“And I’ll kill you,” the front passenger said.
With her free, right hand, she quickly gripped his wrist at the top of the radial bone, squeezing fiercely, while pushing his hand upward and to the left. The swift pressure-point manipulation instantly opened his hand. No amount of willpower or brute strength could overcome this painless application of ancient Chinese medicine. The pistol slid out of his hand and fell, quickly snatched out of the air by Reynolds. Before the situation could spiral out of control, she released the man next to her and stepped out of the vehicle. The front passenger, known only as Ivan, kicked open his door, jumping onto the concrete sidewalk.
Reynolds unloaded and disassembled the GSh-18 pistol in less than two seconds, tossing the four major pieces onto the sidewalk and throwing the loaded magazine as far as she could manage over a wrought-iron fence on the other side of the street.
“Tell your people to stay out of my fucking way,” she said, turning toward Dusya Kovalchuk Street, leaving Ivan speechless with a strange look on his face that oddly resembled respect.
Pyotr Roskov took another sip of his vodka martini and stared wistfully at the group of women gyrating on the club’s main dance floor. Tightly stretched body dresses dominated the crowd, leaving little to his active imagination. He was still several drinks away from joining that throng of beauties, which he knew from experience would be too late. By that point, dozens of sharply dressed, clearly wealthy men would be in the mix, leaving him no chance of scoring anything beyond a few annoyed looks. It was the same story for him every weekend, and strangely enough, he had no intention of altering his routine.
He considered this a form of penance for having left Saint Petersburg so readily after completing his graduate studies. Saint Petersburg had been a veritable international melting pot compared to Novosibirsk. The streets were packed with foreign travelers, and the city itself attracted a worldwide residential clientele. As Russia’s gateway to Europe, he found the city a marvelous break from the droll of Moscow and other stiflingly gray Russian cities. Most Russians considered Saint Petersburg to be the true heart of Russia, reminiscent of the Tsarist grandeur that defined centuries of imperial prosperity, but ultimately led to the Bolshevik Revolution, which began with the storming of the Winter Palace on the banks of the city’s Neva River.
The communists couldn’t dull Leningrad, despite decades of uninspired construction and political marginalization. Even the Germans couldn’t destroy it with an eight hundred and seventy-two day long siege. In fact, the Germans had unknowingly saved the city from becoming the shithole Moscow had become. In 1917, the German troops invaded Estonia, threatening the city with invasion and forcing the newly empowered Soviets to transfer the capitol of Russia to Moscow. The communist riff-raff spent the next seventy-four years building one “people’s” structure after another in Moscow, each one bigger and less architecturally inspired than the one before it. Saint Petersburg saw its share of this Constructivist architecture, but most of this occurred on the outskirts, expanding a sea of gray blockhouse apartment buildings around the picturesque, cosmopolitan city.
Without a doubt, he was being punished for accepting a high-paid position at Vektor Laboratories in place of less lucrative offers around Saint Petersburg. Novosibirsk was the antithesis of Saint Petersburg in nearly every way. Founded a mere quarter of a century before the Revolution, solely as a transportation hub to the eastern provinces, Novosibirsk grew up under the communists, who had no interest in the city beyond exploitation. On the banks of the Ob River, Novosibirsk was developed into a massive industrial center under Stalin’s industrialization dictates, eventually claiming the title of third most populous city in Russia. Boring, ugly and culturally flat, Novosibirsk still hadn’t emerged from its communist shell.
Pyotr hated it, which is why he repeatedly found himself standing in line at Diesel, waiting to pay an outrageous cover charge to drink overpriced alcohol, all while staring at women doing their best to escape Novosibirsk and hoping one of them might eventually see him as that ticket out. At least until they woke up the next morning and realized that they were not in the luxury digs of an upwardly mobile Russian businessman. It was a pathetic strategy to get laid, but it was the best he could come up with in this horrible city without paying a prostitute, and he wasn’t about to travel down that path. His life here was sad enough without that.
He downed half of the martini, resolved to hop off the stool and beat his competition to the punch, but that courage retreated just as quickly, replaced with the practical realization that his efforts would only result in the loss of his seat. Instead, he turned to the bartender and ordered another martini. Before his drink arrived, he spied a woman walking in his direction. This could be trouble if she belonged to the guy seated next to him at the bar.
He stole another glance at the man, careful not to stare too long. He looked like a mafiya type. Tattoos covered his thick, muscular forearm, menacingly visible under cuffed sleeves. The fact that he hadn’t taken off his sunglasses was disturbing. Maybe he was high. Maybe he was hiding a black eye. Maybe he was just a badass motherfucker that never removed his sunglasses. Pyotr couldn’t think of one scenario that didn’t scare him.
The man arrived soon after Pyotr had taken a seat, proceeding to smoke cigarettes and pound Heinekens at an alarming rate. The last thing he needed next to him was a drunk and disgruntled member of the Solntsevskaya gang. These scumbags did whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted with no repercussions. They were above the law and seemed to thrive on finding new ways to flaunt their untouchable status. A wrong look or accidentally bumped shoulder could land you in the hospital, or dead. As much as he didn’t want to give up his seat, he’d resolved to abandon his post if this guy hit five Heinekens. Now he’d leave immediately, giving up his seat to a man who could beat him within an inch of his life in front of the police.
Without staring at the woman approaching, he started to stand, ready to pay for his drink and find another perch to observe the evening’s festivities. To his surprise, Mr. Sunglasses slapped a one-thousand ruble note on the bar and walked away from his seat, headed toward the bathroom. The woman’s eyes widened at the prospect of finding a seat at the packed bar, paying no attention to the mobster as he brushed past her. Now he could check her out and celebrate his unbelievable good fortune. He could count the number of times a hot woman sat next to him anywhere in public on his thumb. Judging by what he saw before she took the seat, tonight was nothing short of a miracle.
Upon first inspection, he could tell that she was different than the rest of the women at the club. Her confidence was natural, not the practiced indifference on display in every corner of the club. Her black dress was chic and form fitting, but didn’t devolve into the gratuitous body-flaunting spectacle of skintight one-piece dresses dominating the dance floor. Her soft, porcelain face was framed by shiny, jet black hair that ended at the middle of her neck. He caught the attention of her light blue eyes momentarily and offered her a weak smile, which she returned without an air of superiority. That alone set her apart from every other woman in the club, and possibly all of Novosibirsk. When she spoke to the bartender in decent, yet clearly academic Russian, he almost fell off his stool.
“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” she said, turning to Pyotr. “That’s a vodka drink, right?”
He hadn’t noticed that his replacement martini had already arrived. “O-of course. Y-yes. Dry martini,” he stammered.