Born to Run js-7

by James Grippando

  “You think that’s all it takes?” said Demetri. “I make a phone call, and I can pay you back?”

  “I don’t care what it takes. One call is all you get. So make it count.”

  “You need to work with me. I’m close, really close to making a deal. This is money in your pocket. What good am I dead?”

  Vladimir pushed the phone toward him.

  “One call,” he said. “If you’re that close, then pick up the phone and seal the deal.”

  Demetri lifted the receiver and then put it down. “Why should I do this for you? You said you were going to kill me even if I get the money.”

  “You get the money, you save Sofia.”

  “I don’t care about her,” he said. It hurt to say it, but a bluff was his only way out.

  Vladimir smiled. “Nice to see you haven’t changed.”

  “Come on,” said Demetri. “I’ll make the call, but if the money comes in, we’re square. No need to kill me.”

  Vladimir’s smile drained away. Some men were capable of showing no reaction, putting themselves in the emotional equivalent of “neutral.” Vladimir, however, was always in gear. When he was happy, he was the life of the party. His every other waking moment, however, seemed to be driven by contempt or anger, albeit in varying degrees. It all depended on how much the poor slob on his hit list reminded him of the bastards who had cut open his nine-year-old son and left him on the doorstep to bleed to death.

  “I’ve had it up to here with your disrespect,” he said. “We give you a job, you steal from us. We give you another chance, you steal more from us. This is the end of it. You pay your debt, and you go out with no pain. You don’t get the money, I take you to the Kamikaze Club.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Idiot,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not worth the plane fare. We got one in Brighton Beach now. Just like the original.”

  Those words-just like the original-sent his heart racing. Demetri had never visited the Kamikaze Club, but stories of it were Russian Mafya legend. It was for men only, except for the high-priced prostitutes brought in to service them. The night’s entertainment climaxed with the arrival of two unlucky souls who had been yanked off the street. It was not just a fight, but a barehanded fight to the death-the human equivalent of cock-fighting. Guys like Vladimir would place their bets, wagering on everything from which of the two warriors would win to which of the whores sitting ringside would end up with the most blood splattered on her tits.

  “Who wants to watch an old man like me fight?” said Demetri.

  “Don’t give me that ‘old man’ crap,” said Vladimir. “Plenty of young men have fallen for that line and ended up in the dirt. We’ll have to give your opponent a hatchet just to keep it interesting.”

  Before Vladimir could laugh at his own joke, the window suddenly exploded and the Venetian blinds danced with the rattle of machine-gun fire. Demetri dove to the floor. Vladimir slammed against the bullet-riddled wall, smearing the white wainscoting with a bright crimson streak as he slid to the floor. His body collapsed in a heap right beside Demetri, bits and pieces of his shattered skull sticking to the wall.

  Another spray of machine-gun fire popped the fluorescent ceiling lights. Groping in the darkness, Demetri yanked Vladimir’s gun from its holster.

  The machine-gunning stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  Demetri lay perfectly still, his body covered with thousands of glass pellets. He listened. With the window blown out, he could hear footsteps outside. The click of leather heels on asphalt sounded like two men. The clicking turned to crunching on grass made stiff by the winter drought. The men were crossing the courtyard and coming closer.

  Demetri got a comfortable grip on the pistol. At first touch, fumbling in a blackened room, he couldn’t tell what it was. He was certain now that it was the Russian MR-444 Baghira, a 9-millimeter pistol that incorporated thermoplastics and many other of the Glock’s best design features. It was no machine gun, but with a seventeen-round magazine of Parabellum ammunition, he had more than enough stopping power for any gunfight.

  The approaching footsteps slowed with caution and then stopped altogether. The men were standing right outside the window. Demetri waited, his pistol at the ready. A flashlight switched on and shined into the conference room. Busted Venetian blinds cast zebra-like shadows on the walls, and the sweeping beam of light came to rest on Vladimir’s bloody streak on the wall.

  “Bel colpo!” said one of the men. Good shot.

  They were Sicilian, Demetri realized, and instinctively his forty-year-old thirst for revenge took over. He rolled to his right and squeezed off a half dozen rounds-rolling and firing, rolling and firing. The fall of the flashlight and painful cry in the night told him that at least one round had found its mark. The return of machine-gun fire told him that one wasn’t nearly enough. Bullets whizzed overhead as Demetri scrambled through the noise and darkness to the door.

  The machine gun fell silent.

  Demetri quieted his breathing and listened. For a moment-it seemed much longer-he heard nothing. Then, faintly at first, he heard something in the distance. He started counting the number of rounds he’d fired, trying to see how much ammo was left, but then his focus returned to that growing noise.

  Sirens blared in the distance, and for a brief instant Demetri almost let himself believe in God.

  Someone called the cops!

  Suddenly, the sound of footsteps returned-crunching of dry grass, then heels clicking on the asphalt-but this time it was the sound of one man running. A car door opened and slammed shut, the engine turned over, and tires squealed in the night. The gunman was making a run for it, leaving his dead partner behind.

  Demetri hurried back to Vladimir’s body and rummaged for his car keys. They were bloody, but they would still work. He jumped to his feet, pushed the busted blinds aside, and hopped out the window. He was at full speed when he stepped on the dead man’s chest, his pulse pounding with adrenaline.

  Hang on, Sofia.

  Chapter 37

  From across the room, Jack counted the small liquor bottles on the nightstand. There were at least a dozen. Mika had gone through the entire minibar stock-brandy, scotch, bourbon, rum, gin, vodka-and stacked the empties into a pyramid.

  Jack wondered how much longer Mika would stay awake.

  Mika had the look of Miami’s first-generation Mafiya, an insanely arrogant breed that Jack had prosecuted during his brief stint at the U.S. attorney’s office. The undercover agents used to joke about how easy it was to walk into a bar in North Miami Beach or Hollywood and pick out the Russian mobsters who consciously played to the stereotype-loud, muscle-bound, tons of gold jewelry-so that people would know not to mess with them. Most feared was a guy called Tarzan, famous for his drug and sex orgies on his yacht off South Beach, until he landed in jail for trying to buy a nuclear submarine from a former Soviet naval officer. His plan was to smuggle Colombian cocaine to Miami-underwater. For every criminal visionary like Tarzan there were scores of foot soldiers like Mika, street thugs who would shoot you just to see if their gun was still working.

  “I’m starving,” said Sofia. She was seated on the floor beside Jack, their backs against the wall.

  “I’m hungry, too,” said Jack.

  Mika propped himself up on one elbow. He was still shoeless but fully dressed, relaxing atop the bedspread.

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Order us some food,” said Jack.

  “How about champagne and caviar?” said Mika, clearly being facetious.

  Jack said, “The room is on my account. It all gets billed to my credit card.”

  Mika smiled. It was as if Jack had said the magic word: free.

  Mika climbed off the bed and grabbed the room service menu from the desk. He started flipping through the pages, but the confusion on his face said it all. He looked as if he were trying to calculate the square root of 367,000 divided by nineteen.


  “You want me to read that to you?” said Jack.

  “Fuck off,” said Mika, and then he threw the menu across the room. Jack ducked, and it hit the wall behind him.

  Mika raided the minibar one more time, grabbed a can of beer, and went back to the bed. The soccer game was over, and he started channel surfing.

  “There’s news at ten o’clock on channel seven,” said Jack. He was hoping to find out if the police were looking for him or Sofia.

  Mika ignored him. He switched to paid programming and started scrolling through the adult movie menu. The screen lit up with the provocative images of a dozen soap opera rejects turned porn star. Mika chose the sexy blonde in a flick called April Showers. It took about thirty seconds for her to land in the shower with a pizza delivery boy who could only be described as a freak of nature from the waist down.

  “Can you at least kill the sound?” said Sofia.

  Mika laughed and hit MUTE. “You no like the movie?”

  Sofia didn’t answer.

  The shower scene was getting steamier. Jack wasn’t really watching, but it did trigger a brief recollection of the one and only time he and Andie had showered together. She washed her hair, conditioned it twice, shaved her legs, applied the exfoliant to her entire body-all while Jack stood off to the side shivering and waiting for someone to throw him a coat or a blanket.

  Mika stood up and grabbed his crotch.

  “Hey, old lady. Come jerk me off.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Jack.

  “Come on,” said Mika. “All I need is thirty seconds. I just got out of prison three days ago.”

  “I said leave her alone,” said Jack.

  A sinister smile creased his lips. “I got a better idea.”

  Mika went to the closet and pulled a gun from the coat pocket. It was much smaller than the 9-millimeter pistol on the nightstand. A.22-caliber, Jack guessed. Then Mika found another piece of equipment-a suppressor. He fastened it to the barrel of the.22, unzipped his fly, and stuffed the whole thing down his pants. It was nearly a foot long, still short of pizza boy. He walked toward Jack with the business end of the equipment sticking out of his trousers.

  “Here, big mouth. Suck on this.”

  “Get away, you pig.”

  Mika kicked him in the stomach so hard that it knocked Jack over. It was a well-placed boot in the solar plexus that left Jack gasping for breath. Then Mika went to Sofia.

  “Here you go,” he said, as he brought the weapon to her lips. “A little Russian roulette, Mika style.”

  “Don’t!” said Jack.

  She jerked her head back so quickly that it bumped against the wall behind her.

  “Come on,” said Mika. “Last time I did this, a little whore in Moscow sucked her brains right out the back of her head.”

  “Sofia, don’t,” said Jack.

  “You listen to him,” said Mika, “and I’ll put a bullet right in your face.”

  A tear ran down her cheek.

  “Open your mouth!” said Mika.

  Jack was about to lash out, but he stopped himself. Across the room, through a crack between the closed drapery panels, Jack saw movement on the patio. Someone was standing right outside the room, behind the locked French doors.

  “Do it,” said Mika.

  Jack drew his knees to his chest and coiled up like a catapult, then shouted at the top of his lungs as he sprang into action. His right shoulder hit Mika squarely in the belly, and Jack kept pushing against him with every bit of strength and momentum he could muster. A glass panel shattered in the French door on the other side of the room, but the noise couldn’t drown out the discharge of Mika’s gun and the unmistakable sound of his suppressor doing its work.

  Sofia collapsed as Jack and Mika tumbled to the floor.

  The French doors burst open. Demetri raced into the room and squeezed off a quick shot that sounded like a bazooka. Mika went still, a dead heap, the left side of his head a bloody mess. Jack pushed himself away from the body, and Demetri charged across the room.

  “Sofia!”

  Chapter 38

  “Stay away!” said Sofia.

  She had withdrawn to the corner, well away from the bullet that had whizzed past her ear and lodged in the wall behind her. Demetri started toward her.

  “Sofia, please.”

  “Stop!” she said, her tone bordering on hysterical.

  “Put the gun away,” said Jack.

  Demetri seemed to have forgotten that he was holding a weapon. He shoved it into his coat pocket and approached slowly. Sofia cowered, clearly overwhelmed. Demetri tried to switch on the lamp, but it didn’t work. The muted porn on the flat screen was still the only light in the room. Demetri knelt beside Sofia and untied the frayed lamp cord that bound her wrists.

  “We have to go,” he told her gently.

  She sniffled, on the verge of tears. Demetri embraced her, but she did not hug back.

  “Sofia, listen to me,” he said in the same soft but urgent voice. “We need to get out of here. They found us. Madera’s men know we’re in Miami.”

  “Agent Madera?” said Jack. “That’s the new head of my father’s Secret Service detail.”

  “Gee, what a coincidence.”

  Jack sank even lower. His father’s role in all of this was getting cloudier at every turn.

  “Sofia, we don’t have much time,” said Demetri. “Come with me.”

  She shook her head, and for a moment in the dimly lit room, Jack felt as if he were watching a twenty-year-old Sicilian beauty struggling in the middle of the night as she came to terms with her fears about a new life in Cyprus and her new husband’s line of work.

  “I can’t do this,” said Sofia.

  “You must,” said Demetri.

  “Where’s the Russian guy?” said Jack.

  “Dead,” said Demetri. “They killed him.”

  “Who are they?” said Jack.

  “The same people who are going to kill us if we don’t get out of here right now. Sofia, I’m begging you. Don’t stay here to die.”

  Jack heard panicked voices and footsteps in the hallway outside their door. Guests were running from their rooms.

  “They’re evacuating the hotel,” said Jack. “Obviously they heard your gun go off.”

  “We’re running out of time,” said Demetri.

  “You go,” said Sofia.

  “I don’t make the same mistake twice. Tonight you come with me.”

  “That time has passed,” she said, “a long, long time ago.”

  “Don’t let yourself believe that. We’re older, but it’s still me, and it’s still you. That will never change.”

  His words seemed to play on her very conflicted feelings, but before Sofia could speak, police sirens sounded on the next block. Demetri pulled his pistol and checked his ammunition clip.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Jack.

  Demetri held Sofia’s hand tightly and looked her straight in the eye. “You know what will happen if you go with the police, don’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Jack said, “It’s the only choice.”

  Demetri ignored him, continuing in his soft, persuasive voice. “Sofia, that’s not what you want.”

  The approaching sirens grew louder. Sofia shot a nervous glance at Jack, and he shook his head, as if to tell her Don’t even think about it. Then her gaze swept back to Demetri, her voice filled with more resignation than resolve.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  Demetri threw his arms around her and helped her up. Then, like a guy turning the doorknob in a gas station bathroom, he reluctantly reached inside Mika’s pants and grabbed the gun. He pitched the silencer aside and tucked the little.22-caliber pistol into his pocket.

  Suddenly, sirens were blaring right outside the hotel.

  “It may be too late,” said Sofia.

  Demetri aimed his pistol at Jack’s face. “You’re coming, too.”

  “Leave him,” said S
ofia.

  “He’s our ticket out.”

  “I won’t be a kidnapper,” she said.

  Demetri’s face flushed with anger. It was as if the pressure of the past two weeks, the stress of the past two days, and the events of the past two hours had finally come to a crescendo. All patience-even for Sofia-had run out.

  “Then be a hostage,” he said as he pointed his gun at her.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Sofia was dumbstruck.

  “Go on!” he said. “Move!”

  Sofia obeyed, and the way his command sent her moving toward the busted French door reminded Jack of the battered wives he’d defended.

  Demetri spotted Mika’s 9-millimeter pistol on the nightstand, did a quick check of the ammunition clip, and smiled like a man who’d just hit the daily double. He tucked the extra weapon into his other coat pocket, and then he grabbed Jack and took him out at gunpoint.

  The narrow alley outside the hotel had been converted into a pedestrian walkway with vine-clad walls and colorful flower boxes adorning the windows. The streetlights resembled old-fashioned gas lamps, and the cobblestone path had just enough twists, turns, and depressions to remind Jack of old Sienna at midnight. Right around the corner, at the main entrance to the hotel, blue beacons from police cars swirled in the night. Demetri stopped.

  “Where’s your car?” he asked Jack.

  “My car?”

  Demetri shoved the gun up under his chin. “Where is it?”

  “In the parking lot behind my office.”

  “Can we get to it the back way?”

  Jack struggled. “You really want to take my new car?”

  Demetri cocked his pistol.

  “Follow me,” said Jack, and he led them down the narrow walkway.