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DMITRI
It won’t be long now.
I’ve been doing this for long enough to know the signs. Each time might play out differently when it comes to the little details, but the end result is always the same.
The low-down hustlers and rats might think that my trust is a display of weakness. The reality though is something quite different. When a newcomer to my organization asks for more, they have one chance to prove their trustworthiness.
More product to move? Of course.
More businesses to extort? I can make it happen.
More politicians to blackmail? My pleasure.
But what I’ve found is that those who come to me with such requests are almost always the kinds of men who will betray me at the first opportunity. It’s almost like clockwork, in fact.
Give a man a little extra cheese and he’ll try to steal the whole damn wheel.
And, of course, as soon as this happens there can only be one outcome.
No mercy. No compassion. Only a swiftly carried out lesson that will ring out around the city…
The night sky is dark all around us, only the streetlights and bar fronts offering any real light. We’re far away from the tourist trap parts of the city. And this isn’t the kind of gentrified neighborhood populated by yuppies, bankers, lawyers, and other corporate assholes either.
No, this is the part of the city where shit goes down, where names are whispered, and the police know better than to come to unless they’re looking for trouble.
“There’s movement over by the alley, Pakhan,” Mackensie says, his ocean blue eyes as alert as ever.
“Good,” I reply. “Now we watch and wait.”
“And if he is treacherous?” Mackensie asks.
“Well… what do you think?” I laugh coldly. “A lesson will be delivered.”
“What I mean is… guns or bats?”
“First we see if he does indeed betray us,” I say. “You never know, this one might prove loyal to the cause.”
Mackensie leans back in his chair. He’s been my right hand man for several years now, even before I became Pakhan. Mackensie isn’t from Russian extraction, so there was never a pathway for him to rise all the way to my rank. But that doesn’t mean we’re not close. Far from it, in fact.
I remember meeting Mackensie during one especially dicey poker game. I was barely in my thirties, wild, and not a very good looser. But one thing I hated even more than losing at poker was being cheated.
And so it turned out that this underground game was fixed from the start. A rival family was using the game to lure in whales, take their money, and ideally keep them on the hook for extortionate interest payments on their freshly acquired debts. I should have seen this from the jump, but as I say… I was younger.
And that’s where Mackensie came in.
I was already twenty thousand down for the night and Mackensie approached me with a ice cold vodka. We got to talking in between games and it soon transpired that Mackensie had figured out what was going down. Of course, my first instinct was to shoot up the place, but Mackensie had another idea…
Keep losing…
Set up a line of credit…
And then stake the place out after the game ended and rob every damn dollar.
Over a quarter of a million dollars richer, the two of us bonded over sunrise scrambled eggs and the strongest of black coffees at some diner across on the other side of that city. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“Wait… wait… got him,” I say, my blood turning to ice as I watch my so-called street soldier exchanging cash with a member of a rival clan across the road. “Who’s the other guy?”
