She stopped, as if reluctant to continue.
“It’s all right,” said Jack. “You can tell me.”
Jack listened as she described that night in their apartment. The noise outside that woke them. Demetri naked and leaping from the bed. The pounding on the door, and their panicked good-bye before the door burst open, the armed men rushed in, and Demetri escaped out the window.
“One of the men stayed with me,” she said. “When the others finally came back, they told me they had thrown Demetri off the roof. I thought he was dead.”
“So did they, I’m sure.”
Sofia nodded.
“Then what happened?” said Jack.
“When?”
“After the men came back to your room and told you about Demetri. What happened?”
She shifted uncomfortably, and Jack could read her body language. He’d seen it in many clients before. It was something Sofia clearly didn’t want to talk about.
“There were five of them,” she said. “Do you really want to know?”
“Only if you want to talk about it.”
“I’ve never actually told this to anyone.”
“You don’t have to. Really, it’s okay.”
“No. I want you to know the truth.”
Chapter 36
The Greek stared at the telephone on the table.
“Go on, use it,” said Vladimir. “Make your big money phone call.”
They were in a conference room at a ground-floor office suite somewhere in North Miami Beach. The Venetian blinds on the picture window were shut, but a few slats were twisted and out of place, offering Demetri a glimpse of the courtyard and the parking lot beyond. It was impossible to tell what kind of business had once been conducted in this place. The cubicles outside the conference room were vacant. Employees were nowhere to be found, and there were no computer terminals, telephones, office supplies, or other signs of an active workplace. Some desks didn’t even have chairs. The Greek figured that it was the ghostly remains of a Mafya-controlled boiler-room operation. “Gemstones” was his guess. In a month’s time from a place like this, they could have phone-blitzed the over-seventy population in North Miami and sold five thousand dollars’ worth of colored glass for over a million bucks. The Greek had run similar operations over the years. Only about one time out of a hundred did the bosses catch him stealing from them.
“You think that’s all it takes?” said Demetri. “I make a phone call, and I can pay you back?”
“I don’t care what it takes. One call is all you get. So make it count.”
“You need to work with me. I’m close, really close to making a deal. This is money in your pocket. What good am I dead?”
Vladimir pushed the phone toward him.
“One call,” he said. “If you’re that close, then pick up the phone and seal the deal.”
Demetri lifted the receiver and then put it down. “Why should I do this for you? You said you were going to kill me even if I get the money.”
“You get the money, you save Sofia.”
“I don’t care about her,” he said. It hurt to say it, but a bluff was his only way out.
Vladimir smiled. “Nice to see you haven’t changed.”
“Come on,” said Demetri. “I’ll make the call, but if the money comes in, we’re square. No need to kill me.”
Vladimir’s smile drained away. Some men were capable of showing no reaction, putting themselves in the emotional equivalent of “neutral.” Vladimir, however, was always in gear. When he was happy, he was the life of the party. His every other waking moment, however, seemed to be driven by contempt or anger, albeit in varying degrees. It all depended on how much the poor slob on his hit list reminded him of the bastards who had cut open his nine-year-old son and left him on the doorstep to bleed to death.
“I’ve had it up to here with your disrespect,” he said. “We give you a job, you steal from us. We give you another chance, you steal more from us. This is the end of it. You pay your debt, and you go out with no pain. You don’t get the money, I take you to the Kamikaze Club.”
“Moscow?”
“Idiot,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not worth the plane fare. We got one in Brighton Beach now. Just like the original.”
Those words-just like the original-sent his heart racing. Demetri had never visited the Kamikaze Club, but stories of it were Russian Mafya legend. It was for men only, except for the high-priced prostitutes brought in to service them. The night’s entertainment climaxed with the arrival of two unlucky souls who had been yanked off the street. It was not just a fight, but a barehanded fight to the death-the human equivalent of cock-fighting. Guys like Vladimir would place their bets, wagering on everything from which of the two warriors would win to which of the whores sitting ringside would end up with the most blood splattered on her tits.
“Who wants to watch an old man like me fight?” said Demetri.
“Don’t give me that ‘old man’ crap,” said Vladimir. “Plenty of young men have fallen for that line and ended up in the dirt. We’ll have to give your opponent a hatchet just to keep it interesting.”
Before Vladimir could laugh at his own joke, the window suddenly exploded and the Venetian blinds danced with the rattle of machine-gun fire. Demetri dove to the floor. Vladimir slammed against the bullet-riddled wall, smearing the white wainscoting with a bright crimson streak as he slid to the floor. His body collapsed in a heap right beside Demetri, bits and pieces of his shattered skull sticking to the wall.
Another spray of machine-gun fire popped the fluorescent ceiling lights. Groping in the darkness, Demetri yanked Vladimir’s gun from its holster.
The machine-gunning stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Demetri lay perfectly still, his body covered with thousands of glass pellets. He listened. With the window blown out, he could hear footsteps outside. The click of leather heels on asphalt sounded like two men. The clicking turned to crunching on grass made stiff by the winter drought. The men were crossing the courtyard and coming closer.
Demetri got a comfortable grip on the pistol. At first touch, fumbling in a blackened room, he couldn’t tell what it was. He was certain now that it was the Russian MR-444 Baghira, a 9-millimeter pistol that incorporated thermoplastics and many other of the Glock’s best design features. It was no machine gun, but with a seventeen-round magazine of Parabellum ammunition, he had more than enough stopping power for any gunfight.
The approaching footsteps slowed with caution and then stopped altogether. The men were standing right outside the window. Demetri waited, his pistol at the ready. A flashlight switched on and shined into the conference room. Busted Venetian blinds cast zebra-like shadows on the walls, and the sweeping beam of light came to rest on Vladimir’s bloody streak on the wall.
“Bel colpo!” said one of the men. Good shot.
They were Sicilian, Demetri realized, and instinctively his forty-year-old thirst for revenge took over. He rolled to his right and squeezed off a half dozen rounds-rolling and firing, rolling and firing. The fall of the flashlight and painful cry in the night told him that at least one round had found its mark. The return of machine-gun fire told him that one wasn’t nearly enough. Bullets whizzed overhead as Demetri scrambled through the noise and darkness to the door.
The machine gun fell silent.
Demetri quieted his breathing and listened. For a moment-it seemed much longer-he heard nothing. Then, faintly at first, he heard something in the distance. He started counting the number of rounds he’d fired, trying to see how much ammo was left, but then his focus returned to that growing noise.
Sirens blared in the distance, and for a brief instant Demetri almost let himself believe in God.
Someone called the cops!