24. Demin
DEMIN
"You're just sore because it's not your party." Mishka chuckles, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. I have to laugh with him because he's not wrong. Oh, to be six again, with birthday parties and new bicycles to look forward to. But once you're grown, you can never go back.
"Well, tell him I said happy birthday, and make sure you pull his ear for me." I don’t have a family of my own, he's right. But one day, I hope to. And with things going as promisingly as they are with Isabela, I feel more than ever that it might be a possibility.
Today, we're on the way to the insurance adjuster's office to discuss the rebuilding of my warehouse after that fire.
We've spent enough time waiting around, and I believe breaking ground immediately will show the Cartel we're not afraid.
After Bart led the charge scattering their forces earlier this week, I think they're getting the point.
"You really think we'll build back better and stronger?" Mishka asks as he turns onto the frontage street next to the highway. It's not a matter of thinking but doing, and I know we will do better.
"There's no doubt in my mind. With things on track the way they have been and Octavio producing finer product than we have ever had, we're on track to have our best year—"
The sound and the force hit me as one sensation—a hammer swung up through the floor of the SUV.
The whole armored frame jumps off the road and flips over, driving my head into the C pillar behind me.
The seatbelt bites my chest and shoulder as the entire vehicle flips a few times and lands on its side, where it grinds to a stop.
My head is spinning, and my ears ring. For a few seconds, I can't make my body do anything at all.
I hang in the harness with my ears ringing so loud, I can't hear anything else.
Blood runs down into my eye from somewhere above my hairline, and I taste copper where I've bitten through the inside of my cheek.
The shock of it grips me for a second as I sit there reeling, imagining a very different outcome if this SUV wouldn't have been armored.
I blink, looking around me at the shattered windows and smoke now filling the cabin.
"Mishka." My voice sounds far away even to me.
"Talk to me." I taste salt on my tongue, and something sharp—a shard of glass, maybe?
Something that landed on my tongue during the impact.
He groans from the front, and then his hand grips the back of his seat as he drags himself up. "I'm here, Boss. I'm here." He's slurring, but he's moving. "You hit?"
"Fuck," I grunt, trying to make my shoulder work.
Feels like I snapped it out of the socket.
"Everything hurts." I get a hand on the seatbelt release and try my hardest to brace against the door under me.
"Get your weapon. That was no accident…" I feel dizzy, like that knock to the head was more than just a bump, but whoever set a charge on my SUV isn't going to wait around for me to snap out of this to have a fair fight.
He understands me before I've finished. A bomb that size in a street this empty wasn't only meant to flip a truck.
It was meant to crack the box open so they can come by and finish whatever crawls out, which means there are men coming, and they're coming now while we're upside down and bleeding out slowly.
"Mishka…" I struggle to breathe, realizing how close to unconsciousness I am as the release snaps open and frees me.
My body crumples to the opposite side of the car in a heap, landing on more broken glass that pricks my palms and stabs into my knees.
The ringing is slowly lifting, but the gravel in my throat is suffocating.
Pain shoots up through my ribs where the belt did its work as I drag my pistol from my jacket with a shaking hand. Outside I see the feet of men moving around the vehicle, and they don't look like average pedestrians. They're wearing black boots, black pants… They've come for us.
The first man reaches the windshield and looks in at me through the spider-webbed glass, bringing his gun up on aim. But Mishka shoots him before he can use it, his reaction time much faster than mine. We've got to be surrounded by a dozen armed Cartel soldiers who've come to do Solano's bidding.
The glass blows inward and the man drops out of sight.
But Mishka twists in his seat and keeps firing through the gap where the side window used to be, driving the rest of them back into cover.
I can't see them from where I'm wedged, but I hear them scatter, hear rounds going both directions and hear a man swearing in Spanish.
"How many?" I shout over the noise. I manage to use the sleeve of my suit to wipe the blood out of my eyes and readjust, chambering a round.
"Three, maybe four." Mishka ducks down to reload, but even his hands are shaking.
That was quite the tumble the car took. "They didn't bring enough men…
They expected the bomb to do more than it did.
" With two down and three or four left, I think he might've miscounted, but I'm not taking any chances.
"Who the hell do they think they are?" I snarl under my breath, ducking down to look out the busted window. I see nothing from where I'm at, and when I move, my side screams at me.
But Mishka rises up and continues firing while I peer under the gap in the door and add what I can. Between the two of us, it's enough racket to raise the dead, though my bullets are aimed haphazardly with one hand while I send a message to Bart to get to our location.
After a solid ten minutes of shooting, the boots start retreating. I listen as a vehicle guns its engine and tears off into the night, and then the street goes quiet. I slump against the roof and close my eyes, catching my breath as the throb of pain through my ribcage threatens to suffocate me.
"They're running," Mishka says. I hear him crawling over the broken glass to get to me, but there's no room in here for that.
"Let them. We're in no shape to chase." I press the heel of my hand to the gash above my eye to make it stop bleeding and wince as it grinds more glass shards into my skin.
"Let me get you out of here," Mishka snarls, standing to his feet.
He kicks the back windscreen, which is already heavily cracked, and it gives way little by little until we have a spot large enough to crawl out.
The smoke streaming up from the engine is worrying.
If this thing catches fire, it could explode again before we get out.
But we manage to crawl through the wreckage onto the pavement just as two sets of headlights scream around the corner and brake hard alongside the wreck. Doors start flying open before the vehicles have fully stopped, and I hear Bart first, calling my name.
Sergei stands over me with his gun ready as Bart crouches next to me, ignoring Mishka. A few other men tend to him as Bart begins assessing my wounds. "You're alright," he keeps saying. "You're alright, Boss. We've got you."
"God," I grunt, trying to move. The shoulder is so bad, I might pass out. I'm not a weak man, but fuck is this painful.
"You need a doctor, Boss," Bart says, slinging my good arm up over his shoulder, and he hauls me to my feet, gritting his teeth against the roar that erupts out of my chest.
The hospital isn't an option. A man in my position doesn't bleed in a public ward, where any nurse with a phone can sell my location to Solano. So Bart loads me into the back of his vehicle and drives me to the safehouse instead.
The doctor meets us at the flat above a shuttered shop, swept weekly for bugs and known to almost no one.
I sit on a kitchen chair with my shirt off while the doctor works on the gash above my eye, pulling glass out of it one piece at a time.
I let him do it. The pain gives me a thing to hold onto besides the rage.
"It's not bad," Dr. Weber says, feeling my shoulder joint.
"But this will sting." Before I can even respond to him, he has his knee in my armpit, tugging my arm, and it pops.
My shoulder goes back into the socket, tearing yet another scream from my mouth.
"Holy fuck," I snarl, glaring up at him, but he pats my back.
"I told you it would sting." Turning, he produces a bandage from his black bag and nods at my shirt, saying, "Take it off."
Bart is there, helping to make sure I obey orders, but I'm already feeling tremendously better as Weber begins wrapping his wide bandage around my bruised ribs. "How bad is it, Doc?" I grumble angrily, having had my ass handed to me yet again.
"Probably have a few cracked, but I don't think anything's broken badly." He works and focuses on what he's doing and not me, but the only thing in my mind is how the fuck this happened. That bomb had to have been planted on my own property, which means someone inside my own fucking home did this.
"You'll be fine… Just rest now. Nothing too strenuous for a few weeks, Demin. You only get one life. Don't throw it away playing hero. Let your men do things."
I glower at him. I'm not paying him for advice on how to handle my jobs, just to keep me alive, which will be impossible if I don't finish this job and find this goddamn mole.
When he's done I send him out, and I have Bart bring Sergei up alone.
By now he's either unearthed something I need to know or he knows and he's not telling me.
After that bullshit with Isabela, I'm beginning to feel conflicted about bringing him on, and part of me wonders if he's not finding ways to look the other way at times.
When he walks in, I'm in no mood to fuck around. I've been blown up and shot at, and my body feels like I've been a punching bag for a heavyweight champ. "Sit," I tell him.
"I'll stand, Boss, if it's the same to you."
"It isn't the same to me. Sit." My hardened glare buckles his knees and he sits.
I cross to him and stand over him, but I can't cross my arms over my chest like I normally would. My ribs remind me that I've been punished severely this evening. So I stand with my hands fisted at my sides and a cold glare on my face.
"Five men knew my route tonight," I say. "Me, Mishka, Bart, you, and the man I was going to meet… That means unless my most trusted men put a charge in the street they know I'd drive down, this bomb was planted at my home… Explain how that could happen?"
The new acting head of my security peers up at me with an expression so bold, I want to smack it off his face.
He spreads his hands and shakes his head like his conscience is clean.
"Demin, I see how it looks. I came here to find your leak, and the attacks have gotten worse.
Why would I be stupid enough to do something so foolish…
? And why let myself get caught? I'm better than that. "
My conscience is screaming, and alarm bells are going off. Sergei had full access to that car at all times, and he was in charge of securing it and all of my property. "Then who did this?"
"I'll review the tapes, Dem. I'll send you every video, every motion sensor trigger… I swear we'll find the guy." He's still calm as a cucumber, but I'm not. I was just blown up and it could've killed me.
I lean down with a hand on each arm of his chair until my face is close to his. The movement pulls at my ribs, making my vision swim, but I keep the pain off my face. I refuse to show him weakness.
"Let me be plain about where we are. I brought you into my house and put my men's lives in your hands because I trusted you with mine. If I find out you've taken that trust and sold it to a Spaniard, I won't kill you. Killing you would be a kindness, and I'm fresh out of that tonight.
"I'll skin you alive and keep you breathing through every second of it, and the last thing you'll ever hear is the sound of your own gasps for breath… Do you understand?"
His jaw tightens and his lips purse as his eyes narrow. "Understood, Boss…"
Then I fist the front of his shirt and haul him up out of the chair, into the wall where his head slams against the plaster.
The effort tears through my side like a blade.
He doesn't fight me, which is a small mercy.
But he knows if I made one peep, Bart would be in here with his Makarov ready to kill.
"I swear, Sergei," I breathe into his face.
"I've known you twenty years, Dem… Do you think I'm lying?"
I hold him against the wall another moment until the pain in my ribs forces me to stop.
Then I let him go and step back. I can't see a trace of deception in his expression, but he's been living on his own for so long, I can't say that I know him well enough now.
For all I know, he's been baiting me to bring him back just for this.
"I'm not your leak, Demin." He straightens his shirt where my hand creased it. "Give me three more days. I'll put the man who's doing this on his knees in front of you."
"Three fucking days," I snarl, knowing damn well he won't. If he were anywhere close, he'd have given me a name by now.
But I also don't have a thing I can act on, but a man in my position can't do much. Being wrong about this and moving on bad intel would cost me a hell of a lot more than a mole.
"I'm not gonna find the guy here…" he says, nodding at the door, so I move back, letting him pass. And then I pick up my torn shirt and my blood-stained jacket and move toward the door myself.
I don’t know if that hit was the mole or Solano or the two of them working in conjunction. But I don't want to stand around and find out. I have a job to do, and I need to get it done.
It's time to raise security around my own home and every one of our sites. If the person responsible wants to play games, I’ll play. They just won't like how I play by my own rules.