Absolute Money: Part I: An Oliver Holmes Caribbean Thriller

by C B Wilson

  Nikki said, “I didn’t assault him, he fell.”

  “He’s having his face stitched up in the clinic right now, so he might not exactly agree with you about that.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “My advice to you,” said the security man, “is to put some distance between yourself and Mr Lobachev. Starting now. Stay away from Russia, London, New York and especially Brighton Beach until he’s forgotten about it.”

  Nikki said, “You’re not going to apologise?”

  “For what, Miss?”

  “For having such an animal on board?”

  “Mr Lobachev is one of Mr Volkov’s closest friends. They go way back. I think you should consider yourself lucky they’re not throwing you overboard and letting you swim back.”

  Ellie said, “What about our friend? We’re not leaving without her.”

  The helicopter was an AugustaWestland AW109, with an interior designed by Versace. It hovered above them before beginning its descent to the deck. When it touched down, the security guy started pushing the three women towards it.

  Nadia shouted above the noise of the engine. “We’re not leaving without Nadia.”

  The security chief said, “I’m sorry. You have to leave now. We’ll find your friend and tell her what has happened. She can join you later.”

  It took a couple more minutes for him to persuade Nikki to get into the helicopter, but in the end she had no choice. The helicopter took off, circling away from the yacht and back towards Jamaica. The view was spectacular, but Charlotte was looking back at Plutus wistfully.

  “Did you see their spa?” Charlotte said.

  “Forget the spa” Ellie said, her voice stinging with resentment, “Nikki got us kicked out of a party on a mega yacht. What were you thinking?”

  Nikki said, “Don’t start.”

  Ellie said, “Sure a drunken idiot came on to us. When you’re partying with billionaires, it can happen. Doesn’t mean you have to slice his face open. There are other ways to deal with it, you know.”

  Nikki said “You think I should have let him assault me?”

  “Why do always cause trouble?”

  They argued back and forth but they were no closer to resolving their differences when the helicopter touched down at the airport. Nikki made a vain attempt to get Charlotte to support her.

  “I was only trying to stop him hassling you.”

  Charlotte said, “Oh, I don’t know. Did you get a look at the toiletries in the guest bathrooms?”

  * * *

  The look Nikki gave her was answer enough.

  3

  For its Kingston office, Justice Unlimited had hired a small two-room rental on the second floor of a faded building on the very edge of the city’s business district. Unfortunately for the developer, the street hadn’t kept up with his ideas of progress, leaving his brave investment marooned amongst the derelict lots where goats grazed and homeless men huddled and bickered.

  The other offices in the building were empty, apart from a worn-out travel agency on the first floor and a medical supply company whose staff kept such irregular hours that Oliver Holmes had to assume it was a front for drug smugglers.

  But still they kept up appearances. There was a security guard at the front gate and a cleaner who worked on Saturdays so she could keep her other job at the hotel.

  She didn’t like the messy way that Oliver Holmes left his office. She didn’t like the fact that he was on the side of the gunmen against the police, and she really didn’t like the fact that he was at work on a Saturday afternoon, getting in her way.

  Sure he was handsome for a white guy and he had a good size on him, but he was wound so tight, he was so irritable and tense, it was like he was going to explode at any moment. He wasn’t nice to be around.

  She hoped that she conveyed all that with the snippy way she stabbed into the corners of the office with the duster and over-sprayed the polish. But he ignored her. Holmes sat at his desk, in that long, slow sag after lunch, staring out of the window at the clouds boiling over the top of the Blue Mountains that crowded in on the city’s north-eastern side. He called it working.

  His phone rang. He said, “This is the call I’ve been waiting for. You had better go now.”

  She asked if she could come back later to finish. Oliver Holmes snapped at her. She already knew that he was going to video some gunman’s testimony against the police. The camera and the tripod were set up in the corner of the office where she hadn’t been allowed to dust.

  She played dumb and didn’t move.

  Holmes pulled a handful of dollars out of his pocket and waved them at her as he answered the phone. The cleaning lady smiled to herself as she walked away down the corridor, tucking the cash into her pocket. She always liked taking money from Holmes.

  The gunman he was waiting for was Omar Hall, a nasty young man from West Kingston. The police had a drawer full of warrants for his arrest – murder, assault, sexual assault and armed robbery.

  Holmes didn’t care about any of that. In his business, he dealt with all kinds of evil people. There was no doubt Hall was a bad man, but he wasn’t even the worst person Holmes had dealt with that week.

  The reason that he wanted to talk to Hall was the shooting a month or so back, at the International Jerk Centre when Cecil King had been murdered. Omar had managed to record some of the event on his phone from his hiding place.

  Holmes knew that if he could get Hall to identify the officers who shot Cecil, it would go a long way to help make his case that there was an unofficial death squad operating within the JCF.

  Unfortunately for Holmes, Mr Hall believed his life was in danger if he considered giving evidence, so Holmes had hired the Powers Detective Agency to find the young man before the police did.

  That was the call he was expecting, from Floyd Powers, to say that he had picked up Hall.

  “Where are you, Floyd?”

  It wasn’t Floyd. It was Nikki.

  4

  At the sound of her voice, Oliver’s heart skipped. His mouth flapped. Five years had passed and she still had the power over him.

  His heart pounded louder than the wheezy old air-conditioning unit. He shook his head, took control of himself. “How are you?”

  Nikki said, “I’m fine. It’s my friend, Nadia. She’s missing.”

  Oliver said, “OK. OK,” just to buy himself a few seconds to calm down.

  Then he said, “Who’s Nadia?” and then, overlapping himself, “How did you get my number?”

  Nikki told him that she had occasionally checked up on him on Facebook and kept an eye on his career since they had split. “We’re in Montego Bay and I thought you might be able to help us. I called your head office.”

  He said, “I’m not on Facebook.” Then, “What do you need me to do?”

  Nikki said, “My friend Nadia is missing. We went to a party on a yacht and she disappeared.”

  Oliver said, “You need to call the police.”

  Nikki described how unhelpful the police had been. “They basically spent all their time trying to look down my shirt,” she said. “But they won’t do anything for forty-eight hours. They think she’s not a proper missing person because it only happened last night.”

  “Why do you think I can help?”

  Nikki said, “Finding people is kind of your job, isn’t it?”

  Oliver said, “Sort of, but not really.”

  There was desperation in Nikki’s voice. “I need your help.”

  Oliver explained that he was in the middle of something and he couldn’t just drop it to go and help an ex-girlfriend. “I have a witness who saw the police shoot someone. I have to interview him and get him on tape before the police find him, otherwise they’re going to shoot him.”

  “Please, Oliver.”

  Over the years, Oliver had tried to forget what Nikki had done. Now it was just an old bruise that he prodded from time to time to remind himself of the hurt, the fading mem
ory of a much worse pain.

  “I work with a private detective agency,” he said. “I can get one of them to come up there and help you.”

  “You’re not going to come?”

  Oliver let the silence run.

  Nikki said, “Is this because of…?”

  Oliver snorted. “That was a long time ago.”

  There was another long silence. Nikki broke it. “I still think about you.”

  Oliver said, “That’s not really the issue here. I’m in the middle of something really important. It might take a couple of days, but when it’s sorted out, I’ll come and see you, but trust me, you have to get the police involved.”

  5

  The late afternoon breeze off the Caribbean was fresh. Twenty metres above the sea, on the sun deck of Plutus, moored a nautical mile off the coast of Jamaica, Jerry could feel the wind whip across the back of his neat white shirt and enjoyed the coolness where it wicked away some of the sweat. He turned his body so the cool air angled up his short sleeves, which was nice, but he was waiting to see Malkin, which was not so nice. And they had sent the Gulfstream to pick him up from the Dominican Republic. That was a really bad sign.

  Jerry had spent the whole of the flight running through the last week in his mind. Had he slipped up anywhere? Was there anything for Malkin to get angry about? He couldn’t think of anything, but with the Russian, you never knew.

  Since the early nineties, when Volkov had started using serious violence to get what he wanted in Russia, a lot of gangsters and thugs had worked for him and some still did, even though the whole business was now supposedly legitimate. But the most terrifying man in his entourage was Malkin, a guy who had never pulled a trigger, never detonated a bomb, never even clenched a fist.

  Jerry always said that Malkin was the smartest, sharpest person anyone had ever met. Having a conversation with Malkin was like going to fight Zorro and having your shirt buttons sliced off before you’d even pulled your sword out.

  “What happened with the kid in the Dominican Republic?” said Malkin when Jerry slid into the seat in front of him. Malkin liked to work in the outdoors, and he had a laptop open next to a bowl of fruit that he nibbled on but didn’t offer to share. The shade from the awning only covered Malkin, leaving Jerry with the afternoon sun angling straight into his eyes. Jerry had no doubt the positioning was deliberate.

  Jerry was pleased that he could report success. He said, “It’s controlled. The bad news is, the parents of the dead kid want to press charges. The good news is, we own two judges, a police commissioner and all of his people right on down to the street. Plus, all the good law firms in the country are on a retainer. Trust me, the family aren’t getting anywhere with this. Give them a couple of days and they’ll take the money.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” said Malkin. The steel edge to his voice made Jerry uneasy. His heart rate ticked up. This had started off badly.

  “But we’ll talk about your mistake later. Right now, we’ve got something else.” He paused, waiting for Jerry to figure out the problem.

  Jerry had to think quickly. The only kind of questions you could ask Malkin were ones that you couldn’t possibly know the answer to before you spoke. Malkin was already angry, and it was going to get worse if Jerry wasted his time asking dumb questions, so Jerry ran through the possibilities out loud.

  “You had a party on board Friday night,” said Jerry. “The problem isn’t a Russian hooker because they never cause any trouble. The boys don’t like their women too dark so it wouldn’t have been a local girl. Must be either a gold-digger or a hooker. Eurotrash?”

  Malkin nodded his head in approval of Jerry’s reasoning.

  Jerry said, “What bothers me is we had two in one week. Two is too many.” Then, “We need to cool down on this. The guys are getting a little out of hand. Can’t we fly in more Russian girls? That seems to work much better for everyone.”

  Malkin’s voice was cold. He said, “This one is dead.”

  Jerry said, “Oh come on. Really? You’re kidding. What happened?”

  “That’s not your business.”

  Jerry smoothly changed direction without acknowledging the rebuke. “What do I need to know?”

  Malkin said, “Nadia Mills-Walker. She’s British.”

  “What?”

  Rule number one when you worked for Mr Volkov was: no dealings with Americans. He didn’t do business with Americans or their banks, he didn’t go to the States or any of the US territories and you certainly didn’t invite Americans or American hookers to any of his parties. The risk of an FBI investigation if anything happened to one of the girls was something Mr Volkov didn’t want.

  Second on the list of nationalities to avoid were the Brits. They didn’t have the resources of the Americans but they could sometimes tap into them, and the British police and media were dogged once they had got their teeth into a case. That’s why Malkin had hired Henin, a French guy, to get European girls, because the French police were…well, they were better than the Spanish or Italian police but nothing that Jerry couldn’t handle.

  Jerry said, “Useless sleazebag. What was Henin doing?”

  Malkin said, “They wanted blondes…she was blonde… ish.”

  “Has he never heard of Scandinavia?”

  Malkin said, “We’ll do the blame thing later. I want this cleared up now.”

  Jerry said, “I’m telling you, The Panda is always the one that causes problems.”

  “I said blame later.”

  Jerry said, “Where’s the body?”

  Malkin said, “Junior ordered it dumped overboard in chains out at sea.”

  Junior was Mr Volkov’s eldest son, and everyone tried to find things for him to do that he couldn’t screw up, like watching movies or eating. Dealing with an incident like that was way too complex for him. Jerry said, “Why Junior?”

  Malkin stared straight into Jerry’s eyes with all the expressiveness of a reef shark. “I was off-duty.”

  Jerry got it.

  Volkov had lived on his yacht permanently for the last three years, and in that time Plutus had hosted every kind of appalling and illegal act imaginable, but the worst crime that any of the Russians on board could imagine was male homosexuality. Malkin tried to keep his sexual orientation a secret, but every so often he would slip away from the yacht onto one of the smaller boats where there was no crew. As far as Jerry could see, there was only one reason to keep his trips a secret. Plus Malkin was thin and neat and never so much as touched any of the girls that flocked onto the yacht, so if this thing with the dead hooker wasn’t dealt with, some awkward issues might be uncovered.

  Jerry said, “Who’s asking the questions?”

  Malkin said, “The missing hooker came on board with three friends.”

  “Henin invited them as well?”

  Malkin said, “He’s a pander. That’s what they do.”

  Even though English wasn’t his native language, Malkin spoke it better than anyone alive, apart from Stephen Fry. He even used the old English term for a pimp but no-one else knew what he was talking about, so they called Henin “The Panda”, like the bear, without knowing why.

  Malkin pushed a slim file towards Jerry. He opened it to see pictures from the security cameras at the party. All four of the women were stunning enough to stop traffic in the real world, but on Plutus they were nothing special. Only the most beautiful females in the world were ever invited on the yacht and Jerry was getting jaded. Malkin pointed out Nadia and they agreed that she had “The Look” that often caused problems for them.

  Malkin said, “They got into a fight with Dmitri and got kicked off.”

  “Nice,” said Jerry. “I like a girl with spirit. But who’s Dmitri?”

  “One of our guys in Moscow. He wants the girl dead but I’ll handle him. But when their friend didn’t show up, they started hassling the helicopter crew in the morning so someone had to make up a story to get rid of them.�
�

  Jerry said, “It had to be that she already left Plutus.”

  “Some idiot told them she’d left on a jet-ski.”

  Jerry laughed. “What was wrong with just a boat?”

  Malkin said, “I know.”

  “They didn’t believe it?”

  Malkin said, “That’s our working assumption, since they went to the police.”

  Jerry said, “But the police weren’t interested in a missing prostitute?”

  “Not yet. But that could change. Seems like the hookers are planning on sticking around.”

  Jerry rubbed his nose and thought. He said, “Consider it dealt with.”

  Malkin wanted to know what his plan was. Jerry said, “I’m going to make sure that the problem goes away.”

  “That’s not a plan, that’s an objective.”

  Jerry laughed as he stood up. “You get me all confused with your strategy and your tactics stuff. I can’t tell the difference. Trust me, they’ll be gone by Tuesday.”

  Malkin said, “I want to know how you’re going to handle this.”

  Jerry said, “You’re smarter than me and the ten other smartest guys on this yacht put together. The only way I can stay on your good side is by doing my job. And I don’t find it so easy when you’re breathing over my shoulder. Just let me handle it in my own way.”

  Malkin wasn’t happy with the answer, but Jerry had dealt with worse stuff than three inquisitive hookers before now, and it had all gone smoothly. He waved Jerry away and carried on eating his fruit.

  6

  Floyd didn’t call to say he had found Omar until eight o’clock that evening. He said that the gunman had asked specifically to see Holmes before he would agree to anything.

  It wasn’t an unusual request. A lot of witnesses needed to have their hands held. Testifying against the police was always a dangerous thing to do.

  Oliver walked around the corner from his office to the hotel where the taxis waited. It was dark but still hot enough to stick the shirt to his back.