Judge & Jury - James Patterson [19]
“So, what are we up for, mister? Nachos? Deli? I got forty bucks from the U.S. government that says dinner’s on me.”
“They gave you forty bucks?” Jarrod seemed impressed. “So, what’s the trial about, Mom? Anything cool?”
“I shouldn’t say, but it’s about this Mafia guy. We heard these lawyers talk. Just like on Law and Order. And I got to meet the judge. In her office.”
Jarrod came to a stop just in front of their building. He cried out, “Mom!”
Their car was parked on the street, a ten-year-old orange Volvo wagon. Sluggo, they called it, because it didn’t go very fast and looked like it had taken quite a few punches. They kept it on the street. The local cops always cut them slack.
Someone had smashed the entire front windshield in.
“Oh my God,” Andie gasped. She hurried up to the station wagon in disbelief.
Shards of splintered glass were all over the pavement. Who would do such a thing? She’d kept it on the street for years. Everyone on the block knew it. Nothing like this had ever happened. She placed a hand on Jarrod’s shoulder.
Then Andie felt a knot tighten in the pit of her stomach. She thought of Cavello sitting there in the courtroom with his calm, indifferent stare. Like he had it all under control. And the stories Louis Machia had told. He had murdered for Cavello. Something like this was child’s play to the mob, wasn’t it?
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Jarrod.” She pulled him close.
But he didn’t believe her any more than she believed herself. All they would have to do is follow you home.
Maybe they had.
Chapter 18
RICHARD NORDESHENKO HAD a very good plan, which was why he was sitting in a fashionable bistro on the upper East Side, watching an attractive, middle-aged woman from the relative safety of the bar.
There were three others with the woman at her table, talking and laughing. The place was jammed with an affluent, successful-looking crowd. The two men with her wore nicely tailored suits, expensive dress shirts, gold cuff links. She seemed to know the other woman in her party quite well. The conversation was lively, familiar. The wine flowed. How nice for all of them.
Nordeshenko had followed the woman home from court that day. To her lovely town house in Murray Hill. After she went inside, he stopped on the street directly in front of the red wooden door. No guards. That’s how they did things here. And the lock was a Weiser; it would be no problem. He saw the wires from a security system connected to the phone line. That was no problem, either.
“Mr. Kaminsky.” The pretty hostess at the restaurant stepped up to him and smiled. “Your table is ready now.”
She seated him precisely where he had requested: at the adjoining table to the woman he had followed. It didn’t bother him to be so close. She wouldn’t know him; she would never see his face again. He had done this kind of thing countless times.
In the beginning, it was the Spetsnaz Brigade, special forces, in Chechnya. There he had learned how to kill with precision and without any remorse. His first real job had been a local bureaucrat in Grozny who had stolen several pensions. A real pig. Some of the victims had approached him to get even, and they paid him a sum he would not have earned in six months of waiting around to get blown up by the Chechen rebels. He was ridding the world of filthy scum. He could easily justify that. So he killed the bureaucrat with a firebomb placed in his speedboat.
Next, it was a policeman in Tashkent who was blackmailing prostitutes. He’d gotten a royal fee for that. Then a mobster in Moscow. A real big shot; impossible to get close to. He’d had to detonate an entire building, but it was just part of the job.
Then he started offering his services to whoever would pay his price. It was the time of perestroika, capitalism. And he was just a businessman. He’d hit the big time.
He stared at the fashionable woman again. Too bad. She seemed successful, and even likable. He knew exactly how it would go from