how many of them there were. It was a challenge and she was well aware of how dangerous it was; the men were notoriously hard to get information on and she knew if they got wind of Karen’s presence in the city, or even the fact there was someone asking questions, the consequences would be fatal. They wouldn’t make any mistakes the second time.

  She’d been patiently gathering information for five weeks until something totally unexpected had happened. She’d arrived home one afternoon to find three people in white overalls waiting for her.

  Gas masks over their faces and silenced pistols in their hands.

  Outside the Columbus Circle building, four Latino enforcers were sitting in a car, all of them pissed off and confused about what had gone down tonight.

  Four of their guys had been killed in Queens and two more had been hit on the Queensborough. They’d lost the cop car as it left the Bridge but they’d been sent the address of the safe-house where the cop was heading. The passenger in the front seat looked up at the building, hearing sirens in the distance.

  ‘Shit,’ the guy behind the wheel said. ‘We’re running out of time. Do we check it out?’

  As he spoke a black 4x4 suddenly screeched out of the underground parking lot immediately ahead of them, smashing through the barrier and swinging right.

  Two of its windows were already smashed out, the vehicle riddled with bullet-holes. It was their target.

  ‘Go!’ the guy in the passenger seat shouted, loading his gun.

  Arriving at the East Side docks, Karen pulled in through the front gate. The place was huge and as she drove in she saw Henderson and Tully’s spare van forty feet to her left, the giant piping warehouse they used as a base another fifty feet beyond it.

  She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened after she’d been confronted at her place in the East Village, but she realised later she been chloroformed and had woken up to find herself restrained with zip-ties, a strip of duct-tape over her mouth, the three figures pouring a chemical liquid into a tub which she’d quickly realised was meant for her.

  As she’d lain there terrified, desperately trying to figure a way out of this, she’d noticed the smaller of the three had been staring at her. After a few moments the figure had turned to speak to the other two who stopped what they were doing. The ensuing argument getting heated, the figure had removed the mask, revealing an attractive woman with a blackened vein down the side of her neck.

  Searching back through her memory, Karen had suddenly recognised her, and then by association, the two men although they’d both changed dramatically since she’d last seen them.

  When she’d killed the head of the Suki just over ten years ago, his two sons had also been wasted by the Prizraki that same night but his grandchildren had been spared, not out of compassion but because they could be sold. Good money had been offered in California for the teenage captives, Mikhail, Seva and Ninochka, the grandchildren of a Suki boss. Vladimir had concluded the deal and been preparing to ship them west to San Diego.

  Karen had arrived just as the three kids were being moved; fortunately for her now, the three of them had been blindfolded and hadn’t seen Karen. They had no idea who she was.

  The woman was looking at her Suki tattoos instead.

  She’d pulled up Karen’s shirt, seeing the rest of the inking on her back. A rapid conversation had followed, the strip of tape across Karen’s mouth removed, aware that if she said the wrong thing now then this would all be over and she’d be going into the tub.

  Lying through her teeth, Karen said that her husband had been killed by the Pittsburgh Prizraki and that she was here to exact revenge on the crew who were responsible in Little Odessa. To her relief, the trio had fallen for it, starting to ask her questions, wanting details.

  After a tense few moments the girl with the pronounced vein, Ninochka, had removed Karen’s binds. Once again, she’d somehow managed to escape what had seemed to be certain dea
th.

  And the enemy of her enemy had just become her friend.

  FORTY NINE

  Driving fast up 8th Avenue, Shepherd only had one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on his lap; the injury to his arm was painful but he and Hendricks had patched themselves up as best they could. Right now they couldn’t afford the time to go the hospital so both were running on painkillers and adrenaline. Beside him, Hendricks was wrapping a bandage round his leg, swearing each time Shepherd took a corner.

  A squad car suddenly screeched into view from their right, speeding alongside them and just missing a white van coming the other way. Frowning, Shepherd glanced at the car then looked left to see what they were chasing and saw a Counter-Terrorism Bureau Ford burning down 9th.

  ‘That’s Archer!’ Hendricks said.

  Shepherd wrenched the wheel over, causing Hendricks to let fly with another stream of expletives as they raced towards 9th Avenue after Archer.

  Henderson, Tully and Lister may have untied Karen but she wasn’t out of danger yet; they tested her, wanting to hear a lot more about her time in Pittsburgh. Fortunately for her, Karen had a good memory as well as a silver tongue and it didn’t take long before she’d loosened them up enough to discover why they’d been intending to kill her. It wasn’t because of what she and Vladimir had done to them; she was very lucky they had no idea she’d been involved in that.

  The Suki brothers and sister been shipped to San Diego for a total of thirty five grand; then they’d been split up and sent to three different clients. However, a problem for pimps when hustling boys was puberty. Nic had been a scrawny and lanky teenager but two years into his captivity he’d filled out rapidly, growing to over six feet, his weight soon reaching over two hundred pounds.

  His pimp was five eight and maybe a buck sixty by comparison.

  Twenty four months after his abduction, Henderson had killed the man, making his escape. He’d managed to track Tully down, helped him escape too and the pair began to look for Lister. It turned out that she’d killed a john and was doing a two year sentence for manslaughter.

  Waiting for her to get out, the two young men had needed cash and had ended up working for a Mesa drug cartel involved in a bloody war with another organisation from Culiacan. Used as enforcers, the pair had worked with the cartel’s muscle charged with fighting off the Mexicans and was where they’d learnt the lye recipe to dispose of bodies. The other men had figured they were just Russian thugs, no idea they were actually Suki Mafia royalty.

  There were two reasons for that. The first was their names; knowing they were vulnerable as children and wanting to protect them from rival gangs, the three kids had always been called by their Western first names, each given a different legalised surname too to add another layer of protection.

  The second reason was they’d been too young when they’d been abducted to have Suki tattoos. However, having reached manhood Henderson and Tully changed that, getting their stars as well as other ink they’d earned after serving a joint sentence at Lompoc for weapons charges, one month after Henderson’s twenty first birthday. Lister had still been in jail at that point and had never had any ink-work done.

  Once she’d been released, her two brothers had ditched the cartel work and the brothers and sister had focused on one thing.

  Finding the men responsible for both destroying the Pittsburgh Suki and for trafficking them out to the West Coast.

  They’d left San Diego and started working their way across the country, heading for Pittsburgh. Realising they were going to need significant funds if they were going to succeed, they quickly identified a lucrative way of making money; sourcing a high-level escort service in a city, removing whoever controlled it then taking over the operation. Consequently, when their pursuit of the people who’d trafficked them out to California brought them to New York, they’d looked around for a high-end service they could acquire.

  Karen Casey’s lucrative operation had caught their eye.

  Once they found out they had the same goal, they quickly realised they could increase their chances of getting to Bashev and the rest of the Prizraki if they worked together. Soon establishing a working relationship, they focused all their energies on achieving the outcome they all wanted, the destruction of the New York Prizraki. Karen had discovered how scarily efficient the trio were in disposing of their victims and the fate she’d narrowly escaped.

  However, because of all the hard work and planning involved in killing her husband’s new team and disrupting his operation, Karen had been distracted and it’d cost her. She’d taken her eye off her step-daughter, who’d been arrested in February on a police bust and served three months inside. She’d only been out for eight weeks or so when she suddenly checked herself into rehab in August without any warning.

  Karen had been furious. The day Leann had been released, Karen went to the facility to pick her up, making sure she got her straight back to work, but found the girl had already left. She’d called her immediately and it was then Leann had told her she was leaving and threatened to expose Karen and the real reason she was here in the city if she didn’t let her go without a fuss.

  The moment she made that threat, she’d signed her own death warrant.

  When Leann had hung up on her, Karen had still been on her way back from the rehab clinic in Long Island and so couldn’t deal with the issue herself. With Henderson, Tully and Lister fully occupied in Little Odessa, she’d contacted Goya and Santiago, telling them to handle the problem. However, the imbeciles had managed to shoot two cops when they killed Leann, both of whom worked for one of the most powerful divisions in the city. That stupidity had suddenly brought a very unwelcome spotlight of attention onto Goya and Santiago, their girls and potentially, Karen and Henderson, Tully and Lister.

  The problem was, at that point they’d still had seven Prizraki left to take care of, including her husband, and there was absolutely no way Karen was leaving until he’d paid the ultimate price for what he’d done to her. She’d looked at their escort service client base and the men they had footage of, trying to find anything or anyone she could use to help rescue this situation long enough to finish off the Prizraki.

  Then, like manna from heaven, she’d found the tape of an NYPD lieutenant with one of the girls, Kelly Greer.

  Across town, the Counter-Terrorism Ford roared down 9th Avenue, shooting red lights, swerving past traffic with just inches to spare.

  However, it suddenly took a burst from a sub-machine gun from the car behind which blew out a rear tyre. The Ford slammed into a lamp-post, knocking the post back slightly on its heavy base; the front fender of the vehicle crumpled and smoking, the horn blaring and the glass in the windshield and doors shattered.

  Pulling to a halt behind it, the four Latinos were already out of their vehicles, loading their weapons as they approached the crashed car, the sound of police sirens getting closer.

  Stalking forward, the lead passenger focused on the driver’s side, his Ingram Mac-10 held sideways and in the aim.

  Arriving by the door, he looked through the blown out driver’s window and paused, holding his weapon up with the sights on the driver’s head.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’

  Now just over four weeks after Leann’s death and Lieutenant Royston’s reluctant but valuable assistance, the New York Prizraki had all been disposed of.

  Sam Archer was a done deal too. Like the Russians’ moves on the detective team’s homes, Vargas’ death had successfully distracted her boyfriend and kept him off their backs for a while, but Karen had known that wouldn’t be enough and that he needed to die. She’d previously ordered Royston to pull the files on the Counter Terrorism team and had seen Archer’s exemplary record. She’d instantly realised he’d be a major threat, but not anymore, finally. Henderson and Tully had seen to that.

  Apart from her involvement as Leann’s supposed mother, she’d managed to keep attention off herself, despite the visits from the police detectiv
es. Before any of them had come knocking she’d found several framed photos amongst Leann’s things she’d brought from Pittsburgh and put them in the sitting area, giving the impression of a happy mother-daughter relationship. Playing each encounter with the police moment by moment, she was either hostile or turned on the tears, and it had worked like a charm. With Goya and Santiago gone, no-one could ever have guessed that she’d been the person who ordered Leann’s death.

  She already had a new identity for herself and she’d handle Henderson and Tully later, wasting them on the road once they were out of the State. The cops knew their names which meant she had to get rid of them; they’d served their purpose and were now a liability. If she let them live, at some point they could figure out she was actually former Prizraki, heavily involved in the deaths of their father and grandfather and she couldn’t allow that to happen.

  Tossing the empty container of bleach to one side, Karen slammed the door and checked her watch.

  It was time.

  On 9th Avenue, the Latino gang member lowered his weapon and stared in confusion at the driver of the crashed Ford.

  Rather than the blond NYPD detective he was expecting to see, instead there was a red-haired woman sitting behind the wheel, leaning back in the seat and away from the airbag, blood trickling down her face from a cut to the side of her head.

  ‘Wrong guess, asshole,’ she said, smiling faintly.

  Enraged, the gang member raised his gun again, aiming it at her head.

  ‘Drop the weapon!’ a voice suddenly bellowed from behind him.

  The man whirled around, his weapon still up, giving Shepherd no choice but to fire.