Payback

by Mike Lupica

  It was quiet enough on Branch that I could hear the hammer on the tall guy’s gun.

  I dropped to the ground as he fired over me and put both hands on the .38 and hoped I was close enough to him and fired back at him, hearing him yell and then grab his leg. He didn’t go down, but I had enough time to roll and fire two more shots at the guy, smaller and much wider, coming from Charles.

  Missed him.

  But he stopped when he heard the shouts coming from behind him on Charles Street. I scrabbled underneath the scaffolding and saw the giant up on one knee and raising his gun and firing again, the bullet hitting one of the metal bars well above me.

  I fired another shot back at him, hoping he wasn’t counting my bullets. Missed. Lights went on above me now, from the old apartment building across from the Beacon Hill. I heard shouts from the windows, and saw the other guy in retreat toward Charles as I heard the first sirens in the distance.

  I looked in the other direction and saw the car pulling away. I ran toward Charles, realizing I still had my gun in my hand, when I saw a tall kid carrying a pizza drop it and put his hands up in the air.

  “I’m the good guys,” I said.

  When I was on the corner I saw the first flashing lights of the first cop car coming from the park. I got my breathing under control and leaned against the brick wall next to what had been the entrance to the Beacon Hill Hotel in far better times than this.

  “A freaking shootout?” the pizza kid said. “In freaking Beacon Hill?”

  “Happens in the best of neighborhoods,” I said.

  I waited to talk to the cops. As I did, I thought: It was a lot easier for these guys to shoot somebody Russian-style when the other person wasn’t shooting back.

  FORTY-NINE

  The next morning I sat with Frank and Lee Farrell at two small tables we’d pushed together along the wall at Thinking Cup on Newbury Street. Lee had asked if he could tag along because he at least partially blamed himself for putting me in this picture in the first place.

  “Like she needs help getting herself into the shit,” Belson said.

  “At least nobody died this time,” Lee said, as if trying to be helpful.

  “I owe it all to dedicated gym work and lightning-fast reflexes,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Belson said. “You’re a real peach.”

  Belson sipped black coffee. His unlit cigar, well chewed, hung over the table next to his cup. His idea of being decorous.

  “I’m here to help, Frank,” I said.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” he said.

  I had determined not to hold anything back, even though holding things back from cops seemed to be my natural state. So I painstakingly took him through all of it, as linearly as possible, starting with the day Spike had tried to pay off on Drysdale’s loan. I told them everything from, and about, Matt Dunn, and the grift he had been running with Emily. I watched Lee’s face as I told him about Emily and Eddie and poker.

  I knew Belson would remember all of it later, and remember where he wanted to jump in and ask a question. For now he allowed me to continue uninterrupted, as I told him about Eddie Ross and what he’d told me about Ivan Kuznetzov and his seven-foot shooter.

  I circled back when I remembered I hadn’t included the photographs left at my house, the unspoken threats against my father, and Richie, and his son.

  When I finished I was hungry enough for a Morning Glory muffin. I asked Belson and Lee if they wanted anything to eat.

  “Could you run over to the Dunkin’ on Boylston and get me a Boston Kreme?” Belson said.

  “You know those have three hundred calories?” I asked him.

  “And me always worrying about my girlish figure,” Belson said.

  When I came back from the counter with my muffin Lee said, “Why did it take them this long to shoot at you?”

  “I can only make the assumption that it had something to do with my meet with Eddie in Charlestown,” I said.

  “But,” Lee said, “you told us that it was Eddie who gave you the heads-up that Kuznetzov might be in play, correct?”

  “Eddie’s got a lot of moves,” I said.

  “I’m gonna need to talk to him,” Belson said.

  He gave me his cop face and said, “Something I would have done already, as he is connected to two stiffs that occurred on my watch, had I known about his potential involvement.”

  “My bad?” I said, and ate some muffin.

  “The bigger, badder Russian could be the one who had them killed,” Lee said.

  “Or not,” Belson said.

  “Well,” I said, “there is that.”

  “You gotta think about standing down now,” Belson said. “Not because you’re in my way. You always seem to be in my way. But as tough a cookie as you think you are, if this is some new branch of the Russian Mob, they’re not going to stop because they missed.”

  “The thought has occurred.”

  “You could call Vinnie Morris,” Lee said.

  “I am told he’s out of town on a thing,” I said.

  “What kind of thing, you don’t mind me asking?” Belson said.

  “It’s Vinnie.” I shrugged. “Use your imagination.”

  “Maybe Tony Marcus could loan you Junior or Ty-Bop,” Lee said.

  “I’d rather not start running another tab with Tony if I can help it,” I said.

  “Jesse?” Belson said.

  “Kind of has a day job,” I said.

  We sat and stared at our coffee. I asked Belson if he was sure I couldn’t interest him in a cherry ginger muffin. He casually gave me the finger.

  “I could put a car in front of the house,” Belson said.

  “If I think I need one,” I said, “I’ll ask for one.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. I was not at all shocked to see that he was still using a flip.

  “I’m gonna have a chat with a guy from Major Case when I get back to the office,” he said. “See what kind of chatter and all-around bullshit he might have going with Russians.”

  He drained the last of his coffee, grabbed his cigar, and stood up.

  “You know any Russians you could talk to?” Belson said.

  I smiled.

  “One,” I said.

  FIFTY

  You need me to kill somebody else for you?” Gled said.

  “Not to make too fine a point of things,” I said, “but you didn’t kill anybody for me. You settled a score for Tony and I didn’t stop either one of you.”

  “If you are saying so,” Gled said.

  The last time he had been in my house he had engaged in some techy voodoo and found a bug in my kitchen left by a dirty cop named Jake Rosen. And the last time I’d seen Rosen had been when Gled and some other guys had driven off with him, after which the guy who had murdered Tony’s ex-girlfriend went on the list of the permanently disappeared.

  Gled had still been working for Gabriel Jabari, whose brother Tony once had shanked in prison. Now Jabari and Tony had mutual business interests. The heart wants what the heart wants.

  Gled was big and broad and bald, and certainly armed, and undoubtedly dangerous.

  “Actually,” I said, “I was just looking for information about one of your countrymen.”

  Gled grinned. He was sitting on my couch but made it look as small underneath him as a barstool. He still looked strong enough to stop a Green Line train with one punch.

  “If I tell you everything I know about my country,” Gled said, “maybe I am having to kill you, huh?”

  Jabari had told me once that Gled had spent a fair amount of his adult life working for the Federal Protective Service, one of the supposedly legit government agencies that had replaced the KGB, which meant separate from Putin’s secret police. But he finally decided he needed to get out, out of government
service and out of Russia, and had ended up in Boston, working as a bodyguard for Jabari.

  “You still with Gabriel?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Working for him meant working for Mr. Tony Marcus,” Gled said. “One time working for him was enough.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Now he smiled.

  “A man’s got to know his limitations,” he said.

  “Dirty Harry?” I said.

  “Magnum Force.”

  It was the middle of the afternoon, but I asked if he wanted a drink. He said vodka. I told him I could do that. He asked what kind I had.

  “Beluga Gold Line,” I said.

  “The good stuff,” he said. “You keep it in the freezer?”

  “Where else?” I said.

  I brought him back a healthy pour and asked him what he was doing for work.

  “Some of this and the other,” he said. “Some protection. Some private security. I am even doing some consulting for Major Case.” He grinned again. “Maybe I’m a little like another movie. Taken? You know that one?”

  I told him I would watch Liam Neeson if he were conducting the Boston Pops.

  “People, they seem to appreciate I have a particular set of skills,” Gled said.

  I explained to him then that somehow I had gotten sideways with Mother Russia. When I mentioned Eddie Ross’s name, Gled barked out a laugh that sounded like rolling thunder.

  “The mouse,” he said, “who grew up to be a rat. Little, little boy desperate to be his father.”

  “How much of a threat is he, really?”

  “Only to himself,” Gled said.

  He drank. I could almost see the vodka settling inside him. Then he sighed. He wore an electric-blue suit and black sneakers with white soles.

  I told him about my ride in the car with Eddie’s guys that night, and how I had to bite one of them to escape.

  “You get a rabies shot?” Gled said.

  Then I told him about the scene on Branch Street last night, and what Eddie Ross had told me about Kuznetzov before that.

  Gled put down his glass.

  “Kuznetzov is in Boston?”

  “Sounds like.”

  “Nobody has been seeing or hearing from him for a long time,” he said. “People I know who are still with the government thought he was dead. Who did he send after you, huh?”

  I told him about the giant.

  “Boyko,” he said.

  “I shot him,” I said.

  He smiled fully now and said something in Russian that sounded to me like “you bought some.”

  “Help me out,” I said.

  “I was talking about admiring you,” he said.

  “For shooting him before he shot me?”

  “For not being dead,” Gled said.

  “Eddie said he might be opening a gallery here,” I said. “Kuznetzov.”

  “If he is, it would not be because of his love for art,” he said.

  “Is he a poker player, by any chance?” I said.

  “So much so,” he said. “He is not just playing. He was always obsessed with playing. Almost as obsessed as he was with winning.”

  I told Gled about Drysdale and Matt Dunn.

  “Would he go so far as to kill somebody he thought was cheating him?” I said.

  “For sport,” Gled said. “In either poker or business, if he thought someone had been—what you call it?—boning him. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said.

  He held out his glass. I went and got him more Beluga and hoped he wasn’t driving.

  “Just because Eddie Ross says he is in Boston does not mean he is in Boston,” Gled said.

  “But if he is, do you think you could do me a favor and find out why?”

  “For you, yes,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes,” he said. “One of the girls that the cop you don’t want to talk about killed? One of the young whores? She was the sister of a woman I know.”

  “I don’t suppose I want to know where you took Rosen that night,” I said.

  “You are supposing so much correctly,” he said.

  He leaned forward and looked at me intently. He had very bright blue eyes and was, in his own odd way, good-looking.

  “If it is Kuznetzov, he will come for you again,” he said.

  “I’ll be careful.”

  He shook his head. “You need protection,” he said. “North End and South End and everywhere.”

  It came out “norse” and “souse.”

  “That’s what they’re saying,” I said, “all over town.”

  “I am doing this for you,” he said. “You will not even be seeing me.”

  He reached inside his jacket and came out with a .44 Magnum.

  “You can’t cover me by yourself,” I said.

  He smiled again. “You have friends,” he said. “I have friends.”

  Then he placed the Magnum across his lap and said, “Do you feel lucky today?”

  I told him I did now.

  “See what I did there?” he said.

  FIFTY-ONE

  After I’d fixed myself a dinner of pasta and vegetables I sat in the living room and did some reading about the Russian Mob, which seemed to have never had much of a footprint in Boston.

  The capital of the Mob in the United States was still Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. There was occasionally a money-laundering case involving Russians in a place like Atlanta. But the biggest and best money laundering seemed to be going on abroad. There had been a lot of arrests a couple years ago when the front had been one of the country’s largest insurance companies, that case stretching all the way to Spain. There had been a bigger bust of a lot of hard guys from both Russia and Ukraine in Atlantic City involved in a literal laundry list of bad behavior, from extortion all the way to slot machines.

  I closed my laptop and said to Rosie, parked next to me on the couch, “This is another fine mess I’ve gotten us into.”

  She gave me a look that I interpreted as her saying, What do you mean ‘us’?

  I had recently branched out from Jameson and Bushmills Black Bush to try bourbon as a sipping drink, and was working on a glass of Heaven’s Door. I was still on my Eddie Harris kick. I sipped bourbon and listened to Eddie and wondered all over again if a Taft girl I didn’t like and a restaurant that was now back in Spike’s hands were worth getting killed over.

  I took out my phone and called Jesse and asked him that same question, even feeling it was classically rhetorical.

  “Were you under the impression that I might tell you it was a good idea to get into a shooting war with the Russian Mob?” he said. “I know you’re not any better at letting shit go than I am, but this one you need to let go.”

  “It may be too late for that,” I said.

  “I have this rule,” Jesse said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “You have a lot of rules.”

  He ignored that.

  “When you’ve got no skin in the game, make sure to save your own,” he said. “Skin, I mean.”

  “Did you just come up with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not the only person who thinks that way.”

  “I’ll bet.” He paused and said, “You need protection, either way.”

  “Got some.”

  “Who?”

  I told him.

  Jesse said, “The guy who helped you with Tony and the cop?”

  “Turns out he had some skin in that game,” I said.

  “You trust this guy?”

  “He’s a Russian, but he’s my Russian,” I said.

  “So you’re not walking away.”

  “Would y
ou?” I said.

  “Guys like we’re talking about, they kill people to stay in practice,” he said. “Not that they generally need much practice.”

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” I said, “but I need to figure this out.”

  “I’ll take a few days off and come down there,” he said.

  “You just took a few days off,” I said. “But if I really need you, I’ll holler.”

  I heard him chuckle.

  “You often holler when you need me,” he said.

  “Oink,” I said.

  I walked Rosie after ending the call. I didn’t see Gled, or any of his sidemen. I hadn’t expected that I would. But I was sure they were around. I wasn’t sure why I trusted him this way, but I did.

  I had left my phone inside. Not a gun. I generally moved the guns in the house around. You could do that when you lived alone. Tonight I was carrying a Smith & Wesson M&P9. A personal favorite. The newest one I had. Lighter trigger. No manual thumb safety. Extended finger grip.

  The neighborhood around us was quiet and still as Rosie took longer than usual to perform her nightly duties. A neighborhood that would have been out of my price range, and more than somewhat, if not for the largesse of Melanie Joan Hall. Someone else who had come to the determination that she owed me something because I had done my job.

  I had always felt the world ought to be far less transactional than that.

  Rosie and I walked all the way up to the Public Garden and back. I had brought treats and gave her all of them because her nightly walk was far longer than usual.

  Still no sign of Gled, or whomever he had shadowing me tonight. I thought back to the night he had silently come up behind Jake Rosen and stuck a gun into the small of his back before shoving him into the backseat of the car, Rosen never to be seen or heard from again.

  Gled was right:

  I didn’t know what I didn’t want to know.

  Rosie and I went back to the house. I set the alarm when we were inside and was about to head up to bed when Richie called.

  Jesse and Richie. Richie and Jesse.

  “Can you get over to Desmond’s house as soon as possible?” Richie said.