me—I’ve never killed someone not in the life. Alexei never killed the girls who slept with the wrong mobster. He relocated them to a different state, but he didn’t kill them for that. I’ve never killed a witness ’cause they saw too much. Ziggy’s plan was to go in like a random shooter, and Alexei, God, he was so tired of all Ziggy’s shit. The heart went out of him when he realized Ziggy had killed James Cosgrove. It was like he knew he’d gotten in bed with the devil, and he was just waiting for the devil to fuck him to death and get it over with. He gave that order and I… I had to do something or I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it, and the next person on Ziggy’s list to kill would be me.”
There was silence in the room then, and Ellery tried a little harder to hate Avi Kovacs and failed. He wasn’t a good man—would never be a good man—but he hadn’t been pure unadulterated evil either.
“Why’d Ziggy kill James Cosgrove?” Ellery asked. “Was it because he was asking Dima to back off?”
Avi’s expression grew haunted. “Yes. The kid was going to his uncle to help get Townsend out of jail. Ziggy was begging for Jimmy to wait because he wasn’t ready for the takeover yet. He had a few guys on his side and a couple of Alexei’s guys ready to come up. He’d had a football coach working for him for the last two years to help him get contacts at the school for girls and drugs, but things weren’t quite in place. So he… he killed Dima’s nephew, which was too fucking bad because he wasn’t a bad kid. Dima had tried to keep him out of the business. That’s why he changed the last name. So Dima was all fucking ripped up about it, and Ziggy pinned it on the Dobrevk kid, thinking it would be easy to take him out. Who was going to care about an immigrant kid, right?”
“We did,” Jackson said. “We cared for the immigrant kid, and the Black kid, and the dead guy named No Neck who bled out on the laundry room floor.”
Avi nodded again. “Yeah. I figured as much when you guys asked if you could come talk to me.”
“So why did you agree?” Ellery asked, but he figured he knew what was coming.
Avi looked at him and shrugged. “My brother’s dead. Most of his contacts are in the wind. I got no reason to go home and nothing to stay here for, but I don’t want to be a snitch. Ziggy’s dead. Dietrich and Karina are fuck knows where, and I just told you everything I know about them for free. I got my own money in an account that’s got nothing to do with the mob. All I want is for you to plead me out and let me do my twenty-five years someplace nowhere near Sacramento or Vegas. Let me serve my time in fuckin’ Washington or Colorado or something. Let me close my eyes and pretend I was born someplace else.”
Ellery’s eyebrows went up, and for a moment, he thought of saying no. But he had a better idea.
“San Quentin?” he asked. “It’s on an island near the ocean, if that helps.”
“You can get me something near the ocean?” Avi said, with a sort of wistfulness that actually hurt.
“Can you pay Tage Dobrevk’s and Ty Townsend’s legal fees?” Ellery asked, ignoring the suck of breath through Jackson’s teeth and Henry’s hum of surprise.
“You get me near the ocean and I’d pay Ziggy’s,” Avi said starkly. Then his face relaxed into a sort of smile. “Lucky me, I don’t have to, so I’m glad the fucker’s dead.”
Ellery agreed, and they shook hands on it. Then he told the guards to make the necessary arrangements to allow him to represent Avi Kovacs, and they took their leave.
As they neared the car, the weighty heat of August tapering off a little in the late afternoon, Henry said, “But I thought you were going to do Townsend and Dobrevk for free.”
“I was,” Ellery said. “But don’t tell him that. This way I can keep you and Jackson in vehicles and health insurance for all of the other ‘free’ cases I do.”
Henry smirked, but after they’d gotten into the car, he still had one more question.
“Rivers?”
“Yeah?”
“Did your mother really sell you for a hit of crank?”
Jackson grunted. “She made me