Page 11 of Marcellus: House of Drakos
Marcellus didn’t expect to see a man in her apartment. But why wouldn’t he? A dynamic woman like her and no man in her life? He should have known. “I was looking for Ashley,” he decided to say.
“Ashley? Don’t no Ashley live here. Get on from round here bothering people this time of morning.” Then he slammed the door in Marcellus’s face.
Marcellus felt like a fool. He left that building and headed for his limo. Johnny, standing at the limo, opened the door for him.
“Where to, sir?” Andre asked him when he got in and Johnny got back in on the front passenger seat.
“Airport,” Marcellus said. He couldn’t get back to France fast enough. But then, as if to add insult to injury, the R & B group Tavares came on singing a song that made him wonder if he was the unluckiest man in the world:
“She’s gone -
Oh I (Oh I). Oh I.
I better learn how to face it.
She’s gone –
Oh I. . .
What went wrong?”
Marcellus leaned his head back. What was it about that woman? It felt like torture. Unadulterated torture! He wasn’t accustomed to such treatment and wasn’t going to become accustomed to it either.
“Cut that shit off!” he angrily ordered his driver.
Johnny looked back at the boss as Andre swiftly did as he was told and turned off the music. Then the driver and bodyguard looked at each other.
The boss was in a mood, their looks suggested. Which wasn’t unusual at all to either one of them. He was always in a mood. But they both had the same idea why.
What on earth, they wondered, did Niko do this time?
The idea that it could be because of a woman was too far-fetched to even enter into their minds.
CHAPTER FIVE
EIGHT YEARS LATER
Of all the places they could have chosen, this was where they picked. They were supposed to be discussing the details of the biggest drop of his life. Just the three of them sitting, not in a quiet, discreet location where they could iron out the finalities of the details, but in a raucous, overcrowded honkytonk bar that was so loud it made a prison riot sound like a relaxing ballet.
He thought he was being diplomatic by letting them pick the place, figuring international arms dealers would know what they were doing. But as soon as he drove up and saw where they had chosen, he realized alarmingly that they didn’t know shit. Who would pick a bar like this to handle the kind of sensitive business they needed to handle? It was bad enough that it was so far out in the boonies that they were no longer in Chicago, but in Indiana. It was bad enough that it was so crowded and so loud that you could hardly hear yourself think, let alone hold a super-private conversation without screaming it out.
And it was seedy as hell too. And he meant down and dirty seedy. He felt as if he was sitting in a den of thieves where stone-cold killers outnumbered the thieves and where nobody around him could be trusted as far as he could throw them. Including the two men at his table.
Not that he was in a position to complain. He was doing everything in his power to keep his fashion house afloat before anybody in the family, especially his uncompromising father,ever discovered what dire straits he was truly in. He was the only one of his four siblings who didn’t work for their father, who decided to go it alone, and this was his reward? Abject failure? He wouldn’t hear the last of it at those monthly family dinners he was forced to attend. He wasn’t about to becomepoor ol’ Nikothat everybody had to pitch in and bail out. No way. Not after the great success he’d had. He’d rather die first.
But he also never thought he’d become this guy either. He never dreamed he’d be willing to make deals with devils like foreign rebel groups seeking to provide arsenals of ammunition for their so-called freedom fighters around the world who were supposedly fighting against government corruption and overreach. Niko didn’t know if they were fighting for freedom or just for power for themselves, and he honestly didn’t care. He just didn’t want his business to fail.
His father, whom he loved more than life itself even though their relationship was rocky as rocky could get, would disown him on the spot if he failed. He was that kind of hard, cold, unyielding man. Niko, just like his other siblings, could never accept his father’s rejection.
Which meant he had to make deals with some unsavory characters just to stay afloat. That was why he was there. This was serious business for him. But it was all going south faster than a redneck in a pickup truck, and there were many pickup trucks in that parking lot. But something was off. He could feel it before he could see it. Something was wrong.
“Twenty-five on the front end. Seventy-five on the back.”
The man known only as Boris did all the talking for the two men seated across the table from Niko. Another man, Boris’s bodyguard, was nearby too. Niko was outnumbered, but that was the story of his life. Those numbers bothered him, but he knew how to get out of jams. The numbers Boris had just recited to him, however, bothered him more.
“I know I didn’t just hear what I just heard. Did you just say twenty-five up front? Since when, Boris? You think I drove all the way out to this hellhole just to let you start bullshitting me?”
Boris smiled. “You misunderstand. Not the numbers. Yes, I said what I said. You heard the numbers right. But you misunderstand me. You are a business man first and foremost,” he said in a heavy Eastern-European accent. “Look at you. The fancy suit that bares your own name. The muscular body. The thousand-dollar haircut. The ladies, I am sure, go mad for you. You are a fashion designer of the highest order. Indeed, even I have been known to wear your suits myself on the rare occasion when I chose to dress fancy. Unlike your other siblings, you went your separate way from your father and did your own thing. You are your own man. I commend that.”
