Burn, p.8
Burn, page 8
part #1 of Vancouver Series
The first thing Patrick thought when he got the call was that the hot cop had fallen for him and wanted to have sex. Maybe, though, he thought, as he whipped himself in and out the shower and wacked on a touch of cologne, she’d found a place she wanted to buy and needed him to broker the deal. Either one was fine with him.
As soon as he opened the door, the first thing she said to him as she smelled the Clive Christian which still hadn’t dried was, “You got a telescope?” And then, marching uninvited along the corridor until she reached the living room window, she followed it up with “And don’t get any kinky ideas!”
Patrick looked confused. Following her in, he said, “May I ask why you need a telescope?”
Daltrey turned to him and glanced around. He had a nice place. Really nice. She said, “Because I want to look into your girlfriend’s apartment.”
Saying it to him just like that, as if it was her God-given right to be wherever she wanted to be.
Patrick was quiet for a second and then said, “I’ve got people coming over.”
Daltrey looked at him and tilted her head slightly. Patrick got her meaning.
“No, my mother,” he said. “But I do have one in the bedroom that I use to look at the boats.”
Of course you do, Patrick, Daltrey thought as she now walked uninvited toward his bedroom.
She entered the room and saw the high-powered telescope sitting next to Patrick’s bed, pointing toward the condo building opposite. Quickly, she turned to him and asked, “Can you line it up on your girlfriend’s place?”
Patrick walked over and fiddled with the telescope. “I had it in here because I was cleaning it.”
Daltrey took over and a second later had a crystal clear view right into Alla’s apartment and bedroom. Taking her eye away from the scope, she looked at Patrick. “This thing is good.”
“You should see the moon.”
“Yeah right, like you’ve been looking for cheese, Patrick.”
He moved in nearer and sat on the bed, a little too close.
She took her eye away from the scope and looked at him. “Fuck off, Patrick,” she said.
Patrick stood again and said, “I think she’s still in the hospital.”
“You call her?” Daltrey asked, remembering the curt nurse telling her there was a man who kept calling. “Did you go see her?”
He hadn’t. “I was going to go in the morning. I’ve been very busy. You know how it gets. I’ve ordered flowers, though.”
Good, maybe her husband Dennis can help you arrange them, Daltrey thought as she looked through the telescope. A shadow passed along the wall in the hallway in Alla’s apartment, and a man appeared from what could only be the bathroom. He was young, maybe in his thirties, and was wearing track pants and a top. Daltrey asked, “Who’s this guy?”
And without even looking through the scope, Patrick answered, “Her brother. She hates him.”
Chapter Ten
It was the third time Dan had been to the washroom, and they had only been at the Slave offices for just over twenty minutes. He sat back down in the boardroom and apologized. “Sorry, I’ve been eating a lot of cakes lately, and they’re not agreeing with me.”
Mazzi Hegan closed his eyes. That was one piece of information he really did not need to know. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Listen, I’m willing to forget about the damage you’ve caused to my bathroom, my sheets, my shoes, my clothes, the interior of my Ferrari, and my favorite pure seaweed loofah I had imported from Tahiti that you’d been eating. I’ll forget about everything including the money because that’s the kind of guy I am.”
Dan looked at Mazzi Hegan, then at his partner Sebastian sitting there with a fluffy dog on his lap, then at their lawyer with his beady little eyes, then at the private investigator who didn’t like McDonald’s. He said, “I thought that green thing was some sort of special food.”
Sebastian smiled and leaned forward, lifting up his little dog so as not to squash him. “Dan, it wasn’t food, you don’t eat those things. Honestly, you don’t. Now listen, I really don’t know what you were up to that night in Mazzi’s place, but the photos Mazzi took of you when you were trying to escape are just sensationally sexy.”
Dan frowned. What the fuck was this guy with the dog talking about? He’d never considered himself sexy at all, far from it, but he had noticed since his nose was broken, women were now looking at him. “Can I see the photos?” he asked.
Sebastian shook his head. That was a no-no. Taking a deep breath, he said,
“I’m sorry, company policy is that models don’t see their work, and besides, they’re being rendered.”
What the fuck was he going on about? Dan thought as he looked at the dog. “When did I become a model?” he asked.
Sebastian shrugged. “A couple of nights ago, we hope.”
Dan looked at Chendrill, who stared back and raised one eyebrow.
Sebastian lifted his dog off of some papers sitting at the side of his chair and slid them across the desk toward Dan, saying with a smile, “What we want to do, Daniel, is use the photos Mazzi took of you in an advertising campaign we’ve been working on for a client. They absolutely love you. They think you’re a sensation. If you accept and sign today, we’ll draft you an advance of fifteen thousand dollars, which is about twelve percent of what you will get as a minimum when we run the campaign.”
Dan felt faint. Fifteen thousand dollars is twelve percent of more money than he could imagine.
“But,” Sebastian continued, “all being well, we still need you to do some more photo work at the studio and on the yacht, and then maybe a commercial or two, which could add another twenty percent on top of the initial contract.”
More photographic work? He couldn’t remember doing any in the first place, unless you called getting the fuck out of there “photographic work,” he thought. Fuck, he wished he’d listened in math class at school instead of having sexual fantasies about the teacher. His head was spinning. He looked to the floor, wracked his brain, and did the math as the guy with the dog spoke.
Then, as cool as a cucumber, Chendrill leaned forward and put it all into perspective. “Dan, it comes down to being able to walk into McDonald’s and order thousands and thousands of Big Macs, all at once.”
And without missing a beat, it all came together as it always did and Dan replied, “Yeah, forty-seven thousand three hundred and sixty-eight, to be precise.”
******
Illya stood in the fancy apartment that looked out over the creek, admiring the way his new gray Adidas tracksuit hung on his frame in his reflection in the plate-glass window. The way the pants just clipped the top of his runners enough to put a little crease at their bottom was perfect.
Fuck, he looked good.
Twisting, he turned and stared at his reflection from another angle in the hall mirror. He’d seen this new tracksuit on a mannequin in a shop window across the road while getting a haircut and just knew it was going to be styling. Now he had one tracksuit for almost every day of the week. When he’d been in prison, one suit would have to last for months, and they were almost always counterfeit.
He sat down on the sofa, stared out the window, and lit up another cigarette. Alla had been gone now for almost four days, and there was no sign of her coming back. He'd resigned himself to that, but if she did return, he would make her pay back tenfold.
Illya looked at himself one last time in the lobby mirror as he left the apartment building, walking out and along the seawall toward the casino. It was hot out this late afternoon. He looked to the yachts below, moored with their flags flying proudly, looking good and going nowhere. Stopping, he looked back along the seawall, his eyes following two guys in shorts as they raced along on rollerblades, weaving through the runners and cyclists too scared to go fast, whipping past him, then the girl sitting on a bench along the way watching them also, catching her long hair tied up tight in a ponytail in the breeze as they flew past.
He looked back again at the crystal clear water. It would be cold, but never as cold as it had been the morning he’d jumped from the ship where he’d lain hidden, stowed away over a year before, lying cramped and sweaty as it headed west across seas and oceans. Weak and hungry, he’d leaped off the ship’s side before first light as it waited for clearance on the edge of English Bay. His heart momentarily stopping as he hit the water, swimming for land through the cold with the early morning tide and arriving exhausted and frozen on the beach. He’d wrung out his clothes and left them to dry on a huge abandoned log in the sand and thought about how close his sister might be now as he warmed himself in the early morning sun.
The night his temper broke, he’d spat at his mother as they sat eating his celebratory homecoming dinner. Illya there holding his father’s hand, breaking his father’s fingers one by one as he waited, watching his mother as she ran to the bedroom to find the address she’d hidden so well, the one she’d sworn to her daughter she would never let her son see.
With all the money he could steal and as much canned food as he could carry, Illya had left his parents as they cried in the ransacked house he’d once called home. Heading out into the night, toward the huge cranes and ships he’d seen years before through the wide, innocent eyes of the young boy he’d once been, when his father had taken him there for the very first time, wanting Illya to see the docks he had worked since his late teens. Young Illya, happy back then, looking to the cranes towering high above the water like giant monsters with huge necks moving slowly along the dock, plucking supplies from the insides of ships. Where his father had kept his head down and his nose clean, providing for his family, working the ships and oil tankers that moored in the dark, dirty water alongside the naval submarines that sat waiting for repair like sleeping behemoths.
Within the day, Illya had found the ship that would take him to the new life his sister had set up for him. In the dead of night, with his bag full of canned goods and water, he sneaked up the gangplank and down into a corner section of the large engine room. Climbing up a bulkhead, hidden by tarpaulins, he lay quietly by day and by night, unseen and unheard, pissing and defecating in a tin as he fended off rats, his ears stuffed with rags to lessen the noise of the huge diesel engines that thundered away, powering him across the ocean through the Panama Canal and up the west coast of North America to his new home.
Illya reached the casino by the water at the end of the seawall and walked inside. He scoured the area around the roulette tables by the door, searching as he had each day for his sister and her lover, glimpsing the faces of the men and women throwing away their money in search of the thrill of winning what they would someday in the future give back.
He moved on, making his way back and forth through the maze of slots, passing lonely people whiling their day away, staring at lights and spinning characters drawn in a far-off land they would never see. He took the escalator up to a level where others were throwing their money away on high-stake card games they didn’t understand, yet thought they could play. They weren’t there, either, his sister and her lover, hanging at the bar, Alla with a margarita and Sergei with his expensive vodka drowned in fresh orange and full of ice.
It was just as he headed back downstairs that he saw Daltrey for the second time that day. The first, he remembered, had been as he’d turned to watch the guys on their rollerblades. She had been there sitting on a bench some eighty feet behind him, doing the same. Now she was in the casino, playing slots ten minutes after she’d been relaxing in the sun.
A cop? Maybe, but she was too good-looking for a cop, more like one of those greeters in a restaurant chain. He reached the bottom of the escalator and walked toward the roulette tables. He’d heard of pretty cops posing as hookers in the hotels in Moscow, but over here, pretty women had better options. Even so, in this day and age you could never tell, and if she was a cop, why was he now suddenly on the radar?
He walked to the other side of the casino and sat down next to a Chinese man on a blackjack table and laid down a hundred dollars he knew he would never see again on chips. Through the crowd, Daltrey was still visible and showing absolutely no interest in him. Maybe I’m crazy, he thought. Maybe she’s an addict. But addicts didn’t relax in the sun when there was a casino up the road, and they almost always had a boyfriend with them or were texting one. This girl was doing nothing but feeding the machine.
An hour passed, and nothing had changed. Illya sat on his seat and threw more money away, the woman with the ponytail still sitting there playing the machine, now texting and not even looking at him once. Fuck it, he was crazy, seeing things, cops in tight-fitting blouses with nice legs. Maybe he should go over and give it a go, see if she wanted to earn real money, not the pennies dribbling from the machine she was on.
He looked at the dealer and asked for one last hand and lost. Shit. Getting up quickly, he headed for the door and left without looking back. Alla was not there, and neither was her flashy photographer boyfriend whom he should’ve told to fuck off as soon as she’d had her husband pay for his flight over and he’d never returned home.
His lucky card dealer who’d just taken him for five hundred hadn’t seen either of them since the weekend. Maybe they’d run off together. Maybe, but to where? Maybe the States, both of them crossing the border on some remote farm or some mountain pass like he heard you could do. Maybe the two were now sitting at a bar in San Francisco or New York, laughing at him. Illya sat down on a wall just out of sight of the entrance and waited. If the girl came out, then she was a cop, and he had problems.
******
Daltrey was doing well. Surprisingly well, in fact. Six-hundred-dollars-in-pocket well, which was good for a girl who had only sat down because Illya had taken her by surprise by coming toward her down the escalator. It was a five-dollar-a-hit game, and with such a fantastic view of the table Illya was on, it seemed crazy not to stay.
Carefully, she looked toward the door through which Illya had just left and simultaneously hit the play button with her right hand, winning another two hundred dollars. Wow. She hit the button again, lost five bucks. Hit again, lost another five. Hit again, and went back up by another sixty. In less than an hour, she was up two days’ wages and had the new leather jacket she’d had her eye on coming her way.
Half an hour later, Daltrey was sitting in the casino's office with the security chief, talking to the dealer and reviewing the security footage of Illya throwing his money away.
“So how long has he been coming here?” Daltrey asked the dealer, who took in tens of thousands a day from customers with his smiles, but needed new shoes.
The dealer looked up from the floor and stared Daltrey straight in the eye.
“A year maybe, I’d say.”
Daltrey nodded, thinking. It made sense. The timing was right. The guy had come here on the dentist’s coin, no doubt.
“And he sits with you?”
The dealer smiled, then twisting his head with a frown, he said, “When I’m here.”
“Does he win?”
The dealer shook his head, and smiling again said, “Most of the people who come here think they do. He’s no different.”
Daltrey looked at the monitor, at Illya looking straight at her as she sat at the slot machine across the floor, and wanted to say, Well, I’m just about to leave with over six hundred bucks, so fuck off. But instead, she asked, “Who does he come here with?”
The dealer shrugged, happy for this interlude in his otherwise predictable day. “He has a couple of friends—a girl and a blond guy of about the same age.”
“Alla?”
The dealer nodded. “Something like that. She’s really pretty. They’re both Russian as well.”
Daltrey stood from her chair and rubbed her hand across her face. Then she pulled the picture she’d taken of Alla in the hospital when she’d been pretending to sleep.
The dealer smiled and nodded, saying, “Yep, that’s the girl. She lives close by.”
“How do you know?”
“I listen.”
Daltrey looked away from the monitors and smiled, weighing the information. “They take you for a fool, speaking Russian, and you understand everything they say?”
The dealer laughed. “My grandparents were from the Crimea.”
Daltrey stared at the dealer, who was obviously no fool. “And they never knew?”
He smiled, almost laughing. “I got a kick out of their scheming, you know? The way they would always be trying to beat me.”
“And they never did?”
“Sometimes, but not often.”
Taking a moment, Daltrey stood and watched the monitors again. Then she asked, “And the casino just happened to match you with them every time they came in?”
Smiling, the dealer nodded. It was the way it was.
“Were they all here Saturday night?”
The dealer thought back. He didn’t know what day it was today, Saturday having come and gone in a blur of video games, work, pizza, and masturbation.
“Maybe?”
Without being asked, the security chief moved to his computer and seconds later was scrolling through footage of Saturday evening until Illya came into view walking across the center of the casino, staring at the tables as he passed. Reaching his dealer’s table, he sat down at a table next to a couple.
Daltrey stared at the girl and said out loud, “Alla.” Pointing to the blond guy next to her, Daltrey asked the dealer, “Is he the boyfriend?”
The dealer nodded.
Daltrey stared at the face of the good-looking young Russian man with his beautiful girlfriend who was lying in a hospital bed a few miles away, unable to feel her feet. She looked over to the security chief. “I need to see the boyfriend’s shoes.”
Three hours later, Daltrey had put together her version of Alla’s evening at the casino before she’d been crippled and her boyfriend in his fancy shoes had burned to death in a small boat outside her apartment.
