Born to Run

Chapter 37

From across the room, Jack counted the small liquor bottles on the nightstand. There were at least a dozen. Mika had gone through the entire minibar stock-brandy, scotch, bourbon, rum, gin, vodka-and stacked the empties into a pyramid.

Jack wondered how much longer Mika would stay awake.

Mika had the look of Miami’s first-generation Mafiya, an insanely arrogant breed that Jack had prosecuted during his brief stint at the U.S. attorney’s office. The undercover agents used to joke about how easy it was to walk into a bar in North Miami Beach or Hollywood and pick out the Russian mobsters who consciously played to the stereotype-loud, muscle-bound, tons of gold jewelry-so that people would know not to mess with them. Most feared was a guy called Tarzan, famous for his drug and sex orgies on his yacht off South Beach, until he landed in jail for trying to buy a nuclear submarine from a former Soviet naval officer. His plan was to smuggle Colombian cocaine to Miami-underwater. For every criminal visionary like Tarzan there were scores of foot soldiers like Mika, street thugs who would shoot you just to see if their gun was still working.

“I’m starving,” said Sofia. She was seated on the floor beside Jack, their backs against the wall.

“I’m hungry, too,” said Jack.

Mika propped himself up on one elbow. He was still shoeless but fully dressed, relaxing atop the bedspread.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Order us some food,” said Jack.

“How about champagne and caviar?” said Mika, clearly being facetious.

Jack said, “The room is on my account. It all gets billed to my credit card.”

Mika smiled. It was as if Jack had said the magic word: free.

Mika climbed off the bed and grabbed the room service menu from the desk. He started flipping through the pages, but the confusion on his face said it all. He looked as if he were trying to calculate the square root of 367,000 divided by nineteen.

“You want me to read that to you?” said Jack.

“Fuck off,” said Mika, and then he threw the menu across the room. Jack ducked, and it hit the wall behind him.

Mika raided the minibar one more time, grabbed a can of beer, and went back to the bed. The soccer game was over, and he started channel surfing.

“There’s news at ten o’clock on channel seven,” said Jack. He was hoping to find out if the police were looking for him or Sofia.

Mika ignored him. He switched to paid programming and started scrolling through the adult movie menu. The screen lit up with the provocative images of a dozen soap opera rejects turned porn star. Mika chose the sexy blonde in a flick called April Showers. It took about thirty seconds for her to land in the shower with a pizza delivery boy who could only be described as a freak of nature from the waist down.

“Can you at least kill the sound?” said Sofia.

Mika laughed and hit MUTE. “You no like the movie?”

Sofia didn’t answer.

The shower scene was getting steamier. Jack wasn’t really watching, but it did trigger a brief recollection of the one and only time he and Andie had showered together. She washed her hair, conditioned it twice, shaved her legs, applied the exfoliant to her entire body-all while Jack stood off to the side shivering and waiting for someone to throw him a coat or a blanket.

Mika stood up and grabbed his crotch.

“Hey, old lady. Come jerk me off.”

“Leave her alone,” said Jack.

“Come on,” said Mika. “All I need is thirty seconds. I just got out of prison three days ago.”

“I said leave her alone,” said Jack.

A sinister smile creased his lips. “I got a better idea.”

Mika went to the closet and pulled a gun from the coat pocket. It was much smaller than the 9-millimeter pistol on the nightstand. A.22-caliber, Jack guessed. Then Mika found another piece of equipment-a suppressor. He fastened it to the barrel of the.22, unzipped his fly, and stuffed the whole thing down his pants. It was nearly a foot long, still short of pizza boy. He walked toward Jack with the business end of the equipment sticking out of his trousers.

“Here, big mouth. Suck on this.”

“Get away, you pig.”

Mika kicked him in the stomach so hard that it knocked Jack over. It was a well-placed boot in the solar plexus that left Jack gasping for breath. Then Mika went to Sofia.

“Here you go,” he said, as he brought the weapon to her lips. “A little Russian roulette, Mika style.”

“Don’t!” said Jack.

She jerked her head back so quickly that it bumped against the wall behind her.

“Come on,” said Mika. “Last time I did this, a little whore in Moscow sucked her brains right out the back of her head.”

“Sofia, don’t,” said Jack.

“You listen to him,” said Mika, “and I’ll put a bullet right in your face.”

A tear ran down her cheek.

“Open your mouth!” said Mika.

Jack was about to lash out, but he stopped himself. Across the room, through a crack between the closed drapery panels, Jack saw movement on the patio. Someone was standing right outside the room, behind the locked French doors.

“Do it,” said Mika.

Jack drew his knees to his chest and coiled up like a catapult, then shouted at the top of his lungs as he sprang into action. His right shoulder hit Mika squarely in the belly, and Jack kept pushing against him with every bit of strength and momentum he could muster. A glass panel shattered in the French door on the other side of the room, but the noise couldn’t drown out the discharge of Mika’s gun and the unmistakable sound of his suppressor doing its work.

Sofia collapsed as Jack and Mika tumbled to the floor.

The French doors burst open. Demetri raced into the room and squeezed off a quick shot that sounded like a bazooka. Mika went still, a dead heap, the left side of his head a bloody mess. Jack pushed himself away from the body, and Demetri charged across the room.

“Sofia!”