“You sure are a tasty looking little piece,” Beverly said breaking the silence.
“What do you want, Beverly?” Maddy flatly asked eliciting some snickers from Beverly’s friends.
“Ah, come on, princess. We just want to be friends. Everybody needs friends in here,” Beverly replied with that same smile and attitude.
“All right, mama cow,” Maddy snarled turning Beverly’s smile into a serious frown. “Let me tell you and your merry band of calves here how this is going to go. There are seven of you and you can probably get me and hurt me. Even hurt me bad. But,” here Maddy paused and looked over Beverly’s six pals, “at least two or three of you will leave here in a lot more pain than when you came in. Bleeding and broken bones, too. Especially you,” she said staring at Beverly. “Count on it.”
She looked over the now uncertain little gang then turned back to the leader of the pack and said, “As for you, sooner or later I’ll catch you alone. And when I do, I’ll beat your fat ass into the tub of goo that you are then I’ll pitch you out a window just to see if you can fly.”
Beverly, with a much more cautious, worried, uncertain expression, silently stared back. This aggression from a would-be victim was not something she had ever experienced and made her pause, not sure what to do.
“Yeah, princess,” Maddy mockingly said to her, “that story you heard about me is true. And he was a lot tougher than any of you are. So,” she paused and again looked at the other six women, one at a time, directly in their now worried eyes, “any of you want to find out if you can fly after being tossed through a window?”
Maddy waited five or six seconds then said, “I didn’t think so.” She took a short step toward Beverly who stood up and nervously tried to back away.
Maddy jerked a thumb toward the exit and derisively said, “Waddle your fat ass out of here and take this,” she stopped and waved a finger at the others then said, “gaggle of morons with you and don’t bother me again.”
As Beverly started to silently back away, Viveca and four other women, all black except for Cheryl, came into the library. Without a word passing between the two groups, Beverly led her bunch through the door.
“What happened, honey?” Viveca asked Maddy after Beverly and her followers had left.
As soon as Beverly was out the door, Maddy had collapsed into a chair. She was staring straight ahead not even acknowledging her cellmate for several seconds.
Viveca and the women who came in with her were all looking down at Maddy waiting for her to say something.
“What happened?” Viveca repeated.
Maddy finally looked up and over all of their expectant faces and said, “I can’t believe I did that.”
She then told them exactly what went down.
“That story is true?” one of Viveca’s friends said. “That story about you throwing that man through a window, that’s true?”
“Yeah, it is,” Maddy quietly said.
“Girl, I’m glad you’re on my side,” the woman replied.
FIFTY-TWO
Charlie Dudek waited patiently in his car in the above-ground parking lot of Ethan Rask’s condo building. Not knowing the type of car Rask drove, Charlie was on station before 6:00 A.M. looking out and waiting for him. Being Friday morning and what Charlie assumed was a normal workday, he expected Rask to have left for his downtown office long before now. It was now after 9:00 and he was growing increasingly concerned that he had missed him.
While on his way to New York, Charlie had checked with his source in Chicago, the man who had originally put Rask in contact with him. Charlie demanded to know who had hired him. Normally, this man would keep such a thing confidential but Charlie made it clear this was not an option.
Realizing Charlie meant business, the Chicago wiseguy gave up Rask without a second thought. Unfortunately for Ethan Rask, this information put him first on Charlie’s list.
While waiting for Rask to appear, Charlie let his mind drift back to his confrontation with the Russian and his last night in New York. After seeing Andrei Dernov in the alley, he watched the two men until they eventually split up. He followed Dernov to an apartment building in the Bronx and saw him go in when a woman opened the door. Charlie waited in his car across the street parked behind Dernov’s BMW. The street was quite dark, the only light coming from the doorway Dernov went through, an excellent place to take him.
A few minutes later, Charlie realized what Dernov was up to. Angry now, he almost broke his car door exiting the vehicle. He ran across the street. Charlie went up the steps to the door two at a time then kicked the door open, shattering the frame. The noise it made caused the woman who met Dernov to open her apartment door to see what happened. Charlie ran three steps then blew through the open door, grabbed the scruffy looking, strung-out junkie by the throat and snarled, “Where is he?”
Charlie heard a noise coming from a room in the back of the apartment and before the terrified woman could answer, tossed her on the floor. He ran toward the noise and without slowing down, put a shoulder into the door where the noise came from and made it explode into a filthy, small bedroom. In it, he found exactly what he feared he would find: Andrei Dernov, naked on top of a small, naked girl no more than ten or eleven years old, a younger version of the woman on the floor.
Charlie was on Dernov before the pedophile had a second to react. One punch to the side of Dernov’s head and the Russian was out cold.
The little girl had been knocked to the floor then crawled into a corner. She sat with her knees up covering her naked little body, her red-rimmed eyes wide with terror.
“Get dressed, sweetheart. I won’t hurt you,” Charlie told her still straddling the tattoo-covered, naked, unconscious Russian.
“Do you have someplace you can go?” he asked her while she quickly dressed.
“You can’t take her,” the girl’s mother screamed from the doorway.
In a flash, Charlie had a gun in his hand pointed right at the woman’s head.
“Shut your goddamn mouth, you disgusting bitch! One more word and I’ll blow your fucking brains out!”
The terrified woman backed away and Charlie turned back to the girl.
“My grandma’s,” she said. “My dad’s mom. Please take me there.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Yes, not far. I’ll show you.”
It was then Charlie noticed the shackle marks on the girl’s wrist and the chain attached to the room’s radiator. He looked at the mother again and said, “You better start running or I’ll come back.”
An hour later, after dragging the naked Dernov out of the building and into the trunk of his car, Charlie parked in Barreto Point Park, a public park in the Bronx. He had found the girl’s grandmother, dropped her off and was now getting ready to deal with Dernov.
It was after 1:00 A.M. and Charlie had found a secluded spot with a tree he needed. Dernov, still naked and with his hands, feet and mouth duct taped, was defiantly staring up at him when Charlie opened the trunk. Normally, being a professional, Charlie would not act in a cruel way. He would do the job required and be done with it. But for the sick, twisted Russian, Charlie decided to make an exception.
Mentally snapping back to his current post, he saw a beige Mercedes exit the Rask’s condo building’s underground parking lot that Charlie was watching. It was Ethan Rask’s beige Mercedes and it brought Charlie back from his daydream about the Russian. As he had done with every car, Charlie checked out the driver with his binoculars.
“And there you are,” he softly said to himself.
As Rask pulled the luxury sedan out of the lot onto West 69th, Charlie wrote down the make model and license plate of the Mercedes. There was very little traffic so Charlie sat still watching as Rask drove up to the corner of 69th and York. Rask’s left turn blinking light came on which told Charlie he was headed toward the Crosstown Freeway then likely downtown to his office. Charlie let Rask get a block away then drove after hi
m, confident he knew where Rask was going.
“Exactly how long do you think this will take?” Corbin Reed asked Walter Pascal.
All five of the CAR owners were in the private Suite 2007, across the hall from the main office. They were the only ones in on this Friday morning. The idea to close the office and send all of the employees off on a long weekend had been a great idea. They didn’t need any employees hanging around the office today. What these men were up to might raise some eyebrows at the SEC. Doing it on a Friday before a holiday weekend would likely minimize the risk. Even if an SEC investigator did pick up on it, it would likely be set aside until Tuesday of next week. By then it would be over, they hoped.
“All day,” Walter replied. “We still have a considerable amount to liquidate into cash. That needs to be done as carefully as possible…”
“That’s all set up,” Jordan Kemp interjected.
“Yeah, but we still don’t want to wave any flags to anyone about it. The more time we have to clear out…”
“The better,” Rask said.
“Then once it’s all turned into cash, probably around 1:30 or 2:00 our time this afternoon, we start bouncing everyone’s shares around the globe for the next couple of days.”
“And the cartel’s money? That will go back to them?” Corbin Reed asked.
“Corbin, relax,” Victor Espinosa calmly told him. “It’s all set.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I just don’t want that crazy bastard coming after any of us. The rest of these assholes, well, who cares?”
“Hey, you getting cold feet?” Kemp asked Corbin.
“No, no,” Reed said shaking his head. “No, it’s just, well, now that we’re actually here, I just want to be careful.”
“You’re about to become a very rich man, Corbin,” Rask said.
“You’re right. Rock and roll,” Reed laughed and slapped his hands together. “Let’s do it.”
That evening, after waiting all day for him, Charlie had followed Ethan Rask back to his condo building an hour ago. This time Charlie was waiting in his car in the underground parking garage for him. He had backed into a visitor’s spot approximately fifty to sixty feet away from Rask’s car which was parked in its reserved spot. He was as close as he could get and his view was partially blocked by a concrete support pole. It was also poorly lit in this section of the garage. Even so, Charlie was confident he would see Rask get off the elevator and come to his car. He just hoped the man was not in for the rest of the evening.
Ethan Rask stepped onto the empty elevator on the building’s eighth floor. As he descended toward the garage he was tempted to check his pulse. Between the events at CAR Securities earlier in the day and his destination this evening, he was pretty sure his heart rate was racing. Plus the two lines of cocaine he had done in his apartment did not help calm him down.
Rask was hurrying toward a pleasant several hours with his current high-class hooker of choice. Rask had developed a taste for prostitutes almost twenty years ago. At the time, while still in his twenties, he was heavily involved with a young Jewish woman. Like most young women at that age, she wanted marriage. Rask finally agreed. For the next six months, the girl and her mother planned every detail of the wedding. A few days before the big event,a friend told Rask—at the time he was still Anatoly Brodsky— that if he wanted to know what his wife would be like, check out the mother. The next day Anatoly Brodsky was on his way to Florida and never looked back.
Seconds before the elevator reached the garage, he again thought about Audriana. Of all the prostitutes he had known, she had been his absolute favorite. Too bad she had given him up. Once again he thought about the guys she gave him up to: At least they weren’t cops, he thought to himself.
Thinking about where he was off to and not paying attention to where he was, after he settled into the driver’s seat of his car, Rask started to close the driver’s side door. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a large, dark shadow appeared and blocked the door open. Startled, Rask turned his face toward the intruder and barely had time to say, ‘no’ when a silenced gunshot permanently turned out his lights.
Blood, brains and bone particles were splattered all over the car’s interior. What used to be Ethan Rask was slumped over the console and gear shift. The dark shadow quietly closed the car door and quickly walked away. Although the handgun, a .357 magnum, had a sound suppressor attached, the shot still made a considerable noise in the closed environment.
FIFTY-THREE
Corbin Reed was smugly relaxing on his semi-circular, white, sectional couch. He was enjoying a second glass of Cognac, staring at the soothing gas-flames of his large, wall-inset fireplace, imagining his future. Corbin’s arrogance and narcissism were in overdrive while he relived in his head, the events of the past year. Everything, with the possible exception of Pat McGarry and Rob Judd, had gone exactly as planned. Even the speed bumps of McGarry and Judd had not proven to be much of an obstacle. Too bad about Judd’s girlfriend, he thought, reflecting on Maddy Rivers. It’s a shame a woman such as she should be wasting away in prison.
“But,” he began to say as he sipped his drink, “sometimes little people have to be sacrificed for the good of the more deserving,” he smiled.
Corbin downed the rest of the brandy and decided he owed himself another one. Tomorrow was going to be a long, busy day. Once he was sure the money was where it should be, he had a plane to catch for a warmer climate and a life of luxury.
He stood up and stepped out of the sunken living room to go to the bar. As he did so he chuckled and said, “Hot chicks and thong bikinis. It will be a great life.”
On his way back to his seat on the couch, he felt, more than heard, the patio door behind him open. He turned, saw the man standing there and started to say, “What the hell…”
The last thing Corbin Reed heard, if he lived long enough to be aware of it, were three long, rapid sounds: Woomp, woomp, woomp. All three bullets hit him squarely in the chest from barely ten feet away. The brandy snifter he was holding went flying and the impact drove Reed tumbling over the back of the couch.
The intruder took a few steps forward and looked down at Corbin. Satisfied, the man quickly exited the townhome the same way he came in closing the patio door behind him.
There was an asphalt walkway on the other side of the privacy fence surrounding Reed’s patio area. The killer went through the gate, turned right and replaced the handgun at the small of his back. He stood still and waited for two or three seconds, listening for evidence of a neighbor overhearing what he had done. He quickly, but not hurriedly, went down the walkway back toward the parking area.
Along the walkway, behind the townhouse buildings were a significant number of fir trees to lend privacy. As the killer went past the closest tree to the walkway, he felt a cold piece of metal pressed up against the back of his neck. Knowing what it was, he immediately stopped and raised his hands.
“You’ve been a busy boy, Walter,” Charlie Dudek whispered as he quickly frisked him and found the gun. “It’s time we had a little chat.”
“Who are you?” Walter Pascal quietly asked.
Charlie placed Walter’s silenced handgun in his coat pocket, jabbed his own gun in the small of Walter’s back and said, “Put your hands down and walk slowly. Don’t try anything stupid. I’m a professional and you won’t get away from me.”
“Who are you and what do you want?” Walter asked again, his voice cracking.
“All in good time, Walter. Let’s go.”
Charlie opened the trunk of his car and silently motioned for Walter to get out. His mouth was covered with duct tape and his hands were taped together. Charlie was parked in a small, off-street parking area a hundred or so feet from Walter’s home.
Charlie jabbed his gun into Walter’s back again and quietly said, “Let’s go inside and we’ll get acquainted.”
A couple of minutes later the two men were in Pascal’s living room. Walter was seated on his couch in
front of the front bay window. Charlie had removed the tape from his hands and mouth then placed it in a plastic bag to take with him. The drapes on the window were closed and there was only one lamp lit on an end table next to Walter.
“I was in the parking garage of Ethan Rask’s condo. I was waiting for him myself,” Charlie quietly said. He was in an armchair that matched the sofa sitting opposite Walter. Charlie had his right leg casually crossed over his left and held his gun in his right hand. It was resting on the chair’s right arm pointing directly at Walter.
“Are you eliminating your partners?” Charlie asked.
Charlie waited for Walter to reply and when he did not, Charlie continued. “What about Jordan Kemp and Victor Espinosa.”
“Who are you and what do you want?” Walter asked again, only this time very nervously.
“Relax, Walter. If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. Tell me what you’re up to. What about Jordan Kemp and Victor Espinosa?”
Walter licked his lips and shifted his eyes about. He stared at the extremely confident man holding the gun then decided cooperation was likely his only option.
“Jordan Kemp is dead. I got him as he was driving home. I caught up with him in my car and signaled to him that I wanted him to pull over so we could talk. There was a motel parking lot right there so we pulled in. It was dark, no one was around and so,” Walter shrugged, pointed the thumb and forefinger on his right hand at Charlie and motioned as if he was shooting a gun.
“He’s still there. Probably won’t be found until morning.”
“Victor Espinosa?”
“Victor is probably in Mexico by now. He got out of town this afternoon. He told me he had it all set and was going to catch a flight to Houston, then Cancun. He may still be in the air but he’s gone. I couldn’t catch up with him.”
“All right, that accounts for everyone. Now, what the hell are you guys up to?” Charlie asked.
Marc Kadella Legal Mysteries Vol 1-6 (Marc Kadella Series) Page 255
