Page 1 of Blood & Snow

1

XANDER

Iscrape dried blood from underneath my fingernails while the elevator rises toward the forty-first floor.

The metal cage climbs past floors that host legitimate businesses which exist to clean money we earn from dead men.

Three washings haven't removed all traces of this morning's work, and the Pakhan notices everything.

The doors open into the official office space of my employer, but it looks like any other executive suite.

Leonid Markov's secretary types at her computer without acknowledging my presence.

She has survived fifteen years in this office by perfecting selective blindness, and she's very good at it.

"He's waiting for you," she says without looking up. "And he's not happy."

Her fingers peck away at the keyboard as I turn toward the gold placard on the door to my right where Leonid's name is emblazoned in black lettering.

I knock twice and wait, as is typical.

Sometimes, he's in a charitable mood.

Other times, he's cutting off fingers or tongues and I have to wait.

Today, he calls for me to enter because he told me to be here and I'm never late.

When I enter, he's smoking a cigarette and there is a stack of unorganized photos on his desk in front of him.

Smoke rises toward the tiled ceiling where it'll leave orange stains, and I tug the lapels of my leather jacket as I approach him.

He's an intimidating man, but weak.

If I were to face him in a fist fight, I'd win, but the force that stands behind him would immediately crash in like a tidal wave and consume me.

No one messes with Markov.

"Sit down, Xander."

He nods at the leather armchair opposite his desk, and I settle into it and wait while he takes a long drag from his cigarette.

My eyes wander, though, peeking at the photographs that show burned trucks at Sheremetyevo Airport.

Empty cargo holds where forty kilograms of heroin should've been.

Customs officers I've been paying for three years suddenly developed moral objections to our business arrangements, and it's something I have to fix right away.

Who knows what "motivated" them.

"Tell me what I'm looking at," Markov says, but I know he knows already.

Word travels in this town, especially when it concerns our more discreet businesses.

I study the images.

Our driver was shot execution-style, single bullet to the base of the skull.

His blood and bits of his brain are splattered all over the inside of the windshield, along with half his face.