15
Victoria Welling looked a mess. She knew she looked a mess, although she hadn’t quite been able to work up the courage to check her reflection in a mirror yet.
But she wasn’t surprised. Looking like hell was the natural result of sleeping a total of maybe three hours overnight. It hadn’t been three straight, uninterrupted hours, either. More like twenty minutes here, a half-hour there, her fitful dozing interrupted by a series of hellish nightmares that had caused her to awaken screaming at least three times.
She had been dreaming about him. And that was no surprise, as Joel Stark had dominated her thoughts and fears since that heart-stopping moment when she first spotted him. Last night after leaving work, Victoria had been anxious and afraid, on the lookout for her Man of a Thousand Nightmares the entire drive home. By the time she entered the Royal Flush parking lot, her hands had been shaking so badly she could barely control the vehicle.
Then came the real adventure: getting from the relative safety of her car to the relative safety of her apartment. Her legs wobbled, making her feel like she was going to crash to the pavement at any moment, and her stomach rolled exactly as it had done the time she was twelve and rode the Tilt-a-Whirl at the state fair three times in a row. She puked her guts out that day, and Victoria felt last night like she might do exactly that as she hurried across the poorly lit parking lot.
But she made it, and by the time she had entered her apartment Victoria was sweating like she had just run the New York Marathon. She managed to complete a thorough check of the place—easy enough to do, considering it was roughly the size of a broom closet—before falling onto her bed fully clothed and crying herself to her nightmare-plagued half-sleep.
Now, sitting at her kitchen table nursing a cup of green tea and fearing to look in the mirror, Victoria considered for perhaps the millionth time over the last six years how her life had managed to spiral so completely out of control.
The prosecution of her rapist was supposed to be a slam-dunk. Those were the exact words used by both the investigating officer, Detective Bancroft, and the Assistant District Attorney who had prosecuted the case, Ed Melvin. “Slam dunk.” Between the positive identification of her attacker and the DNA recovered from her body, there was no question Joel Stark would be convicted and would spend a very long time behind bars.
Slam dunk.
Except that wasn’t what happened.
Right from the start of the first trial, everything had gone horribly wrong for the prosecution team, which hadn’t realized one critically important fact: Joel Stark had a twin brother. An identical twin brother named Jason Stark. Jason also lived in New York, and he also had no alibi for the night in question.
And there was more. In an Orwellian twist that the prosecutor’s office said they had never before encountered, and that caught them completely by surprise, the twin brothers shared identical DNA.
The end result was that the slam-dunk, the supposedly open-and-shut airtight case, began unraveling immediately and never stopped. The state could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Joel Stark—and not his brother Jason—had committed the crime. The trial ended in a hung jury, resulting in humiliation for the district attorney’s office.
Victoria was devastated. She could still recall, even now, years later, the physical feeling of violation that had come roaring back with the trial’s result. She could still recall her exact words to prosecutor Ed Melvin: “How is it possible he can just get away with it? Does the DNA thing mean he’s invincible? That he can do whatever he wants and as long as his brother’s available to provide reasonable doubt he’ll escape consequences?”
The state’s attorney had looked away, his silence saying more to Victoria than words ever could.
There was a second trial. The state’s attorneys hammered hard at Joel Stark, but in the end, the result had been the same. The jury was unable to reach a verdict.
Ed Melvin and company promised Victoria they would not give up, that Joel Stark would commit more crimes and that when he did, they would be waiting to put him away, but that was small comfort for the devastated victim.
After the second trial, the soon-to-be-freed Stark had looked Victoria in the eyes and mouthed, “I’ll see you soon,” from across the courtroom. At that moment she had known exactly what she had to do. The sociopath made it perfectly clear he would not stop until he possessed her, likely until he raped her again and this time killed her.
The authorities had made it equally clear there was nothing they could really do until he had killed her. And Stark would soon be a free man. Just like that, Victoria Welling’s time at Juilliard came to a close, as did any semblance of a normal life.
Within a week of the second trial’s end, she packed up all her belongings and left New York in her little Pontiac Sunbird, a high school graduation present from her parents, taking off for parts unknown. The decision was an easy one. As close as she had become to her roommates and fellow Juilliard students, their lives were now foreign to her. And there was nothing else holding her in New York.
She meandered down the east coast, eventually winding up in Tallahassee, finding work playing music in a college bar and slowly beginning to rebuild her life. Dating was out of the question, of course, but her time in Florida was good, bringing Victoria some much-needed rest, and even—after a while—a little peace of mind. It never occurred to her in those early days of her nightmare that Stark might actually come after her, that his obsession could be that all-consuming.
She spent almost a year in Tallahassee. Eventually she got to the point where she would occasionally go almost an entire day without thinking about Stark or his attack on her at all. She still didn’t date; couldn’t stomach the thought of a man touching her, and the concept of trust was one she doubted she could ever relearn, but under the circumstances, Victoria thought looking back on it, she was almost happy.
And that made it all the more horrifying when she glanced up from her piano one night at work and saw him. She froze in mid-song that long-ago night in Tallahassee, simply seized up, something she had never done at the keyboard, not even when she was ten years old playing piano recitals in front of a dozen bored parents.
The club was busy that night, crowded, and there had been noise and confusion, and when Victoria saw him her hands had hung suspended over the keys for a moment and then come crashing down on them. She leapt to her feet so violently that she had given herself deep bruises on the tops of both thighs from where she slammed them into the piano.
To this day, Victoria had no idea how he found her, living quietly more than a thousand miles from New York. She was utterly surprised and totally devastated. She left the club in a panic and never returned, not even to pick up her final paycheck.
This time when she hit the road, she did so with the knowledge that she had a pursuer, someone to whom literally nothing mattered other than finding her and doing . . . something . . . to her. Why he was so fixated on her she had no idea, but there was no sense in kidding herself, because kidding herself just might get her killed.
A series of moves followed, random stops in random places for periods of anywhere from three months to eighteen months. Victoria never allowed herself to get comfortable, never allowed her guard to drop. She traveled from Tallahassee to Fort Worth to Muncie, Indiana, to Fargo, North Dakota, to Oakland to Las Vegas.
She sat at in her tiny kitchen and sipped her cold tea and knew it was time to run again. She drained her mug and put her head in her hands and started to cry. She was exhausted from running, tired of being afraid, and heartsick from the knowledge her ordeal could only end one way.
After a while she forced herself out of her chair. Trudged to the sink and rinsed her mug. It slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the stainless steel and she jumped, startled. She had only seen Stark the one time in Vegas—so far—but once was enough. He was somewhere close and he would be coming for her. When he did, she had to be long gone.
The pr
oblem was she had no idea where to run next. She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and turned toward the bathroom. It was time to shower and prepare to face the day. She would give her notice at work tonight, pack her few belongings tomorrow, and then hit the road again.
For somewhere.
16
Blake drove to work via his usual route, which bypassed the Las Vegas Strip entirely. Like most residents, Blake Standiford tended to avoid that particular area like the plague unless he had a specific reason for being there.
Instead, navigating on autopilot while he considered the problems the day might bring, he stuck to neighborhoods most tourists would never see unless they had somehow gotten hopelessly lost. The route took him past the warehouses, power plants, distribution centers and other structures that would hold no interest whatsoever for vacationers.
It was in one of these areas, a few blocks that might as well have been a million miles away from the strip, that Big Tony Mercadante’s base of operations was located, and where Blake was currently headed with so much on his mind. He turned into a well-maintained parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence complete with razor wire encircling the top and a small guardhouse manned by armed security.
The kid at the gate recognized Blake and opened it so quickly Blake almost didn’t even have to slow down. Blake offered up a dismissive wave as he passed. The guard had only been with Big Tony’s family a few months, thus making him unworthy of even a second’s full attention.
Blake nosed the Mercedes into a parking spot outside an enormous cinderblock building. The words Great Southwest Import-Export Company were emblazoned in gold on a massive handmade wooden sign hanging over the entrance, a sign Big Tony had commissioned himself and of which Blake thought the fat fuck was overly proud.
Blake climbed out of his car and walked quickly toward the office. He was late, as usual, and while he normally didn’t give a damn about being on time, he thought it might not be the best idea to push his luck with Tony, given the Kathy Saldana mess.
He slowed as he walked through the door. The interior of Great Southwest Import-Export was a flurry of activity, as always. The company had a hand in dozens of business ventures, some of them even legitimate. The various enterprises made laundering money easy and went a long way toward explaining the presence of armed guards outside what was essentially nothing more than an office building.
Blake had decided the best way to approach what he hoped would be his last day in the employ of Fat Tony Mercadante was to act as though everything was completely normal. If anything had changed as far as Tony learning Kathy Saldana’s fate, Blake knew he would find out about it soon enough, and he would deal with the fallout then.
He would shoot his way out of here if necessary.
He didn’t think it would come to that, though. The Saldana bitch had been dead long enough that it was simply inconceivable the news had not made its way to Tony yet. Blake was still alive and kicking, which meant the fat bastard believed his story about breaking it off with Kathy. The fact that she had been murdered in Vegas was nothing more than an odd coincidence.
And if Fat Tony harbored any suspicions? Blake would do what he had been doing his whole life and lie, bluff or bluster his way out of trouble. He only needed to string the old asshole along for a day. That would be enough time for Blake to get his shit together and disappear. Maybe go to New York, where some of the outfits still had an appreciation for a man of his talents and abilities.
In the meantime, treating today as just another workday meant checking in at the Great Southwest offices to receive his instructions. As one of the higher-level employees who was still not part of the Mercadante family’s inner circle, Blake’s duties included but were not limited to ferrying drugs, guns, betting slips, cash, sometimes even people. Usually it was a combination of the above.
Often his duties included intimidating or hurting people.
Sometimes they included eliminating people
Obviously the job had the potential to be dangerous, given the illegal nature of most of his assignments and the fact that he was constantly coming in contact with some of the seediest members of Nevada’s criminal class. A few of the people he dealt with were even more sociopathic than he, and that was saying something.
But he rarely felt in danger. Big Tony Mercadante was one of the most feared men in the Vegas underworld, and everyone Blake dealt with, from the lowliest scumbag drug dealer to the highest-level casino contact handling the most outrageous sums of money, was well familiar with his employer and what the response would be should Blake Standiford be treated with anything less than the utmost professional respect.
By the time he had entered the building, Blake’s hurried walk had turned into a measured strut. He had an image to maintain among the grunt-level guys in the family, and that was exactly what he was going to do.
A receptionist’s station was located in the middle of the lobby. Sitting behind the desk, surrounded by telephones, computers and a fax machine was a harmless-looking little man, prematurely balding, who sported the most ridiculous-looking black horn-rimmed glasses Blake had ever seen. He looked like a bad Elvis Costello impersonator.
The man’s name was Janousz, and his current position with the Mercadante family was combination receptionist/armed guard. The improbably named little man was tasked with preventing anyone who wasn’t supposed to be here from venturing any farther into the building.
Blake hated him. The guy had immigrated to the States from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and as far as Blake was concerned, he should have stayed there. He had no idea what Big Tony saw in the guy. His English was terrible and he looked like he’d struggle to beat up a ten-year-old even if the kid spotted him the first punch.
Blake did, however, very much enjoy fucking with the guy. He took particular pleasure in addressing him as “Janice,” although—or maybe because—the dumb foreign fuck never even seemed to realize he should be offended by the term. Now, as he slowed slightly on his way past the reception desk, Blake said, “Yo, what up, Janice?”
The mild mannered-looking fellow blinked behind his comically large glasses and said, “You are to go to Big Tony’s office, yes?” With his accent it sounded like he was saying “Beeg Toonee”.
Blake stopped and shook his head. Glanced at Janousz scornfully. Scratched his armpit. “So, I am to go to Beeg Toony’s office, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars?”
The overmatched foreigner wrinkled his forehead in confusion. “What is ‘pass go and collect two hundred dollars’? And the name is Janousz. Janousz.” The words came out, “Waaht ees ‘pess gou andt collect two hahndredt dollars’? End zee name ees Yah-noosh. Yah-noosh.”
Blake smirked. “It’s just an expression my friend, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. Nice talkin’ to ya again, Janice.”
He turned toward the hallway leading to Big Tony’s office, mumbling just loudly enough to be sure he was overheard. “Jesus, what a fuckin’ dope.”
***
Janousz Bejko stared through narrowed eyes as the blonde-haired idiot walked away. He understood a lot more English than Blake Standiford realized, certainly enough to know when an arrogant ass was belittling him. He longed to be given the latitude to handle Standiford in his own way, but thus far hadn’t risen high enough in the Mercadante family to have earned such a privilege.
It wouldn’t take long, though. Despite his meek appearance and slight stature, Janousz Bejko was in reality one of the most accomplished hitters in all of what used to be known as the Communist-bloc countries. He was smart and ruthless, and Big Tony Mercadante had been recruiting him for a position in Vegas for years. Six months ago he had accepted Tony’s offer and started a new career—or, more accurately, a new extension of his old career—in the States.
His current position, manning the front desk at Great Southwest Import/Export was strictly temporary. Tony had explained it was the best way he could think of to make Janousz com
fortable in his new surroundings and also allow him to become familiar with his coworkers.
Janousz understood and appreciated Tony’s intentions. But he had had enough of sitting around buzzing people into and out of offices, checking IDs and sending unwelcome visitors on their way. He was ready to begin taking on more interesting jobs, and he was hoping against hope his first assignment might be to take down that miserable little bastard Blake Standiford III.
***
Big Tony Mercadante watched Blake through narrowed eyes as the loose cannon entered his office. Just seeing The Stupid Horny Bastard set his blood to boiling. He knew Standiford had absolutely no appreciation for the difficult position he had put Tony in by killing Shotgun Sammy Saldana’s wife, and that knowledge pissed him off almost as much as the fact that Blake had killed an innocent woman.
“You wanted to see me, boss?” The words were out of Standiford’s mouth before he was even completely through the door. It was obvious he didn’t want to give Tony the chance to speak first.
“Figured that one out, did you?” Tony hated the way Blake strutted round like he owned Vegas. Big Tony, who practically did own Vegas, never strutted. He was too large to pull it off successfully and besides, he had long ago come to the realization that the truly successful lawbreakers were the ones who stayed invisible, not the ones who promoted themselves like Hollywood celebrities.
Blake ignored Tony’s remark. He stopped at a chair placed in front of the desk and waited for an invitation to sit.
Tony let him stand. “Tell me about Kathy Saldana,” he said, staring unblinkingly at Blake through eyes narrowed to slits.
“What do you wanna know?” The Stupid Horny Bastard spread his hands like a priest on Sunday morning.
“Come on, asshole, don’t fuck with me. I’m not in the mood. Are you really gonna stand there and pretend you don’t know your little extracurricular activity ended up dead on the floor in her old man’s room at the Luxor?”
The Organization Page 9
