“Us or them,” he repeated, holding her close.
Chapter Five
RYAN…
North Mashta Drive
Key Biscayne, Florida
14 Miles from Star Island
A ll the blinds were pulled in the upscale 3,500-square foot island property that also doubled as a Ryan Colt’s drop house. The windows had been nailed shut. The security system was activated. Guns lined the dining room table along with a few shot guns in the corner by the umbrella stand. But Ryan wasn’t stupid enough to believe that it would be nearly adequate if Anatoly Medlov found out where he was.
Pacing back and forth as he spoke on the phone, Ryan shot a few contemptuous glances toward Anastaysia, who was curled up on the sofa in the den. She had not said a word to him since they arrived, but her eyes screamed her hidden thoughts.
Life had finally dealt her a possible winning hand. And she was reveling in Ryan’s hysteria, feeding on his fear like a feast during Thanksgiving dinner.
Just a few hours ago, he was a smug, mean bastard with the entire world bowing at his feet. Now, he was a sniveling coward, looking for anyone who would save him from his impending doom.
A smile crept behind her lips. No one would save him. She rolled her eyes and wiggled her toes in muted glee. She could almost taste her happiness on the tip of her tongue. There was nowhere to run. Ryan had means, more than most, but he didn’t have Medlov money. He could only hide for so long before someone somewhere exposed his position in exchange for a payout. And then, Anatoly would come for her.
Ryan screamed into the phone, jolting her attention away from the television. She glanced over at him, wearing the same suit from the night before, dark circles under his eyes, and wondered by the treble in his voice if he might actually cry soon. She couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the phone, but evidently things weren’t going so well for poor Ryan Colt.
Clover walked into the dining room with a brown bag, just back from the gun shop, and placed it on the table. His keys jingled as he threw them down. With a huff, he reached into the bag and pulled out several boxes of ammo. Lining them in front of the guns, according to their caliber, he nodded over at Ryan, who raised a finger for him to stay put for a minute while he finished his conversation.
“Listen to me,” Ryan pleaded into his cell phone. “My situation is your situation. Now, that prick, Andretti won’t even take my calls. He hung up on me when I told him who the girl was. But the points aren’t sent up to him, they are sent up to Mr. Popov. I need to speak with Mr. Popov. If I end up in a war with these Medlov people, he loses several very valuable revenue streams – the club, the businesses, the brothels – that will be very bad. He gets a piece of everything that I make, and I can’t pay him if I’m fucking dead. Now, when that happens, are you going to cover my end? Are you going to tell him that you sat by and did nothing, not even make a call to him? Do you think he’s going to reward you for protecting him from his own money?” Taking a deep breath, he leaned against the table and listened to the man on the phone.
Clover looked over at Anastaysia confounded by her real identity. They had screwed up royally this time. He was scared to go near her now like she was the bubonic plague incarnate.
After doing a little research on the Medlov family via his cell phone, he knew they were on borrowed time. Still, he couldn’t cut and run yet. He was still in the process of developing a plan, which included trying to get on Anastaysia’s good side.
“Thank you,” Ryan said, heaving a sigh of relief and throwing his hand up in the air. He glanced up at the ceiling with a silent prayer on his lips and then relaxed his broad shoulders. “I’ll have my phone on waiting for the call.” Hanging up, he scanned the ammo boxes in front of him. “Is that all you could get?”
Clover shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, hoping Ryan would have been more appreciative of the fact that he was able to bring back anything at all. “This is all I could get without raising someone’s curiosity.” He put the remaining money from the purchase on the table for Ryan.
“No one cares about how much ammo you buy,” Ryan said, grabbing one of the boxes off the table. He ripped it open. “It’s not like there is a law against it.”
“These Medlov guys are arms dealers. I’m sure they know every gun dealer in the city. If we start buying in bulk, someone might make a call and tip them off.”
Ryan hadn’t thought of that. “Well, regardless this isn’t going to be enough.” He picked up the magazine to the Glock 19 on the table and started to feed the rounds into the clip.
“Maybe we should consider moving soon,” Clover said, picking up one of the 12-gauge shotguns to load it.
“Move where? This place is as safe as we can get. It’s not in my name. It’s not a place where any of the girls outside of Eddy knows, and we barely come here, except for a transaction every once in a while,” Ryan said, frustrated by Clover’s skittishness. “If we go to a hotel, we’re basically putting ourselves in a barrel and inviting them to shoot in it. If we get on the road, we run the risk of being seen by someone who is out there looking for us. What if they put out a police report? Cops could be looking for her. Feds could be looking for her. Every possibility is just that…a possibility.” He glanced over at Anastaysia again and lowered his voice. “The most important thing is that we have her as leverage.” He looked back at Clover as though he had it all figured out. “They aren’t going to just shoot up the place and run the risk of killing her.” Or at least he hoped.
Clover thought Ryan’s plan was stupid. His boss might have been a human trafficker, but at the end of the day, he was just a South Beach pimp, and his expertise started and stopped with that business. The Medlovs were international drug runners. They had people everywhere.
“We’re going to stay put right here in this house,” Ryan said, putting the Glock back down on the table. “And wait for Popov to call us back. Once we can explain what’s going on, he’ll send reinforcements.”
Clover had another thought. What if Popov gave them up? Russian mobsters were loyal to each other, sometimes even over money. They might already be sitting ducks. Deals may already have been made. But to say that to Ryan without proof would only make things worse in an already tense environment.
Ryan tried to be positive for a minute. “We might be still a few steps ahead of them, you know. They saw our faces, but that doesn’t mean that they know who we are. I had Jose round the other girls up and take them straight back to the brothel. As far as I’m concerned, we left no trace.” The smudge on the table was aggravating his OCD. He picked up a napkin and cleaned it until he buffed out the imperfection.
Clover watched him with an incredulous disdain. They were fighting for their lives, and he was still trying to clean shit? Idiot. What Ryan needed to be worried about was having an exit strategy to get out of the state if not the country as soon as possible.
Ryan could feel Clover looking at him, judging him silently. It was the way the air rushed out of Clover’s nostrils, the sound of his elevated breathing. Having made a life based on knowing people and anticipating their actions and desires, he knew Clover was starting to doubt him, maybe even turn on him.
Anastaysia turned from the television playing an old black and white western and observed the two men. She couldn’t hear what they were saying now that their voices were lowered, but their body language suggested they were at odds. Her only conclusion was that paranoia was starting to creep in between what was once an ironclad bond. If that were really the case, it would only be a matter of time before one of them fired the first shot. The western had reached its climax. The bad guy in black and the good guy in white were having a shootout in the middle of the town square. She slowly dragged her gaze back to the movie, noting its timeliness.
Ryan glanced up from the table and narrowed his gray eyes on the large bodyguard, chopping him down to size. His voice was grave and full of warning. “Just remember, Clover, what happens to me, happens to you.
We’re in this together to the very bitter end.”
Bullshit, Clover thought to himself. He shrugged as though the thought had never crossed his mind. No one had ever accused him of being a genius, but he wasn’t a fool either. He wouldn’t show his hand until it was necessary. “Why would I think that, Boss? I’m just trying to be helpful here.”
Ryan twisted up his lip, cautious not to be too blatantly accusatory of his only ally. “It’s the stress,” he said, playing on Clover’s emotion, no different than he played with his whores. The key to a pimp’s ultimate mind game was to never let them get comfortable – always keep them eager to prove themselves. Remain the center focus of their lives. “Can I trust you?” Ryan asked, knowing full well that he could not.
“Yes,” Clover answered emphatically. He racked the shotgun and placed it back in the corner with the others. “I’m here. I’m focused. I’m ready to do whatever it takes.” He said so with conviction and double meaning.
Ryan relaxed his stance and his tightened face theatrically to show his faux-appreciation of Clover’s declaration. “Good, because you’re all I’ve got, right now. But you can guarantee when this is over, and all is right in the world, you’ll be the only one to be richly rewarded. I always take care of my people.”
***
The Bouncing Beaver Strip Club
3:00 p.m.
On his smart phone, Dmitry sat in the back of the SUV reading over the dossier that had been pulled together on Ryan Colt for a third time, taking extra care to remember every detail and hoping to find clues that might lead him to his son’s sister in time.
Colt was worth $20 million on paper. This club, an older building in a strip mall off the Ronald Regan Turnpike, was his largest revenue stream. But he also owned a car wash, a tanning salon, a massage parlor, interest in an hourly motel behind the strip club and several properties sprinkled around South Florida.
More than likely, all of them were used to run girls and launder his real money. Like a good little business owner, Colt paid his taxes on time every year and made charitable donations to receive tax relief and keep the IRS off his back. However, according to the dossier, he used only one accountant to handle all his businesses. That bit of information was more important to Dmitry then any of the rest of it.
While Colt’s business life was healthy, his private life was non-existent. No social media. No steady girlfriend. No wife. No children. His mother had died when he was ten years old in a car accident that also took his only other sibling. His father committed suicide the following year. He was raised in Ft. Lauderdale by his aunt on his father’s side, who incidentally died last year, and he went to college locally before taking his first job as a manager of an adult sex store in Outer Bay. That must have been the gateway that led to Colt’s descent into sexual depravity, because after that job, he made his first investment, using the money his aunt had bequeath him in her will, to take ownership of a sex dungeon in Miami Beach. The rest was history.
Dmitry saw all the red flags behind the words on the phone. He was certain that Colt had kept his relationships to a minimum over the years in order to keep prying eyes from his business, but more than likely the man also had some serious intimacy issues and maybe even a few behavioral hiccups. Time would tell. Still, he knew Ryan Colt was a man, and no man was an island. There had to be someone the young man was close to, a woman he had a relationship with, and more than likely she was in the business with him.
Where ever she was, Dmitry would find her.
This wasn’t business; it was personal. Just getting Colt wasn’t enough to even the score. Dmitry wanted to make an example of him that others had no choice but to take note of, and to do that, he had to be up close and personal with this operation until the end.
Putting down his phone, Dmitry lowered the partition between the backseat and driver. “Is everyone in place?” he asked, glancing out the window at the purple doors of the entrance.
“I’ll check, sir.” The driver got on his earpiece to check the status, and then nodded toward Dmitry a few seconds later. “They’re ready when you are, Boss. We’ve got six men inside, already sitting by the exits and by the dressing room. Two men are at the check points watching out for cops down the road. Eight are ready to neutralize the neighboring businesses, and nine ready to converge with you.”
“Sounds good,” Dmitry said, rubbing a hand over his trusty pistols.
Opening the door, Dmitry stepped out of the back of the SUV and straightened his suit jacket. The sound of doors slamming around him filled the parking lot as his small army mobilize.
There were four other open businesses in the strip mall – a nail shop, a barber shop, a beer and cigs shop and a WE BUY GOLD dealer. Two of Dmitry’s men were assigned to each of them. They headed toward the businesses with one objective. Ensure that the surveillance video from all the shops left when Dmitry left the premises.
No video. No witnesses.
Anatoly jumped out of the SUV on the other side of the parking lot and slammed the door. His father had asked him to stay at the house and rest for a few more hours, but it was like talking to a brick wall. No matter how many cops were looking for him, he was not going to miss an opportunity to exact some justice.
Dmitry had already explained that more than likely Ryan would not be at the club or anywhere else they could easily find him, but this trip wasn’t about finding Ryan, this trip was about letting him know they were coming.
With his hair pushed under a gray beanie and shades to cover his eyes, Anatoly marched with tunnel vision toward the club in a pair of jeans and black, long-sleeve T-shirt with a HK416 assault rifle and his men on his flanks.
Sunday afternoons at any strip club were always slow. The B-squad was normally the less-than-stellar group of women who came in to make their money while the big money headliners slept-in from the night before. However, Ryan, being the greedy monster that he was, only had one team at the Bouncing Beaver. He worked his same group of fifteen girls on 14-hour shifts and only gave them one day off a week - that day was never Sunday.
If it was the weekend, they worked. If it was a holiday, they worked. If it was a sports championship or play off, they worked. If there was a major concert in town, they worked. Without calling it slave labor, he had managed to develop a system to keep his strippers in check and readily available. If they couldn’t keep up, he bounced them out of their asses. If they gained weight, they were out. If they were late more than three times, they were out. If they couldn’t make his inflated payout, they were out. He demanded his hand-picked beauties follow every one of his rules every day, whether he was present or not.
If they didn’t, not only were they out, but his team of bouncers were trained and expected to give the girls a parting beat-down that left them unable to get work anywhere else for a very long time.
“Don’t forget to tip your waitresses,” the skinny mid-twenties, Korean DJ reminded over the microphone as he put on another song. His voice thundered across the club and into the VIP rooms. “It’s two for one right now to kick off the beginning of happy hour. That’s on all drinks, folks. Also, stop by our awesome buffet and try our famous chicken wings.” Checking the time on his MacBook Air, he sipped on a White Russian and updated his Facebook post. It was slow, even for a Sunday, which was why they had their worst dancer on the main stage.
Daisy Mae – a big boobed, bleach-blonde known for her Southern charm and confederate flag bikini, twerked into a naked split under pink neon lights. Her only captive audience was five half-drunk regulars at the drink rail, who always wanted to negotiate the price of her signature rub-n-tug private dances.
“I’ve got a fifty-dollar bill for two dances in the back room,” one of the men screamed out to Daisy. His words slurred as he pulled at the crotch of his pants.
Daisy rolled her eyes. “It’s sixty, Matthew. You know that. I tell you the same damn thing every time.”
“Cut me a deal, girl. It’s Sunday,” he said sa
rcastically. “I don’t see anyone else around here willing to pay that kind of money to rub one out with you.”
He was getting too close to the stage as he leaned over the table to touch her leg. Daisy looked over for head bouncer to pull him back. “Where the fuck is Marko?” she yelled out.
Marko was sitting at the front of the club, flirting with a waitress and rubbing his hand down her thigh. As the doors opened, bringing with it a flood of sunlight, he turned to collect the cover, but was met with a mean right hook that knocked him off the stool and onto the floor.
Anatoly stood over the man and lifted his gun. Shooting up in the air, he caught everyone’s attention. “Nobody fucking move!” he yelled.
Immediately, screams erupted and people scattered, hiding under the tables and trying to run toward the exits, but the men who had been sent in by Anatoly in advance stood up with their weapons and blocked anyone from leaving.
Marko tried to get up off the floor, but Anatoly kicked him in the head with his boot, knocking one of his front teeth across the floor.
“Move again, motherfucker,” Anatoly said, pointing the gun at him.
The DJ stopped the music and hid behind the booth. Reaching for his phone to call the police, he heard a click above his head.
“Drop the phone,” one of Dmitry’s soldiers who had been planted to wait, ordered with his gun drawn.
“Okay, okay.” The DJ complied instantly, dropping his phone on the floor and raising his hands in the air. “Whatever you say, man. Just don’t shoot.”
The bartenders were corralled and pulled from behind their station. The waitresses were pushed into a pile in the middle of the floor. The dancers were being held at gunpoint in the dressing room, and Dixie was still in her split on the stage.
Dmitry looked around the club unimpressed. He hated the façade of adult entertainment. It was one big magic show filled with smoke and mirrors designed to keep the patron from noticing he or she was being fleeced. The music was too loud. The drinks were too strong. The lighting was too dark, and the strippers were all the same.
Anatoly's Retribution Page 9
