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The rug was probably acquired wholesale from the Vegas collection, mostly deep red but with persistent and swooping patterns that would hide spills well. Spaced around the room were tables where people played cards, shot craps, spun roulette wheels, and did pretty much any organized activity where they could give their money to the Russian Mob without feeling like they were just handing it over. The lights were the same kinds of faux antiques you’d find in an ice cream parlor. They were tough to see under a haze of blue-gray cigarette smoke.

A bar ran along one wall, home to a couple sad sacks drinking off a losing streak and a few bros trying their luck with women who had to have day jobs working some kind of pole. Waitresses circulated through the crowd, trying not to look as tired as they obviously felt. The clientele ranged from Willy Lomans in rumpled suits to gym rats in Affliction shirts. The women were mostly just model/actress/waitresses, the kinds of LA hopefuls that were thick on the ground.

Except one. I tried not to react, but seeing her made me flinch. Carmelita Donella, an auditor for the Knights of Malta. Italian accents can go one of two ways. Either someone talks like Super Mario and it’s the most adorable thing ever, or they talk like Don Corleone and it’s terrifying. Don Corleone wishes he were as scary as Carmelita. And even though you might mistake her for your standard cougar in a nice blue evening gown, it would be tough to miss the look she was giving the money as she glided between tables. She was like a shark, and that was what Malta needed her for. See, once upon a time they had been the banking arm of the Knights Templar, and these days, they were trying to recover all that Templar gold the Vatican had looted in the 14th century. The problem was, all that money had been invested for the past seven hundred years, and according to the Maltese, it was all theirs.

I didn’t know what Carmelita was doing in a Kosher Nostra gambling den, but it was fair to say it was bad news for them.

If she saw me, she’d call me Chris, short for Cristobal Huerta, an enterprising young former CPA who had been drummed out after blowing the whistle on the wrong people. She had used me for any number of dirty tricks, mostly involving repossession of some kind or another. The most bizarre was probably an Oscar—a goddamn Academy Award, no shit—for Costume Design on that movie about Hitler’s girlfriend. I can’t remember exactly how Carmelita traced its origin to Templar lucre, but it had something to do with Eva Braun’s earrings. I really wish I were making that up.

The reason I didn’t want to be seen was not necessarily that she was more dangerous than the Russian Mob foot soldiers outside—she was, for the record, but for different reasons—but that I didn’t want my finances completely destroyed because one of my ancestors once took a bribe from a hedge knight. She might have overlooked that in the past, but probably not after I’d vanished for a year. I knew that as good as I made Cristobal’s finances look, they wouldn’t survive a Donella audit. Nothing could.

I slunk to the corner of the bar and ordered a Coke. He offered Pepsi and I narrowly avoided asking for a cheeseburger and chips.

The door to the back, where the “show” happened, opened. A young couple dressed for a night on the town came out, and a mystery solved itself. I had wondered who was handling the day-to-day with Vassily cooling his heels in Quentin, and there
was my answer. It didn’t make me feel much better beyond the momentary endorphin rush of my brain rewarding me for terror.

The reason was because the couple was the Brangelina of the sociopath set: Arkady Lazarev and Tatiana Renko. Arkady was an old-school mobster out of Moscow who had a thing about dressing the part of a gangster. He looked it, too, almost like someone had reincarnated Bugsy Siegel but decided to crazy him up a little more. See, Arkady loved pain, but unlike most mobsters, he liked being on the other end. That’s why he was always walking with a new limp, wincing at broken ribs, or adjusting bandages poking out of his sleeve.

The usual author of said pain was his girlfriend Tatiana, who had come over to the States from Kiev with her father Anatoly. If you don’t know the name, he was one of the big bosses in the Russian Mob before getting taken down on an extortion scheme involving the Blue Man Group. Tatiana looked like a model in a catalogue that catered exclusively to damned souls in hell. With her ivory complexion and black hair, she almost looked like a mannequin. She was also guaranteed to be carrying six or seven knives somewhere in that body-hugging gown.

I didn’t need trouble with them, either, but fortunately they weren’t my immediate contacts. Sure, we’d met a couple times and I might have shared some caviar with Arkady once. But I didn’t think they’d recognize me as Nicky Zorotovich… except that at the jail, a couple cops I had never met had done just that.

I circulated through the tables, keeping away from Carmelita, Arkady, and Tatiana. At a pai gow poker table near the back, where the real gamblers were getting their fix, I found one more contact. Vinnie Cha, degenerate poker player and a mid-ranking member of the Rosicrusophists, a Rosicrucian splinter group turned trendy Hollywood cult, was sitting there chain-smoking and winning. He walked around in a haze of cigarette smoke like a carcinogenic Pig Pen most of the time, but here in the gambling den, he was scaling new heights. He looked like he was trying to recreate the atmosphere of Dickensian London with little more than a cigarette and a can-do attitude. Vinnie was a decent source of information and unlike the other three people in the room I recognized, probably wouldn’t do anything horrible to me.

I waited at the edge of the table, ready to catch Vinnie’s eyes between hands, but the guy never looked up. He was so keyed into the game, the world around him—a world filled with armed psychopaths—had ceased to exist. I knew the man had a problem when I walked in, but I was beginning to think he might need a twelve-step program.

I waited until the douchebag across the table from Vinnie went bust and got up in a swirl of cursing and Drakkar Noir. I sat down at the table, watching Vinnie light a cigarette off the glowing stub of the last one.

 I bought in. Vinnie never once looked up as the dealer turned my bills into chips. I wished the different denominations had Russian mobsters on them like the world’s most insanely violent mint, but they were pretty generic. Decent quality, but nothing special. The dealer gave us each seven cards and I stared at what I had, trying to figure out how I was going to say what needed to be said.

The irony was that I got the joker, and so could build four of a kind with sevens for my bottom hand, and the king of hearts didn’t make a terrible front hand. Problem was, that didn’t say what I needed to say. So I was going to have to settle for a pair of sevens up top and a pair of fours on the bottom. As long as I was willing to look like a total schmuck, I could fold with my cards face up, so at least I wouldn’t have to lose too much cash. Which is what I ended up doing.

Vinnie blinked when he saw the fold, finally looking up at me. He’d read the message in the cards:
Hi, Vinnie. How are you?

He didn’t nod; he was too much of a poker player for that. I caught the glimmer of recognition in his eye after he looked past the duckbill and haircut and knew he would respond in the cards. The conversation was slow, spaced out over several hands.

Go see Regina,
he said to me with a bottom flush. The ace high up top added,
Now
. He meant Regina del Monaco, the local Knight of the Rose Croix, 18th Degree Practitioner, Enlightened Sage of the Ages, and Bursar of the Los Angeles Temple. My old boss. Well, one of them, anyway. I wondered why she wanted to see me all of a sudden, if that’s what this was. Good timing. Or extremely bad timing, depending on your perspective.

Why?

Ask her.

The trouble with communicating like this is that you had to wait for the right cards to say what you wanted to say. To solve that problem, I was cheating. I have good hands. Seriously, it’s one of my better traits. I pick up magic tricks pretty easily and I can hide a card without trying very hard, especially if I’m not cheating to actually win.

I have some questions
, I said, with a pair of twos and a queen high.

 Gorilla pants fish hammer.

Of course, if one side of the conversation is a degenerate gambler, you’re going to get some misunderstandings from time to time. I don’t even know why we bothered to include words like—oh, right. The fish hammer job. That had been fun.

 
Have you heard of any hits?
I asked.

Of course.

Any on redheads or gymnasts?

Fortune favors the bald.

Goddamn it. Focus.

No hits on redheads or gymnasts.

How about frame jobs?

Hungry for floor wax.

I swear I will hurt you, Vinnie.

No frame jobs.

Tell me why Regina needs me.

She has something needs doing.

I had been playing pai gow poker with Vinnie for about an hour, and it was only because of my judicious cheating that I hadn’t lost all of my money. I didn’t like that Regina needed me for something, and it was a minor miracle that none of the other sharks in the room had recognized me. I held up a hand to cash out and got ready to get the hell out of there to hunt for leads elsewhere.

That’s when a hand as big and smooth as a flipper came crashing down on my shoulder, making my bones grind together. “If it isn’t Nicky Z,” said Vassily the Whale.

FUCKING
JURASSIC PARK
.
We’ve all seen that movie, and chances are, we all like it at least a little bit. Sure, we’d have liked it more had the dinosaurs gotten to eat those obnoxious kids, but it was a Spielberg film. He wasn’t going to let kids get eaten unless that taught someone a very important lesson about fatherhood.

Anyway, the first time the T-rex shows up to wreck shop, right around when Jeff Goldblum is in the process of sleazing all over Laura Dern, the cup of water sitting on the dashboard starts wobbling. The monster is so big that her steps cause tremors in the goddamn earth. The thing is a walking earthquake. And to top it off, she can’t walk two steps without unleashing an unholy roar designed to make everything within earshot lose control of its bowels. Yet at the end of the movie, she swoops out of nowhere to mess up the raptors going after our heroes with nary a thump. All of a sudden she’s a stubby-armed ninja.

So, what, was the T-rex tiptoeing around? The alpha land predator of the entire history of the planet suddenly decided she needed to be sneaky? And really, for whose benefit? The audience, sure, but does that mean that the T-rex alone knew she was in a movie and behaved accordingly?

That always annoyed me. I couldn’t get the image out of my head of a T-rex on tippy-toes, watching a glass of water for ripples and wincing whenever she took a wrong step. “I gotta save Alan Grant and the kids silently because dinosaurs nature-finds-a-way frog DNA.”

Only it had just happened to me in real life.

Vassily “the Whale” Zhukovsky is the largest man I have ever met. I think there’s something in the human genome to prevent us from getting bigger, or else Vassily himself is some kind of throwback to the days of the giant ground sloth. Actually, his mother being a
Megatherium
would clear a few things up. Anyway, the guy is gigantic, coming by his nickname in the most honest way possible: by looking like someone pulled a beluga whale out of the Arctic, put him in a shiny gangster suit, and taught him to talk like a Bond villain.

Vassily didn’t cause earthquakes when he walked. That would have been silly, even in LA. But his footsteps weren’t what you’d call quiet, either. Anytime he was indoors, the floor was usually squealing in agony with every thudding step. Plus, there was the whisper wake, in which everyone around would see the massive gangster coming and whisper general affirmations about how big, scary, or dreamed-up-in-the-mind-of-a-vengeful-God Vassily looked.

And yet I missed it. The first indication Vassily was there was his hand on me, already feeling like he was trying to mash me up into a thin paste. It was not a friendly grip.

“Hi there, Vassily,” I said, affecting a little bravado in the hopes that it might confuse him.

He spun me in my chair, which fell to the ground. He was now holding me off the ground with that one hand.

“So, you’re out of prison,” I said.

He was dressed in a silver suit that looked like it might actually be made of silver. Everything on the man shone, from his shaved head to the jewelry dripping off him to the Bruno Maglis on his feet. “I am. Do you know why I was in there?”

“Poor career choices?”

Vassily hit me. Not hard. Well, not for him, anyway. He popped me right in the gut and dropped me in the same motion, causing me to hit the pai gow table and crumple in a soggy heap on the floor. Fortunately, I didn’t have to stay there long; Vassily plucked me up by my collar.

“Your girlfriend. Bitch sent me into ambush.”

“The way I heard it, you were going to kill me and her.”

Vassily shrugged. “I don’t see relevance.”

“No, you don’t.”

Vassily smiled. He even had big teeth. Giant, prehistoric, and professionally whitened. Flat, the teeth of an herbivore. Bull elephants were herbivores, too, and it didn’t improve their disposition.

“It’s nice to see that you’re out,” I said.

“Thank you. I had to do some things, you know?”

“So you weren’t paroled.”

Vassily laughed. The room, which had been dead silent other than our conversation, broke out in guffaws, but it was only the Kosher Nostra joining in. I glanced around and realized that Carmelita Donella was watching the scene with interest. Goddamn it. “No, I am released on my own reconnaissance.”

I didn’t correct him. “Let me buy you a drink. We can catch up.”