Chapter 2 - Gavril
I rolled around to the back of the bar, pulling into the empty lot and parking with a little more gusto than necessary. The front wheels of my Bentley knocked into the chipped yellow barrier. The car stood out like a… well, like a Bentley at a seedy dive bar.
A glance at my watch told me I wasn’t early. The others who were supposed to meet me there were late. Every last one of them. This crew wasn’t what anyone would label conscientious, so it might have been in character that they weren’t already waiting for me, their supposed boss.
I might have thought that if this shit hadn’t been going on for weeks now.
At best, it was annoying. At worst, it was going to get dangerous.
For them, because if they thought I didn’t see what they were doing and was about to be caught off guard, they were stupider than I gave them credit for. And I didn’t give them much credit.
The headache I had been ignoring pulsed behind my eyes, getting sharper as the minutes ticked past, and still no one arrived at the meeting I had called earlier that day.
Come to California, they said. It will be fun.
Well, here I was, reminiscing about better days. Running my organization in Russia was about as easy as breathing, with hardworking, loyal people who didn’t need constant babysitting or meticulously laid-out orders before they did something. And they certainly weren’t plotting behind my back.
No one would dare. Not just because I would have crushed them and everyone they cared about, but because I had earned their respect. I missed those days, which seemed so long ago, when it was only a little more than a year since I came to America.
So what happened to change everything if I was so happy back home?
A not-so-little organization called the Collective came knocking at my door while I was spending some time in Milan, bolstering my relationships with the crime families there.
They ran a tight ship in Italy and were kicking ass and taking names in Russia as well.
But they were having problems in America, namely, a family I was already familiar with due to my businesses in Russia.
The Petrovs had neatly taken out almost their entire leadership structure in one attack.
From a strictly academic point of view, it was a masterful take-down.
That was a family I didn’t get on the wrong side of, and for the most part, neither did the international Collective that was wooing me to come on board with them.
Why not clean up the mess with the Petrovs in America? I got lured in with the promise of better weather, more money, and vast amounts of power, to head to LA and bring down the hammer.
The weather and the money were certainly true.
Even the power to a certain extent. While juggling the promises I made to the Collective, I was quietly building up my own little empire in the parts of LA that weren’t already under the Petrovs’ rule.
Besides my well-oiled machine back in the old country, I was sitting pretty.
However, I was now the leader of an unruly bunch of assholes, ranging from idiots to psychopaths, and without a single loyal one among them. My branch of the Collective had turned out to be a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.
Thankfully, I had a small, loyal crew who came with me and whom I could count on without any qualms, or I might very well have been dead by now. And I was damn hard to kill. People had been trying for years, and I wasn’t about to let someone in my own organization end up finally succeeding.
Ever since I took over this shit show when the Petrovs annihilated the Santino family, who’d been corruptly running the whole organization into the ground and sullying the Collective’s international reputation, I had been fighting one headache after another.
That was just my own people. The Petrovs were still a major thorn in my side, and one that needed to be eradicated.
That was one thing the Santinos had right, they just couldn’t manage it.
And neither could I so far, and it was continuing to be a seemingly impossible task.
The most recent attempt was a complete disaster, losing me a valuable plant in the FBI.
It wasn’t easy to find a cop dirty enough to bring over to the dark side, and I had a great stooge who could cover up a raft of wrongdoings.
Now he was dead, after blundering through what should have been a simple kidnapping.
All I needed for him to do was get rid of someone who knew too much about a particularly shady accounting firm I had since shut down.
Unfortunately, that person with too much knowledge just happened to be a woman one of the Petrovs had an interest in. The last I heard, they were getting married, and she was out of my reach. Not that it mattered since that accounting firm was getting to be more trouble than it was worth.
Like almost everything since I arrived in sunny California.
Everything always came back to the damn Petrovs. They weren’t just a major criminal organization, completely on top of their game. They were a true family, completely cohesive. Everything the American branch of the Collective was not.
My undisciplined bunch wasn’t just making me look bad with their random attacks, they were getting themselves picked off one by one with every new, failed attempt.
Which didn’t exactly break my heart, though it was annoying as hell.
They were childishly lashing out while I called for a break so we could regroup and make a foolproof plan.
That kind of thing only works when there are no fools involved, though.
Speaking of fools. Luigi Scalfiore finally arrived, with his men pulling in shortly after him.
Luigi was about ten years older than me, and had racked up enough failures in his life that bitterness seemed to seep from his pores.
He was unable to hide the fact that he was still pissed off about me being brought in to lead after the Santinos were slaughtered.
He hated me for a variety of reasons, not least of all that I was Russian, taller than him, younger, and had a better car collection.
Things that should only matter to fools, but he was one of those, and I could sometimes be petty and rub it in.
It certainly didn’t help that his youngest daughter had a massive thing for me, but I made a point to ignore her whenever we were in the same room together. I might have hated him just as much, but I wasn’t petty in that way.
I got out of the car as they hovered near the back door, lighting up cigarettes and wasting even more time. I blew past them, tapping on my watch. One of the young men whose name I could never remember scurried after me, probably earning himself a punishment from Luigi later.
Fucking hell, I was the one in charge, and if everyone could accept that, we might make some headway into the Petrov problem. It was time to stop being so diplomatic and start bashing heads if they couldn’t get it together.
“Sorry, we’re late,” Luigi said, sliding his oversized gut behind the bar and pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
The female bartender tried to scuttle out of his reach, but I saw the swift motion of his hand as he grabbed the poor woman’s ass, laughing his head off.
I mean, the weather was also great in Milan, but I wasn’t a quitter.
If I had to arrange for Luigi to end up taking a midnight swim with some weights tied around his ankles, then so be it.
For now, he actually commanded the bulk of Santino’s remaining men, and I didn’t need an all-out mutiny by two-thirds of the organization.
Luigi’s main lackey, who went by the charming nickname Meathead, slammed his overly muscled body into the chair across from me, scowling.
“I’m going to send you an article about steroid abuse,” I said. “Read it.”
His brows knitted together, then he realized I was giving him shit and scowled harder.
“Leave him alone, he serves his purpose,” Luigi said, sitting across from me. Now that he’d harassed the bartender and had downed a shot, he could manage a smile. “You’re going to love what I’ve got planned for this weekend,” he said.
Instead of a golf game, he outlined some incredibly stupid attacks on a few of the Petrovs’ minor holdings. Setting a convenience store on fire, robbing their latest weapons shipment, vandalizing a construction site. Seriously?
“Did your fourteen-year-old come up with those plans?” I asked. “Probably not, because even Gianni would have cringed at how weak they are.”
“And what are your plans?” he snapped, turning red with embarrassment when the kid whose name I didn’t know snickered at my assessment. Definitely getting a punishment later. “Let me guess,” Luigi continued, sputtering. “Do nothing. The same as you’ve been advocating since—”
I cut him off with a hard slap on the scarred wooden table. “Since we lost a valuable operative and had to shut down a lucrative operation because of your inability to sit still for five minutes, like a toddler?”
“I told you there was no need to dismantle Axon,” he said, referring to the accounting firm we had been funneling millions of dollars through to clean them up.
“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “We only had to get rid of at least another dozen people in order to keep the operation working. Including any of the feds who looked into what my agent was up to before he got killed. You went too far on that one, and you know it.”
“Dead people can’t talk,” he rumbled, reiterating that the people I paid off would come back to bite me in the ass eventually.
Once again, we were arguing in circles about things that didn’t matter, the real problem going unsolved. I slammed my hand down on the table again and got up, sick of it, my head feeling like an overzealous drummer was crashing cymbals repeatedly against my skull.
“Call off your attacks,” I said. “Everything for the foreseeable future. We have enough to deal with right now without starting a war we can’t win.”
“That you don’t want to win,” Meathead muttered. He might have had more to say, but I smashed my fist into his face, sending blood flying from his nose.
“How about you?” I asked Luigi, wiping Meathead’s blood on a napkin and tossing it onto the middle of the table. “Any more arguments?”
He shrugged, looking sullen. It was the closest I would get to an outright agreement, but my point was made. We’d lay off the petty attacks that did nothing but lose us men, when the Petrovs retaliated.
“You come with me,” I said to the kid whose name still eluded me.
He seemed grateful not have to take the brunt of Luigi’s impotent rage now that I had laid down the law.
He sat in silence as I drove back to the apartment I kept when I had to deal with my insubordinate underlings in the city.
There was no way I would let anyone I couldn’t be absolutely sure of know about my real sanctuary in the hills.
Once at the apartment, I turned him over to my head of security, a man I actually trusted, and told him to give him some training while keeping an eye on him. The more people I had on my side, the better.
The weekend passed without any of the ridiculous attacks, and I was able to breathe a little easier. Luigi had apparently taken my threats seriously and was listening to me for once.
But for how long? I had a bad feeling that I’d reached a breaking point, and I wasn’t going to be able to hold it together. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I needed to be the one to tear it all down while I was still in charge.