“How do you know what’s inside? You’ve only seen the outside of me.”
“Cop instinct.”
“Careful, buddy. I’m at the age where I get all giddy when a man flatters me like that. I might do something stupid. Like taking you seriously.”
“I’m several years older than you. I’m ready to be taken seriously.”
“Let’s postpone this conversation until end-of-watch,” Andi said, “when I can focus on it.”
“Whatever you say, partner.”
“I say, let’s go get a videotape and clear a homicide.”
“Is Viktor still gonna meet us there for a little Russian fast talk?”
“He’s a very busy guy tonight but he said he would.”
“To the Gulag, comrade,” Brant said with a smile that crinkled his heavily lashed green eyes and made Andi’s toes curl under.
Cosmo was a shocking sight to Ilya when he limped up the stairs. She helped him clean up the head wound and stanch the ooze of blood. As to his finger, she did her best to hold the laceration together with butterfly Band-Aids, then wrapped and taped the finger until they could get to a doctor tomorrow and have it sutured. Where they would have that done, where they would be tomorrow, was anybody’s guess. Ilya just wanted to concentrate on getting the money from Dmitri tonight.
“We may run away now, Ilya,” Cosmo said. “We have diamonds. We find somebody in San Francisco.”
“We are very much hot,” Ilya said. “Too much happening. We got no time no more. The police shall be coming when Farley informs to them about us. No time to fish for diamond people in San Francisco. We need money now. You know, Cosmo, I may run clear back to Russia. I do not know.”
He didn’t know either. All he knew was that he was very much afraid to face Dmitri tonight without the ATM money. And to try to sell him a lie. Dmitri was very smart. More smart than Ilya, he thought.
He made the phone call to the cell number Dmitri had given to him.
“Yes,” Dmitri answered.
“Is me, brother,” Cosmo said.
“Do not say your name.”
“I shall like to come in thirty minute.”
“Okay.”
“You ready to finish business?”
“Yes, and you?”
Cosmo swallowed and said, “Ready, brother.”
“See you in thirty,” Dmitri said, and somehow Cosmo could see that smile of his.
Cosmo put on the black beret to hide his head wound. It was something that Ilya wore with her black sweater and boots when she wanted to look very sexy. He wore a pale white sport coat and blue slacks and his best cordovan shoes. He tucked the Beretta inside his waistband in the small of his back. He cinched the leather belt tight to hold the pistol there.
Ilya was wearing the tightest red skirt she owned, and a shell with a deep V neckline, the one that made her breasts swell out, and a short black jacket over that, one trimmed with sequins. And since they were going to a Russian club she wore her black knee boots with three-inch heels. She was not short on bling, she thought. Ilya liked that American word: “bling.”
Cosmo forced a brave smile and said, “We go to get our thirty-five thousands, Ilya. We go to the Gulag.”
The Oracle looked at the clock. He was getting hungry and this had been a very busy night what with the pursuit driven by a dead man, and Viktor Chernenko tying up one of his midwatch cars, along with more ordinary Hollywood madness breaking out here and there as though there was a full moon. He felt a stab of heartburn and popped a couple of antacid tablets.
He said to the Watch 3 sergeant, “I gotta go do a PR job to keep some dirtbag of a lawyer from making a personnel complaint on everybody in Hollywood Division who met or failed to meet his goofy daughter who’s made a bogus crime report. I just gotta get the name and address of the manager of a nightclub, if the guy really is the manager. Maybe he just has business cards made up to impress the chicks he meets in bars.”
“Which nightclub you going to?” the sergeant asked.
“A Russian joint called the Gulag. You know it?”
“No, but I imagine it’s a Russian Mafia hangout. They change owners and names more often than they change underwear.”
The Oracle said, “After that, I’ll be taking code seven with Fausto and his partner. They found a hot new mama-and-papa Mexican eatery. Call if you need me.”
When the Oracle drove out of the Hollywood Station parking lot, he sent a message to 6-X-76 telling them he was on his way to the Gulag and shouldn’t be there for more than fifteen minutes.
The Gulag parking lot was jammed when Cosmo wheeled his Cadillac in. He had to park in the far corner by the trash containers.
“Dmitri should hire valet boys,” Ilya observed nervously.
“Too cheap,” Cosmo said.
They could hear the place rocking the moment they stepped out of their cars. Cosmo snuffed out his cigarette, touched the pistol under his coat, and limped to the entrance with Ilya.
Ilya went to the bar, joined the rows of drinkers trying to get service, and called to the sweaty bartender, “Excuse me, please.”
A boozy young guy sitting at the bar turned and looked at her face, then at her tits, got up from the bar stool, and said, “I’ll give you my seat if you’ll let me buy you a drink.”
Ilya gave him her best professional smile, took his bar stool, and said, “That is lovely, darling.”
Smiling at her accent, he said, “Are you Russian?”
“Yes, darling,” she said.
“How about I order you a Black Russian?”
“I prefer a white American,” she said, and the young guy laughed out loud, drunk enough that anything was funny.
Ilya wished that the world had not stopped smoking. She would have given a diamond for a cigarette at this moment.
As busy as he was, Viktor Chernenko had made a promise to Andi McCrea, and a promise was a promise. He looked at his watch and told Compassionate Charlie that he had to quickly run to a Russian nightclub called the Gulag to do a verbal muscle job for Andi in the proprietor’s own language. As for the outside detectives who were on their way to the station to help piece together the puzzle of the Ramsdale murder and Hollywood robberies, Viktor planned to stay tonight as long as there was hope of finding Farley Ramsdale’s woman. He had a copy of her minor rap sheet for petty theft and drug possession and saw that the name “Olive Ramsdale” must be a recent alias. She’d given the name “Mary Sullivan” when she’d been arrested, but who could say if that was her true name?
Then he put in a quick phone call home and got his wife, Maria, on the phone.
“Hello, my darling,” he said. “This is your most loving husband.”
Compassionate Charlie said, “What the hell?” and looked at Viktor like he’d just burped pepper spray. Charlie couldn’t bear telephone canoodling.
“I am working on the most important matter of my entire career, my little sweetheart,” Viktor said. “It is possible that I shall be sleeping here in the cot room tonight. I do not know for sure.”
Then Viktor listened with a dopey smile on his broad Slavic face, said, “Me too!” and actually did kisses into the receiver before he rang off.
“Is this your first marriage, Viktor?” Charlie asked him.
“My first, my last,” Viktor said.
Charlie shook his head and said, “Must be a Russian thing.”
“I am not Russian,” Viktor said patiently. “I am Ukrainian.”
Compassionate Charlie said, “Bring me back some kielbasa if the Gulag looks like a clean joint.”
“That is Polish, not Russian,” Viktor said, heading for the door.
“Polish, Russian, Ukrainian. Gimme a fucking break, Viktor,” Compassionate Charlie whined.
Cosmo knocked at the door to Dmitri’s office and heard “Come.”
When he limped into the office, he saw Dmitri in his high-back chair behind the desk, but not with his feet up this time and not watching exotic porn on the computer screen. An older man in a dark suit and a striped necktie, bald except for a scraggly fringe of gray, was sitting on the leather sofa against the wall.