by Jon F. Merz
Boston had so far remained relatively untouched in the infiltration of Russian gangs, however. There were some, I knew that. After all, throughout the eighties, Allston had and still had a sizable Russian community of expats. It would be a cake walk for any gangster to come over, blend in, and quietly set up shop for some bigger crime lord back in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or even Groznyy.
But what would the business be? The Russians had a fairly good market share of fresh heroin and opium grown in the steppes of Central Russia, true, but then again, so did the Cambodian and Chinese gangs. Cocaine still belonged to the Colombians and Mexican cartels. Marijuana was the province of the Jamaicans and ex-flower kids of the 60s.
It didn’t leave much for the Russians.
Arms sales had always been a big thing for the Russians, though. They’d sell pretty much anything to anyone for the right price. I knew suitcase nukes were being sold to small contract terrorist groups in the Middle East for huge sums of change. A few years back, there'd been serious concerns about something called Red Mercury. And they’d even sold a submarine some months back: over the Internet of all places.
But arms sales meant you had to have a big buyer. It had to be worth the expense of setting up shop over here and keeping the supply and demand chain in good working order. I didn’t know of many big buyers interested in outfitting their own private army.
I sighed, feeling Dr. Poon work more needles into my body. He was working on my upper back now, where I still had feeling. According to him, I simply had a bad connection between my upper back and lower back and hence my legs. Restore the good connection and all would be well.
At least that’s what he told me.
I think a small corner of my mind might have remained convinced I was wasting my time doing this treatment. But even that corner would be hard-pressed to deny the relaxing benefits that Dr. Poon’s therapy gave me. I could roll in a ball of stress and leave an hour and a half later feeling light as air.
That and my eternal hope of walking again kept me coming back.
Dr. Poon kept humming.
I kept thinking.
Chapter Six
By six o’clock that night I still hadn’t thought of very much which left me a little concerned that my powers of deduction might not be what they used to be. I had to keep reminding myself that I’d been provided with scant information about the case.
And then I reminded myself that I was a professional and excuses didn’t really get me any further along.
Some day, I'm going to give myself a brain operation and remove my work ethicÉ
The key thus far was Don Woolery and his connection to Melinda Patterson. What they’d been doing the night of her disappearance had inevitably contributed to the fact that I was now working on this difficult thing.
And Don Woolery needed to fill me in further on those facts, whether he liked it or not.
Getting to South Boston on the T is about as easy as threading my way down the K2 with skis on my hair. It can be done, but man it was gonna hurt.
I set off a few minutes after six and managed to get myself down to Green Street without causing too many injuries to the local population. I caught the Orange Line at its second stop and rode in to Downtown Crossing and then switched to the Red Line, which runs into Southie and Dorchester.
Years back, both those towns weren’t all that friendly. They’d been home to working class folks as long as I could remember. But as with any such neighborhood, they had unfriendly elements to them as well. During the late eighties, one of Boston’s colorful mayors tried to clean things up and on the surface, he’d succeeded.
But you can always find trouble lingering below the surface. It’s never that hard. And it's never as far away as too many of us like to think.
I got off at Broadway, five stops along and rode the elevator to the top. Street side, traffic whizzed by in three or four directions. Broadway station was stuck into the middle of the street like some almost forgotten ice cream stand.
For the locals it was no problem. They just ante’d up and crossed the street, dodging cars and heavy trucks lumbering past and on toward Route 93.
For a handicapped dude like myself, however, getting across the street was going to require a little more finesse. Not to mention sheer guts.
The bottle of Jim Beam I kept in my top desk drawer might have helped steel my will, but ol' Jim was back in my office in Jamaica Plain.
And I was in South Boston.
Luck managed to find me in the guise of an off-duty police officer that stopped enough traffic to earn him some definite disapproving looks from drivers. I caught a couple of "hurry up you crippled bastard"s from losers on their way to a complete stress-out for getting home two minutes later than normal. Good luck to Ôem. They'd have a coronary soon enough.
I said thanks to the cop and wheeled myself past at least four drinking establishments before the grade of the street sloped upward. I grinned and pushed myself on.
Discipline is something I’m a real big believer in and it’s one of the few things I have that never lets me down, provided I don’t falter first. I could have taken the easy way out years ago when I first came home and splurged on the expensive electric all-wheel-terrain chair that would basically drive itself.
But that would have been the easy way out. Feeling my muscles grind and strain forces me to deal with my situation and not wallow in self-pity. Self-pity's the kind of thing I save for Dr. Poon.
Muscles strained to the breaking point, I finally crested the midpoint by the video store and turned left, heading higher on the hill. Up here, brownstones built in the first half of the twentieth century dotted the landscape.
Don Woolery lived in one of them.
I hoped he wasn’t home yet.
The wait would be comical to say the least. Wheelchairs don’t seem too common down in Southie and as a result, most of the homes don’t offer convenient elevators to gain access to. And Don Woolery’s brownstone was as old as they come.
I saw him before he saw me, which was good. I needed to keep the element of surprise as much as possible. It gave me an extra advantage.
He came loping up the sidewalk with something that might have resembled a saunter at one point in his life but now seemed strangely out of synch with the rest of his body. I wondered why. The other night he’d been out to prove himself as the man about town. Now he seemed different.
He finally spotted me in the last twenty feet, which told me his powers of observation ranked right down there with amoebae. The frown on his face told me I was the last person he wanted to see right now.
"What the hell do you want?"
"More information than what you gave me last night, for starters."
"I don’t have anything to say to you."
"I’m willing to bet that you do."
He leaned close to the chair, putting his hands on the side rails and peering into my face the way some folks peer into a fish tank. Then he exhaled a stream of beer breath and said very softly.
"Don’t make me hurt you."
I smiled. The smile always disarms people. They don’t expect confidence from someone who looks like me. So that’s exactly what I do.
I smiled.
"Don, old buddy, you have no idea who you are dealing with."
And then I snapped out my right hand into the base of his throat while my left hand grabbed his right arm so he couldn’t stumble back away from me.
He wheezed, trying to clutch his throat. I’d struck a vital point that impairs breathing and right now Don wanted very badly to breathe. I used his lack of mobility to keep control of his body. To anybody looking at us, it wouldn’t appear that I’d done anything.
But his right wrist was trapped and now I exerted some painful pressure on the inside of the bone there. I like vital points. They don’t require much power to utilize and the effects are really astounding.
"Want to breathe again, Donnie?"
He nodded his head like a ho
oker giving a blowjob to a guy hung like a thimble.
"Then you have to answer some questions or else we’ll keep going through this kind of fun stuff, got it?"
He answered again with the head bob and I eased off of him. No sense incapacitating him before he could spill his guts for me like a nice canary.
He gasped once and pointed inside. "Can we talk there?"
I shook my head. "No way. Out here where it’s nice and relaxed." I glanced around. "Besides, it’s a gorgeous spring evening. Let’s enjoy it, all right?"
But he didn’t appear all too anxious to do so. He kept glancing up and down the street. I frowned.
"You expecting company, Don?"
"No." He sighed. "But then again, I wasn’t expecting you, either."
"Fair point." I pointed to the steps. "So, I guess it makes even more sense that the sooner you get to talking the sooner you can get to being inside where’s it’s presumably safer, huh?"
He sat. "All right, so what do you want to know?"
"Same things as last night. This time I want the truth."
"I told you the truth."
"Donny." I shook my head. "Are you really going to try to sell me on this bullshit again? I thought we were going to have a meaningful discussion here. I thought we were going to not have me give you some more breathing problems."
He said nothing so I prodded him. "Tell me about what you do for work."
"What’s my work got to do with this?"
"If it’s what I think it is, is probably has quite a lot to do with it." I shifted in my chair. "After all, it’s not every day you find a guy like yourself working for the Russians."
He blanched. He started. Donny boy did everything, in fact, except say something. But that was okay. Because his body language told me everything.
"Surprised?"
It took another thirty seconds but then he nodded. "Yeah."
"Tell me about it."
"I can’t."
"Sure you can."
"Nope."
"Donny, you don’t have a choice."
"You know about the Russians?"
"Some."
"Then you know what they’ll do to me if I tell you anything."
"How are they gonna know, Donny?"
He considered this. "You won’t go to the cops?"
"Do I need to?"
"Maybe."
"Then maybe I won’t go to the cops."
He eyed me some more. "If this thing gets hot can you protect me?"
"I’m not into the bodyguard business."
"You got cop friends?"
"Some."
"Maybe they can protect me."
"Maybe I need to know why they’d need to protect you in the first place."
"They killed Melinda Patterson."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"All right. Give me some details."
"Melinda was acting crazy the other night. I mean, what the fuck, right? I known her a long time, we got together a lot. You get to know a chick. But the other night? She was acting all weird and shit. Kept talking nonsense, fussing with her hair, saying strange things."
"What kind of strange things?"
Woolery shrugged. "Wasn't really listening. Figured she'd been toasting a few wet ones before I got there."
"So what happened?"
"I had to meet Darmov and conduct some business. She wrapped herself around me and wouldn't let go. I helped her outside and when Darmov rolled up, she started acting hysterical. Darmov didn't want a scene on Newbury Street so his heavy got her in the back of the limo."
"And?"
"It became kinda obvious she was out of her mind. She started raving about police this and police that. Darmov had her killed."
"So what are the Russians doing here in town? Are they selling weapons?"
Don smirked. "You think this is about guns?"
"I’m asking you that, Don."
"It’s about babies."
"Babies."
He nodded. "Black market babies are big bucks. The Russians have a huge network here stateside where they nab the kids from local hospitals and take ‘em abroad where they’re sold to the highest bidder."
"What do you do for them?"
"Not all of the kids get taken international. Some of them stay here in this country. I line up prospective buyers here in the states. You know, couples that can’t have kids. They’re desperate for ‘em. Pay anything to have a little bundle of joy."
"What will they pay?"
"Depends. Real beautiful babies like Amerasian kids’ll fetch about sixty grand. Black kids get about forty overseas in Europe while Latin kids are hot in the Middle East because they blend in better. But they do custom orders, too."
"Custom?"
"Sure. Everyone’s got the idea of a perfect kid. Some want blonde hair blue eyes, that kind of thing. They give us the dream list and they can get just what they want. Usually tacks another fifty grand on the price, but these people will pay it."
"You make a lot of money that way?"
"Plenty."
"And the Russians?"
"Even more."
I nodded. "So, who runs the show here in Boston?"
"Guy named Darmov. He’s the top guy here in the northeast."
"And he answers to someone back home in Russia?"
"Yeah. It’s a Georgian gang. But I hear tell they’ve got some powerful backers over in Moscow."
"What kind of backers?"
"You know, guys in the government. Officials on the take who’ll look the other way in exchange for a well-funded retirement package."
I sighed. I didn’t want to mess with the Georgians. They were among the toughest of the Russian gangs as far as I knew. "This guy Darmov. He pull the trigger on Melinda the other night?"
"Nah. Had one of his thugs do it."
"But he’s here, yeah? This guy Darmov?"
"In Boston? Sure. Got a place down by the waterfront. One of those old warehouses they’ve been converting off of Congress Street."
"What kind of car does he drive?"
"He doesn’t drive. He gets driven."
"Okay. I'm impressed. What kind of car?"
"Limousine. A big black number. Pretty sweet ride if I say so myself."
"Yeah, I wasn’t really asking that was I?"
"Just thought-"
"Shut up. I’m interested in knowing who killed Melinda and why. Not whether you think a black limo is a sweet cheese or not."
"I just told you it was Darmov."
"Yeah, so play out the scene for me, wouldja? You and Melinda meet up at the bar. She bugs out about selling babies illegally. You meet up with Darmov and the hysteria continues. Darmov, being the sage businessman, decides to off Melinda and save you all the heartache. That about it?"
"Just about."
"Who decided on the reservoir?"
"We’d been driving around and things got pretty hot and bothered with Melinda. Once we got her into the limo with Darmov she just went kinda crazy, you know? Shouting about going to the cops and shit like that. Not very smart. Darmov just looked at his bodyguard and had him chop her on the back of the neck right there. She was out cold. Some kinda karate chop, you know? We were close by Cleveland Circle and the reservoir was convenient."
"So they shot her."
"Outside. They had a tarp. They got all the bits of brain cleaned up and then dumped Melinda in the reservoir."
Not all of them apparently. "Just like that."
Woolery nodded. "Yep."
"Why'd they go to the trouble of cleaning up the bits of brain?"
"I dunno."
"This guy Darmov sounds like a real fun dude."
"He’s not someone I’d recommend you fuck around with."
"Yeah, well, sometimes you just can’t help that, you know?"
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
I smiled. "It means, Donny, that you are going to get me an introduction with Darmov."
"Say
what?" Woolery shook his head. "You’re fucking nuts. Darmov doesn’t meet with buyers. He keeps himself insulated against that. That’s why he has me."
"But you said you only handled the domestic side. Who runs the international?"
"I don’t know. Someone else. I never met them."
"Regardless, I want the intro."
"I can’t – I won’t do it."
I sighed. "Donny, you have any idea what kind of world of shit you’re looking at here? Let me lay it out for you: first and most obviously, you’re an accessory to murder in the first degree. Then we can tack on illegal baby kidnapping and interstate trafficking and a host of other charges. An aggressive DA might even get those kind of charges bumped up to Federal Ð you'd be looking at Fed charges anyway with the kidnapping."
I shrugged. "Of course, that only matters if you stay alive long enough to make it to the court house. Now, if someone happens to let it slip to Darmov that you’ve been a regular chatty Kathy, well, then that just might make you something of an extinct species."
"You’re threatening me."
I leaned close to him. "You're damned straight I am. Set up the meet with Darmov."
"What the hell am I supposed to tell him? He’ll smell something fishy a mile away."
"Tell him I’ve got a new pipeline for his babies."
"You want to go in as a supplier?"
"Why not? Who’d suspect a guy in a wheelchair?"
Woolery sighed. "All right. I’ll try to set it up. But lemme tell you something. If he smells a rat, and he’s liable to, you’re on your own. I can’t back you up."
I cocked an eyebrow. "You can’t even take care of yourself. I wouldn’t presume to think I could count on you for help."
His face turned red so I pressed the issue. "Now let me tell you something: if you set me up, I will make it my personal mission in life to hunt you down and kill you. And if for some reason I die, I've got some very good devoted friends who will not rest until you're dinner for the sharks off of Long Island. Are we clear?"
"Yeah. We’re clear."
