“I wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” he says. “I found the asshole who did it.”
I freeze. I can’t believe my ears. “Are you serious?”
“Very,” Mikki says. “Took a little maneuvering, but all that work I put in tracking him down finally paid off. One of Nikolai’s men has been conveniently in Russia for the past month. Not so coincidentally in the same city you and Maksim were in.”
“You don’t say.”
He nods. “According to my sources, the night that Maksim was killed, no one could account for his whereabouts. The concierge at the hotel where you were staying spotted him the night before he was poisoned.”
I have to cross my arms to hide my elation. “So, when is he due back?”
“Tonight. I had a couple of soldiers waiting for him at the airport. He’s been secured.”
I nod. This is good.Verygood. “Where is he now?”
“Got him in the basement of one of Lev’s old clubs. The one that he had to close down last year because it was too close to Petrov’s territory?”
I nod. The Landing Strip, the place was called, and its proximity to Petrov’s people wasn’t the actual reason we closed it. It was actually the first strip club that Lev had opened up, back when he had no idea how to run one. The place was dirty and the women were far from anything remotely high-class. There were as many bullet wounds in the walls as there were on the girls. He’d told us that he wanted to close it because of Petrov, but we all know it wasn’t making the numbers the way he’d wanted it to.
“In any event,” Mikki goes on, “I was going to start putting the screws to him, but I figured you’d want the honor of seeing for yourself.”
I smile. “Let me get dressed.”
Looking around the area,I can see the other reason Lev’s business failed. As we park the car in front of the old building, I note the apartment complexes just down the road and the park right across from it. The club is much too close to a residential area. I’m surprised I never heard Lev talk about having to tussle with the city about whatever zoning laws were involved.
“What’s his name?” I ask Mikki before we get out of the car.
“You don’t know him. Emil Andreev. He’sshestyorka. Very low-hanging fruit. I’m told he was trying to win respect with Nikolai with this act.”
I scoff. I might’ve known it was some underling trying to be seen. The way Maksim was killed speaks to someone who either had no respect for this life or was a bona-fide chickenshit. He didn’t even have the decency to show his face and fight it out with him. Or at least use a weapon. Dumb sonofabitch used poison, of all things.
Mikki and I walk across the street to the front door of the old club. Mikki knocks hard on the door and for a second, there’s silence. Then the door opens a crack as someone looks out. “You’re back,” I hear.
“I am, and I brought company.”
The door opens wider and I see one of my larger men, Boris. He sometimes works the door at the Firebird and, as I understand it, he worked out a deal with Magda where he would do it for free if he got a blowjob from one of the girls.
He nods and lets us in. “Good to see you, Anton,” he says in his low, gravelly voice. “He’s all trussed up and ready for you in the basement.”
That’s just what I want to hear. Mikki leads me through the dim light of the main room and to another door that leads into what I imagine was a kitchen. To the left of that is a door with stairs leading down to the basement. I follow him into the smell of dust and damp and through the cool air.
There’s a single light in the basement, hanging over the bastard as he sits tied to a chair. Near him, half in and half out of the shadows, is a worktable with various tools sitting mute, ready to work on whatever needs fixing. Two of my men are flanking the man in the chair and it looks like the fun has already started. Both of them are standing there in tank tops, knuckles bruised, beads of sweat on their foreheads.
And the motherfucker in the chair looks like shit. Bruised jaw, bleeding lip, swollen eye… They’ve probably been kicking this guy’s ass for hours.
Mikki walks ahead of me, stepping into the circle of light around him, and the man looks up at him with his one good eye. “Please,” he says. “You got the wrong?—”
Mikki socks him hard across the jaw. His head jerks to one side as a spray of blood splatters on the floor. “Didn’t say you could talk, did I?”
I stand just outside the circle. Just so that he can see that I’m here, but not my face. Not yet. Mikki knows what his job is in this moment and he’s doing it. He steps back and the man looks through the darkness at me. He’s breathing hard as he squints his rapidly swelling eyes to try and see my face.
“So. You’re the one who killed Maksim Balakin,” I tell him. “You’re exactly what I was expecting. A cowardly little shit.”
“N–No?—”
“You were in Astrakhan the same time that he was, no?”
“I… I was visiting my sister. I didn’t know that Maksim was even there. Please, you have to believe me.”
