One Bad Job Page 2

  The bad thing about that job was Jay-Bee got pinched. I guess the consolation prize for him was that he’d finally been allowed to die, and he’d been a stand-up guy, never dropping any of our names. It probably wasn’t a consolation to the four saps that got zapped thanks to Jay-Bee name-dropping them, but he was a good guy, and he protected us. The cartel never found their money or dope, but after whacking five gringos and displaying their heads on open air cafe tables all around Nuevo Laredo, they felt like they’d sent the message:

  You got us this time, pendejos, but these gringos, it took them three months to die. You think about that.

  The comical Spanish accent I heard in my head at my brain’s interpretation of the news was countered by the cold fear that made my balls try to crawl up into my asshole when I saw the pictures of Jay-Bee’s head sitting on a cafe table. A cafe that looked exactly like the kind of place a tourist might take his family, if the tourist was stupid enough to vacation in a place like Nuevo Laredo, where the cartels were more powerful than the police and the national army combined.

  Once we’d burned through the cash from selling the dope, and it was a lot of dope, we moved on to more of the same. Jobs that would last us six months to a year before we’d have to work again, which meant six months to a year on top of that before we’d actually make the score. Dave and I were the right kind of paranoid. We planned our jobs like Kasparov planned his next sixty-four chess moves. We couldn’t plan for everything, but in the months leading up to the job, we’d think of as many things as possible that could and probably would go wrong, and try to come up with solutions.

  Sometimes the solutions would be to plan an extra getaway route, or have someone start a fire a few blocks away for a diversion, but sometimes there were so many potential problems that to counter all possibilities, each of us would have to be strapped down with two hundred pounds of gear, with more on a cart, and three different getaway cars. On those jobs, we simply kept our wits about us and weathered the constant crawling sensation across our skin of the anticipation that everything was about to blow up in our faces. It never did, because we’re professionals. Except today. We were as professional as any legendary crew had ever been, less than forty seconds on the clock once the bullets started flying until Kenyon pulled away from the curb, and still shit blew up in our faces. Gally was dead.

  So were four Russians, but who gave a shit about those assholes? They all probably deserved it. All the rumors about how they brought in underage Russian and Eastern European girls to work in underground brothels? That was all true. I hated that shit, but Dave was especially passionate about wanting to infiltrate each one we could find and kill every Russian (and any pedos that happened to pick that unlucky day to fuck fifteen year old girls), and free every poor teenager trapped inside. I was of the same mind, but both of us knew that no matter how much we planned, we might as well assault Ft. Hood with plastic spoons.

  Besides, I wasn’t the killer that David Pearson was. He’d been dropped into Iraq with his Airborne mates during the first Gulf War, and had spent some time doing real mercenary shit in the Congo after. By the time 9/11 and Afghanistan rolled around, he’d already been branded a felon, and he’d never have passed the drug test anyway. But he would have been one hell of a soldier in a free fire zone like Iraq or Afghanistan. I don’t know how many notches were on his gun just here in Texas, but it was a lot.

  The Russian I’d aced was number five in my lifetime body count. I never felt good about it, but I didn’t feel too guilty for too long because of the type of people that they’d been. I couldn’t find it in my heart to feel bad that I’d sent a drug dealer or pimp or a cartel thug off to meet his maker.

  I mean, I did, but not like if I’d killed a kid or a woman. Hell, just an innocent bystander. I’d always told myself that in each situation, it had been me or him, and as long as I still had my wits about me, it would always be me that lived. So far, that philosophy, or lie, whatever it was that I made myself believe, it had worked. Today would be no different, especially when I thought of what they would have done to Gally or any of us if we’d been unsuccessful.

  ***

  Let me tell you about these Russian assholes, who most assuredly aren’t innocent bystanders. David, Gally, Kenyon, and I had been planning this job for almost two years. We’d always avoided the big syndicates as too risky, with too many fingers in too many pies. Translation: They knew cops and informants on the street, and it was only a matter of time before they found you. And your family. And your family’s family.

  We held up a mid-level dealer one night, a mouthy Russian punk driving a Beamer, listening to that Eurotrash shit at full volume like an idiot, three thousand Dilaudid pills and ten thousand Hydrocodone tabs bundled up in the back seat. Dave, not liking the kid’s smartass replies, and me, not liking the annoying way the kid said English words with his goddamn Russian accent, gave him a good working over.

  I guess he thought we were going to kill him, and launched into a jumbled tale of a huge money laundering operation that was run by Anatoli Baryshev, the regional head of the Dolgoprudninskaya. The Dolgos were the second largest crime organization in Russia, and had a major presence here in Houston. Something about working with the cartels across the border, which was weird, since the Russians typically hated everyone, especially everyone with dark skin.

  After reports of some of the fighting in the streets of Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey, Matamoros, and Ciudad Juarez between rival cartels where fully automatic AK-47’s, grenades, and Russian RPG’s had been used, it wasn’t so weird. Both sides were getting a major cut of something or other, and the Zaragoza cartel was quickly consolidating power in northern Mexico. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together if you had a pulse.

  This kid, he spewed shit like this for almost an hour. It became a joke for Dave and I, and even Gally as well, as we’d think up some new, terrible torture that we’d threaten the kid with, and he’d belt out another tune detailing some operation or other that Baryshev either outright ran, or had a major hand in. Near the end, one of the kid’s tales caught our attention. We coaxed it out of him, then Dave took him out into the desert and shot him in the head, reminding us that after all the kid had spilled, we’d eventually get a visit from an Ivan or two if we let him go.

  Anatoli Baryshev was the head of the Dolgoprudninskaya in eastern Texas, but the real power was Gennady Konovalov. Gennady was a rich Texan-Russian, as he liked to call himself, who wanted to make his state a better place to live for all. Konovalov donated a shitload of money to all kinds of charities and historical preservations and such. He was such a friend to Houston that he’d received not one, not two, but three keys to the city in his lifetime. He was the classic American immigrant success story.

  Gennady, his father Fyodor Konovalov, and his mother Dunya, had defected to the West in 1974 after a courageous escape across the Berlin Wall. A photographer who regularly sat twelve stories up in an apartment building next to the wall and watched for just this sort of thing had captured the classic image of Fyodor handing his little Gennady up to Dunya at the top. That picture ended up being the cover of Life Magazine back when it was still around.

  America granted them political asylum and moved them to the Houston area, where Fyodor was visited twice a week, until the Berlin Wall fell, by CIA handlers. Fyodor had been a high-ranking member in the Party back in Moscow. In Houston, he was a small time jewelry craftsman, the career he’d always wanted and had persuaded the State Department to help him get started in.

  But what no one other than Dunya knew, and later when Gennady was old enough to carry on the family business, was that Fyodor was a KGB plant, a double agent. He’d been allowed to “escape” over the wall, and had even engineered the whole thing to make sure the photographer that always stationed himself in the Reinsdorf Apartments on the western side of the wall would be able to capture the dramatic struggle to get over the wall before being cut down by the .50cal machine guns in the guard towers.


  What the KGB didn’t know, was that Fyodor Konovalov had become a quickly rising star within the Dolgoprudninskaya syndicate, a new criminal operation that had started as a KGB front and had quickly morphed far beyond even the reach of the Directorate. The Dolgos quietly excluded or forced out the KGB until there were none left, then formed a plan to set up shop in America, where the real money was.

  Fyodor’s desire to be a jewelry craftsman seemed like a quaint hobby to the CIA handlers that helped set everything up for the Konovalovs in Houston. It had actually been a plan in the making for almost a decade. It was a perfect front because of the high value items that moved in and out of the small jewelry shop, and as the Dolgos became more established, the business expanded.

  By the time Gennady took it over, the “Timeless Jewels” chain had a store in every mall in eastern and central Texas, with a few high-end luxury boutique shops in downtown Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, and the company’s yearly income was in the tens of millions of dollars. The more money the business made, the easier it was to launder larger and larger amounts of cash that came in from the shadow operations.

  Soon enough, the major players in the Southwest were laundering their money through Konovalov’s jewelry stores. Even the rival Solntsevskaya syndicate was willing to pay the fee to launder money through Gennady’s empire. The feature that made Timeless Jewels so popular was the fact that it was almost entirely legitimate. Not just legitimate, but it actually made Gennady and the Dolgos even more money.

  See, the Dolgos, back when they planned all of this out, had set up shop in a few places in Africa. It was easy when your Russian government pals were supplying the various strongmen with tanks, planes, and AK-47’s. They’d scheme with local warlords to basically enslave local populations to work in the precious metals and diamond pits. Then they’d take the raw materials and make fine jewelry. The jewelry would get shipped to Western Europe, Brussels or Paris were popular locations, where another shell company that the Dolgos owned had jewelry wholesale operations.

  The international buyers from Timeless Jewels would fly to Europe and spend a few days telling the wholesalers how much to box up and send. The jewelry would enter the country, with more than a few import agreements that were made in backrooms after a few palms had been greased, making this part a breeze. The goods would be delivered to the Timeless Jewels distribution center, where it was cataloged, photographed, and appraised by the insurance companies. Once it left the distribution warehouse, it was sent to the various stores around Texas, where it was “sold” to “customers” that were in on the scheme.

  The supposed sale money was really just drug money, prostitution money, or money from many other operations that various criminal elements had going on. The jewelry would be documented, the purchaser’s insurance company notified, who would send an agent out to verify the item and its value. Once all of that was taken care of, six months, a year, sometimes longer, a burglar would break in and “steal” the “victim’s” expensive jewelry. The victims would file a police report first, then an insurance claim.

  In reality, once the ring or necklace or whatever it was had been verified by the insurance company and the policy written, the item would go back to the jewelry store, and when enough pieces came back, they were boxed up and shipped back to Timeless Jewels’ warehouse. Every other month, the jewelry was consolidated down to a single box and smuggled out of the country, back to Africa, where it was easy to bypass customs if the local warlords controlling the airstrips were paid enough to look the other way. Once back in Africa, the jewelry would be disassembled, smelted down, and new items would be created so the insurance companies wouldn’t become suspicious.

  When the business of laundering money became too big for even Timeless Jewels to handle, Gennady panicked, paranoid that the Feds were going to show up any moment and haul him to federal prison. Then along came the internet, and Gennady Konovalov’s prayers had been answered. With the internet and a cheap shopping cart page, he could sell far more jewelry, and more importantly, it could be spread all over the country.

  Dolgo members in hundreds of cities recruited husbands, wives, single men and women, persons of all races and religions, to buy the expensive pieces with Dolgo money, go through the process of making everything legit, then allowed their homes to be burglarized in the future. For the lackey, it was an easy month’s work for a cool twenty thousand in cash and usually a very small percentage of the insurance money.

  The Dolgos tended to recruit from the affluent but troubled sectors. Men with gambling problems, women with addictions, married couples with kids in rehab or college were the types that would gladly do a little insurance fraud to make an easy twenty grand. Of course, the oft-spoken threat of genealogical extermination helped procure agreements, guaranteeing both discretion and silence.

  Konovalov’s crews, they made bank. They got a 20% cut right off the top, excluding the taxes that the cities, the counties, the Great State of Texas, and the United States government extracted. The clients had to pay the tax, but they were more than willing to pay a little extra to launder money that had an almost airtight legitimacy about it.

  To the Russians, taxes were just another shakedown, something they were intimately familiar with. Since they passed the tax on to the client and still made their cut, it was worth it to give the government mafias a piece of the action to guarantee that none of the government mafias ever sent a snooping dog in their direction. After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, laundering money became extremely chancy, so having a legit pipeline to run it through made the process worth it.

  It was an unbelievable, impossibly large, extraordinarily complex operation, and it was based right here in Houston. And this kid, this annoying little fucker who never shut up even after we gagged him so we could talk about it (before Dave decided to shut him up permanently), he walked us right through it as if he’d helped draw up the plans.

  His uncle was a brother-in-law to Gennady, and like all worthless in-laws, he got drunk and blabbed to the kid and the kid’s brother every chance he got. The uncle was so proud of being part of such a smooth, secret operation, that he had to tell someone. More likely, though the kid didn’t say it, but Dave and I knew how Russians were, the uncle couldn’t help bragging to them, to show them that he was the bigshot, that they were little piles of shit to be stepped in. These fuckin’ Russians loved to tell each other how powerful, how important, how intelligent they were, as if they were psyching themselves up for the big game or something.

  The kid had been so afraid for his life that he thought it would get him a pass to give us the most sacred of information. I felt bad for the kid, but he played the game, and he knew the rules. It helped that I didn’t have to dirty my hands, nor even be a witness. Dave was a homicidal maniac, but he knew that while I was hard, I wasn’t that hard. It was just one more reason I hated him, yet loved him like a brother. There was no one I was more afraid of, and yet no one I’d rather have watching my back when shit went down.

  ***

  I put the briefcase on the coffee table, the duffel next to it. I grabbed Tanya by the hips and pulled her down to the sectional with me. She handed me a joint and a lighter, and gave me a wink before getting up and going into the kitchen to get us something to drink. Kenyon sat down in the only chair, a bottle of homemade beer already sweating in his hand. I heard a toilet flush, then Dave came back into the living room and took a seat to my left.

  I watched him stare at Tanya the whole time she was in the kitchen, even all the way back to the sectional, but I said nothing. I was sure part of his hate for her was that she’d never let him talk her into sleeping with him. Dave and I had fought a few years ago after he’d tried to talk her into a blowjob and decided he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d tried a few more times over the years, but he’d learned how far he could push it, and kept it just behind that line.

  “Open that shit up, Ali Baba,” he said after Tanya sat back down.

>   I reached out and opened the duffel, then turned it upside down. Stacks of hundred dollar bills fell out along with a bundle of strange papers in a foreign language.

  “Holy shit,” Kenyon said at the sight of the money.

  “Holy shit is right!” Dave exclaimed, picking up the papers. “Do you know what these are?”

  “No clue,” I said, fanning a stack of bills next to Tanya’s face to make a breeze.

  “These are government bearer bonds,” he said, thumbing through them. “Germany, France, Belgium...” His voice trailed off as he flipped through another stack.

  “English, motherfucker,” Kenyon said in his best Samuel L. Jackson imitation.

  “Okay,” Dave said, looking up, “a bearer bond is like an IOU. Like a government bond. Except they’re anonymous. There’s no registration required. Bearer bonds are worthless, for the most part, since if the company that issues them goes kaput, there’s no one to collect the IOU from. On the other hand, government bonds, especially from first world countries like these are from, are always payable.”

  “So how much?” Kenyon asked, Dave’s explanation of Wall Street shit visibly boring him.

  “Looks like half a million dollars’ worth.”

  “No shit?” I said, putting out my hand.

  He laid a stack in my palm and I thumbed through them. They were all in languages I wasn’t fluent in. I had no real idea what the bonds were or how such a thing worked, but if Dave did, it was as good as getting paid. The fact that he knew what they were meant his brain had already begun grinding away, thinking of the different contacts he had that could cash them in.

  “Yeah. See, the USA, they know this kind of shit is like the Easy Button for money laundering, so they made some laws back in the seventies and eighties that pretty much killed the bearer bond market. Here. But not in Europe and other places. Not these ones, anyway.”