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“What do you want the guys down at the precinct to do?” he asked tentatively.
I eyed the notebook in front of me. Chicken scratches in Cyrillic. He wouldn’t be able to read them—with a surname like Jorgensen I guessed he was of Scandinavian heritage through and through. “I have a man looking for an associate of Ivan’s murderer. Once we are done questioning her, you can have her. I only want the head start.”
“It’s the Pueblo, then.”
I nodded curtly.
“Fuck.” He ran a hand back over his glued-down hair pointlessly. “Are you going to war? In the middle of Cambridge?”
“I did not wish to. But two of our people are dead, and El Luchador won’t meet.” I turned a page in my notebook. “It is the opinion of the Brotherhood that they should be driven out.”
“We can lean on them. They might be hiding out, but they have friends, family…” He hesitated when he saw my expression shift.
“I’m willing to go a long way, and take a great deal of personal risk, to avoid a war in my town,” I told him quietly. “But I refuse to involve innocents unless we are left with absolutely no choice. Unless they actually break the law, I don’t want you and yours leaning on anyone who is not a direct Pueblo member.”
His expression was an interesting mix as he nodded frantically, relieved, surprised, afraid. “U-understood.”
“That said…” I hesitated. I didn’t want to go behind Boris’s back, but he had yet to produce any information on the woman who had seduced him the night before Ivan’s murder. And I needed to make sure he wasn’t hiding anything. Alcohol wasn’t the only intoxicant that could put a man off his game, and I wasn’t sure that this Maria wasn’t still playing with his head. Or other parts. “This Maria woman.”
“Yeah, about her. I can’t exactly have the boys put out an APB on Puerto Rican women named Maria, but what I can do is send you data on who we bring in with that name.”
That was worse than useless. I didn’t even know what the damn woman looked like. The only one who could verify her face was Boris…
“I want one of your men to watch one of mine for a while. He’s the one who had contact with her, and I want someone to watch for her if she approaches him in public again.” I gave him Boris’s details without a single lick of guilt about it. I probably should have felt something, having Boris tailed by the police like he was no-one, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going on here. Something that I couldn’t trust him to see, with the way he’d been lately.
“Don’t let him realize that he’s being tailed,” I added after a moment. Not that there was much of a chance of that if he was drinking as much as I suspected. But whatever was going on, my instincts told me I couldn’t rely on Boris alone right now. Not anymore.
“Of course not.” He stared at me for a moment, then ventured, “You don’t seem as hot for a turf war as your boys.”
“Definitely not. Yet another reason why I want this handled discreetly.” But even as I said it, I knew there would likely be no other choice now but war. If not violence in the streets, then a cold war of quiet move against quiet move, which would still involve deaths.
Either way, Ivan had to be avenged. And if I discovered that Mischka’s death was anything but completely natural, blood would run.
“Was there anything else?” I asked the new detective.
“No, sir.” He had seen the look in my eyes, and was now so pale that his hair looked carroty by comparison. I waved him out distractedly, and he hurried out of the office like his ass was on fire.
I got up and went to stand at the window, watching him hurry out to his unmarked sedan and drive away. As I stood there, my mind drifted toward more pleasant things.
Olivia. Our son Michael, whom she was apparently working very hard to care for and protect. I smiled faintly. Our conversation had been awkward. But it could have gone so much worse.
At least I had that now. Though I was well aware that if the Puerto Ricans sank low enough, they could leverage that. And being that they had murdered a helpless old man in the middle of a hospital, I had to make sure nobody found out about my new woman and my unexpected son.
***
“Now, Viktor, what have I told you about speaking out of turn?”
I lifted my head and wiped blood out of the corner of my eye. The other was already swelling shut. My beating had been intense, but that wasn’t what bothered me. No. What had me tensed up inside and tempted to test the ropes that bound me was the sobbing I had heard in the other room.
“My apologies.” I was always cool and polite when I spoke to Mr. Florescu. He had plucked me off the Vladivostok streets along with some other boys, and in return, we owed him our lives, our loyalty, and, above all, any money that we earned.
Which was why I was tied to a chair right now, at fifteen, taking a beating that would leave me scarred.
“So explain to me again where that money got to, Viktor. You were short again.” His voice was thick with anger, and I knew that whether I was honest or not, he wasn’t done hitting me.
But if I lied and he caught me in it, he would do more than beat me. Possibly much more. He had killed one boy for taking a payoff from a rival gang. Maybe not intentionally, but dead was dead.
“My neighbor was starving,” I said simply. “She has small children. There is nothing for her by the time she can get into the bread lines. I thought—”
