Murder Aforethought

by Parker St John

  Ah, he was back to the surname again. Apparently he was Maksim only when he was keeping Val from untimely faceplants on the sidewalk.

  Still, the man had a point. Medicine was not Maksim’s area of expertise, so he raised his hands palm up in surrender.

  Val grunted and returned his attention to his injury, though he was looking too glassy-eyed to see much detail.

  “Are you going to pass out?”

  “No,” Val gritted through his teeth.

  “Good. Then you can answer some questions.”

  Val eased up the hold at his side, peeled back a corner of the shirt and winced. He applied more pressure and asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “Do you know who killed Robert Esposito?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is someone so determined to shut you up — and by extension shut me up?” He narrowed his gaze. “What do they think you’ve told me?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We appear to have the time.”

  Val hung his head. Maksim watched the slow, deep rise and fall of his bare chest. It looked like relaxation breathing. Was Val attempting to calm himself… or buying time to fabricate a lie.

  Maksim was always prepared for a lie. He needed to decide quickly just how serious the danger to himself was and what information he could take to the police to resolve the matter.

  The unnatural timing of the attempted hit hadn’t slipped his notice. There was no way the shooter could have known the exact time they walked out the doors unless an informant in the police department had fed them information. It was disconcerting.

  “I mostly told the truth back at the station,” Val began grudgingly. “I didn’t kill Esposito. I don’t know who did. I really did want to talk to him about Pop.”

  “In the dark ass of the morning?”

  “He might have needed some… persuasion… to talk.”

  “Why?” Maksim leaned against the rickety hollow-core door. He only gave a brief thought to the layer of grime rubbing against his suit.

  “I think he knew who took out a hit on Pop.”

  “I see.” Maksim raised a brow. “Your father worked for Dominic Russo, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you?”

  The wait was interminable. Val appeared to be struggling internally. Maksim watched as he opened and then closed his mouth once, then again. His shoulders slumped. He just folded up on himself.

  “Yeah. Me too,” he ground out.

  “It’s difficult to believe you left a promising career in the military to come be an errand boy for a third rate crime boss.” Maksim cocked his head. “What exactly do you do for Russo?”

  Val slowly raised his eyes and met his gaze dead on. Maksim didn’t think he was aware of the bleakness in his expression or he would surely have taken greater pains to hide it.

  “A smart guy like you?” he croaked. “You know what I do.”

  “You kill people.” It was the obvious conclusion given the man’s skill set, but Maksim felt it was always necessary to speak an ugly truth aloud.

  A flush rose up the back of Val’s neck, the same heat that had crept up during the interrogation when he’d been forced to admit to being special forces. At the time, Maksim had taken it as a strangely immature pride reaction. Now, staring at the exhausted, defeated man hunched on a cracked toilet, Maksim suspected the opposite.

  Valentine Rivetti wasn’t proud. He was ashamed.

  “Yeah.” Val forced the words out like bullets. “I kill people. I killed them overseas for my country, and then I came home and killed for a rat bastard like Dominic Russo.”

  “You’re a hitman.” Maksim didn’t feel nearly as calm as he sounded. “How many have you killed on Russo’s orders?”

  There was a pugnacious thrust to Val’s chin. “Why does that matter?” he asked skeptically. “One is enough.”

  “How did you kill them?”

  Val snorted.

  “It matters,” Maksim insisted, though he agreed it was an absurd question. It had no bearing on their present situation.

  If he were in a courtroom, he’d be objecting to his own question. But this wasn’t court, and at the moment, he wasn’t an attorney. He was something more than a captive but significantly less than a co-conspirator.

  The answer Val gave was peculiarly important to him. Death was death no matter how it was wrought, but it felt vital to determine whether the steel-eyed man before him was the kind of cruel murderer Robert Esposito had faced in his final moments or whether he knew mercy.

  “I was a sniper.” He dragged the words up over jagged rocks by the sound of them. “I did what I know best. Even if Russo wanted them to suffer… how the hell would he know? One clean shot. They didn’t know what hit them.”

  “Did they deserve it?” Maksim felt compelled to test the man’s level of sociopathy.

  “They were Made Men. Of course, they deserved it.”

  “Does that line of reasoning extend to your father?”

  It was risky asking such an inflammatory question of a dangerous man. This time there were no uniformed officers waiting outside the door to rescue him if things went sideways. Val might be injured, but he was remarkably steady now that he’d rested, and he outweighed Maksim by a significant margin.

  Oddly, he wasn’t afraid. He never had been, not since the moment his young client had raised his head and gazed at his own reflection with such dispassionate loathing.

  Maksim recognized the man who carried that expression. He was that man himself. It was impossible to fear someone so kindred.

  Val glowered. When the grudging answer finally came, he could hear the truth beneath the faltering cadence.

  “Pop deserved something, that’s for sure. He was a low class swindler, and he’s the reason my mother is dead.”

  “Elaborate.”

  Val’s jaw flexed. His eyes were burning into some middle distance Maksim couldn’t comprehend. “He broke her heart, you know? Running around at that club. So, one day, a few weeks after I got home, she pulled her car into the garage and left the engine running. She was already dead when I found her.”

  “Jesus.”

  Val cleared his throat. “So, yeah, he deserved something. Jail time, a good sock in the mouth, something. But he didn’t deserve to get his head kicked in and his body dumped in a pile of trash bags. He wasn’t evil enough for that.”

  “You’ve been looking for the people who did it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Maksim scratched his jaw.

  There was more to it than that, he was sure. Val had the tone of a man who was bending the truth, if not exactly breaking it. It was amusing, really, that a hardened Marine and supposed mob hitman couldn’t lie for shit.

  “You’ve learned something, haven’t you? Something somebody doesn’t want repeated.”

  “If I have, I’ve got no fucking clue what it is. I know who Pop was in bed with and who they had dealings with. I’ve heard a lot of rumors about Russo’s business ventures. I know whoever killed Pop and Esposito has enough clout to buy off a police informant. Stacked together, it adds up to jack shit, though.” Val pulled the shirt away from his wound. “I think the bleeding has stopped.”

  “I can lend you my jacket.”

  Val snorted. He visually measured Maksim’s shoulders and then glanced down at himself.

  Maksim cracked a smile. “Then again, maybe not.”

  “Could you check the dryers for something big and clean, maybe?”

  “This is Portland,” Maksim said wryly. “The land of hipster vegans and skinny jeans.”

  Val shrugged. “It’s still America, home of the cheeseburger.”

  Maksim found himself chuckling as he searched unattended dryers, and he couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t the reaction he might have anticipated after nearly being killed. But he had a habit of frequently surprising himself with his own callousness.

  An elderly Asian woman sat beside the
washing machines, but she wore a pair of earbuds and was making quick work of a knitted sock. She didn’t seem aware of Maksim’s presence, or if she was, she didn’t care.

  It was with some measure of disgust that he rifled through God-knew-whose clothing before lucking upon a ratty, enormous sweatshirt the color of clay. He hadn’t seen clothing that style since the 80s, but considering the stained collar and frayed hem, it might very well be from that decade.

  He returned to his injured hitman with their prize.

  Val wordlessly accepted the sweatshirt and painfully worked it over his head while trying not to raise his left arm.

  “If you had to guess,” Maksim asked philosophically, “who would you say just shot at us?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not Russo’s style. I ought to know. He’d just have us capped and tossed in the river. All I know is Pop and Esposito must have been into something together. They were thick as thieves this past year. But I don’t know if it was sanctioned or some side angle they were working alone. Then there’s the Russians.”

  Maksim’s eyebrows shot up.

  “I just don’t know,” Val growled. “It’s fucking frustrating, knowing less than everyone gives you credit for.”

  “You’re certain it isn’t Russo? Your father was playing around with a known sex trafficker. Perhaps he’d become a liability.”

  “No.” Val’s voice was strained as he carefully maneuvered his left arm into a sleeve.

  “You sound awfully certain of that.”

  “I am, more or less.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  The sweatshirt was finally on, and it no longer looked like the circus tent it had when he’d pulled it out of the dryer. It was still ugly as sin, but it fit comfortably over Val’s wide shoulders and bulging arms.

  Maksim was forcefully reminded how ludicrously big the man was.

  “He promised me Pop was safe, so long as I worked for him. The guy is a lot of things, but his word means something on the street for a reason.”

  “There’s more to this story, isn’t there?”

  “Of course.” Val stood slowly. He wobbled once but was steady on his feet after that. His legs were like tree trunks, spread to brace him from whatever dizziness he felt. “All you need to know right now is that someone’s tying up loose ends and doesn’t like me nosing around. It might have been my lucky day when you walked into that interrogation room, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours. Even if they weren’t sure I talked to you before, they are now. You go home and you’re a dead man.”

  “I could take a sabbatical.” Maksim suggested reluctantly. He loathed vacations. All that solitary time with no distractions was like an inner circle of hell.

  “Good idea. Get out of town for a while. I’ve got your card. I’ll call when it’s clear.”

  “I’ll go pack a few things.”

  Val shook his head. “You don’t get it. You can’t go back to your place, not until this is over.”

  “Surely they have better things to do immediately after fleeing the police than lying in wait for me?”

  “Maybe.” Val shrugged, then hissed and cupped a hand to his side. “But if it were me, you’d be my first target. A guy like me knows how to stay off grid. You’re the weak link. They can take you out and reduce their problems by half, or more likely, take you somewhere remote and find out everything I’ve told you.”

  Maksim breathed hard through his nose. He clamped his mouth shut on any impulsive words and focused on just breathing through his anger. He hadn’t asked for any of this. “I need to at least stop by my apartment.”

  “You roll that dice and you will end up dead,” Val said flatly. “I guarantee it.”

  “It’s non-negotiable.” Maksim crossed his arms and spread his legs, mimicking Val’s stubborn stance.

  “What, you got a dog or something?”

  “Or something,” Maksim said grimly.

  5

  Val

  Val was ready to kick his own ass. How dumb did a guy have to be to pitch every survival instinct out the window? Even worse, when it was on the say-so of some arrogant piece of work he’d known for only a few hours? The answer was: really fucking dumb.

  His captain had always said Val had no skill for self-preservation. Reese would have smoked him for a stunt like this.

  But wasn’t that one reason Val hadn’t been able to hack it in Recon? A man could have heaps of lethal skill spilling from his hands, but if he didn’t have the heart to use it, he wasn’t much good to anyone.

  Practically speaking, Val was a born killer. Reese had handpicked him out of sniper school to join his platoon, and Val had been damn good at his job. After a lifetime of mediocrity, he’d finally excelled at something that mattered.

  It was a hell of a change from living with his folks in that ramshackle little house on Alder Street, listening to his pop go on about every new con that would break them out of the poorhouse.

  It was better than slogging through a C average at Grant High, smiling and saying thank you every time one of his teachers told him college wasn’t right for everyone.

  And it was a damn sight better than listening to his mother sob her eyes out behind her bedroom door when he’d finally broken it to her exactly why he had no intention of asking the pretty neighbor girl on a date.

  Val had been proud of himself for the first time in his life when he’d joined Recon. He’d been sure he would never set foot in Oregon again.

  But time had a way of changing perspective. Val knew — he knew — he’d saved lives doing what he’d done. But he’d taken them too.

  One year faded into another, and then another, and he’d found himself waking in the middle of the night with the memory of blood spray and a tight, scratchy feeling in his chest. He’d thought he was sick, so he’d gone to the infirmary and been given some antibiotics and sleeping pills.

  A week later, they’d shipped out to Aleppo, and he’d been right as rain until he got stateside again.

  The second time he’d found himself at the doc’s, swearing up and down he was having a heart attack at the ripe old age of twenty-four, he realized the problem wasn’t his body.

  It was his mind.

  His unit understood. They said they did, anyway. It’s not for everyone, they said. They’d pull the cord, too, if they didn’t already have so many years sunk into their careers.

  Val hadn’t believed them. Marines were known for their mental toughness above every other military branch, and Val hadn’t been able to hack it.

  He was weak, no matter what Reese had muttered into his ear at his farewell party.

  You’re not a killer, Rivetti. You never were. Do something better with your life than the rest of us sorry fucks.

  Reese always had his back. If Val hadn’t washed out, he’d have been there to watch his captain’s six when shit hit the fan for him one month later.

  Val’s parents had been secretly thrilled at his return. He’d slept with a pillow over his head so his yells didn’t wake them in the middle of the night, and things had been okay.

  Then Pop had to go fuck it all up.

  But Reese had been correct. He wasn’t a killer at heart, even if he’d been forced to sell his soul to Dominic Russo. If Val left Maksim Kovalenko to his own devices, he was killing him, just as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger. He had enough blood on his hands already. He didn’t want to add more if he could help it.

  So, here he sat, folded into the back of a busted Corolla, trying unsuccessfully to ignore the glare of their Uber driver.

  “I find it difficult to believe this is the best your training taught you,” Maksim murmured against his ear. “You look suspicious as hell.”

  Val turned so he could keep his voice low enough for the driver to miss, but Maksim turned his head at the same time, and he found his mouth accidentally brushing the rough edge of his jaw.

  Damn, that aftershave should be illegal.

  “I was a Marine,” he murmured, �
��not James Bond.”

  “That’s a crying shame. I always had a thing for a man in a tux.” Maksim’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and the lines there reminded Val that there was more than just income and success separating the two of them.

  “Yeah, well, that’s definitely not me.” He sank back into the seat and cupped a hand against his throbbing flank. “I’ve never owned anything formal besides my dress blues.”

  Maksim winked. “Uniforms also fire the imagination.”

  Val gnashed his teeth and turned to glare out the window.

  He’d traveled the world and seen more shit in a few years than most people did their entire lives. He got the job done, whatever it was, no matter the fucked up mess inside his head. He didn’t need this glib asshole making him feel like a dumb kid.

  Charm oozed from the man like snake oil. He didn’t mean half of what he said, that much had been obvious by the playful condescension he’d peppered the detectives with during Val’s interrogation. He liked to hear himself talk, and he enjoyed getting a rise out of people.

  Val was tired, wounded, and angry. He had zero patience for the man’s flirtatious sense of humor on top of everything else.

  The rain relentlessly pounded the city, smearing the landscape into a gray haze scattered with the colorful gems of traffic lights. They were headed to the north end of the city, where skyscrapers sat against each other like upended Lego pieces.

  When the car pulled to a stop at the curb of a glittering building the size of a city block, Val snorted. “I knew it.”

  He heaved his aching body out of the car, while Maksim thanked the driver and handed him a few bills for a tip.

  There was no suspicious activity on the street, and the angle of the building didn’t lend itself well to sniper fire, so he followed Maksim inside.

  There was a doorman, for crying out loud, a middle-aged fellow in a forest green jacket that reminded Val of something from a pro golf tournament.

  He whistled through his teeth. “Damn. You must be one hell of an ambulance chaser.”

  Maksim glanced coldly around the lobby, giving the polished marble floors and brown leather loveseats the same look Val sometimes gave his wall air-conditioner when the coolant began to leak. Like he wasn’t sure how this had become his lot in life.