The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)
“Nick Antonov’s guy. He’s local, out of South Beach.”
“Looks like an ABC.”
“SoBe?”
“Okay, a SoBe ABC. South Beach American-born Cuban.”
Chad nodded. “Right. Forgot that one. Well, Little Havana is right next door to South Beach. Anyway, I met him yesterday at Key West International. The FBO put Nick’s small jet next to my Lear. Something Perez, I think.”
“‘Small jet’?”
“It’s a Citation. His bigger one is a Gulfstream, a G-four, I think.”
“You mean Tikhonov’s G-four,” Matt said.
Yuri Tikhonov, forty-eight, had significant investments in Philadelphia, as well as other cities in the U.S., in Europe, and in his homeland of Russia. He was worth billions, having made his first thousand million dollars shortly after the age of thirty-five. Many of the skills that made him a highly successful businessman, it was said, he had honed in the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Russia’s agency for external spying and intelligence gathering.
Others suggested that it had more to do with his close relationship with high-ranking politicians in the Kremlin—men he had served under in the SVR, once known as the KGB.
“Okay, I take your point,” Chad said. “The planes are the casino’s. And since Nick works for the casino, and it’s Tikhonov who owns a huge chunk of the casino, they’re his. I just never see him on them.”
Matt speared two oysters from their shells as he said, “I don’t have to guess why those Florida hotties are hanging with older guys.”
“That’s the curious thing. They’re not from Florida. The girls are Russian. They work at the casino. Casinos plural—I heard that they rotate the girls. That one on Nick’s arm, Star, she’s a twenty-one-year-old Ukraine.”
“What about those older guys?”
“I dunno. Maybe Nick’s clients from Philly or Jersey?”
Matt was quiet for a long moment, clearly lost in thought. Then he made a face and drained his single malt. Putting down the glass, he looked at Chad.
“How tight are you with Antonov and his crowd?” Matt suddenly said, somewhat sharply.
“What do you mean?” Chad shot back, his tone indignant. “I don’t
fuck around with those girls—or any girls—if that’s what you’re implying. The mother of your goddaughter would have my nuts served to me on the tip of the dull rusty knife she used for the castration.”
“And the girls on your boat?”
“Screw you, Matt! They’re hired by the PR firm. They’re legit.”
“No shit?” Matt said, pushing his chair back to stand. “How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure, damn it,” Chad said, working to keep his voice low. “Why are you even suggesting otherwise? What’s gotten into you?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you got conned into some shady deal.”
Chad tossed his fork and knife onto his plate and crossed his arms.
“You’re not going to let that thing with Skipper go, are you?”
Matt shrugged. “‘That thing’? I’ve told you that I don’t begin to blame you at all for his death—the dipshit was going to get himself killed one way or another all on his own. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but it’s one thing that he ruined his life—and it’s something entirely worse that he almost got Becca killed. As I’ve said, my point is that you didn’t walk away from Skipper when you could have.”
Matt and Chad had grown up with J. Warren “Skipper” Olde, whose history of booze and drug abuse had begun when they all attended Episcopal Academy prep school. His father made a fortune building McMansion subdivisions across the country. While the twenty-seven-year-old Skipper had a few legitimate—if questionably successful—real estate projects in development in Philadelphia, it turned out that he supplemented his cash flow by being actively involved in the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine.
Skipper, on September ninth, had been in a seedy motel room at the Philly Inn, one of the properties owned by the company that Chad Nesbitt had invested in. It was on Frankford Avenue, which had come to be known as the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. They had planned, when the timing—and tax break—was right, to demolish and replace the two-story motel with upscale condominiums. At about two o’clock that September morning, with Becca Benjamin, Skipper’s twenty-five-year-old girlfriend, waiting right outside the room in her Mercedes SUV, the meth lab in the room exploded.
The motel became consumed by the chemical-fueled inferno. Two illegal aliens who had been cooking the methamphetamine were killed. Skipper was critically burned. Becca suffered burns and a severe head injury.