Scandalous Heroes Box Set (102 page)

After many years of being told what to do every second of his life, he felt nervous about simply opening the door on his own.  A wave of distrust came over him, and he put his head on the door to listen to the muffled voices on the other side. 

The echo of deep, laughing Russian accents calmed him. 

Finally opening the door, his eyes squinted at the overwhelming light on the other side of the dark room.  He walked slowly out, cautiously looking around.

As he emerged, his men stopped talking and stood up.

One of his closest men before the arrests was standing only feet away from him.

“Boss,” Aleksi said with a nervous smile.  “You finally got up.  We thought that you’d sleep all night.”

Leo looked around at all his men.  There wasn’t a face in the room that he didn’t recognize making him feel as though he was at a reunion of sorts.  “Yes, I’m finally awake,” he said, scratching his stubbly beard.  The next thing he would do would be to get a good shave from a barber, but for now….  “Where are we?” he asked.

“Ottawa,” Aleski explained. “Canada.”

“Is there another Ottawa?” Leo asked sarcastically. 

Aleski shrugged his shoulders.  He didn’t know.  “We had to get you out of the country, ASAP.  You’re all over the news.  Police are looking everywhere.  Your face is all over the television.  We smuggled you here in a box when you were dropped off by the warden’s men.”

Leo smiled and rolled large arm in a circular motion. “Explains the soreness.  I feel like I was hit by a truck.”  He walked over to the table and looked down at all the food that had been prepared. There was plenty of meat, potatoes, cabbage and beer. “This for me?” he asked, mouth watering and stomach growling. 

“
Da da
, boss.  We wanted to give you the best homecoming we could.  All your favorites are here in one big meal.”  Reaching under the table, Aleski pulled out a case and opened it, revealing two custom-made Glocks.  “You remember these?  We managed to save them from the feds.”  He offered them proudly. 

Leo ran his hand over the cold steel and shook his head. “Oh, I remember everything,” he said, picking one of the guns up.  He took a fully loaded magazine and shoved it into the Glock until it made a distinctive click and sighed.  It was like music to his ears.   “Now, that feels good,” he said with a wicked grin. 

All five of the men at the table laughed. 

Leo scratched his naturally arched eyebrow with the muzzle of the gun and squinted as he recalled something disturbing. “You know, it’s funny. I don’t remember what a hot bath feels like, what a good meal or a good fuck feels like, but I do remember what stab right in the back feels like.  It’s a very sobering thing.”

The tension in the room began to heighten. 

Aleski looked over at his boss confused.  “What?” he asked, paying closer attention to Leo now that he was armed. 

“I paid a lot of money to that prick of a lawyer Lowenstien.  And he promised me one thing; if he couldn’t get me off, he’d damn sure make me aware of everyone who had put me there.  And one of those reports guess whose name showed up for giving information to the fucking cops during an investigation on me?” he said, still sort of chuckling. 

The tension in the room heightened.  Now four of the five men, looked at their friend in disbelief. 

“You helped keep me locked up like a fucking animal, Aleski, just so you could become boss of my men.”

Aleski frowned in confusion. “Who me?”  He touched his chest. “Not me. No, boss. I never gave anyone nothing.  I’m tell you.  Someone is lying.”

Leo laughed. “Oh really? Then how are you walking like a free man?  I mean, I know how Yakov is.  He managed to get to the only guy who could testify against him and cut his balls off.  And we thought that we had taken care of everyone else but it stuck.  Why did the charge stick?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t no fucking lawyer,” Aleksi said, sweat pouring over his face.

“It stuck because you and that bitch made it stick,” Leo growled. 

Before Aleksi could respond, Leo raised his gun quickly and pulled the trigger twice.  Each shot rang into the large man, sending him backwards and onto the floor.  Before Aleksi’s eyes could dim, Leo stepped over him and shot him again in the chest. 

“
Suka
,” Leo said, spitting on Aleksi’s carcass. 

When he finished, he turned to the other men in the room who stood stupefied by the act as if nothing had happened.  Suddenly, the darkness in his eyes had lifted and he almost had a grin tugging at the sides of his mouth.  Still, no one knew if they would be next.  They all froze in place, waiting to see what the verdict would be.  

“Now that that’s done, we can relax.   I don’t remember anyone else’s name, so by all means, sit down.  Eat with me,” he said, pulling back Aleksi’s chair. “Come, come.”  He kicked the dead man’s leg out of the way and sat down at the table, ready to enjoy his feast. 

His men, unable and unwilling to speak, did the same. To say that they were completely surprised by his actions would have been a lie.  Boss Leo had never been a man of many words, but murder was a typical action that he seemed to carry out with a certain amount of unforgiveable pleasure. 

As they ate and drank above the dead man’s body, they all tried to avoid any looks of loss for their friend, or they knew that they would possibly tempt their boss.  Remorse was not taken lightly. And what was done, was done.

Assessing the heightened fear permeating the room, Leo took a deep breath of it and continued.  “Now,” Leo said, grabbing a turkey leg off the platter across from him. “Let’s talk about how to get me back into the U.S. and to find that whore of an ex-wife of mine, kill her and get my fucking diamonds back so that I can actually get on with building my empire back up.”

One of his other men spoke up.  “Boss, the U.S. is too hot right now.  We should be getting you to Venezuela like we planned, where there is no extradition.  If we go back, you could get caught.  Is there any way that we can do this for you? Surely we can find her.”

Leo hit the table in anger, knocking glasses of wine over and down onto the floor.  Voice raised, he spat out angry words.  “I’m flat fucking broke right now besides a couple of hundred thousand dollars, I had stashed away. I went from millions on top of millions to damn near nothing because of a few motherfuckers and their testimonies, even my own wife, who divorced me in prison and ran off with $20 million in uncut diamonds. Well now, I want her head on a plate,” he growled.  “And I want those diamonds back in my hand.  And no one is going anywhere or doing anything else until Lilly Rasputin is hunted down.  Do I make myself clear?”

He looked around the table at nodding or bowed heads.  No one wanted to make eye contact, especially about the present topic.  Lilly was a touchy subject, one that no one wanted to broach.  Evidently, she had married him despite a falling out about a former bodyguard.  However, she turned against him like a rattlesnake as soon as the fed’s came knocking, when she could have taken the 5
^th
and never given them a thing. 

Sitting back, he relaxed his broad shoulders.  “Now, the way I figure it, I can make my way to find the man who last saw her alive.  Find Yakov. He hasn’t been to see me once in prison.  Word is that he went soft, started a family in Brighton Beach.  He shouldn’t be too hard to find, and if I know him, he knows exactly where she is.”

Chapter Three

In a broke down 1998 blue Honda Accord with paint chips missing and a loud muffler, Lilly zoomed up her long, dirt driveway kicking up dust and mud to her home, an old 1930’s style, two-story, white wood house with a wraparound porch and a swing.  She had a Coltrane CD blasting to drown out the irritatingly loud sound of her busted car and the windows down to make up for the air conditioner on the fritz.   

One could tell that in its glory, the old home used to be a beautiful testament to fine living, but now it was shabby and in need of serious power washing.  Still, it was more than she could have ever hoped after her split with Leo. 

By all accounts, she should have been dead, locked in a barrel full of acid and discarded in the Hudson River, but she had been saved, yet again. 

It had been a turn of luck that she had not expected, but each and every day since that day, she had thanked God for life and tried to live it with full appreciation.

And how could she not?  

The night that Vasily ran up the stairs of Leo’s home to stop him from beating her, she thought that he was surely dead when Leo’s man shot him.  Only the bullet that went through his body didn’t kill him.  His friend, Yakov, got him to an underground doctor that removed the bullet and put him up for a few weeks until he could get out of New York and down south to a man named Anatoly who gave him a job. 

Unfortunately, she didn’t know that Vasily was alive until a couple of months after she and Leo were married. 

It had been a bad idea to become his wife, but one choice that she had little choice in. Prior to being convicted on money laundering, violating the RICO Act and first degree murder charges, Leo was in the country on a work visa from Moscow.  He had been using that visa for years until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started to dig into his international business dealings.  As soon as his visa lapsed, they threatened to send him back was looking at sending him back to Moscow, a move he could not afford because of his enemies there.  His solution to the problem was an elaborate wedding to her. 

She wanted to say no for all the moral reasons to Leo, but for the immoral ones that all included millions of dollars and a comfortable lifestyle, she had agreed.

She would never forget the night that he took her to dinner at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan and over a candlelit dinner in the famous Bear Lounge proposed that they get married for all the wrong reasons and learn to love each other for the right ones. In truth, she knew that he was lying.  He had no intention of loving her, and she had no intention of loving him.  She just didn’t want to give up her lifestyle.  Plus, she knew that if she turned him down, with all that she had seen and all that she knew, he would kill her.  Having his last name was her life insurance policy. 

After the pseudo-proposal, she got a huge engagement ring to show off to the other mob wives and girlfriends, followed by a car with a driver and a Black American Express card. 

Life was good for a minute.  But after the newness of marriage wore off, Leo forgot his promise to never hit her again.  Then the real Leo came back out, and being slapped around became a normal occurrence, only there was no Vasily to make it stop. 

Life for Lilly became unbearable.  In just a short time, she went from loving being Mrs. Rasputin to contemplating suicide to end it all.  She prayed to God for an answer, begged Him to forgive her for marrying for the wrong reasons and even tried walking on egg shells around her husband.  Nothing worked.

She was just about to look into poisoning him when God finally heard her prayers.

Normally, Leo had men who would tip him off when the feds were sniffing around, but he hadn’t been informed about the latest and most serious set of charges that he was being brought up on by the U.S. District Attorney.  They came in the middle of night.  Swift and hard, they pounced on their brownstone and arrested everyone except for her and Yakov, who was spared because he was not at the house that night.

In a drastic and desperate move as the feds came up the stairs to their bedroom after him, Leo gave Lilly a bag of diamonds that he had just had heisted to hide for him until he returned. She had hidden them in her bra, under her ample breasts.  When the feds came barreling through the door and saw her in her night clothes, they have her enough privacy in the corner to get dressed.  A move that ultimately allowed her to hide the precious stones better. 

They took Leo with them, handcuffed and cursing.   

They left her there with $20 million in untraceable diamonds. 

Shortly after that, she sought her opportunity to get revenge on Leo for killing Vasily and testified against him in court. The DA was hounding her for her testimony, especially since all of the witnesses kept being murdered.  She was sure that Yakov had a hand it in, because he was the only one who wasn’t in jail, but she was not absolutely sure until the night he came calling late with a blade in his hand, if she was in danger. 

She convinced him that it was worth his while not to kill her.  And they made a deal -               a quiet one that only the two of them knew about. 

Once convicted, the DA managed to find a way to take everything from Leo including the brownstone, all the cars, the jewelry and the money, but they didn’t get the diamonds. 

Hours after his sentencing, she was smuggled out of the city by Yakov and taken to Memphis where she saw Vasily for the first time since that dreadful night. 

Yakov handed her over to him and said goodbye forever.  Vasily took her deep into Mississippi, a place where credit was not necessarily a necessity and black women were never expected to be the wives of crime lords.  She was damn near invisible, just the way she needed to be.  She took a job in a roadhouse, got rid of all airs and became a completely new woman. 

Here she made her life, one that included nothing from her past…
well almost nothing. 

After he left her, Vasily never checked on her or gave any indication that he remembered who or where she was. In fact, he had explained that that would be her sign that everything was safe. 0

As long as he didn’t come around, and as long as there was absolutely no communication, it meant that Leo was still in jail and still worlds away from her. 

Now with Leo’s breakout, nothing and no one would be safe.  She had to get out of here quick.  Besides, considering all the time that had passed, Vasily had probably moved on with his life and forgotten about her.

Pulling up to the front door of her home, she turned off her loud car, grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and jumped out.