Nobody Rides For Free

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Katya called over a waitress and ordered for us in Russian. After the waitress left, I asked, “So what’s your story?”

  “Born in Boston to Russian immigrant parents. Bachelor’s in Russian studies from NYU, recruited to the Bureau right out of law school at Georgetown. I’ve never worked in a field office; I’ve always been undercover.”

  “Wow. What’s that like?”

  “Long periods of boredom interspersed with brief moments of pure terror.” She smiled. “What’s yours?”

  “Bachelor’s and master’s in accounting from Penn State. Crunched numbers for a company in Philadelphia for six months and hated it. Joined the Bureau as an analyst, did that for two years. Then I went to Quantico. Landed here eight months ago.”

  “After you e-mailed me, I spoke to Roly Gutierrez about you. He says you’re very smart. And fearless.”

  “I don’t know about that.” I told her how I’d been shot during a takedown at the Miami Beach Convention Center, as a case I’d been investigating came together. “I felt like the Terminator, you know? These guys in a big SUV were trying to kidnap a jewelry dealer, and they had assault rifles out. I walked toward them, firing at anything that moved. It was an out-of-body experience.”

  “Good agents work on instinct,” she said. “That’s what you did.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

  “What brought you to Miami?”

  I shrugged. “It’s where the Bureau assigned me. How about you?”

  “I needed to get away from the cold and snow.”

  There was something about her posture that made me ask, “And away from a man?”

  She cocked her head. “Have you heard something about me?”

  “Nope. Just a guess.”

  “Yeah. I got in too deep with a guy I was cultivating as a source. I go for the bad boys, you know?”

  “Must make it tricky for you.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. What about you—you like the bad boys too?”

  So she knew I was gay. Well, that wasn’t a shocker. I hadn’t been hiding at the Bureau, so either Roly told her or she’d figured it out on her own.

  “My dad died when I was ten, and I had to step up and be the man until my mom remarried. I was the good boy, never got a note sent home from the teacher, never failed a class, or got drunk or high. Bad boys scare me.”

  She smiled, and I could see how seductive she could be. “Sometimes being scared is the best part.”

  We talked more as we ate. Katya had ordered a bunch of different food for us to share—a spicy borscht topped with a dollop of sour cream, red peppers stuffed with ground beef and rice, and lamb meatballs. It was a real change from the grilled chicken, salad, and pizza I usually ate.

  As we talked, Katya observed the people around us, listening to conversations and making mental notes. She was livelier and more open than most agents I’d worked with, and we bonded as she introduced me to a side of South Florida I’d never seen before.

  By the time we finished eating, her mark still hadn’t shown up, nor had Verenich’s ex-girlfriend Lyuba. I was about to call the evening a wash when Katya said, “Wait here.”

  She stood up and walked to the bar. I watched as she leaned in beside one of the buzz cut guys she’d said was Berdichev’s friend. She spoke to the bartender, then the two guys joined the conversation. Katya laughed and put her hand on one guy’s shoulder.

  When she returned to me she said, “There’s a special party at a Russian bar called Krasotka,” she said. “Those two guys are going there in a few minutes. That’s probably where Berdichev is taking the New York bigwig.”

  Krasotka was tucked away on a side street a couple of blocks away, Katya said. She paid the bill with her platinum card and we walked out into the warm night. There was a steady stream of traffic, with tiny Fiats and Smart cars squeezing between monster trucks and huge RVs beside us as we made our way over to the bar. The night buzzed with honking horns, laughter, Latin music, and revving motorcycles.

  We turned a corner and Katya pointed to a glittering building with two huge wooden front doors. “Krasotka is Russian slang for sexy girl,” Katya said. “Think I fit the bill?”

  “Absolutely.”

  We stood at the edge of the parking lot and Katya analyzed the crowd. “That girl there,” she said, pointing at a blonde with shoulder-length straight hair and large-framed glasses. “Fresh off the boat. See how loose her dress is? And she has no boobs. Give her a year here, and she’ll have contacts, breast surgery, and a full wardrobe of bandage dresses.”

  She took my arm, said something in Russian to the bouncer at the door, and we walked inside. Swoops of tiny glittering blue-white lights hung from the ceiling. The bar and all the banquettes along the sidewalls were black and bright blue, and the music was loud.

  We walked around the perimeter of the room. Then Katya pulled me off to the side. “I don’t see Berdichev yet, but do you see that black-haired girl over there—the one in the tight red dress? That’s Lyuba.”

  Lyuba had short dark hair cut in a pageboy. She held an empty martini glass in her hand as she tapped one of her red high heels against the floor and swayed to a Rihanna song. “I guess I’m on, then,” I said.

  I walked up to Lyuba and motioned toward her tapping foot. “You want to dance?”

  She smiled and put her arm in mine. “You bet!”

  I led her to the dance floor and we danced to a mix of contemporary American music and what seemed like Russian pop. I went to a bunch of LGBT dances when I was at Penn State, so I’d mastered a few moves, though I’d always danced with men before. Lyuba was shorter than most of the guys I’d danced with, and of course bustier. It was odd having her ya-yas pressed against my chest, and she was curvy in places guys weren’t.

  I’d always assumed I was pretty far down on the Kinsey scale, a five or more probably a six, because I’d never fantasized about girls, and I’d never been to bed with one. But with Lyuba, my dick didn’t seem to get the memo. It was stiff and I liked the way it felt as she moved against me. If only I could fantasize she was a guy—but from her frizzy hair, sweet perfume, and insistent hips, she was all woman.

  One of the speakers who’d come to Penn State when I was in school was a salesman from the suit department at a big department store, and he’d given us pointers on the clothes we’d need for our first jobs. He’d asked the guys in the audience who knew which way they dressed, and one guy raised his hand. “To the right,” he said, and I realized the salesman was talking about the way your dick fell to one side or the other.

  Luckily for me, I dressed to the left—which meant my gun was on the opposite side of my body, and it wasn’t difficult to keep Lyuba from realizing I was armed.

  After our fourth or fifth dance, Lyuba fanned herself. “I could use drink,” she said. It was the first time I got a hint of her accent.

  “Sure, me too,” I said. “What do you want?”

  She asked for a Heineken, and I managed to snag the bartender’s eye and order one for her and one for me. She stayed right behind me, as if I’d sneak away if she let me out of her sight.

  When we got the beers I motioned her over to a quieter place by the wall, where we were able to slip into a side-by-side banquette. She knocked her beer against mine and said, “I am Lyuba. What your name, handsome?”

  I began to say Angus, but stopped on the first syllable. “Andy,” I said. To cover for the blip, I added, “They call me Andrew at work. But it’s not work hanging out with you.”

  “You are slick one, Andy,” she said. “What kind of work you do?”

  “I’m an accountant.” I named a big company whose offices I often passed on the highway. “Internal audit. Very boring. How about you?”

  “Doctor’s office. I do Medicare billing. Even more boring.” She looked at me. “I have not seen you here,” she said. Her Russian accent flattened out the hard e so that seen sounded like sin. Or maybe I was getting that sin thing fro
m the way she leaned in close to me, her breast pressing against my upper arm. “You just move here?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t live around here. Just checking out the scene.” I took a breath. “A lawyer I met through work told me about this place, said there were lots of sexy ladies here.” I smiled at her. “He was right.”

  “Ah, these other girls are tyolki,” she said, making a face. “Me, I am good girl. Except when not.” She pressed against me to make the meaning of her statement clear.

  “Hey, you’re Russian, aren’t you?” I asked, as if it had just occurred to me. “Maybe you know my lawyer friend. I was hoping he might be here. His name’s Alexei.”

  “Are a million Alexeis here,” she said. “Is common name in Russian. You know his last name?”

  “Verenich,” I said, though I deliberately mangled the pronunciation like a clueless American would.

  Lyuba pulled back, her mouth open. “You know Alexei?”

  “Why? Is that a problem? You’re not his girlfriend or anything, are you?”

  “For while, yes. But no more,” she said. “He have bad temper.”

  “He seems like such a nice guy. Always talking about his rich friends and clients.”

  She leaned in close to me. “Alexei take stupid risks, cheating clients then bragging about it. I am scared what will happen so I say goodbye.”

  She picked up her beer and took a long drink. “But no more bad talk. You want to take me out sometime, Andy? We go to dinner, have good time.”

  Suddenly, an uproar erupted near the bar. Two men were arguing, and the crowd had cleared around them. One was a younger guy with black, curly hair that reminded me of 70s afros, though this guy was white. The other was a man in his forties, wearing a bright patterned nylon shirt.

  Shirt guy shoved curly hair in the chest, and curly hair tried to punch him. People around them began yelling and the bouncer appeared and tried to separate them.

  My cell phone buzzed with an incoming text.

  GTG, ASAP, Katya texted.

  “Crap,” I said to Lyuba. I held up the phone so she could see the message but not who it was from. “My buddy needs to clear out and I’m driving. Maybe I’ll see you here next time.”

  I leaned forward and kissed her quickly on the lips. Then I put my bottle on the table and hurried for the door, darting through the middle of the dance floor. Staying Alive by The Bee Gees was blasting through the speakers and a glittering ball had been lowered from the ceiling. People were making hokey disco moves and singing along with the lyrics and I felt disoriented by the periodic flashing lights from above.

  It was a relief to reach the front door and step outside into the warm, humid night. “Sorry I had to pull you out so quickly,” Katya said. “But I saw someone I didn’t want to recognize me and I needed to get out. Did you get anything from Lyuba?”

  “More than I expected. I guess I don’t look gay. Lyuba responded right away.”

  “You don’t look gay at all.” Katya fingered my cotton shirt as we hurried from the bar. “These are straight guy clothes. Too bland and boring to be gay. And even if they know, maybe they think they can change you, or at least have some fun with you.”

  “Lyuba said that Alexei has a bad temper, and that he takes stupid risks—cheating clients and then talking about it.”

  “Wow. You got all that so quickly?”

  “What can I say? I’m an interrogation whiz.”

  “I guess so.”

  “How about you? Did you see Berdichev?”

  “Yup. He was with Doroshenko, the Russian bigwig. But also someone else. My ex. The one I left New York to get away from.”

  “What would he be doing in Miami?”

  “I think he might be Doroshenko’s bodyguard. But honestly, he’s the last person I expected to see down here. He always told me how much he hated the heat.”

  We reached the parking lot where we’d left our cars. In the light of a street lamp Katya looked scared, the way Lyuba had when she mentioned Verenich. “You going to be OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m just shaken. I’ll be fine.”

  We said goodbye, and as I drove home, I wondered why Katya had been so spooked by seeing her ex. If she’d met him through her previous case, she had to know he was involved with the Organizatsya, and she could have anticipated he might be accompanying this honcho from New York. Was there something more?

  Not my business. I had learned that Verenich had a bad temper and cheated his clients, but how did that connect to the LLC behind the porn videos? And to the distribution of flakka?

  12.

  Members of the Tribe

  Saturday morning I went to the gym for a long workout. By the time I was finished, my arms were like jelly and my legs wobbled, but I was on the road back to full strength. It was a great feeling. Throughout the day, I checked the URL for the webcam site, but it seemed like Ozzy wasn’t performing. Had he heard about what had happened to Brian Garcia and gotten freaked out? Maybe he’d admitted to giving the drugs to Brian and had been pulled from the roster—or something more.

  Later in the afternoon I got ready for my meeting with Shane McCoy. Was it a date? Technically, I was following up with him on my case. But there had been a vibe between us on Wednesday night, one that both of us seemed interested in exploring.

  I dressed carefully, from my sexiest boxer briefs to a pair of button-fly stonewashed Levis and an oxford-cloth short-sleeve shirt that I could wear tails-out to cover my holster.

  Shane had said that he’d be at a gay teen group meeting at the Pride Center in Fort Lauderdale. He thought I might be able to get some information from the kids. Again, I realized I was focusing on the two boys rather than the flakka, but at least I was on my own time that night.

  • • •

  It was a two-story building that could have passed for doctor’s offices, across from some single-family homes and empty lots. I parked and walked inside, where Shane and a bunch of teens sat on hard plastic chairs in a meeting room.

  I recognized DeAndre and River from Lazarus Place, but the others were strangers. As Shane introduced me, a couple of the kids shifted uncomfortably when they heard I was from the FBI.

  “I want to show you some pictures,” I said. “These are boys your age who are being exploited, and the man I think might be doing it. I don’t want to arrest the boys, just help them get out of these situations and put whoever’s taking advantage of them behind bars. Can you guys help me out?”

  No one said anything.

  “Guys,” Shane said. “This is important.”

  A heavyset black girl with red and blue strands in her thick braids said, “What you care what we think? We ain’t nothin’ to you.”

  I turned to her. “I came out when I was about your age,” I said. “Ten, eleven years ago? So I remember what it was like to be a gay kid. Hell, I’m still struggling with the same things I was dealing with in high school and college. Worrying about coming out to people, figuring out if a guy likes me, getting pissed off or maybe even scared when I hear somebody make a faggot joke. So you’re not nothing to me, girlfriend. You are my tribe and I stand for you whether you like it or not.”

  “I look at your pitchers.” The boy who volunteered had a heavy Spanish accent, shoulder-length dark brown hair, and an almost feminine bearing.

  I handed him the screenshots I’d taken of Ozzy and Dimetrie’s faces. “What’s your name?”

  “Yunior,” he said. I smiled at him, and as he smiled back his face lit up.

  The other kids agreed to look, and I passed around copies of the pictures. A moment later, Yunior said, “I recognize dis guy.” He held up the picture of the older man. “He come up to me once by the bitch.”

  It auto-corrected in my head to “beach.” “What did he say?”

  “He ask me if I want to make money, be sexy. But he scare me so I run away.”

  “Good move,” Shane said. “That’s great advice for all of you. If you get a bad vibe
from someone, get out of there as soon as you can. Head toward other people.”

  There was a general murmur of assent from the group.

  With his smooth skin and lack of facial hair, Yunior could easily be presented to viewers as younger than he probably was. “That’s the only time you saw him?” I asked.

  “I di-int see him, but I was talking to Dorje and I tole him this man come up to me, and he say dat guy was bad news,” Yunior continued. “He say dat guy always out looking for boys.”

  Because of Yunior’s heavy accent I wasn’t sure of the name he’d mentioned. “George?” I asked. “He another kid on the street?”

  “Dorje,” Shane repeated. He pronounced the name door-juh, and I had no idea what that implied about the kid’s background or ethnicity. In South Florida it could be almost anything. Shane spelled the name for me as I pulled up the Notes app on my phone.

  “Dorje knows everything that goes down on the beach,” another boy said. A couple of them seconded that. Shane looked at me and nodded his head a bit to the side, and I took that to mean he’d tell me more about Dorje later.

  None of the other kids had anything to add, and the meeting broke up a few minutes later. “Thanks for inviting me here,” I said as Shane and I walked out into the tree-shaded parking lot. The sun glittered through the leaves and a nice breeze blew through. Hard to remember what dangers lurked in the shadows. “You know this other kid they were talking about?”

  “Dorje’s a beautiful guy,” Shane said. “I think he’s probably in his early twenties, and is half-Tibetan, half-Caucasian, but he’s very cagey about his background. He hangs out in the area around the beach. I’ve tried to point him toward social services, college scholarships, that kind of thing, but he’s not interested.”

  “He lives out there?”

  “So I gather. From what I’ve heard, he makes deals with contractors renovating buildings to bunk down there. When he can’t do that, he has a tent and a bunch of solar-powered stuff hidden away somewhere. He hustles tourists now and then for cash but mostly he meditates and breathes in the beach vibe.”