“Tell me about Vitaly.”
“His last name is Parenko. He’s tough. Smart. Mean. Organized. He actually runs a pretty tight ship.”
“Any mob ink on him?” he asked.
“He has a tattoo on his left arm, up high. It’s a globe with four compass points coming out of it. There are two flags above the globe and a submarine across it.”
Ashe’s jaw flexed. “Are the Cyrillic letters em-cheh-peh-veh on it anywhere?”
Frowning, she thought about his question. “Yes. There’s a little banner under the globe with those letters on it. And some numbers.”
“Russian Navy symbol. And he has no other Russian mob tattoos?”
“Not the traditional ones that cover the whole torso. Now and then someone spills a drink on him, and I’ve seen him change his shirt a couple of times.” She hesitated, her brow furrowing. “He’s got only one other tat. It’s on his left shoulder blade and is small. It’s a shield with a star over it and a sword going down through the star.”
“Jesus,” Ashe breathed. That was the symbol for the KGB, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of a combination FBI and CIA before it had been summarily disbanded in the mid-1990s and replaced with the FSB, the Federal Security Service of Russia. The abrupt disbanding of the KGB had stranded thousands of trained special operatives without jobs, incomes or pensions. Not surprisingly, many of them had turned their unusual skill sets to crime. In under a decade, the Russian mob had become one of the most feared criminal organizations on earth.
“How old is Vitaly?” Ashe asked.
“Midforties. But he’s in really good shape for his age.”
The guy was old enough to have been a young KGB agent in the early 1990s. “Does he ever do anything that strikes you as...paranoid?”
Hank rolled her eyes. “All the time. He does background checks on everyone who works there. Rumor is that he has all of his employees followed randomly—oh, God. What if that guy you jumped is working for him? I’ll lose my job for sure—”
He cut her off quickly. “The guy I took out was moving toward you aggressively. A simple tail wouldn’t have shown himself or moved that forcefully toward his subject.”
She nodded slowly, but doubt still clouded her gaze.
He continued his interrogation. “Any other paranoid behaviors?”
“Well, there’s the time I came into the bar in the afternoon before it was open because I forgot to pick up my paycheck the night before. Vitaly was going over the walls with some sort of electronic device. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was looking for bugs. But I thought he meant cockroaches.”
“Have you seen other men around the bar with mob ink?” Russian mob tattoos were a complex art form with traditional symbologies to indicate which gang a man belonged to, his mob rank and even how many kills he had. The ink tended to cover most or all of a man’s arms and torso and was hard to miss.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“What about the men who take so much of Vitaly’s money?”
“Can’t tell. They tend to wear suits.”
Was her missing boyfriend one of them? She obviously knew what Russian mob ink looked like because she hadn’t asked for any clarification when he referred to it. If her ex was a mobster and caught wind of her stalking him like this, she’d be killed for being such a nuisance. Had that been the purpose of the guy he’d chased off in the alley?
“Look, Hank. You are in more danger than you know. You need to back off looking for this friend of yours and stop working at the Voodoo.”
“Not a chance.”
Dammit. Her reply was emphatic. She wasn’t about to be talked out of looking for her boyfriend. “Did it ever occur to you that this friend of yours doesn’t want to be found? That if he wanted you to know where he was, he would have let you know?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and in spite of knowing that he was right, Ashe felt like a heel. God, he hated it when women cried. Especially when he made them do it. Which wasn’t often. In his line of work, he rarely had time to interact with women at all, let alone get to know one well enough to break her heart.
She swallowed hard. “It’s not like that. We weren’t dating. But I know...I know...something is wrong. Call it woman’s intuition if you like. I feel it.”
She didn’t have to convince him of the accuracy of her intuition. His life depended on listening to his all the time. More times than he could count, a gut feeling had saved his hide in the field.
Whoa. Rewind. She and this guy weren’t dating? For a moment, triumph leaped in his gut. Then who was this man she was so torn up over?
She was lying. She loved this mystery man heart and soul.
Dammit. He glanced down at her hands and noticed that she was wringing them continuously as she paced. Her slender fingers were red, she was pulling at them so hard. Oh, yeah. Head over heels for the missing dude. Disappointment rolled over him. He’d really thought for a minute there that they had some kind of connection.
“Come here, Hank. Sit down and talk to me.”
She looked up at him, stress distorting her lovely features so much that his stomach twisted in sympathy. She moved around the scarred coffee table and sank onto the other sofa cushion. He reached out and captured her hands in his, stilling their restless activity.
“Tell me about your friend.”
For a minute, he didn’t think she was going to answer. But then she let out another one of those great, relieved sighs of hers and started to talk.
“His name is Max. He’s an art and antiques broker. Acquires—well, acquired—pieces for private clients and for an auction house here in New Orleans. He got a commission to find something for someone, and soon after, he disappeared. No one’s seen or heard from him since.”
“What was he commissioned to find, and who commissioned him?”
“The auction house has no idea,” she replied. “You see, he’s an independent broker, and the commission didn’t come through the house. For the last week before he disappeared, he went into the Who Do Voodoo on a daily basis. As if he’d gotten a job there—which makes no sense at all. The day he disappeared, the name of the club was written down in his appointment book, too.”
“Who was the last person to see him?”
“I found the taxi driver who dropped him off there that night. He says he didn’t see Max meet or speak to anyone. He just went inside the club.”
“What does Max look like?” he asked.
“Six feet tall. Athletic. Brown hair. Blue eyes. I have a picture of him if you want to see it.”
“That would be great.”
She
