“No, I haven’t spoken to him since I started dealing with you.”
“Good. We can start the housecleaning on our end, then, tonight.”
“Whatever you need to do,” said the Brit. “That’s none of my concern.”
“Get some sleep. The weather looks good tomorrow. Crisp and clear.”
“I like the sound of that,” the British assassin said, thumbing the cheap phone off.
Chapter 78
After he buzzed the Chinese food guy out, Pavel Levkov carefully arrayed his dinner of beef with broccoli, fried wontons, and egg drop soup on his cleared desk.
He was in his office at the meat warehouse in Brooklyn now, where he’d just finished up the mountain of payroll and inventory paperwork that had piled up during his hospital stay and detention by the feds.
He was in an electric wheelchair, his kneecapped leg in a bulky aluminum and resin brace. The rented chair was costing him a fortune since he had a high-deductible plan, but he needed it, as walking was a no-no since the pain in his knee was unlike anything he’d ever felt. The doctors had told him it had something to do with all the bones in the knee that the American bastard’s bullet had smashed to jelly.
All in all, he was lucky, he knew. He’d paid back all his debts and was out of all of it. Though he had been kneecapped, his duty as middleman between the British assassin and the Russian mobster had been completed.
A bullet to the knee and a couple of phone calls were actually a pretty fair price to pay to erase the massive poker debt he had with the mobster. He’d run with the devil and was still alive. That was winning, in his book. It was time to retire now, sell his businesses, get out of New York altogether. Quit while he was ahead.
Meal over, he was dry-swallowing a Percocet when his new dog, a boxer-rottweiler mix he’d named Sweetie, began growling at the locked office door.
Immediately, he took his fully loaded and cocked SIG Sauer P220 Match Elite .45 out of the knapsack on the side of the wheelchair. The dog began barking like mad a few seconds later, and then he smelled it. Smoke. As he watched, a wisp of it floated in under the door.
Then, over the dog’s bark, he heard it. Out in the hallway, there was beeping from the ceiling smoke alarm.
Somebody had set his place on fire.
Gun in his right hand, he zipped the wheelchair over to the door and unlocked it and pulled it open. He coughed in the gray smoke that poured in as the dog shot out into the hall like a missile. Panicking, Pavel Levkov stared at the smoke, waiting to hear something. The dog barking, a struggle—anything. But even after a minute, he heard nothing.
He’d just made it out into the hall, braced leg first, when the shadow fell over him and something smashed into his outstretched knee.
It was an aluminum softball bat, he saw, as it smacked again, into his torso this time, sending the .45 flying away.
“I didn’t talk, I swear,” he said in Russian. “I did everything you said.”
“We shall see about that,” the Russian voice replied as he was lifted bodily out of the chair.
Chapter 79
Five the next morning, I was in Yonkers, just over the border of the Bronx. On my right was the Hudson River, and on my left were the Metro-North train tracks, and in front of me, beside an old rusted-out Ford flatbed truck, was our Russian suspect, Pavel Levkov, lying facedown in the gravel, dead.
The Russian, who was in a leg b
race from his kneecapping, had been shot in the back of the head a couple of times. His wrists and ankles were bound in wire hangers twisted together really tight with a pair of side cutters or something. It was a neat job. There was no blood at the scene, which probably meant he’d been dumped.
“Who found him?” said Paul as he came up along the railroad tracks with a couple of coffees.
“Guy walking his dog,” I said. “Yonkers PD got him in a car back in the station lot. He’s a local kid. Didn’t see anyone.”
There was a small stand of leafless trees beside the crime scene atop of which some crows were cawing up at the gray sky. I suddenly picked up a rock and chucked it at them, sending them flapping.
“Bird lover, I see,” said Paul.
“No. A peace and quiet one,” I said.
“You know,” Paul said, “the old-timey houses back there and the water and trees here remind me of a sad book I once read. It’s set in the thirties or something, and it’s about an upstate New York Irish bum who’d been a ballplayer and goes back to see his family in Albany for Thanksgiving.”