Page 55 of Ruthless Rustanovs

THIRTY YEARS AGO

“REMEMBER, son, before you kill someone, you must always know why you are doing it.”

Sergei said these words to Nikolai, voice calm, eyes flat, as if dragging the man beside him, the one thrashing underneath Sergei’s death grip, struggling to get out of the duct tape Sergei had wrapped around his wrists, caused him no exertion whatsoever.

Nikolai’s father barely even registered the desperate man’s muffled screams behind the duct tape placed over his mouth.

As the Rustanov family’s main enforcer, Sergei was well-acquainted with the disposal of bodies—dead or alive.

However, the poor fellow his father held wasn’t an enemy of the Rustanov family.

He was only a lowly maintenance man for the apartment building Nikolai, his mother, and Fedya lived in.

The maintenance man who had been keeping Nikolai’s mother company ever since Sergei had started ignoring her for a younger, more nubile woman.

This wasn’t the first time Sergei had done this.

Nikolai had sensed from a very young age that his mother, Natasha, was more a prized possession than someone his father loved.

She was very beautiful, but from a simple shop family, one that used to pay graft to the Rustanovs to do business in their neighborhood unimpeded.

She’d also gotten pregnant in high school with Fedya, only to have the boy’s father move away, wanting nothing to do with a baby.

So though she possessed exquisite beauty, many of her prospects were limited as a result of class and her status as a young, unwed mother.

But Sergei had taken a liking to Natasha, had magnanimously told her family they’d no longer have to pay him graft or support Natasha and Fedya with their meager earnings, before setting her up in an apartment of her own.

Natasha had told Nikolai the story of how she and his father met one night after drinking too much cheap wine.

“I was a stupid girl,” she told him, her face lined with bitter shadows. “I thought he was saving me from a dull life at my father’s shop. But in truth, he was putting me in a cage so he could get to me more easily. I thought I was special but I was only the first of your father’s many women.”

But Natasha was special in a way. Sergei had never married his mother, but he’d never let her go either.

Nikolai had grown up thinking of a father as someone who spent the night in your mother’s bedroom, maybe once or twice a week, for limited time periods—but then disappeared for months before coming back with flowers, jewelry, and gifts for the boys.

However this last time, Sergei had been gone for over eighteen months and Natasha had taken to saying things to Nikolai. Things like, “It looks like your father has finally forgotten about us. At least he owns the building, so we will never have to pay rent.”

But Nikolai had known better. Sergei always came back, and when his mother—who was still very pretty, even with the lines of bitterness that had formed between her eyebrows and around the corners of her mouth—had begun inviting the building’s maintenance man to dinner and eventually to spend the night, it had felt to Nikolai that she was putting the simple man with the simple job in grave danger.

His gut feeling had been validated when Sergei burst through the apartment door earlier that night, his arms filled with a fur coat for Natasha and top of the line hockey sticks for Nikolai and Fedya. He’d dropped it all when found the maintenance man eating at their dinner table.

It hadn’t taken long after that for the rest of Nikolai’s prediction to play out. The only thing he hadn’t anticipated was that after tying the man up (ignoring Natasha’s desperate pleas for his life) he’d commanded Nikolai to come with him.

“It is time you learned,” was the only explanation he gave.

Nikolai could still see his mother at the top of the stairway, both of Fedya’s hands around her wrist, trying to pull her back into the apartment as she screamed at Sergei that Nikolai was only a little boy, too young to see such things.

Sergei had ignored those pleas, too, and Nikolai had ended up walking behind his father as he dragged the maintenance man toward the end of the wharf.

Sergei sounded much like Nikolai’s primary school teacher as he lectured on his favorite subject.

“There are many reasons to kill a man. Maybe he has hurt a member of your family. Then you must kill him in retaliation. Maybe he is talking to someone about your business—someone he shouldn’t be talking to about your business.

Then you must kill him to silence him. There are many scenarios and many reasons to kill.

Too many to name. Remember, you never have to explain to others why you are killing the man you are killing.

You only have to explain it to yourself.

You cannot pull the trigger in good conscience until your reason is clear.

That is what separates me from the young hotheads who get their families in trouble when they are out at clubs and do stupid things like shooting a bartender who got the drink order wrong.

Shooting without purpose is no good and will kill you before your time. ”

They came to a stop at the end of the wharf and Nikolai instinctively looked over both shoulders to see if anyone else was about.

But they were alone except for a few small, empty skiffs swaying from side to side, and the quiet skittering of rats lurking in unknown places.

The night sky was inky black, no moon or stars in sight, as if even they did not want any part of what his father would do tonight under the dock’s dim yellow lights.

“Normally I would not be so sloppy, I would take more time to do it correctly in the Rustanov way. But in this case, I kill to teach your mother a lesson,” his father told him. “This means I do not have to kill this man in the usual Rustanov way. Nikolai, come stand beside me, right here.”

He nodded his head, indicating where Nikolai should go, and when Nikolai was in place, Sergei released the maintenance man from inside his arm.

“You may run now,” he told the smaller male.

The man, perhaps believing his fate had unexpectedly changed, that Sergei Rustanov had only meant to scare him and hadn’t truly intended to kill him in front of his child, ran.

He ran as fast as he could, given that his hands were taped together in front of him. More proof that this man was either stupid or did not truly know Sergei Rustanov.

Sergei watched him run for a bit before calmly pulling a Glock 19 from his jacket holster and shooting a hole in the back of the man’s head. The maintenance man dropped dead less than twenty feet from where Sergei and Nikolai stood.

“You see,” he told Nikolai with a grin as the sound of the gunshot reverberated though the night sky. “In this case, it is okay to be sloppy.”

THIRTY YEARS LATER

“It is one in the morning,” Alexei said in lieu of a greeting when he answered his phone.

“I would not call,” Nikolai answered in Russian. “But I threw a party tonight. Do you still have the maid service in Miami?”

“Lexie, is everything all right?” a tired voice asked in the background.

“It is nothing, Eva,” Alexei answered. “An associate, calling about an important business matter.”

Not a direct lie, Nikolai noted. For men who had been raised like he and his cousins, calls like these were a matter of business. But not the exact truth either.

Nikolai listened to the sounds of rustling on the other side of the phone. He imagined Alexei getting out of the bed he shared with his wife, and going to another part of the house to finish the call out of earshot.

“I do still work with that service,” Alexei answered. “But it’s based in Chicago now.”

So Alexei’s hit man had moved to Chicago, it seemed.

“It is fine. Chicago is closer to my party,” Nikolai answered.

“Also, the service no longer caters. Family obligations.”

That gave Nikolai some pause. He’d only met Tetsuro Nakamura once, when he’d handed him the audio recording of Sergei’s death. But the emotionless Asian man hadn’t struck him as the type of guy who would ever had “family obligations.”

But then, Nikolai had never planned to have children himself and look at him now. Making arrangements to clean up this mess before he went home to his nephew… and his nephew’s current guardian, the girlfriend of a police officer.

In this case, though, whether Nakamura was still willing to kill was neither here nor there.

“That is not problem. The party was already thrown,” Nikolai answered. “But it was very messy. I need your maid service.”

“How long did this party last?”

Nikolai surveyed the basement room, a less than classy affair, with carpet on both the floors and the walls.

Not like his own home, which he had designed as one big fuck you to Sergei, who’d been from one of the richest crime families in Russia but had forced his girlfriend and child to live in a small, grey two-bedroom apartment.

That small apartment was luxury accommodations compared to this room, located below a strip club called Jiggles.

Every piece of furniture looked to have been either hauled from a sidewalk or bought at a discount store’s clearance sale.

So cheap, it was no wonder it had only taken Nikolai fifteen minutes of “questioning” the guy who’d been sent to take out Pavel before he’d sung like a bird and gave him an address.

The drug outfit that had killed his brother was fairly new with a boss who’d come to Indiana with just a few East Coast connections and a family of thick-necked brothers and cousins.

According to the hit man Nikolai had interrogated, they only had the one strip club and apparently not enough money or taste to redecorate.