The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  It was a small sacrifice.

  “What’ll it be, Karen?”

  “Screwdriver, Rusty Nail, two Greyhounds, and a Sex-on-the-Beach. I wonder why we all order in code?”

  And she laughed. It was a throaty, sexy laugh that had all of the connotations of real sex on the beach.

  “Keeps the bartenders on their toes,” he said, and started mixing the various drinks.

  “Where did you work before Bentleys?” she asked.

  “Midtown. Before that, I was in Boston.” The first part was a lie, the second part was true. “Spent some time at a Home Depot there.”

  “Get out! Stacking shelves and selling paint?”

  “Sure.”

  He already had her two Greyhounds and a Screwdriver on a tray. He grabbed the various bottles, using a measure, filling up the shot glasses, going to work on the Rusty Nail and the Sex-on-the-Beach.

  “There’s something about you,” she said. “You haven’t been a bartender or a Home Depot guy all your life. What did you do before?”

  “I was a spy. For a shadowy, covert organization. The kind who sent out unauthorized black ops missions that the Justice Department denied all knowledge of.”

  Her raucous laugh again. He loved that laugh!

  “Right, and if you decided not to take the job, the little tape self-destructed on the tape recorder in the package you’d picked up in a desolate phone booth. I see you more as a pool hustler. Like Paul Newman in that movie. Hustling marks in small towns in the Midwest, getting into fights, riding the rails, breaking women’s hearts.”

  “That sounds about right. Here you go.”

  He put the last two drinks onto a tray and handed it to her.

  “Running a card?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He took her credit card, put it into a slot with others beside the cash register. She took the tray from the bar, guiding it carefully through the tables toward a booth at one of the windows. She had four coworkers, all young women, waiting for her. McCall had seen all of them before. The “Karen Mafia” he liked to call them. They were passionate and full of life. He envied them.

  And, once again, he missed something he would not have missed nine months before.

  CHAPTER 7

  A customer at the bar McCall had never seen before was grinning at him. He was sipping a Corona and working his way through a hamburger with mushrooms, fried onions, and actual garlic (a house speciality) and fries. He was probably in his late twenties, a little heavy, like an athlete who’d stopped running or going to the gym as often as he should. He had a round face, hazel eyes, and a whiff of Cerruti Image cologne strong enough to knock out a lavatory attendant. He looked like the guy in the cell phone commercials whose phone never worked fast enough or in the right places.

  “She’s got a big crush on you!”

  McCall smiled. “I mix her drinks the way she likes them.”

  “No, I could tell! And she’s hot, man. Just cause you’re older? Who gives a crap? Go for it.” When McCall didn’t respond, he thrust out a hand. “Chase Granger.”

  McCall shook hands. “Bobby Maclain.”

  “Great place! Reminds me of the old Maxwell Plum, you remember it? It was on Sixty-fourth and First.”

  “You’d have been three or so when it closed in 1988.”

  “Yeah, but my dad used to go there all the time. Told me all about it. He was in real estate. Lost him ten years ago. I’m in the same business. Transferred to the Broadway office last month. Is it always so packed in here?”

  “Every day, lunch and dinner.”

  One of the servers, Gina, a demure brunette actress with soulful eyes and a big heart, was waiting at the bar. She had a tray loaded down with dirty dishes and glasses. She waved a chit at McCall like a white flag.

  “Gotta take this order,” McCall said.

  “Yeah, hey, burger’s great, by the way. Fries are salty, the way I like ’em.”

  “Enjoy your lunch.”

  McCall moved over to Gina, saw her order was for two glasses of Mondavi Chardonnay. She handed the tray to McCall.

  “Thanks, Bobby. I’ll be back.”

  She said it like Arnold in Terminator and rushed off. McCall dumped the dishes into one sink, the glasses into another, and moved a bottle of Knob Creek Rye so that the back faced him. In the orange, distorted reflection he looked at Chase Granger. He was devouring his burger, picking up fries, savoring them, his eyes not once flicking in McCall’s direction.

  At least McCall’s radar picked up on this guy.

  The tall African American man was sitting in a corner booth on the same side as the long bar. His name was Jeremiah Thomas Lagerman, but everyone had called him J.T. for as long as he could remember. The only person who’d ever insisted on calling him Jeremiah was his old man, before J.T. had wasted him with a shotgun blast in the face one Christmas Eve. It had been an accident, but then again … had it really? J.T. was never sure himself. The old bastard had come at him with the belt. The shotgun had been lying against the doorjamb in the kitchen. His father had brought it in himself, and he always unloaded his shotgun if he brought it in from outside. A lesson he had drummed into his son’s head. But that night he hadn’t unloaded it. He’d been pretty drunk and he was ugly when he was drunk. J.T. had grabbed the shotgun and pointed it and pulled the trigger because he thought nothing would happen, maybe just give him a scare. Make him pee himself. But a second later half of his father’s face had been blown off.

  J.T. was edged right into the corner of the last booth, so he was not in the bartender’s eye line. From this vantage point he got fleeting glimpses of the man, but usually the servers, coming and going, were covering him up. And the man’s back was mostly to this side of the restaurant as he talked to the customers up at the bar. He’d only caught a glimpse of him when he’d walked in, but that had been enough. He was sure. It was a face he was not likely to forget, not that it was particularly memorable. In fact, he’d only looked into it once, in agonizing pain, before the asshole had stepped around him and taken the bitch’s arm and hauled her ass out of the alleyway.

  He still had the bracelets on his wrists, but he’d taken off most of the rings. Almost unconsciously, J.T. touched the splints on four of his fingers, two on one hand and two on the other. They were rigid where the bones had been reset. It made him clumsy and feel like some kind of a goddamned cripple. It was difficult to eat. It took him ten minutes to get his cock out to take a piss. He had the pain under control with Tylenol with codeine, but he had to be careful, as that was a narcotic analgesic and he’d abused his body with acetaminophens as a teenager. But the caffeine gave him an edge and, in truth, where he was supposed to take two pills every six hours, he took four. How bad could the side effects be? He had friends who popped Oxycontin like they were gumdrops.

  J.T. liked to have clarity. It kept him focused and in control. His attacker had taken that control from him. He was in for a world of hurt, but J.T. had to be careful. The dude’s moves had been fast. Sure, he’d sucker punched him; J.T. hadn’t been ready for the attack. Hell, he hadn’t even seen the asshole in the alley until he’d grabbed his wrist. His full attention, his full rage, had been on that bitch Lucy, teachin’ the whore a lesson she’d never forget. He was one hundred dollars short on her day’s work. He’d searched her clothes and her bag and couldn’t find it. He knew damn well where it was, stuffed up her ass, trying to get away with stealing from him. No one ever stole a dime from J.T. and got away with it.

  And no one humiliated him and got away with it.

  But he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The bartender didn’t look like much, but the circumstances had to be right. He had to be somewhere no cops could show up from the next block to intervene. Somewhere the dude felt safe and comfortable. And J.T. wouldn’t be alone. He was never normally alone. He had a lot of friends, and they were pissed about what had happened to him. He already had two of them in for this little ride. A brother—Big
Gertie, they called him, cause his last name was Gertrain—had thought the dude’s description fitted one of the bartenders at Bentleys. Even more humiliating to have the crap beaten out of you by some faggot bartender in a pussy joint like Bentleys. So he’d gone to see for himself. And, sure enough, there the dude was, mixing drinks, scoping out that blond bitch with the big tits and easy smile, shooting the shit with the regular customers at the bar. Everything cool.

  Except J.T. had found him.

  He slid out of the booth, careful to turn away from the bar. He didn’t want Bobby Maclain to glance over and see him. But the bartender was turned the other way, talking to some young dude sitting at the bar, looked like a stockbroker or an attorney or one of those assholes who’d lick your balls while they were lifting money right out of your pocket. J.T. was just a customer in the busy place walking to the side entrance.

  J.T. pushed through the door out into the bright sunlight. He had to use the heel of his right hand to do it. Outside on West Broadway, he carefully took out his iPhone, not wanting to drop it for the hundredth time. He held the phone in the palm of his left hand and used the index finger on his right to hit the silver buttons. Waited for the answer at the other end.

  “Yeah, he’s the guy,” J.T. said.

  * * *

  Katia Rossovkaya had managed to avoid him for three nights.

  She walked through the awakening nightclub. The main motif for the place was a cascade of Russian nesting dolls, starting out large and then getting smaller and smaller, all in silver, all with beautiful painted faces. Above the dolls was a logo in silver script that said DOLLS. She didn’t remember how many Dolls nightclubs there were around the world. At least a dozen, she was sure, five of them in the United States. The silver kaleidoscope ball usually hanging over the large dance floor had actually been taken down and some maintenance men were working on it. One of the colors was not strobing.

  Kuzbec and Salam, two young Chechen turks who worked at the club, were setting up the tables. Another soulless émigré from Chechnya, Rachid, was behind the silver bar, setting it up. Katia knew they were also “enforcers,” not that anyone in the club ever even breathed the word. She didn’t know what exactly it was they enforced, but she knew that innocent people suffered. The resident DJ, a big strapping kid, was setting up for the night’s entertainment. His name was Abusaid, but everyone called him Abuse, and he played the music at levels that would burst most eardrums.

  Silver gleamed everywhere. The tables and chairs were silver, there was silver along the edges of the dance floor and, of course, the silver bar in one corner. There were huge blowups of pictures by the Chechen painter Rustam Sardalov on the walls. The only one Katia liked was a huge close-up of a young woman’s face, streaked with green and a little red, as if her face were melting, while, hidden within, was the almost translucent figure of a bald, older man with a hook nose. She loved the girl’s face, but the faint, grotesque figure within it was unnerving. There was a reproduction of Sardalov’s painting of a gnarled tree over the silver bar with clawlike branches reaching up to a molten sky, a table growing out of the trunk. The one behind the dance floor she found particularly disturbing: a celestial background with a man in a black coat, white shirt, and blue-and-white tie on one side, long spikes creeping out of his pale face. His mouth was gaping open as if he was screaming soundlessly. Across a swathe of white light three alien faces peered out of round silver cylinders, as if they’d just hatched, their faces also gaping wide. An arm in a jacket was protecting them, the hand pointing to two round cylinders floating in space.

  The Sardalov reproduction by the stairs that led to Kirov’s second-floor office showed a man with glasses sitting on a chair, stairs going down into nothing behind him, stairs leading to nowhere ahead of him, all blue-gray except for the chair itself, which was a rust color. The man in the chair did look a little like Borislav Kirov, same hair and glasses, although she doubted he’d sat for the painting. That disturbed her, too, that the likeness was so close to her boss. It was like there was no escape from him. If you ran away, he would just sit in that rust-colored chair, waiting for you to be brought back to him.

  Some of the dancers had already arrived, but they weren’t in their Dolls costumes yet. They were all in their early twenties, most of them from Chechnya, six from the city of Grozny, two from Chervlennaya, one from Kirovauya. There were two more from Uzbekistan and one from Kazakhstan. None from Russia. They had all been desperate to leave their homeland. They had been offered the trip of their dreams, fly to the United States of America, to New York City, to be dancers in a high-end nightclub. No businessman or celebrity or politician who came to Dolls alone ever had to sit forlornly watching the couples on the dance floor. There were twelve gorgeous dancers ready and willing to dance with them. It just cost money. They were all graceful, good dancers with vibrant personalities. There’d been a fabulous grand opening, filled with Broadway actors and movie celebrities, sports figures, politicians, and even a Saudi prince. It was only when the girls had been in the job for a couple of weeks had they realized what else was expected of some of them. There were half a dozen small rooms on the second floor of the club. Katia knew what happened in them. Some of the girls relished it—it meant a lot more money. Some of them were resigned to what the price of their airfare and employment meant. A couple had said no.

  They were no longer at the club.

  The elegant man caught up with her before she could reach the bar. He was dressed in a pinstriped gray suit, a red-and-gold tie with a red kerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket. She knew he always wore a gun in a shoulder holster under his suit coat, but there was no bulge at all. Abuse had told her, in a hushed whisper, the gun was a Taurus 740 G2 Slim with high concealability. He’d seen it once on the elegant man’s desk in his office and he’d looked it up on the Internet. It unnerved her, knowing that pistol was a quick reach away. Not that she feared he would use it on her. They didn’t want her dead. She was too valuable to them.

  He gripped her bare arm. She was in the silver uniform all the cocktail waitresses at Dolls wore. The silk shirt had short sleeves and was cut down so far that wearing a bra was difficult, because Kirov did not want it to show. Most of the girls didn’t bother to wear one. Katia did, but it was very brief and it bothered her to show off her breasts almost down to the nipples. The cocktail waitresses wore tailored silk slacks that were very stylish. They wore silver pumps with four-inch heels that had taken her weeks to get used to.

  She stopped and finally looked at him.

  His name was Bakar Daudov. They whispered about him in the nightclub, even more than they speculated about Borislav Kirov, the boss. Daudov was a killer, she was certain of it. She had seen enough of those strong blank faces with their dead eyes to recognize one. Daudov’s eyes were actually a pale blue, which made him look even more menacing to her.

  Like the Angel of Death.

  He never raised his voice. His Chechen accent was fairly thick for someone who had lived in New York City for ten years.

  “We need to talk, Katia.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. Just walked her over to one of the empty tables around the dance floor and sat her down. He slid into the chair across from her. Reached out for her hand. She had no choice but to give it to him. His hands were smooth, as if he used talcum powder on them. He smiled, but it was the lipless smile of a cobra.

  “You are enjoying your time here in New York.”

  A statement, not a question.

  “I love it here.”

  “You bring an energy to the club. Sophistication. Great style. But being a cocktail waitress is beneath you. We are moving you up to be one of the dancers.”

  “I do not dance well.”

  “You move like an angel. We will give you lessons. There will be rehearsals. You are a natural.”

  “I know what happens in those second-floor rooms,” she almost hissed. “I am not a whore.”

  “You are what
we say you are,” he replied, and his voice was difficult to hear as Abuse wound in Lady Gaga saying you were born this way, the music blaring briefly through the empty club, the DJ finding a sound level. “You will always be in command of any situation. We are here to protect you.”

  “Why are you asking this of me? You know it is dangerous.”

  There was a moment’s pause. Daudov’s eyes were hooded, and now they seemed to almost close to slits, like a snake’s. “You have been asked for by a patron. Someone very special.”

  “Does Mr. Kirov know you’re threatening me?”

  “Mr. Kirov knows everything that goes on in his nightclub. I am asking you to think it over, Katia. The raise in your salary will be substantial. We are not talking about the scum who wander into a strip club off Times Square. These are important, influential people. Good people. Who have a need.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “How is Natalya? You have not brought her to the club in a couple of weeks. We miss her.”

  The threat was not even veiled. Katia pulled her hand out of Daudov’s soft grasp. He had relaxed them. If he had wanted to keep her hand pinned to the table, nothing she could have done would have wrenched it free. She stood up and walked away. She could feel those pale eyes watching her. It made her actually shiver.

  She was very afraid of him.

  But she was more afraid for her daughter.

  * * *

  It was raining hard. The kind of rain that sent you scurrying from one doorway to another for shelter, or you’d be soaked to the skin in five seconds. McCall stood unmoving in the school playground in the drenching storm and stared at the far brick wall. It was covered with graffiti in all colors, Esher-style mosaics of surreal continuity that led nowhere, along with short, pungent statements of hate. He wondered if any of it was the same as when he’d stood in this very school playground at age fourteen waiting for them to come for him. There was a green tortoise, rather beautifully drawn, that crawled along the bottom of the brick wall. He seemed to remember that tortoise. He remembered thinking its shell had looked fragile. That one good smash with a hammer would shatter it. He remembered thinking that when the first of the jocks had hit him from behind.