Gangsters with Guns Episode #3 (12 page)

Her father had no idea Mikhail was here with her now. Artur hadn’t called him. His boss wouldn’t, not after the abrupt dismissal he’d given Mikhail this morning. But Inna didn’t know that.

She also didn’t know that the man he’d hired to chase her this morning had been spying on her all day, waiting for her to leave Koslovsky Imports to make another grab for her and steal her away from Vlad, giving Mikhail another opportunity to play hero. Neither he nor Vitaliy had expected another set of kidnappers to show up.

“Fine. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” She sighed, and he had to hide his smile at her capitulation, all the sweeter since her surrender was tied to concern for him. “But honestly I’m fine. Just tired.”

He placed a hand on her shoulder. She pulled back, and he clamped his hand tighter. “Drink,” he ordered. He pushed the straw into her mouth, but gently.
 

Her lips were plump and moist, and he imagined how he would lick and bite her, how she would welcome his advances once she succumbed to the influence of the tasteless, odorless drug he’d concealed in the frothy shake. He watched the movement of her mouth and throat as she sucked and swallowed.
 

“Again,” he said, his voice thickening with lust. Soon, so soon. “Please, let me take care of you.” His words, or maybe the silken quality of his voice, affected her. She blushed prettily, but then she ducked out of his hold.
 

For a brief moment, he was tempted to grab her, to pull her head back by her hair, and pour the milkshake down her throat.

He quashed the impulse. That wasn’t the way to win her, and, even if he could rush things along in the bedroom with a push of enhancers now and again, he needed to win her devotion. He needed her to be his even when her father disapproved.

He watched her carefully, waiting for the moment he could finally make a move without her drawing away. He touched her shoulder again. This time, she didn’t make her usual sidestep, but she maintained too much distance.

Just a few more minutes. That was all he needed. Then she would want him.

This time, she would want everything, remember everything. Tomorrow morning when she awakened in his arms, she would finally know she was his.

“You should go,” she said. She headed for the door, determined to send him away.

Hadn’t she drunk enough? Why was she being so difficult? His anger swelled, but he controlled it. “I’m here to protect you.”

“I’m sure I’m perfectly safe in my home,” she said, but he noticed the lack of conviction. “I’ll lock the door behind you.”

“Are you sure you’ll feel safe? I thought you’d want someone nearby.”

“I just want to be alone in my space,” she said.

“Vlad crowded you today?” He took a guess. He couldn’t resist casting Artur’s favorite in a negative light, lest Inna start to admire the man and his firepower.

“No,” she said. Then, to his immense relief, she immediately retracted. “Well, yes, actually. If I’m honest. You don’t like him. Do you?”

He was touched that she had noticed. “No, princess. Can’t say I do.”

“Princess?” She crossed her arms as if she didn’t approve of his chosen term of endearment.

“Should I call you something else? Darling? Baby?”

“No—”

“I’ve always had a thing for you.” He cut her off before she could protest the newfound familiarity he wished to impose on her. “I’m just more aware of it now after all of the close calls you’ve had the last few days.” He pushed a lank strand of hair out of her face, and she didn’t shrink away from his touch.

That’s right. Just a little longer. A few more minutes, and you’ll be all mine.

SHE’S SAFE. SHE’S safe. She’s safe.
Vlad repeated the mantra over and over. The cops had left him in lockup, separated from Inna. He didn’t know where she was right now or what she was doing. He had to hope the precinct was one of the safest places she could be, provided she had actually arrived in one piece and that she didn’t leave without him.

She had said she’d wait. What if she didn’t?

The cops had clapped him in handcuffs and dragged him in here. He couldn’t blame them for that. After all, they had found him with a smoking gun and two dead bodies. But once they got his statement—and Inna’s and Nick’s—they should have let him go. The gun he’d used was registered, and he’d stopped those men from abducting Inna.

He’d killed them, but that didn’t mean whoever had sent them wouldn’t try again.

He folded his hands behind his neck and dropped his head down. At this rate, he’d go insane worrying over her.

Why was he still here? The cops had taken his statement and then put him back in lockup. Surely they couldn’t be thinking they would press homicide charges.

He was feeling rather homicidal at the moment. God help them if they didn’t reunite him with Inna soon.

The vein throbbed at Vlad’s temple. It seemed like hours before someone came to get him. Detective Sharp.

The choice of interrogator could only mean someone liked to fuck with him. He could easily guess who that was.

Sharp led him, handcuffed, to an interrogation room, as if he were the most dangerous of criminals. Once they were seated in the cinder block room with its viewing mirror, Detective Sharp said, “I have a witness who says you took money for a hit from Ivan.”

“Your witness is lying,” Vlad said.

“Did you do a hit?”

“No.”
 

Vlad knew exactly what the cop was referring to—the men he’d killed in the alley outside Troika. Ivan had later claimed it was a sanctioned hit, but that was not what had really happened.
 

This was all a useless bluff on the cop’s part. They couldn’t possibly have any evidence, certainly not enough to waste a trial trying to get a conviction. He had no motive, and he’d sanitized the scene. Sure, the buildings on either side of the alley where he’d been ambushed by Ivan’s men had pockmarks now from the spray of bullets, but he’d disposed of the essentials.

No bodies. No smoking gun. No conviction.

Still, they could make his life hell with an investigation. His usefulness to Artur would be dubious at best if he had Homicide constantly breathing down his neck. Murder charges wouldn’t possibly stick, but Vlad had most definitely tampered with a potential crime scene—a very serious infraction with charges of its own if anyone found out.

It had to be a bluff, he reassured himself yet again. The only way Vlad could be tied definitively to the deaths outside Troika was if Svetlana had suddenly had a turn of conscience.

Fat chance. She hadn’t left her son for months on end to have their careful plans scorched because some of Ivan’s men had decided to take shots at him and paid the price. If they got yanked from this assignment now, when he was so close to proving himself… Such a failure didn’t bear contemplating.

And he wasn’t ready to leave Inna. Not yet. Probably not ever.
Mine. Only mine.

“Did you take money from Ivan?”

“No.”
 

The detective’s slow-blinking eyes made Vlad tap his foot with impatience.
Hurry up. Get this over with. Let me get back to Inna
. But he knew Sharp would belabor the same points over and over, as if asking the same question would eventually get him a different answer, one he liked better, one that was a confession of guilt.

Sharp could go to Hell. Vlad hadn’t committed a hit for his father, even if Artur had tossed a wad of cash at him and claimed it was compensation for the self-defense shootings outside Troika. He certainly wasn’t going to tell Sharp about any of it.

The real question was, who had? Vlad and Artur had been alone in the shop this morning. Had someone been eavesdropping? Had they been bugged?

Maybe Ivan’s man, Slim, had been onto something with his warning that there was an agent in the field. Maybe the cop who’d been undercover with the Georgians had a partner, someone with the DEA or a joint task force. Or maybe there was a confidential informant. Could there be someone planted in Ivan’s organization, someone who’d heard about Ivan’s plans?

Vlad didn’t have enough information. He didn’t know how far Ivan reached from his prison cell, how many men he commanded, what kinds of resources he had at his disposal.
 

All he really knew was that the once powerful
vor
and Artur kept in touch and still did business together, even if that business was no more than Artur’s disbursing funds to pay for Nadia’s apartment or for Ivan’s hits.

“Did Ivan talk to you about killing someone?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vlad lied. He knew Ivan had boasted after the fact about commissioning him to do a hit, but said commission had never been discussed while the bodies in question were warm. Rather, Ivan had sent his men after Vlad, likely with orders to kill, and then chosen to tell a different tale when Vlad had been the only one to emerge from the alleyway without his own body bag.

“I also have this,” Detective Sharp said. He slid a piece of paper, the size of a cigarette wrapper, across the table. “Recognize this?”

Vlad leaned down to inspect it. He recognized Ivan’s clumsy handwriting:
$300,000 commission to Vladimr for Vasya and his brothers.
“What the hell is it?”

“A commission for you from Ivan.” Sharp smiled thinly. He looked like a turtle that had just snapped its beak over a tasty morsel.

“Bullshit,” Vlad said. He had to wonder why his father would send him a secret message printed in English, unless the message wasn’t meant for him or to be secret. “How do you know it’s from Ivan? Or that it’s for me?”

“I won’t reveal my sources,” Sharp said.

“Fine.” Vlad sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. “I want to talk to Detective Hersh,” he said. When Detective Sharp looked like he might balk, Vlad added, “I’ll only talk to him.”

But he had no intention of telling old Hershey anything either.

Hersh arrived a few minutes later.
 

“Where’s Inna?” Vlad demanded.

“On her way home.”

“You let her leave?”

“She’s not currently under investigation.”

“I told her to wait for me,” Vlad said. The muscle in his jaw twitched and tightened beyond comfort.

“We told her you’d be a while.”

“Are you an idiot? She’s in danger.”

“We sent her home with Artur’s other man.”

“His other man? You mean Mikhail?” Vlad pounded his fist on the table. The scrap of paper with Ivan’s supposedly incriminating bounty notice bounced off the table and floated momentarily in the air.

Mikhail
. Vlad didn’t trust the blue-eyed pretty boy. He didn’t like the predatory way the man’s eyes tracked and catalogued Inna’s every move or how close he stood to her whenever he had the opportunity.
 

Did Inna like Mikhail? Was that why she hadn’t waited for Vlad?

Maybe that spontaneous embrace earlier today had been nothing more than shock and leftover affection from their childhood.

Whatever the moment had meant to Inna, he knew what it meant to him. He wouldn’t let a blue-eyed Casanova or anyone else get between them.
Mine. Only mine.

“The sooner you cooperate, the sooner we get you back to her,” Hersh said as if he had a valuable bargaining chip.

Vlad’s temper threatened to break free of his tenuous hold. His head throbbed.

Hersh slid the small slip of paper in front of Vlad again. “Tell me about this.”

“Your man Sharp thinks this is proof I killed someone,” Vlad said. “But you and I both know you can’t possibly have much of a case if this is all you’ve got.”

“But you did kill someone,” Hersh said.

“I’ve killed lots of people. Usually with the full blessing of this fine country.”

“Ever in cold blood? Ever since you left the Bureau?”

Vlad’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Seems to me Ivan wants to ensure you’ve made a clean break from law enforcement—a public one so that he can promote you.”

“Is that what he wants?” Vlad made the question sound like a taunt, but his mind raced, pulling puzzle pieces together. Suddenly, the ambush and Artur’s sudden anger at him all made a certain logical sense.
 

He hadn’t, not in his wildest dreams, expected his father’s support. He’d thought he’d have to pledge himself to Artur and make his play before Ivan was freed from prison. But now…

For whatever reason, Ivan was paving the way for him to join the highest ranks of the brotherhood. What better method than to let everyone know he had blood—blood Ivan wanted—on his hands and then to promise even more?
 

There might not be any spies in Ivan’s organization, other than the ones Ivan himself controlled.

“He’ll be out of prison soon,” Hersh said.

“And?”

“And it would be helpful to have someone on the inside.”

Vlad pounded his fists on the table again. “I don’t fucking believe it. You dragged me in here to ask me to be your narc?”

“Make no mistake. We’ll get someone in there eventually,” Hersh said.
 

Did that mean they’d already tried unsuccessfully to break into Ivan’s organization? If they had planted someone with the Georgians, Vlad couldn’t be surprised they’d also made a play to get close to Ivan or Artur.
 

“Might as well be you,” Hersh said.

“Still trying to save my soul for God?” Vlad taunted.

Hersh didn’t even blink. His quiet faith slipped like the sharpest knife beneath Vlad’s skin and poked at his hidden doubts and fears.

He didn’t want to be a monster. Not like Ivan.

But he knew what he had to do. Sometimes slaying a monster required being one. And he didn’t need Hersh or anyone else getting in his way.

“Say I agreed. What then?”

“Immunity,” Hersh offered.

Vlad barked out a laugh. “That all you got? Fuck you.”

“Money?” Hersh asked tentatively, as if reluctant to believe the mighty dollar could be a motivating factor for Vlad. “Is that what this is about?”

“We’re done talking,” Vlad said.
 

He had no recourse but the tough guy routine. Even if Vlad felt swayed, it wasn’t safe to say so in the interrogation room, where anyone might be listening in from the other side of the mirrored glass. Marano was Artur’s man. Vlad would bet there were others here, taking bribes from one crew or another.