Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
And now he had to run.
There was no way to call off what he started when he called Isaac Kane into his office.
He phoned Isaac on the only number he had. He left messages until the voice mail was full.
Joe Bob didn’t know what Isaac had done that brought those men into his home. He only asked Isaac to find his daughter. He never asked how that would be accomplished. It hadn’t mattered to Joe Bob then. It sure as shit mattered now.
The men who came to see him knew why Isaac was in Florida. They knew about Jenna. They knew where she was. They knew what happened to her. They were the ones Isaac went to find. They offered him no solace, no answers, no hope of ever seeing Jenna again. All they did was promise that they would return if the search for Jenna continued.
That scared him. With the fright came shame. A father’s shame at his own helplessness to help his child. A man couldn’t turn from his flesh and blood to save his own skin. No man does that.
He raised his face to the spray and let the water wash his tears away then stood up and turned off the taps.
Joe Bob made up his mind. He wasn’t running and he wasn’t calling off what he’d started even if he could. Fuck these assholes. He’d unleashed Isaac Kane on them and they’d have to deal with that. He hadn’t started this shit. They had. Whatever kind of hell Kane was raising down in Florida, they’d called it down on themselves.
Sometimes doing nothing at all is the best revenge.
It was a matter of trust, Dr. Jordan Roth told himself as he sat gagged with wrists duct taped to the hanging bar of a closet in room twenty-seven of the Golden Chariot Motor Lodge.
He thought he had an understanding with the two men who took him from the shelter of his old life and into a world of movement and chaos. They were accomplices now. He had cooperated with them willingly and with no resistance. But they insisted on treating him like a captive, like a child, still.
Something made them stop their pharmaceutical shopping spree. They quickly found a motel where they could pull their car directly up to the room. The place was run down, a hideous remnant of the ’50s. Loud music was playing from one of the rooms that was being used to house a party. They’d deposited him here in the closet and left.
His hands were tingling from blood loss. He tried shifting in the tight confines of the closet but found no relief. His legs were tired. His feet hurt from standing. But if he relaxed then his weight pulled the tape tight on his wrists and brought new pain.
The music and shouting and breaking glass stopped after a few hours. A strip of light beneath the closet door turned from watery blue to muted white as the sun filtered through the blinds over the windows in the bedroom outside.
A knock at the door followed by another. The jangle of a key ring, the turning of a lock. Someone was in the room and it wasn’t his captors. Lights were turned on outlining the closet door in a corona of yellow radiance. Water ran in the bathroom. A vacuum cleaner droned. A shadow grew to block the strip of light on the floor. The closet door swung open.
A diminutive woman in an over-sized smock raised her eyebrows in mild shock. She was a Latina with almond eyes that regarded him without interest. He made mewling noises at her through the tape. Her only response was a sad shake of her head.
She reached up past him to retrieve a pair of fresh toilet paper rolls from the shelf above his head. After a prim nod she turned away and shut the door.
The wheels of the vacuum cleaner squeaked away. The lights went out. The door closed and the lock snapped back in place.
He was alone again.
The doctor was awakened by noises from the room. The door opened and the big man was there. Jordan was cut free. They had McDonald’s breakfast takeout. He drank two cups of orange juice and wolfed down a greasy egg and bacon sandwich.
“Take a shower. We are leaving here,” the younger one with the pop star looks and predator eyes said when they were done eating.
The two men were taking him with them. It sounded like a long drive ahead.
They’d decided to keep him. He rushed to the bathroom to take his shower. The days ahead held adventures for him unimagined.
An explosion at a pawnshop in Seffner, a blue collar/?no collar town south of Tampa, reduced the building to a scorched shell. It went boom at three in the morning. A standalone store, the only outside damage was a spray of glass on the street before it.
The first suspect was a gas explosion. One of the firemen hosing down the smoldering wreckage called bullshit on that. He’d done three deployments in Iraq and knew the stink of discharged C-4 when he smelled it. Someone was pissed at somebody and letting them know it.
Just in case that somebody missed the point, a second pawn shop, this one in Port Richey north of Tampa exploded. Another standalone blasted hollow within twenty minutes of the first explosion.
The following morning, Symon Kharchenko received a FedEx package addressed to him at his condo. Inside was a cellphone with a note on a Post-It in marker.
CALL ME.
Symon hit send.
“Yeah.” A male voice. An American.
“You have balls, my friend. I tell you that,” Symon said. He paced the great room of the condo.
“You know what I want. Give me the girl and this ends.”
“This is never going to end. Not for you. We know who you are.”
“And I know who you are, Kharchenko. I know what you have. I know how to take it away.”
“You have already taken my sons.”
“Give me the girl and this ends. Keep this phone so you can tell me when you have her.”
“You give me orders? Tell me what to do? Fuck your mother!” This last was shouted in Ukrainian as Symon strode out onto his balcony and sent the phone flying out into space to fall into the water of the marina many stories below.
It was still early morning. He was dressed in a silk robe only. His own house phone rang. He snatched it from his dresser. It was Soshi with the latest he’d heard. The Georgian had special contacts inside the county sheriff departments where the two pawnshops once stood. Both were brought down by strategically placed charges. Officially the motive was robbery and the blasts were meant to cover any evidence.
“Robbery?” Symon said.
“The under counter safes are both gone. Torn out and carried away,” Soshi said.
Together over a million dollars in cash at least.
Both pawnshops were money laundries for the Vor. It was easy to move ill-gotten cash through a shop that bought and sold items using cash; items that were all aftermarket. The meticulously kept sales records of each store were almost entirely fiction. On paper they were going concerns. In reality the only car on the lots most days belonged to each shop’s manager.
They were separately owned through two different holding companies with no connection to one another. Even the managers, and paper-only owners, of each shop had no idea their businesses were connected in any way. This Isaac Kane knew they were connected and struck at them to send a message. He knew more about the brotherhood’s operations than they knew about him.
“He has no family but a young daughter and she has disappeared,” Symon said.
“The man is alone? What man is alone?” Soshi said.