35. Chapter 26
Smooth Criminal
Bruce Cooper
The club is finally closed. My bar manager is the only other person remaining in the building, and he’s busy inventorying booze downstairs.
My other beauties, as I call the pretty girls and boys hired to keep my patrons happy, have gone home.
They won’t clock back in for another twelve hours, and I relish the quiet of their absence.
I’ve always been a night owl. Three a.m. is as good, if not better, for business, at least when you’re in the businesses I’m in.
The only sounds in my office are the whir of my fan and the scratching of my pencil across the pages of the various ledgers spread out over my desk, of which there are many.
There’s one for each of the clubs and bars that I own.
As largely cash businesses, they’re an ideal place to squirrel away funds.
Plus, they are surprisingly profitable. For example, there’s this little place in The Neck that looks like a shithole, is a shithole, and yet delivers me a tidy little sum every quarter without fail.
Then there’s Blue Grace’s ledger. It’s one of the reasons I write in pencil. It erases.
Blue has a bad habit of taking money he shouldn’t from dangerous people like Franklin-fucking-Barrett, or of letting his dick lead him into trouble that, as his accountant, I need to bail him out of, for a tidy sum.
And then of course, there’s the one I dread looking at more than any of the others, Viktor’s ledger.
Where I keep track of the non-alcoholic sales that happen inside this particular club.
All catalogued against the fucking huge debt that I owe him.
I’m a man of many talents, but numbers and money have always come easily to me.
In another life, I probably could’ve been an actual accountant.
Too bad, I’m also a man of many vices. It was our common vices that led me to befriend Lou Braun in the first place all those years ago, and those same vices again that led us both into Viktor Vetrov’s path.
Not that I have moral qualms about balancing a drug dealer’s books, or those belonging to a money-laundering rockstar.
Morality holds piss-all value if you ask me.
Not compared to the value of the almighty dollar.
As long as you’re the one in the black, that is.
Which I most certainly am not. No matter how many times I do the math, the three of us still owe that Russian a fucking fortune.
I stare down at the ledger before me where the amount I owe Viktor contains wayyyy more zeros than I’d like.
My eyes quickly dart to the ledger belonging to this place, my Kitty Kat Club, but I’m squeezing blood from a stone here already and short of turning this place into some kind of trap house—something that would most certainly stand out against the backdrop of Ocean Avenue’s fancy boutiques and hotels—I don’t see any way of boosting sales figures.
I lean back in my chair and let my mind wander.
The three of us might technically be partners in literal crime, but I don’t trust either Lou Braun or Blue Grace worth a goddamn.
At least with Blue I’ve got leverage, because that dumb fucker needs my help to stop Franklin Barrett from burying his ass.
Who’d have thought a billionaire CEO would, behind closed doors, be the leader of one of the world’s largest human trafficking rings.
I moan inwardly because right now, Blue’s ledger is the only one I can get to balance.
Standing up, I grab that particular ledger as I go.
All the books are kept squarely behind the locked door of my private office safe.
One by one, I put them all away, minus the “official” version of the Kitty Kat ledger.
That, I leave out. Because the world’s best forensic accountant could look, and he wouldn’t find a single trace of anything suspicious.
The last of the other ledgers is the one belonging to that little bar in The Neck.
Lou was right when he texted us last night and said that Cohen Brady’s fight with Rain Gamble’s supposed boyfriend, or is it fiancé now, was a convenient distraction and that the press would be all over it.
Despite there being no apparent witnesses, pictures from the fight were splashed across the front pages of the tabloids today.
I’d grabbed one from the newsstand on the corner near the club, and the more I look at the picture, the more I wonder why the other man, the “boyfriend,” looks so damn familiar.
And then it hits me, because, like I said, numbers come easy, and as I store the last ledger amongst the others, two equations with the same solution float through my head.
Lou seems to think that bringing The Pistols back from oblivion for this tour will somehow clear our debt.
Then again, it was Lou thinking with his dick that led to The Pistols’ break-up and our own subsequent money troubles in the first place.
So, let’s just say I’m not fucking convinced.
It’s something I’ve had many years to consider.
The more time passes, the more questions I have about Lou Braun and his reasons for persuading Blue and me to join him in his shit.
But there might just be a solution that will free me from my debt to Viktor and Lou Braun’s mess in one convenient move.