GIFT FROM THE HITMAN: The Petrov Mafia

by Zoey Parker

  “You’re mine, all mine. I want all of you, no, need all of you, won’t stop until I have all of you. I put a baby in you and I’ll do it again and again until we’re both dead and gone, and even then, I will own you and keep you to myself. I don’t share, I won’t share, I can’t share. Carmen, you’re mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”

  He came again, hard, filling me up for the second time in as many hours. I knew it then: I loved him.

  # # #

  A little while later, after we both had showered and put on clothes to sleep in, we were lying in bed together. I was curled against his side with my head on his chest, rising and falling with his breaths.

  “How is it better every time?” I murmured.

  He knew what I was talking about, of course. My heart was still fluttering from the sex, despite how much time had passed. My body was exhausted, but my brain refused to let me sleep.

  He rumbled something I couldn’t hear because my ear was pressed on his pec. What he said wasn’t important, though. I had everything I needed already. I had him next to me. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. Before I knew it, we were both asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ben

  I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when I clomped into the clubhouse the next morning. My body was a little sore from all the roughhousing with Carmen, but I’d never felt lighter on my feet. I felt downright giddy, like a fucking schoolgirl. But goddammit, I loved it.

  My mood immediately took a down turn when I waltzed around the corner and into the hallway. Spark and Slick looked up at me from where they sat on the floor with half-empty boxes arranged messily around me. They blinked a couple times, looking like goddamn zombies, then turned back to the papers without saying a word. I frowned.

  Stepping into my office, I saw Jay and Duncan hunched over the conference table. Judging by the frightening number of cigarettes smoked down to the butt and stubbed into the ashtray in the middle of the table, they’d already been there for hours.

  As I walked in the door, Duncan roared “Argh!” and stood up suddenly, flinging his seat behind him and plunging a knife into the wooden tabletop. He was seething. I could almost see the steam rolling out of his ears. His eyes were bugging out of his head, rimmed with red, while his nose flared out like a bull in the ring.

  He heard me clear my throat and raised his gaze to me, but it was like he could barely see me through the haze of fury clouding his vision. “This is fucking impossible!” he snarled. He picked up a sheath of papers and shook it in the air over his head. “It’s all fucking ruined! I can’t read a goddamn thing. We’ve been here for hours, fucking hours, and we’re not anywhere closer to finding this shit!”

  “Calm down, Duncan,” said Jay. His voice was level and cool, as always, but I’d known him long enough to hear the exhaustion underpinning it. I guessed the night’s rest hadn’t helped restore their patience much. They both looked ready to eat a bullet rather than dig through one more pack of water-stained files.

  Jay looked at me. “Not going well?” I asked.

  He took a fresh cigarette from the almost-empty pack at his elbow and tucked it in between his lips, then retrieved the lighter out of his breast pocket. “Not exactly,” he growled while lighting it and taking a drag. “Just too much damage from the flood. Here, take a look. This is the best thing we’ve found.” He held out a browned piece of paper, turning up at the edges.

  “That shit is useless, I’m telling you,” Duncan muttered as I walked over and took the paper from Jay’s hand.

  “It’s all we got,” Jay replied.

  I studied the page. It looked to be a newspaper clipping. If I squinted, I could make out the date. It was from a few weeks after Olaf and James’s wife were found dead. The headline read, With No End in Sight, Murder Investigation Called Off. The article was still damp, and most of the ink in the paragraphs below had run together. I didn’t think it mattered, though, because the first line said, “Lacking promising suspects and any substantial evidence, local police have temporarily suspended their investigation into the murders of…” before trailing off into blurry nonsense.

  My eyes roved over the sheet, looking for anything else that might be useful. I felt Duncan watching me and nodding his head. “See?” he said. “Useless.”

  Something caught my eye. “What’s this?” I asked.

  Jay frowned. “What?”

  I held out the page and pointed out something on the bottom edge. “What’s that look like to you?”

  He brought it close to his face, wrinkling up his nose as he tried to get a good view. “Ain’t shit,” Duncan said from across the table. “I’ve looked at that thing a hundred times already.”

  “Ben’s right,” Jay said. “It’s something.”

  “Lemme see that again.” I laid the clipping flat on the table and hunched over. Duncan and Jay came to stand on either side of me and together, we all stared down at the handwritten scribble I’d noticed just below where the text of the article ran out.

  “Looks like turnip,” Jay said.

  “No, it’s turning,” Duncan countered. “That’s a g, not a p. See the little squiggle underneath?”

  “That’s just a pen mark, not a g. C’mon, use your head. Didn’t they teach you kids how to read in school?”

  “Joiner,” said a voice at the door behind us. “It’s a name. Joiner.”

  All three of us whirled around immediately. “Sorry, boss,” Slick said, panting. “He insisted he had to see you. I was just gonna bash his face in, but he said you’d know what was going on.”

  “That’s okay, Slick. Let him in.” Slick stepped aside and John Hunter came shuffling into the office. He looked like he was favoring a bad knee, and he was wearing a bathrobe and house slippers, but it was the folder clutched in his fist that really had my attention.

  “Eric Joiner,” the man said as he hobbled over to where we were standing, pushed through to the table, and laid the file down flat. He opened it up and started thumbing through the contents before plucking one out and raising it up to me like it was a medal he’d just won.

  I took the paper from his hands and read it as quickly as I could. What I read made my heart start racing at a million miles per hour.

  Seeing Duncan and Jay’s confused faces, John started to explain. “The police department somehow never released this to the media. They had a whole file full of stuff like that, in fact. I couldn’t believe I still had it. I remembered I made some copies of it—not that I was supposed to do that kind of thing, of course, but I was friends with Marty, who ran the file room, and we used to bowl together, and so—”

  “Get on with it, old man,” Duncan snapped. Jay gripped his shoulder and Duncan growled but fell silent.

  Hunter cleared his throat and continued. “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, I was a cop at the time, yeah? Different unit, beat cop instead of murder, you know how it is, but anyhow, not important. Apparently, word came down from on high that the investigation needed to end right away. Inconclusively was the word that was used. Came straight from the commissioner’s mouth, according to my sources. Whoever had that woman and your, uh, your friend bumped off, he must have had some pretty powerful friends. It takes serious influence to get a double murder investigation cut off. But whoever it was, he had that kind of influence, and the whole thing went kaput. They stashed all of the files they had into the storage closet and told the press that they didn’t have any leads and they couldn’t keep devoting resources to the case. So they moved on. And that was that. No suspects, no witnesses—at least, that’s what the press was told.”

  Jay’s eyes narrowed. “But what?”

  “But there were witnesses!” John said, beaming with pride. He pointed at the paper I held in my hand. “Eric Joiner. He was there! Lived in the apartment right across the hall from where it happened. He saw it all. The cops interviewed him, but he was in shock and his memory was so jumbled up, and they didn’t have time to sort it out b
efore the commissioner’s order to put a bow on the whole thing. So his side of the story got buried. Until now.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Duncan interrupted. “There was another guy at the apartment complex that night who saw the man who did it. Cops interviewed him. Then, before they could follow up on what he told them, the police department ordered the investigation be squashed.”

  “Yes, yes,” John said, nodding. “That’s right.”

  “That’s bullshit!” he exclaimed. “Motherfucking pigs!”

  “Anyway,” Jay drawled, “now that it’s been broken down so our simple-minded friend here can understand what’s happening, can you tell us what that paper says, Ben?”

  “What’s it say, boss?” Duncan asked eagerly. “Can Joiner ID the bastard?”

  Everyone’s eyes shifted to me. I let the paper fall onto the table. “It doesn’t say shit,” I mumbled. “His statement doesn’t make any sense.”

  Duncan snatched it up and scanned it furiously, but as he read, his face fell further and further. By the time he reached the bottom, he looked depressed enough to jump out the nearest window. “Whoever took down this statement didn’t give a damn about getting it right. It’s just a bunch of nonsense. ‘I saw a man in a mask, oh wait, it was a woman, no, it was a pygmy dwarf.’ I mean, what the fuck, man?” He fell into a slump in a nearby chair. “We’ve still got nothing.”

  “We need to find the guy,” Jay said quietly. “If we talk to Joiner ourselves, maybe we can wring some sense out of him.”

  “Yeah!” said Duncan, jolting forward. His eyes were suddenly glistening again. “Let’s find the motherfucker! He’ll talk. He won’t have a choice.” He looked back and forth at us excitedly.

  “What do you think, Ben?” Jay asked me.

  “It’s a good idea. Any lead is helpful at this point. Put out the word for everyone to start looking around for this Eric Joiner guy.” But then I noticed John was wringing his hands and frowning. “What is it?” I asked, turning to him.

  He swallowed a lump in his throat before pointing to the file. When he spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper. “Next page.”

  I plucked up the next sheet of paper in his folder and started reading. When I finished, I buried my head in my hands on the table.

  “Please tell me that’s good news,” Duncan whispered.

  “It’s an obituary,” I said. “Eric Joiner is dead.”

  # # #

  I’d thanked John and sent him on his way with a renewed offer for him to call on the Dark Knights if he ever needed assistance with something. He’d been as helpful as he could have been, but I was still steaming fucking mad. It didn’t seem like there would ever be an end to this shit. We’d come so close to a breakthrough, but now we were knocked back on our asses, planted firmly in square one. It felt like someone was toying with me. And all I could think of was Dina, begging me to bring a close to her misery.

  I picked up the obituary and read through it again. I’d read it a thousand times over in the hours since John had left, but it kept niggling at me. Something just didn’t sit right.

  Duncan and Jay were back to digging through the documents. At first, they’d had some real zing in their movements, but as the minutes wore by and the clock hand ticked loudly in the silent room, they grew more and more despondent, until they looked every bit as depressed as they had when I had first walked in the room that morning.

  The obit was dated a few months after the investigation had closed. Eric Joiner, 23, passed away suddenly yesterday evening… Designated no heirs… Is survived by his uncle, Victor, and cousin, Petrov…

  I froze. His cousin, Petrov.

  The memory practically slapped me across the face: Ivan shouting at the pimply teenage boy, “Go on, Petrov, get the hell out of this room. I don’t want to look at you.” Turning to me and giving me an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. “My apologies, Ben. My son is often useless.”

  I leaped to my feet and grabbed my jacket with one hand and my keys with the other. Duncan whirled around to look at me. “Where are you going, Ben?” he asked.

  I growled over my shoulder as I swept out of the room, “I’m going to pay our friend Ivan a visit.”

  # # #

  Six pairs of eyes locked onto me as I barged in through the door. I had a Russian henchman pinned in a headlock, my gun pressed against his bleeding forehead. The men surrounding the poker table with cigars clamped in their mouths looked stunned at the sudden intrusion.

  “I need to talk to you, Ivan,” I thundered. “Right now.”

  Ivan looked around at his companions and shrugged, then set his cards face down on the table and stood. As he walked over to me, he pointed at the man in my arms and said, “Come on, Ben, let poor Dante go. He did no wrong to you.”

  I relinquished my grip and let the poor motherfucker go. “Put some ice on that or it’s going to swell up like a bitch,” I advised.

  He grunted as he stumbled away down the hall.

  “Come, come.” Ivan gestured for me to follow. He led the way to his office, where he settled into his chair with a sigh and pointed for me to do the same.

  I sat. “Sorry about your man,” I said. “I’m a little short on time. Had to do things the messy way.”

  He waved me off. “It is no big deal. Good for a man to get knocked around every now and then, no? Teach him he is not so tough. But, you did not come to discuss philosophy with me. Tell me, then, what brings you here in such a violent temper?”

  “I need to know if you know a man named Eric Joiner.”

  Ivan leaned back, frowning and stroking his chin. “Hmm,” he pondered. “I must say, the name does not sound familiar.”

  “He’s your son’s cousin, Ivan.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m going to lay this out simply, because I trust you and I know you cared about Olaf as much as I did. Eric Joiner disappeared less than six months after Olaf was murdered. The newspapers said he died. I think that’s bullshit.”

  “Oh?”

  “Eric Joiner is a distant relative of yours. I’m willing to bet he came to you right around that time and said he was in trouble. Said he needed to go underground, get out of the limelight for a little while. With James Sanders breathing down his neck, I can understand why he might want that.”

  “My friend, I swear to you I know nothing of this.”

  “I believe you, Ivan. But I think your son does know something.”

  His frown deepened. Extending a finger, he pressed a button on his desk. “Lana, find my son and tell him to come immediately.” He didn’t wait for a response, instead rubbing his temples as he sank deep into thought.

  A moment later, the door squeaked open and Petrov stood there. “Yes, Papa?” he asked timidly.

  “Come,” his father ordered. Petrov slinked over to stand at the side of the desk.

  “Go, Ben, ask him your questions.”

  I turned to face the boy. “You had a cousin named Eric, didn’t you, Petrov? A distant cousin, probably, maybe not even blood related. Eric Joiner.”

  He kept his face studiously calm. “I don’t know. Maybe. My family is very big.”

  “You’d remember this one. He came to you, didn’t he? Told you he was in trouble. Said he saw something but refused to tell you what it was, just that it was bad and he needed to disappear for a while. You helped him, right? And you didn’t tell your father?” With every passing word, he went whiter and whiter, until it looked like there was no blood running through his veins at all. “Thought you’d get in trouble for getting your daddy’s business involved in something without his permission, right? Tell me, Petrov, is that right?”

  He paused for a long time. Then he nodded. He started to speak in a whisper. “He just said he needed some help getting people off his back. Guys were looking for him. They came to his house when he wasn’t home, kept trying to snatch him off the streets. He was terrified. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t let him get k
illed, could I? I just gave him a place to stay for a while, that’s all. Then he asked for my help to get the obituary published. I was too afraid to ask my dad for help. He would have yelled at me and told me we didn’t need to risk tangling with biker gangs, that there was nothing good in it for us.”

  I nodded solemnly. “Where is Eric now, kid?”

  His voice was a pipsqueak. “He works in the kitchen.”

  I rose. “Thanks, Petrov. Thanks, Ivan,” I said.

  Ivan’s face was purpling with rage. I turned and strode out the door as the sounds of his enraged bellows erupted behind me. “Stupid, stupid boy!” he screeched. I heard flesh smacking flesh before I was too far down the stairs for the sound to carry anymore.