Page 19 of Wintering with George

“Yeah.”

“Wait, have you slept?”

“No, sir,” I teased him.

“Did someone fuckin’ feed you?”

“Yes,” I grumbled, thinking I could eat again.

“Okay, give me a few minutes to see if—oh. Wait. Where are you?”

“I’m in Portland.”

“I know you’re in fuckin’ Portland. I can see where you’re calling from since you got me on my sat phone. I’m asking where precisely.”

“At Brad and Thomasin Carr’s home.”

“Thomasin?”

“Her brother calls her Sin for short.”

“Yeah, that’s terrible, but listen, Brad there owes money to a guy named Melor Vladek, whose father, Victor, used to have ties to the Petrov crime family out in your neck of the woods before their guy in charge, Burian, went to a nice federal prison.”

“I saw that on the news.”

“Well, Vladek, senior, is now moving some serious product with a cartel out of Sinaloa, but I mean, that’s his business, nothing for you to get in the middle of.”

“What is my business?”

“That his son, Melor, invests in different things—think venture capital—and this is how he knows Brad.”

“Okay.”

“Brad has made him a lot of money, and everything was great up until Thomasin went into her last venture, which is, apparently, flipping houses like all the other lovely folks on HGTV, except, unlike the others, her changes are only cosmetic and so nothing sold.”

“So the rest of her business is holding up this buying-and-selling-houses one.”

“Correct. Her whole schtick is that interior decorating is all you really need.”

It sounded really dumb to me. “That sounds terrible.”

“It is.”

“And because, I’m guessing, the rest of her businesses would be drained dry by the strain, Brad put in money from his business to help cover his wife.”

“Yep.”

“And since he didn’t have enough, he borrowed from Melor Vladek.”

“You’re good at this. You should work in intelligence or something.”

“Funny.”

“Apparently, Vladek has been sitting on this loan for about six months, and he’s done waiting. I guess Brad”—he said his name snidely—“thought it was a good idea to tell a Russian mobster that his wife had a trust fund from her grandparents that’s worth quite a bit and that she moved it into the names of her children.”

“But the trust can’t be used until the boys are both eighteen, I’m guessing.”

“That’s right. You’re smarter than you look.”