But still, it did involve some career jeopardy.
'Okay,' I told them, 'but I'm not throwing down on this guy unless we have backup.'
'Say no more, Joe Bob. Rowdy and Snitch always deliver.'
Chapter 54
Take the entire top floor of a Century City high-rise; buy every bad Russian painting you can find; stick them in overdone gilt frames, then hire Donald Trump's decorator, and you have a reasonable idea of what the offices of Petrovitch Industries looked like. There was enough nude statuary and crystal swag to decorate every whorehouse in New Orleans.
The receptionist was a beautiful Russian girl with flawless skin, piercing eyes, and a sculpted jaw. She also had a bitchy attitude and a graceful swan neck acceptable for wringing.
I was standing with Danny Dark and Sid Cooper, two detectives from the Financial Crimes Division. They were both carrying thick briefcases with notebook computers inside.
'And this is regarding?' my Russian goddess asked. Only the slightest sound of the Ukraine still remained in her clipped, chilly presentation.
'I will only discuss it with Samoyla himself,' I said. 'And he won't agree to see you unless you first state the nature of your business,' she replied coldly. Ice started to form on the mirror behind her.
I laid my temporary creds down on the marble desk. 'See if you can get Mr. Petrovitch to change his mind so he won't have to take an uncomfortable ride chained to the inside of a big gray bus.'
'Really?' she said, arching plucked eyebrows as if she would really like to see me try that.
I held my ground under the weight of her disapproving stare, but after a second she folded, and deserted her post like an Afghan army regular. On her way past, she reached for my ID and started to leave with it. I grabbed her wrist.
'Where are you going with that?'
'I have to show Mr. Petrovitch.'
'You don't get to take it. You tell him you saw it and then he gets to come and see it for himself. That's the way it works.' I was playing it very ballsy and tough for a guy in a Kmart suit, standing in a lobby surrounded by two million dollars worth of crystal and art. But what the hey. You gotta believe in yourself, as I'm so fond of telling everyone.
After a minute, the receptionist departed and the three of us were left alone to study a huge lobby painting of thousands of Cossacks on horseback charging across a wooded field. Glorious carnage and romantic death.
We waited for almost five silent minutes before the Russian princess returned. 'If you're the one in charge, he'll see only you,' she intoned coldly.
I turned to the financial dicks. 'You guys wait here while I get this guy set up.'
She led me away from Cooper and Dark, down a hallway full of art depicting the Greats. Peter, Ivan, and Alexander. The Russians have produced a lot of Greats. Most of them in braided jackets with warlike personas.
I was ushered through a Russian Barbie section where half a dozen beautiful blonde secretaries, all perfectly groomed with arched backs and jutting breasts typed diligently at computers. I followed my princess into an executive suite that faced the Avenue of the Stars. A Louis XV desk and a high-backed swivel chair covered with expensive gold brocade sat in front of a glass wall overlooking the street twenty stories below.
'He'll be here shortly,' she clipped. Almost no accent this time. I had to really strain to hear it now. She left me standing there and closed the door. After a minute alone, the side door opened and the most frighteningly ugly man I have ever seen walked into the office. His booking picture didn't begin to capture the essence of him. In person, he radiated evil.
Where to begin?
He was a dermatological mess-much more so than I had realized from the photograph. Scar tissue everywhere. I've seen a lot of scars, even have my share, just not ones where the crude stitching so horribly altered what had been there before. All that was left was a hideous mask. He had at the same time, both a ghoulish smile and a frightening scowl. This amazing expression was accomplished because his restitched mouth curved up on one side with a scar that ended in the middle of his left cheek. On the other side, the scowl side, the scar collapsed down from the corner of his mouth to his chin, ending at his destroyed uneven jaw line. It was as if the Riddler had gone into a psychopathic rage, ripped his own mouth wide open, then stitched the mess back together using a staple gun.
He was huge, so those metric measurements now translated to about six-foot-eight and almost three hundred fifty pounds. He had shoulders like a water buffalo and hands the size of anvils. All that was missing were the neck bolts.
'Shto tibe nado? ' he said, in Russian. His voice was a strange whispery squeak from vocal cords wasted in all that carnage.
'Sammy Petrovitch?' I asked, knowing there couldn't be two like this.
'Da?'
'You speak English?' I said, wondering if it was possible that this guy could have been in the U. S. since 'ninety-five and still not speak the language.
'Ya, I speak. Vat is?' he said. It was not that his voice was high, as much as it was a whistling, muted wheeze. I'd never heard anything quite like it.
'I have a subpoena to gather up all of the records for Patriot Petroleum,' I said, holding out the paperwork. He didn't look at it, didn't care about it. But that's okay. Neither did I.
'I also have two financial crimes detectives in the lobby who need access to your computers and all the electronic records and transactions for that same company.'
'We have done nothing,' he squeaked. 'We have rights.'
Time to throw sand in the giant's eyes. 'The only right you have is the right to suck my dick, yakoff.'
His huge, flat brow furrowed. Rage began to climb up his neck and redden his destroyed face.
'Did you hear me, dummy? You're under investigation for running a federal gas tax scam. This subpoena orders you to give my detectives full access to your computers. Then we'll see about getting you and your limp-dick brother, Igor, downtown to answer some more important felony charges.'
The first part of our plan was to insult him. Get him operating on impulse so he'd make a mistake and follow me after I left. It never occurred to me that this guy might decide to just flat out whack me right under the crystal chandelier in his overdecorated antique office. But apparently that's what he planned, because without warning, he started a murderous shuffling advance across the room. That ruptured face became a distorted mask of rage. His scarred lips pulled back in a snarl, exposing teeth, big and square as tombstones.
I don't like giving up ground under any circumstance, but in that instant Sammy Petrovitch had me spooked. I was now close enough to read unchecked insanity in his stone gray eyes. He had at least a hundred fifty pounds and five inches on me, so I started backpedaling until I slammed into a paneled wall and rocked an oil painting. One of the female greats-Catherine, was hanging from a hook in a thousand-dollar gilt frame, looking down her aristocratic nose at me.
Sammy took another shuffle step, then paused, bringing both hands up into some kind of combat strike position, methodically sizing me up, deciding how he was going to annihilate me.
'Back up, asshole,' I commanded. 'You touch me, I'm taking you in for aggravated assault on a police officer.'
It didn't begin to dampen his enthusiasm. He shuffled in closer. His eyes glinted with pre-combat intensity. This wasn't going at all as I planned.
Just then the side door burst open and out of the corner of my eye, I saw another man moving into the office. 'Samoyla! Stoi! Shto ti delaesh? Nyet!' he shouted, as he grabbed Sammy and pulled him back.
I was propped up against the brown paneling next to a disapproving Catherine the Great, who was still swinging wildly from her hook.
'Who are you?' the man demanded. Judging from the expensive suit and the size of his diamonds, it was Iggy.
