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Compared to the luxury condo,the Sheepshead Bay apartment feels like a dingy cave. It smells of tobacco and grilled food. Books lie open, spines up—Roey is a compulsive reader. He picked up reading while on deployment.
“To keep my brain in check,” he explained to me once.
He smokes with his head sticking out of the window to the fire escape. I crave a cigarette, too, but I quit.
Roey Torres and I met overseas in the service. In fact, he was my captain. Almost ten years older than me, he retired from the service several years ago and has been in the bounty-hunting business ever since.
Currently, the main team is Roey, Miller, and I.
Roey is the mastermind and the big boss.
I am the hands-on kinda guy, literally, since no one can beat me in distance shooting with a sniper rifle except for expert snipers.
Danny Miller is our IT guy and rarely does fieldwork. His connections include DMV workers, police personnel, hackers, and dark web guys, which gives him access to a lot more info than regular private investigators.
Miller summarizes the surveillance report from the night we lost Reznik.
“The surveillance team picked up Reznik on Dumbo cameras before he went into the subway. As per the MTA cameras, he took the F-train that goes to Brighton Beach. Then we lost him. But he’s in Brighton, I’m sure.”
Hence the reason we anchored in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood next door. That’s beside the fact that our main connection for weapons and tracking devices, Sergei Kolchak, lives in Brighton. He is the one who manages the surveillance team in Ukraine, a hundred IT guys who survey public cameras and devices they access through their own connections and use face recognition to track people. It’s cheap labor but it’s getting expensive for 24-hour surveillance for several months already.
Roey, Miller, and I finally settle around the coffee table, loaded with takeout food. Roey is slurping onmastavasoup and I dig intolulya kebabfrom a small Uzbek joint in Brighton.
The one thing I appreciate about Southern Brooklyn, Brighton Beach specifically, is the amazing food. Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Tajik, Kyrgyz—you spy an unusual word on a restaurant sign, chances are it’s the name of a country or a region in Eurasia you didn’t know existed.
Belarus—I knew that one. Best gymnasts and tractors in the world, beautiful lakes, and the last surviving dictatorship in Europe. Now Lucy Moor, whose mother is Belarusian. Suddenly, I want to know everything about the potato country.
Lucy’s mother, Iryna Moor, formerly Iryna Vaitovich, used to reside in Brighton Beach until twenty-one years ago when she moved to Virginia.
“Reznik is Ukrainian and used to reside in Brighton, too,” Roey says. “Maybe it’s some old Eastern European bonding.”
“Do you think Iryna Moor has something to do with this crypto-currency scam?” I ask.
“I’d say no. He did have a silent female partner, but she’s supposedly overseas and filthy rich by now. Miller is running Lucy’s mother’s records, but I think it’s just a coincidence. The Moors are not rich. You can tell they are tight about money, so obviously, Reznik didn’t share his loot.”
That is, the one and a half billion dollars he swindled his investors out of, including the fifty-million investment from his former partner and now our employer, Seth Gordon, the construction mogul.
Reznik is wanted by the FBI for his participation in a large-scale virtual coin fraud scheme. A year ago, he was charged in the United States District Court with multiple counts of fraud and money laundering. The FBI reward for any info is $100,000. Seth Gordon’s bounty is five million. Yeah, exactly. The government can suck it. That’s why they can’t catch their most wanted for decades.
And us?
Right, just lost him. Because of a cute blond girl who might be our only chance to locate him again.
We don’t have any active jobs yet. Usually, they are last minute and urgent. So right now, we’re chilling.
The difference? Roey and Miller are stuck in this small apartment. Me? I’m residing in Goldsling Towers.
“Try to learn her daily routine,” Roey says, bringing up Lucy again. “You just never know when Reznik might contact her again. Become her best friend so she tells you where she goes and who she talks to.”
“What if Reznik doesn’t contact her again?” I ask. “Maybe he got spooked and won’t take another chance.”
“Then consider it a paid vacation.”
“For how long?”
Roey licks the kebab sauce off his fingers. “We are here until we get something. One month? Two? Who knows. But when we get him, it’ll be the biggest paycheck we’ve ever had.”
“And I’ll retire,” says Miller.
