To start from the beginning go here.
If Mitnick had meant to distract me with his talk, it had worked. He stopped me in the shadow the cathedral. I glanced around to realize he had walked us to a secluded patch of the church’s square, surrounded by the building and its peripheral trees, preventing outside view. Whip and Brick formed an orbit to keep the tourists away. “So, tell me,” Mitnick took a step away and spun to me expectantly, “what was the Frenchman’s dirty laundry?”
Listening to Mitnick justify his parasitic existence almost made me glad to tell him lies. I quickly decided to start off with the real bad news. “Mikhail’s dead.”
I don’t know what reaction I was expecting from this, but Mitnick didn’t appear to be overly distraught. Concerned might have more accurately described his furrowed brow. He only said, “That is disappointing.” He scratched his beard and then pulled his hand from that neatly-trimmed nest to point a finger at me. “Did you kill him?”
“No.” With no truth to anchor that lie to I only tried to keep a straight face and my heartbeat under control. I thought about adding other protests of the “why would I” variety, but instead went with misdirection. “The Frenchman killed him.”
Mitnick put his forehead in the space between his thumb and forefinger, hiding his expression as he uttered a quiet curse. When it came out again he looked like he might ask me how I could have forgotten the milk I promised to pick up from the store. Instead he said, “Tell me everything.”
I put my hands back in the trench coat’s pockets. “I got word that the three Idiots might work for Sartre.”
Mitnick recalled Max and his friends with a surprising readiness, but he still asked for some clarification. “The three Idiots that went after you for beating up their Corsican friend?”
I thought about saying, “You mean the ones you sicced on me?” Instead I just replied, “Yeah.”
Mitnick turned his gaze to the cerulean blue of the sky. “What a small world.”
“They hang out a place called The Factory. They do some pimping and dealing there.” I glanced around at Whip and Brick and the others floating around us. “I think your men may know it.”
Eyes still skyward, Mitnick shrugged. “That is not unlikely.” He sounded like a father overly tolerant of bad behavior.
To confirm my suspicion, I added, “Mikhail knew the place. He took us straight there.”
Mitnick brought his eyes to me, smile replaced with a bit of confusion. “Why did you need a car for this?”
“In case, we needed to,” I put my forefinger to my temple, “take them somewhere.” Mitnick chuckled a bit, gesturing for me to go on. “So we leaned on them and they gave up a location. A service station near Cemetery Hill. Said that Sartre used it as a stash house.”
“Stash house?”
“A place to hide things.”
Another nod from Mitnick and I continued. “So we went there. Mikhail scared off the attendant. And in the back, we found a freezer. A big one.” Pause for dramatic effect. Mitnick’s eyes urged me on. “It had a couple of corpses in it. One of them had a passport stuffed in its pocket. With Cyrillic words on it.”
That got his attention. “What country was it from?”
“I don’t know.” I may have known that at some point but I didn’t now.
Mitnick’s eyes sharpened with an interest that I hadn’t seen before. “Was it red? Blue?”
To make things more confusing I said, “I thought it might have been green.” I shrugged. “It was dark.”
Nodding, he considered this, then asked, “What happened then?”
“Some of Sartre’s men showed up. They were ready for trouble. Things got pretty rough pretty fast.” I shrugged, feeling more than just the tightness in the trench coat. “I guess the Idiots tipped them off.”
“And they killed Mikhail?” Mitnick emphasized the pronoun in his sentence.
I stopped and gave that some honest thought, contorting my face like a man trying his best to remember what had happen in the chaos of combat. After wrestling with that I answered, “I don’t know. We got separated. Mikhail had the keys to the car, so I ran.”
Mitnick cocked his head so he was appraising me with one eye. “So you do not know that he is dead?”
I decided I wouldn’t. I nodded to concede the point. “No, I guess I don’t.”
Mitnick smiled like a doctor trying to comfort a patient with a terminal diagnosis. “Ah, well, then he may still show up. Mikhail is,” he paused, and for a moment I thought he was going to say, ‘cockroach.’ Instead he continued with, “a hardy sort. Perhaps he went somewhere to lick his wounds.”
I hoped it might take the authorities awhile to identify Mikhail. If they were able to at all. That led me to, “Well, I got away. So maybe he did.”
“Indeed.” Mitnick patted me on the arm, his touch surprisingly light. “I’m glad that he was of help to you. Mikhail can be unpredictable.”
After everything, I couldn’t disagree with that. It made me wonder why he sent him with the car. Instead I asked, “Then why do you keep him around?”
“Hmmm?” He let out the long interrogative until he shook his head with an internal conclusion. “No, you misunderstand, he is not one of my men. He is merely a guest here. He volunteered to…what do you say? Help around the house.”
I blinked, trying to process this new bit of information, somehow my lack of surprise making it more difficult. “He sounds – very proactive.”
Mitnick grinned at me. “Much like you.” There was something in his expression that made me wonder if me and Mikhail trying to kill each other was a part of the plan all along. Or maybe he just sent Mikhail with the car in order to get him out of his hair for awhile.
Trying to avoid that slippery slope of paranoia I replied, “It’s the American way.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what Mikhail’s excuse is.” A small part of me sighed in relief that I unintentionally referred to him in the present tense.
To read the next chapter, go here.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
To read a polished and published prequel to this story go here.
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