James Grippando - Born to Run

“I meant my Jack, wise guy.”

He shouted something to a customer. It was getting hard to hear him, between the traffic noise on the Mile and the weekend roar over the line from Cy’s Place.

“Sorry,” said Theo. “Haven’t seen him since lunch.”

“Do you know if he had something going on? He’s over an hour late. He hasn’t even called, and I can’t get him to pick up on his cell.”

“You might want to call Hotel San Pietro. He had…er-uh.”

Andie definitely sensed backpedaling. “What?”

“He has a client staying there. I gotta go. See ya.”

Andie looked at her phone, confused. Theo had clearly just committed a slip of the tongue of some sort. Calling a hotel probably wasn’t a lead she would have followed if Theo hadn’t acted so weird. She pulled up the number for Hotel San Pietro, dialed it, and connected to the front desk.

“Hello, this may sound like a strange request, but I’m trying to reach Mr. Jack Swyteck. I understand that he has a client staying at your hotel.”

“Yes, actually he paid for the room.”

“He did? Is he there now?”

“I believe so. He went back to her room a couple of hours ago. I haven’t seen him come out.”

Her? Andie suddenly felt numb. “Does…she have a name?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give out that information. Would you like me to put your call through to the room?”

“No!” she said, her tone way too sharp. It was suddenly difficult to breathe, and she struggled to get the words out. “I mean, that won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

Andie closed her flip phone and laid it on the table. Her hand started to shake, and she suddenly had the same sick feeling that she thought she had left behind with her ex-fiance in Seattle. The pit in her stomach was widening, and part of her wished that she could just fall into it and disappear forever.

“Will it be just you this evening, miss?” the waiter asked.

She looked off toward the traffic on Miracle Mile. “Yes,” she said. “I guess it is just me.”

For the second time in one day, Jack’s hands were tied with electrical cord. Sofia’s were bound in the same way, which left no working lamps in the hotel room. Mika was reclining comfortably on the bed, shoes off, basked in the colorful glow of the flat-screen television on the wall. His gun rested within his reach on the nightstand. Jack and Sofia were sitting side by side on the floor near the closet, their backs against the silk wallpaper.

It had been at least two hours since Vladimir had left with the Greek. Jack had no idea what kind of debt Demetri owed the Russian mob, but he had no hope that Demetri would somehow pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with the money. Bottom line: Jack had about twenty-two hours to figure out how to stop Mika from putting a bullet in his head.

“Gooooooooooooooooal!” said Mika.

A soccer game was playing on Spanish-language television, and Mika was joining the sportscaster in the universal language of celebration.

Mika rolled off the bed and grabbed his gun. Then he picked up the complimentary copy of City Beautiful magazine and started toward the bathroom.

“I make shit now,” said Mika.

“Knock yourself out,” said Jack.

Mika pointed at Jack with his gun. “You move, you shit. Understand?”

Jack could have explained that “shit” could be either a noun or a verb, but he assumed he meant the noun. “Understood,” said Jack.

“Good.”

Mika thumbed through his magazine, went into the bathroom, and closed the door almost all the way, leaving it open just a crack.

The televised soccer game played on, and the world suddenly felt surreal to Jack. A half Cuban man and a Sicilian woman held captive in a Coral Gables hotel room. A Mexican sportscaster calling Brazil versus Argentina on the television. A Russian mobster “making shit” in the bathroom. All they needed to complete the quintessential Miami moment was a disgraced politician and a dead body-and in a matter of hours, the Greek would probably be that body.

“He doesn’t learn,” Sofia said, speaking softly so that Mika would not overhear.

“Who doesn’t learn?”

“Demetri. Whether it’s the casino, the track, or whatever business they asked him to run, he always thinks he can take a little extra for himself.”

“Is that what happened with the Russians?”

“Of course. And before that it was the Sicilians.” She shook her head. “He never learns.”

“He told me it was the Mafia looking for you.”

“Yes,” she said. “But it all goes back to Demetri.”

“How do you mean?”

She breathed a sigh, as if not sure where to begin.

“You can tell me,” said Jack. “I can’t get us out of this mess if I don’t know the players.”

She hesitated, but only for a moment longer. “I know of three times for sure. This is the latest. The last time was with the Sicilians.”

“When?”

“Right before the election.”

“President Keyes’ election?”

Sofia nodded. “They were going to kill Demetri. But he talked himself out of it.”

“How?”

“Demetri gave them the power to control him.”

“To control the president?”

“Yes. He told them the truth about Daniel Keyes.”

“Which is what?”

She looked Jack in the eye but said nothing. It was clear that she had no intention of telling him.

Jack said, “How do you know about this?”

“Demetri told me when he came to see me last week.”

“Demetri also says that he told you the secret about Keyes.”

Sofia didn’t answer.

A shout came from the bathroom: “Quiet out there!”

Sofia waited a moment, then lowered her voice. “There is more history,” she whispered. “It was in Cyprus. We were young, married less than a year.”

She stopped, as if reluctant to continue.

“It’s all right,” said Jack. “You can tell me.”

Jack listened as she described that night in their apartment. The noise outside that woke them. Demetri naked and leaping from the bed. The pounding on the door, and their panicked good-bye before the door burst open, the armed men rushed in, and Demetri escaped out the window.

“One of the men stayed with me,” she said. “When the others finally came back, they told me they had thrown Demetri off the roof. I thought he was dead.”

“So did they, I’m sure.”

Sofia nodded.

“Then what happened?” said Jack.

“When?”

“After the men came back to your room and told you about Demetri. What happened?”

She shifted uncomfortably, and Jack could read her body language. He’d seen it in many clients before. It was something Sofia clearly didn’t want to talk about.

“There were five of them,” she said. “Do you really want to know?”

“Only if you want to talk about it.”

“I’ve never actually told this to anyone.”

“You don’t have to. Really, it’s okay.”

“No. I want you to know the truth.”

The Greek stared at the telephone on the table.

“Go on, use it,” said Vladimir. “Make your big money phone call.”

They were in a conference room at a ground-floor office suite somewhere in North Miami Beach. The Venetian blinds on the picture window were shut, but a few slats were twisted and out of place, offering Demetri a glimpse of the courtyard and the parking lot beyond. It was impossible to tell what kind of business had once been conducted in this place. The cubicles outside the conference room were vacant. Employees were nowhere to be found, and there were no computer terminals, telephones, office supplies, or other signs of an active workplace. Some desks didn’t even have chairs. The Greek figured that it was the ghostly remains of a Mafya -controlled boiler-room operation. “Gemstones” was his guess. In a month’s time from a place like this, they could have phone-blitzed the over-seventy population in North Miami and sold five thousand dollars’ worth of colored glass for over a million bucks. The Greek had run similar operations over the years. Only about one time out of a hundred did the bosses catch him stealing from them.