by Stacy Gail
Draped in shadows, Polo kept the phone to his ear. “Yeah. You and your dad in position?”
“Yeah.” Alex’s voice came through as a calm, steady thread of sound. “You’re all set, man. Parking lot’s CCTV is out, so feel free to go to town.”
“Great, thanks.” His attention swerved to the single light from a streetlamp at the mouth of the alley running along the deli’s back parking lot. “Do me a favor and hit the light once I’ve got our guy. My eyes are sensitive.”
“Roger that.”
Polo didn’t take his eyes off the man heading for the roadster. He slipped the phone into his pocket, picked up the tire iron beside him and pushed silently out of the car. It was half past midnight. Artie’s Deli was closing up, and with the exception of the beautiful little sports car, the deli’s back parking lot was empty. Comfortable that it was going to stay that way with his people on the lookout, Polo took dead aim at his target, closing in like a shark sensing blood in the water.
“Nice car. Guess it pays to be a cop, after all.”
Detective Martin Schott dropped his paper bag of deli goodies, shoved a hand into his jacket and spun around to face whatever was coming at him out of the shadows. Well aware that crappy people like Schott always shot first and made excuses later, Polo swung the tire iron in a short backhand motion, gauging just the right amount of force to incapacitate, but not shatter. The streetlight blew at the same time metal thunked against the other man’s face, and in the dim light he saw blood spew from the older man’s mouth.
My way of saying hello, motherfucker. Hope you like it.
Then Polo was on him like white on rice, slamming the smaller man back against the car, trapping his arm even as he’d reached for his gun. With deft efficiency, Polo dropped the tire iron, got in under the cop’s windbreaker-style jacket and snagged the weapon for himself.
“Well, well, lookie what I found, Marty.” He grinned with all the dark glee pumping inside him, pleased to see a faint smudge of purple already showing on the man’s cheek where the tire iron had hit. “I could go on a fucking murder spree with this baby. There are a lot of assholes in this city that need to be gotten rid of, know what I mean? I could do that public service with your pea-shooter, while at the same time bringing a white-hot spotlight down on you. That’s what I call a win-win. What do you call it?”
“F-fuck you.”
“Nah, that’s not a good working title at all. No originality.”
“You goddamn lunatic.” Pain and fury mingled in Detective Schott’s growl as he struggled against his hold. “If you’re into killing assholes, put the barrel of that gun in your mouth and pull the fucking trigger just like your old man did, you psycho piece of shit.”
Polo couldn’t help but laugh, and even he could hear the crazy in it. “Were you hoping to hurt my widdle feelings with that, Detective Dumbass? News flash—my old man was smart to do himself before I had a chance to do it for him. Question is, are you smart enough to live through the next five minutes?”
All at once the fight went out of the smaller man. Breathing hard, he held up the one hand that was still free in a clear pose of no-balls capitulation. “All right, all right. I can see you wanna have a chat, so fine, Scorpio. Let’s fuckin’ chat. D’you mind getting off of me first, though? If you were a bitch with big tits I wouldn’t mind this position, but my door doesn’t swing your way.”
Polo pressed harder, and smiled when the breath whooshed out of the other man. “Too bad for you that I like you right where you are—one-handed and unable to reach the spare piece you’ve got strapped to your ankle. Now,” he added, ignoring his captive’s badly covered glare of frustration, “let’s talk about your car. It’s a nice car, Marty. I like.”
“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Schott muttered, staring at him in baffled fury. “You wanna talk about my car?”
“What can I say, I’m a car guy. I got a Ferrari at home, but I never really take it anywhere—gas mileage sucks. On average, how many miles to the gallon do you get with the Roadster?”
Schott just kept staring. “Jesus, all the bogeyman stories about you are true. You really are insane.”
“Not at all, I’m just curious. I like to know things, like gas mileage and who paid for it.” Polo smiled brightly and pushed down hard on the cop’s chest, not letting up until he wheezed. “Come on, don’t be shy. Tell me. Who paid for it?”
“Fuck you, I resent the implication. I paid for it.”
“Two months ago you’re driving a used Beamer—still nice, and still something that should have been out of your price range, but not Roadster-nice. Then all of a sudden you went and traded up. You got a brand new Roadster with all the bells and whistles, and it so impressed me I couldn’t help but look this little baby up. It’s seventy grand, easy.”
The smaller man sneered. “So?”
“So? Jesus, you’re fucking stupid, Marty, you know that? You might as well hang a sign around your neck that reads corrupt cop in neon letters.”
“You don’t know shit about me, asshole. I make good money at my job, all right?”
“Yeah, if your job is selling yourself to the highest bidder. Tell me, when you were a kid, did you ever imagine you’d grow up to be a whore?”
Schott reared back and spat in his face.
For half a second, Polo froze. Then, pausing just long enough to wipe the insult off his face, he decided that it was time to take Alex up on his suggestion.
He went to town on Detective Martin Schott.
There was a certain artistry involved when it came to a proper pistol-whipping. It was important that the whipper kept the whippee conscious throughout the session in order to achieve maximum results. It was also important that if the subject was required to talk coherently, that particular ability had to be preserved. Therefore, dislocating or breaking a jaw, or accidentally ripping off a lip had to be avoided.
Tooth loss, however, was permissible.
He heard the crunch of a couple teeth in the front, but only when he saw one fly out of Schott’s mouth to land with an audible clatter on the car’s shiny hood did he decide to give in to the other man’s pleas to stop.
“Lesson number one.” Polo caught Schott’s shirt and jacket and dragged him up when the smaller man’s knees gave out. “Talking to me instead of spitting on me is a lot less painful. More talky, less spitty, get it? I’ll even be kind and let you keep the rest of your teeth, but only if you mind your manners from this point on. Deal?”
“Guhh...I...I...”
“Aww, listen to you, making words like a big boy. See? Talking’s so much nicer, isn’t it? More civilized. It won’t bring you any pain, and that’s a great reward you’re earning for yourself. Good job, buddy.”
“Ugh...”
“Now, then.” He leaned in, making Schott’s body lean so far back against the hardtop of the little sports car that Polo felt the other man’s feet leave the ground. “As the ringing in your ears slowly fades away, I need you to concentrate very hard on my questions, okay? Are you employed by the Scorpeone family?”
By now, the detective’s sharp breaths were edged with dry sobs. “N-n...”
Polo sighed. “Come on, man. I can do this all night, but I’m beginning to think you can’t. Unless you want to try?”
“No! P-pwease, no.” Schott’s mouth was just mushy enough to bring in a hint of Elmer Fudd-speak, but it was far from unintelligible. “I can’t. I can’t...”
“Sure you can, Marty. I believe in you, I totally fuckin’ do. By the way, you don’t mind if I call you Marty, do you? You look like a Marty.”
“Mm...ugh...”
“Great, thanks. Now, go ahead and talk, and all the pain stops.”
“So. Does. My. Life.”
Polo dug hard for sympathy, because the man truly was between a rock and a hard place. But in the end, he came up empty. “See, here’s the thing, Marty. A clean cop wouldn’t be in the position you’ve gotten yourself into now. In
fact, do you know where all the clean cops are at this very moment? They’re in their beds, all snug as a bug in a rug, dreaming happy little clean-cop dreams and looking forward to waking up tomorrow with all their teeth still in their happy little clean-cop heads. But you wouldn’t know that, because you’re here. With me. Years ago you chose to roll the dice on being a hypocritical dirty-ass motherfucker. You know why? Because you honestly believed you were so smart, you thought you could get away with playing both sides of the fence and never paying the price for it. But there’s always a price, Marty, and it’s past time for you to start paying. So I’ll ask you one last time. Do the Scorpeones still own you?”
“N-no. No.”
Polo kept his expression unmoving while his blood began to chill. Just as he’d suspected. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who owns you?”
Through the dimness, Schott’s swelling eyes widened in fear. His mouth opened, but when no sound came out Polo realized the guy was near his limit. He had to find another way.
“All right, let’s table that for a second. You’re in Vice, right? That means illegal gambling falls under you purview, so that got me thinking. Were you a part of a raid on a floating illegal poker game that happened a while back? You know what I’m talking about, right? It was in a warehouse near Comiskey Park, held a bunch floats and shit from the St. Paddy’s Day Parade. You remember it.”
Schott nodded in a vague way. “Yeah. That...I did that.”
“Why’d you hit it? It was a Scorpeone game, so...were you ordered to hit it? Or was that personal thing because you no longer worked for them?”
“No...” He swallowed laboriously, and his words began to slur. Shit. The asshole was going into shock. “Not...personal.”
“So, it was professional. You were following orders. Who told you to hit it?”
“I...there was a tip.”
Okay, so he wanted to dance around the question a while longer. “Who tipped you off to it?”
“Some kid. Daddy’s boy. Supposed to be loaded, but daddy’s bankroll wasn’t what it used to be, so the kid...he was targeted to be a source of information for my new employer. Kid was obviously addicted to the good life, so he was thrilled to get that easy payoff. At least for a while.”
“But then favors were asked of him?”
Schott gurgled a wet sound of affirmation. “At first, all the kid had to do was report on where the games were going to be located, who attended, and how much was won—that kind of thing. But when the poker game was held at the warehouse near the ballpark, things changed. I was told to expect the kid to be there, holding your woman, Dasha Vitaliev, in place so we could scoop her up. I was told to let the kid go without putting him through booking, and then I was told to be as loud as possible about arresting a notorious Vitaliev.”
“To be as loud as possible?” By now the freezing of his blood bordered on painful. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Had plans... I was gonna make her do a perp walk in front of local media. Humiliate her with a strip search. I even had a woman cop there to do a full body-cavity search on her, with all of the Vice squad there to cheer it on. Then I was gonna lose her paperwork for a day or two while she was in holding with a dozen or so of the most violent offenders I could scrounge up. Anything I could think of, I was supposed to do it. Just as long as it didn’t actually kill her.”
This fucker, Polo thought, grinding his teeth. This goddamn fucker was going to die for even thinking of putting Dash through that kind of wringer...
“But none of that worked out. Daddy’s boy didn’t do his fuckin’ job. He didn’t hold the Vitaliev woman in place. By the time we got inside the warehouse, everyone had scattered. Stupid little turd wound up dead a week later. Found in a dumpster behind one of Daddy’s insurance buildings—bullet to the back of his head, execution-style. Daddy’s now on some kind of warpath that’s gonna land him in the same fuckin’ dumpster.”
Polo nodded, unsurprised. “Who did him? Who did the stupid little turd?”
“Wasn’t me.”
“I didn’t ask you who didn’t do him, Marty, I asked you who did. What family owns you now?” When he didn’t answer yet again, Polo sighed, resigned, and raised the hand holding the detective’s gun to teach him another lesson. “Geez, man, if you insist. Sorry about the remainder of your teeth.”
“Yours.” The words shot out of the detective’s swollen and bloody lips, the jagged pieces of his front teeth gleaming in the dimness as he gasped in panic. “Your family. You understand? I work for you.”
I now had Rudy Panuzzi and another PSI man, an uber-ripped blonde jarhead dude by the name of Dorian Havlik, as my constant companions, hired by Polo whenever he couldn’t be with me personally. I was sure they were fine bodyguards. They were both so muscle-bound they almost looked like video game caricatures of military-style tough guys, with absurdly big shoulders, barrel chests and lean waists.
But they weren’t nearly as fun as Konstantin.
When I got a mani-pedi, neither of them joined in to get the dude’s version. When I went shopping for a dress for Chicago’s Future charity gala, they had no opinion on whether or not I should go with the full-length gray or the backless red lace that showed some leg. I went with the red that showed leg, which meant I needed some killer shoes.
Sadly, my two new friends were even worse at shoe-shopping.
In my mind I could hear Konstantin insisting that I had to get the sluttiest, pointiest fuck-me shoes I could find, if only to scandalize any high-society tight-asses I ran into. But these guys? Ha. They didn’t know—or care to know—the difference between a flip-flop and a stiletto.
I never knew I could miss someone as much as I missed Kon.
I never knew that missing someone could cause physical pain.
Now I knew. And I hated the world because of it.
The day before the gala, I took down the sign in the door of Chicago’s Future explaining the food pantry was closed until today, due to a death in the family. While Rudy and Havlik went about securing the property, I stayed in the silent, empty front office and grabbed up a clipboard instead of breaking into a new spate of tears. I wished with everything in me that Konstantin was there shooting the breeze about his plans for his downtime, or leaning against the wall as we debated what exactly constituted the term “sexy.” Konstantin was gone now, forever lost to me, and since the ocean of tears I’d already cried hadn’t brought him back, it was a good bet that more tears would have the same effect.
So I was done with crying.
My new bodyguards had rejoined me in the front office by the time I decided to re-familiarize myself with the pantry’s inventory. But before I could get to the open doorway leading to where the food was shelved, the front door opened behind me. I turned with an automatic greeting, but it never made it to my lips when my gaze locked onto Shona as she kicked the door shut behind her, some kind of potted bouquet in her arms.
“Nice of you to tell me we were open for business today,” she announced by way of greeting, eyes filled with the light of battle. “Oh wait, that’s right, you didn’t tell me. In fact, I haven’t heard word-one from you since the day Kon died and you texted me to take a few days. I had to drive by here to see the sign in the door to find out when I was supposed to be back at work. Cookie bouquet,” she added, shoving the potted bouquet into my arms before stomping over to her neat desk. “That alone is enough to put me in a bad mood, but you know what really fries my bacon? You didn’t even tell me when or where Konstantin’s funeral was. I texted and called you a dozen times trying to find that out, and you never responded. What the hell kind of friend does that? Now Kon’s going to haunt me because I didn’t get to pay my proper respects.”
I sighed and set the vibrant, edible bouquet aside. I’d known I was going to pay for that one, but keeping her away was the only way I’d known how to protect her. “Shona—”
“It’s a good thing I know when and where the gala is tomorrow night. Ot
herwise you might try to freeze me out of that too.”
“I’m not freezing you out.” But the mention of the gala and that she’d be there—another person I adored—made my stomach drop all the way to my knees. I flicked a glance at my muscle-bound shadows, who were doing their best impressions of blankly staring statues. “Forgive me, gentlemen, but would it be possible for us to have the room?”
“New watchdogs?” Shona watched as Havlik promptly went out the glass front door to stand guard just outside. Rudy hesitated a second longer than his partner before he turned to duck inside the open door leading to the pantry. “I recognize one of them, but where’d the blonde one come from?”
“Polo arranged for them to be with me. Shona—”
“That’s a good idea, what with Kon and all. They look like they know what they’re about. They could ward off bullets with a mere flex of their muscles. Place feels safer already.”
I tried again. “Listen, Shona—”
“No.” At last she got right down to it and held up a hand, palm out. Then she stood and rounded her desk to face me, and all the while her gaze never wavered. “Let me go first, okay? I lost my mind last week, and I feel terrible about it. It’s been gnawing at me all this time, and now that Konstantin’s gone I feel even worse for lashing out at you when I was in a bad moment. I never should have said the crazy things I did. I know you’ve done nothing to bring this shit into your life. You didn’t deserve a single thing I said to you.”
“You were right.” I bled all the emotion out of my voice, just as I tried my damnedest to bleed it out of my system. If I could just be like stone, and not let a fucking thing break me down, I could protect her from all the hell that came with me. “Everything you said about my life being a dangerous place was bang on target. Someone is playing a deadly game, and because I’m a Vitaliev they’ve decided that this gives them the right to move me around on their board like I’m some damn game piece. I don’t know what their game is, or what their rules are. All I do know is that it’s dangerous to be close to me right now. For all I know, it’s going to be dangerous to be close to me for the rest of my life.”
