by Chuck Dixon
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Folks see what they want to see. Never let them see what you are. Let them see what they want you to be.”
24
The doublewide sat at the end of Lockhaven Road. A standalone steel garage building with six bays. A primer-shot Dodge Charger sat on the concrete pad by a pair of Harleys. The place had a view of Cotton Lake off the back deck where Dutch Manklin sat counting out the last of the fifty dollar bills on a granite-topped table. Dougie sat with him. They were having coffees brought to them by Rachel, Dutch's latest old lady. Dutch poured some flavored creamer into his mug and stirred.
“How can you drink that shit?” Dougie’s nose wrinkled at the smell of faux hazelnuts wafting off the other biker’s mug.
“You keep up drinking your shit black you wind up with the reflux, brother,” Dutch said while wrapping the stack of Grants with a double strap of rubber band.
“Think this guy’s for real?” Dougie said.
“His money is. You told me he went into the Red Roof alone, no reservation. No phone calls. Never talked to anyone.”
“We don’t know him. This deal could be the set-up. Next time it’s him and an army of staties.”
“Doesn’t matter. We can’t handle the weight he’s talking about anyway,” Dutch said taking a sip of the milky mess in his mug. It left a frosting on his mustache that he licked away.
“It’s a lot of money, Dutchie.”
“It’s a lot of hassle and a lot of heat. Let him deal direct with the Russian. We pick up points off the deal. Ten percent maybe. That’s eleven kay we didn’t have last night without any real exposure.”
Dutch picked up one of three cell phones he had on the table and punched send then send again. A female voice answered on the other end.
“Tell Dimi to pick up, bitch.”
25
The cellphone buzzed and shimmied on the table by the bed waking Levon.
It was Dutch.
“You got a meet two days from now. You know Channelside?”
“Tampa. Where the cruise ships come in.”
“That’s right, brother. There’s a bar. Upper level. The River Rock. Four o’clock.”
“I hear you.”
“But first you have to prove you’re up for the deal. We need to know you’re for real.”
“How do I do that?”
“Use the cell I gave you. Take a picture of your cash and send it to me. Five minutes.”
The line went dead.
Levon got out of bed. Just after midnight. He got the satchel of cash out of the closet of the hotel room. He stripped off the bank bands and dumped it on the bed. He picked up the USA Today still lying where it had been slid under the door that morning. It went on the bed by the cash. He snapped a picture after figuring out the photo function on the phone. Took another for safety then forwarded it to the only number in his send file.
The cell buzzed seconds later.
“The newspaper was a nice touch. You like the James Bond shit after all.”
“I have the cash. Do you have my product?”
“We’ll talk at Channelside. Bring the cash.”
“I’m that stupid,” Levon said.
“It’s a public place. A cruise ship will be loading and off-loading. There’s gonna be assholes off the Carnival Princess everywhere.”
“Sunday. Channelside. River Rock. At four.”
The line went dead again.
26
The moored cruise ship towered over the open-air mall at Channelside. The top decks of it were level with condos on the eighth floor of the buildings facing the deep waters of the turning basin.
People in cruise-wear were exiting the ship and complaining that Tampa was colder than they anticipated. Channelside Drive was packed with cars heading for the long term parking garages. The cruise-bound tourists climbing out of buses and taxis were dressed for Florida winter in layers of sweats. The two crowds, a human estuary of the boarding and debarking, mixed in the mall with idle hours to fill before departure.
The mall was shuttered, a victim of economic downturn and the collapse of Florida tourism. The landed passengers were left wandering empty halls lined with white-washed storefronts. The food court was on the second level surrounded by shuttered theme bars, a locked up bowling alley and closed multiplex theater. There were tables and chairs under tattered awnings and tiki-style gazebos. The only food and drink available came from cart services that the city allowed to set up in the empty space.
A stiff wind off the channel sent most of the time-killing tourists off to restaurants within walking distance. Or to the trolley to take them to warm bars and shops in Ybor City ten minutes away. That left most of the tables on the upper level of Channelside empty.
Levon arrived early. He parked the Avalanche on the first level of the parking tower across the street. He joined the growing crowd of new arrivals and drifted up to the food court and took up a vantage point in the shade of an awning. From there he could watch as two men in leather coats took seats in front of the plywood-covered front of River Rock. The rest of the seats and tables bolted down to the deck were empty. They were both young guys with dark hair and carefully trimmed goatees. Both the kind of guys who spend a lot of time on their appearance. Their wrists flashed with jewelry.
At the same time they arrived, three other men took up positions around the food court, doing a poor job of appearing to be casual lookie-loos. They got their coats off the same rack as the seated men.
Each man at the table either spoke on or played with smartphones as they waited. They might have been strangers except that they were dressed like actors auditioning for the same part.
Levon approached using the milling crowd around the hot dog and pretzel wagons as cover. He was right up on the pair before they noticed him. The younger of the two-eyed the Nike bag slung under Levon's arm. He took a seat across from them, straddling it with one leg free. The bag went out of sight under the table. The younger man stuck out his hand and smiled.
“They call me Dean,” Dimi Kolisnyk said.
“Bill Coates,” Levon said.
The other man didn’t offer his hand or a smile.
“Cold, yes?” Dimi said hunching his shoulders.
“It’s the water,” Levon said.
"Still, warmer than Ohio, yes?" Dimi's eyes weren't smiling anymore.
“You ran my plates,” Levon said.
"We know you are not called Bill Coates. But it is okay. If your money is good, you call yourself whatever you like." Dimi laughed at his great joke. He was alone in his mirth.
“It’s good.”
“We see, yes?”
The other man pulled the Nike bag to a place on the ground between them. He unzipped the bag and pulled aside the t-shirt lying atop the stacks of cash bound with rubber bands. Dimi leaned over to run his fingers through the bundles.
“We good?” Levon said.
“Good. Very good.”
“Where’s my goods?”
Dimi slid a plastic card with a key atop it over the steel table top.
“Is in a locker at Gold’s Gym. The one off Waters. You can find it?”
“I’ll Google it.”
“Yes. Google it,” Dimi said, amused. “Your stuff is in the locker with this number. The card is a one-day guest pass. Come and go. Stay and work out. Whatever.”
“What if I want to reach you again?”
“You use burner that Dutch gave you. He tells me. We set up deal.”
“He tell you this is a once a month deal?”
"He told me. You like the shit in the locker we do more business."
Levon sat regarding Dimi. The tourists moved past like fish in a pool, colorful and slow. Dimi’s lips thinned and eyes narrowed.
“You leave first. Go back to Ohio. Shovel snow,” Dimi said, no smile. He waggled his fingers in a shooing motion. The other guy smiled for the first time.
Levon moved away through the crowd for the
exit, never looking back. He brushed right by one of the leather-jacketed watchers who eyed Levon all the way down to the street.
He crossed to the parking tower and walked to where the Avalanche was parked. A panel-sided van was parked in the next slot. Levon stopped to turn.
A flash of light turned his world to an explosion in luminescent white before going black.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Never let them bind you. Never let them take you to a second place. You won’t like it. You fight like a cornered hound or a treed cat. You never, never, never let them take you somewhere else. Even if you have to die. Believe me when I tell, it’s better to die on your terms than theirs.”
27
He’d been tazed before. The trick was to go limp early. Possum up.
His thoughts were coming back together. The muscles in his legs and arms starting to answer to his brain. The burning in the joints was subsiding. The crushing fatigue was still to be overcome.
Fuck that. Fight through it.
Levon was in the back of a van and it was moving at speed. Two figures were trying to turn him on his back, arguing in Ukrainian. He opened his eyes.
Danny and Van. The blond twins. Danny was pulling Levon’s wrists together. He jerked an inch-thick tie-wrap tight around them. Van was crouched at Levon’s feet trying to join two tie-wraps to bind his ankles together.
Danny was telling Van that he got his done first. Van was bitching that he couldn’t get the two bands to connect.
Levon brought a knee up and drove the heel of a work boot into Van's face. A snap of gristle. A spurt of blood. With the same motion, he brought his joined hands up to drive deep into Danny's crotch. He grabbed a double handful and twisted hard. Danny howled.
Maintaining his death grip on Danny’s genitals, Levon rolled, carrying the now shrieking man with him. Danny was atop him, providing cover. Van was backed against the rear doors of the van, rising to his feet. A hand to his nose to staunch the gout of blood running into his mouth and over his chin.
The van came to a violent, slewing halt. Levon and Danny, joined by Levon’s grip, went airborne and crashed against the cage mesh separating the rear of the van from the driver’s cab. The driver was unbuckling. Levon head-butted Danny in the mouth. He felt the other man’s jaw separate with a pop. Danny shrieked in his ear with a gush of fresh blood and broken teeth. Levon relaxed his grip on the man’s junk and yanked an automatic from the holster in Danny’s belt.
More shouting. The driver and Van. A new weight pressed atop Danny and down on Levon under him. Van was in the fight.
Levon levered the end of the pistol against flesh and pulled the trigger again and again. The weight came off him. Van leaped back crying out, holding both hands to a spreading stain on his thigh. Danny, shuddering, rolled off of Levon leaving him drenched in blood. The van filled with the smell of hot piss.
Lying supine, Levon stabbed the automatic toward the driver’s compartment and emptied it through the mesh. A grunt followed by an abbreviated bleat of the van’s horn.
Van was trying to get at his own handgun left-handed while maintaining pressure on his thigh. Levon was up and charged across the confining space to shoulder-check the man into the back doors with all his weight. Levon dropped upon the unmoving Van who was going white, bleeding out. Blood pooled in the recesses of the van’s floor grid making the surface greasy slick.
Levon yanked a black Sig Sauer from Van’s waistband. The man was shivering with the chill that blood loss brings. Levon crawled over him to drop the latch on the back doors and climbed out onto the road.
The van was on the verge of a two-lane with nothing but saw grass and pines visible either side. Levon used the butt of the Sig to break the driver side glass. He reached in over the slumped form of the driver and slid the gear shift to neutral. With a shoulder to the door and a hand holding the wheel to the right, he nudged the van rolling onto the grass. He stepped back and allowed the van to continue down the slope and into a swale filled with black water. It settled in the mud with water up to windows. The water downflooded through the break Levon made in the glass. The van sank further in an explosion of escaping air until only the top of the roof was visible. Big white birds rose from the surrounding shallows to flap away toward the trees.
Levon was covered in a spray of blood already growing stiff and tacky as it dried. He pulled the buckle from his belt revealing a spade-shaped blade. The razor sharp edge sliced through the tie wraps on his wrists. He checked his pockets. Wallet and keys were gone. His long slide was probably in the sunken van as well.
There were no rooftops or lights in sight. Only a lonely cell tower a few miles west. He started back up the road the way the van had come. His legs felt like he was dragging sacks of sand behind him. It would take a long hot soak and a long deep sleep to shake off the tazering.
He had a long walk ahead of him before that could happen.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Body counts don’t mean shit if they’re not the right bodies.”
28
Two uniformed Tampa cops found Symon Kharchenko in the communal steam room at his bay view condo complex. He was with a pair of men of his approximate age. All three were covered in tattoos. Prominent on Symon’s chest was a snarling tiger. The three men were dressed only in the ropes of gold chains draped about their necks.
The cops stood sweating in their body armor under their starched uniforms. They politely asked if Symon would get dressed and meet them by the pool. Symon twisted his lips and nodded to his tovariches before standing and exiting his naked ass out of the hot box.
They weren’t arresting him. So it had to be bad news. He showered off, put on a robe and sandals and joined them in the sunshine by the pool.
The cops told him what they came here to tell him. Symon’s granite façade shifted for only a second before regaining his usual impenetrable expression. He thanked the police officers and promised to cooperate with any further questions they may have in the future. The cops left for their patrol car and Symon took the elevator up to his one-level dacha on the eleventh floor.
Once inside he fell to his knees in the deep pile carpet and wept into his fists while the sun sank over the golden waters visible through the window wall that overlooked the bay. The sky and water were dark and pearls of light along the shoreline were twinkling to life when he lowered his hands from his face. His eyes were red-rimmed and his lips pale. Though damp with his own tears, his expression had regained the density of a sphinx, unreadable and placid.
Only now there was a heat in his eyes; a fire that would consume anything his gaze fell upon.
He would swear to God and Jesus and all the saints that from this day forward his life was divided into two parts. All the days before this day and all the days that would follow. His life with his two boys and his life, from here, without them.
The days left to him would be solely for finding answers. And once he found them, the rest of his life was God’s.
But before that, he would get drunk.
Symon made a single call on a cell phone while pouring his first tumbler of Platinka.
“Find Dimi. Tonight.”
He tossed the phone to a chair and took a long, burning pull of vodka.
29
He was hungry, horny and sober. Three conditions he found intolerable.
Dmitry Kolisnyk tossed the remote across the room.
Dimi to his family. Dean Collins to his friends.
There was serious shit coming down and his Uncle Symon wanted to talk to him. They dragged him out of a strip club on 19 in the middle of a private session. All drama, these Old World assholes. Have to make a thing out of what could be accomplished over the phone.
For now, he waited.
He threw himself back in the king-sized bed and looked at himself in the mirrored ceiling. He wore Buccaneers warm-up pants and jacket. His gold crucifix glowed on his spray-tanned chest. He ran a hand over his gym-rat abs — no pr
ison muscle for him.
His father and his ‘uncles’ were proud of their years inside. They wore getting caught like a soldier wears his medals. Their ink told their story in a kind of illustrated code. Something they should all be ashamed of and they turned it into a club. Smart criminals didn’t get caught. Smart criminals skated. The only ink on Dimi was a Bacardi bat on his right forearm and a winged pixie with big tits on the other. Jesus, he was drunk that night.
The red walls of the room were making him crazy. As was the faux gold trim on the heavy Mediterranean furniture and the ankle-deep carpet on the floor. There was nothing on the TV at this hour of the day. Negros arguing in phony courtrooms and white people arguing at tables. He couldn’t even look out a window. The black velvet curtains that covered one end of the room hid a bare cinderblock wall.
This place looked like a hotel room but it was all just a set. It was a property Uncle Symon owned in an industrial park in Largo. He leased it to some Lebanese outfit and they set it up as a porno studio. The Arabs divided it into separate rooms each equipped with HD cameras sending out a live feed of whatever was happening in the rooms. How many couples, threesomes and gang bangs had happened on this bed?
When Symon found out about the operation, he sent his Cossacks to throw the Lebs out on their asses. The Vor was puritanical like that. They'd steal the coins off a dead man's eyes and take the change out of a poor box. They'd kill and smuggle and extort and defraud without losing a moment's sleep. They ruined lives and bankrupted businesses. But they didn't like dealing drugs and they didn't like whoring out women.