The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson Page 0,54
between them, if not an alliance. Had he come across something in his father’s files to change that? Or, like a bored zoo animal, had he simply lost interest?
“Look, I’ve told you what I know, all right? I run a strip club. I ain’t in the Life. Those days died with my pops.” Disappointment flashed across Ray’s gaze, erased with the next strobe of light and forgotten in the following pulsing beat.
“You’re right,” Grif said, blowing out a breath. Ray’s father had been the most influential, feared mobster in this town when feared, influential mobsters were damned near celebrities. And Ray? Well . . . Ray was Ray. “It was a long time ago. I’m sorry.”
Looking away, Ray jerked one shoulder, but Grif could see he was still steamed.
“How ’bout these folks, then?” Changing the subject, he reached into his pocket. “Know them?”
“Shit, man.” Ray glanced down, then quickly away. “Why you asking me about the Kolyadenkos?”
“A case I’m working on. A new one,” he clarified, and jerked his head at the couple in the photo. Ray’s dad was gone, but there was always someone to take a mobster’s place. “We think they’re getting kids hooked on this new drug, but we don’t know why or how.”
Ray picked up the photo, then whistled quietly under his breath. “Not surprised. They call her the Viper, you know? On account that she’s so deadly.”
Grif blinked a few times, feeling suddenly like he was playing catch-up. “She?”
“Yeah, man . . . wait.” He chuckled, then allowed the sound to bloom into a full, rounded laugh. “You think this guy, Sergei, is running the action? Oh, man . . . you’re as out of the loop as the heat.”
“You mean . . . Yulyia?” Grif frowned, looked at the photo again, anew, trying to wrap his mind around this new information. “She took over when her husband got sick?”
Ray reached for his beer. “That was just an excuse to amp up the action. She’s always run that crew, though up until recently only those close to the Kolyadenkos knew it. She’s gotten bolder lately, though. Like I said, striking fast, hard. Remember that killing atop the tower last year?”
“Yes,” Grif lied.
“They say that was the Viper. Pinned the guy up there and let him spin—or ordered it. Sergei is just a front. He looks every bit the Russian general, but make no mistake. Mrs. K calls the shots.”
Grif sat silent for a bit, drinking his beer, reordering his thoughts.
“I thought you were out of the loop, Ray,” he finally said. “How do you know all this?”
“ ’Cause the only way to stay out of the loop is to know where not to step.” He pointed at Grif. “Something you obviously haven’t learned.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Besides, a babe like that comes on the scene, everyone notes it.”
Grif looked around the room at all the girls nobody really noted. Sidelong, he glanced back at Ray. “Marco Baptista note it?”
Ray’s face shuttered the same way it had when Grif had asked about his own dark past. “No habla Español, man.”
“C’mon. You can’t stay out of the loop, and not know this guy, Ray.”
“Yeah, I know him.” Ray jerked his chin. “I know enough not to talk about him.”
Grif just waited.
Pulling a face, Ray cursed. It took another minute after that, but he finally looked at Grif. “There is a story.”
Grif settled back. “I like stories.”
And Ray had a doozy. It went back eight years, though that didn’t dilute the telling. There was a gorgeous woman involved, and worlds were upended because of her. Not a new story, no, but in this telling it was Marco Baptista’s world that got the shake, right when he was running a drug operation to rival the kingpins of old.
There wasn’t a woman Baptista couldn’t bag, Ray said, either by enticement or by force, though one look at the long-limbed blonde who’d stridden in to buy a cache of hash, and he wanted her to come to him by her own neediness and will. On her knees, he said. Begging and desperate, as he deserved.
“That’s how Yulyia Kolyadenko got into the neighborhood.” Ray leaned forward, relishing the telling despite himself. “She sat across from Baptista in his own restaurant, eating Cuban pork and drinking rum he’d smuggled from the homeland, and got him to talk.”
Yulyia learned who the players were in Vegas, which cops to press on vice, and what attorneys and judges turned a blind eye in exchange for a pocketful of green.