I reached across the table and took her hand. “I’m not.”
She nodded again, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced.
“Listen, maybe it would help if I knew why you hate him so much.”
She pulled her hand away and looked out the window. There was a gecko hanging on the other side of the glass, his pale underbelly exposed to me. I put my napkin on the table and unintentionally scared him away.
Natasha said, “It’s the way he treats my mother. He doesn’t love her…and she deserves better than that.”
“How do you know he doesn’t love her?”
“He sleeps around.”
“Does your mother know?”
“He doesn’t do it in front of her, but she knows. She has to know.”
“Maybe your mother should leave him.”
“She can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She was starting to raise her voice. “Because he controls her, Juno. She’s afraid of him.”
“Why is she afraid?”
“She just is.”
“Does he threaten her?”
She looked out the window.
“Is she worried about money? Doesn’t she think she can make it on her own?”
Nothing.
“Why is she so afraid?”
“You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. He rapes her! I hear him at night yelling at her, telling her it’s time to give him a son. She begs him to stop, but he forces her. I can hear her crying while he grunts away.”
I looked away-wrong thing to do.
“You just had to make me say it, didn’t you!? You treat me like one of your snitches. You push and push, wear me down until you break me. Well, you broke me. Now you know why I hate my father. Does that make you feel big? What are you going to do about it, cop? Have enough evidence now?”
She hurried to her feet, bumping the table and making the plates jump. She took the napkin with her, using it to wipe at her eyes as she stomped out of the restaurant.
I wanted to chase after her, but I couldn’t move. I felt like there was a giant ball of lead in my stomach, holding me down like a paperweight. What the fuck was I doing? I was spying on her. Spying on her family. Leading her on while Paul cooked up his bullshit schemes. It needed to stop. If we were going to have a future, it needed to stop.
I found Paul watching channel F. Natasha was lying on her bed, bawling. She hadn’t bothered to take off her dress or let her hair down. My eyes stung with salt.
Paul said, “What do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” I managed to rasp out. I felt sick.
She began to moan when it took too much energy to wail. I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned down the volume.
Paul asked, “How was your date?” He still didn’t know about Natasha and me.
“Not so good. We had a fight.”
“Really. What about?”
I didn’t answer. Pavel Yashin was at Natasha’s door. What is he doing? Natasha didn’t see him; her back was to the door. He came into the room and crossed over to her bed. Her face was buried deep in her pillow. Yashin slowly, tentatively set his hand on her shoulder, where my hand should be. Natasha’s body went rigid. He started to rub her shoulder, moving toward her neck. She jerked away.
I could see it now. She had lied about her mother.
Yashin stood still for a moment with his hand outstretched. She stopped crying; she stopped breathing. She had the pillow gripped like a life preserver. He withdrew his hand and walked out.
I finally understood. He’d never raped her mother. I’d seen how he never even touched her; he had a thing for young girls, substitutes for his grown-up daughter. Natasha was the one he’d raped.
I went red. In my mind, my father’s face superimposed itself over Pavel Yashin’s. The rage boiled over.
“Hey. Are you okay, Juno?”
I knocked the display over.
“It’s okay, Juno! Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
I ran outside into the stinging rain. Lizard eyes mocked me. I stomped a gecko, kicked at a too-fast-for-me iguana. I pulled my piece, took two shots at the iguana. The second one blew it apart. People came out of their houses. Paul badge-flashed them back in.
I counted breaths, bringing myself down from memories of frenzied struggles against my father’s wrist restraints. I tucked my piece away. I ran my fingers into my hair and squeezed, the pain nudging me back toward center.
Paul tried to lead me inside. “Are you okay?”
I stayed where I was, letting the rainwater cool my overheated body. “We have to talk, Paul.”
“Let’s go have a drink.” Paul didn’t ask what my blowup was about. He knew I’d tell him when I was ready.
Paul and I walked into the first bar we could find, the Jungle Juice. Fake trees lined the back wall, and fake vines hung down from the ceiling, nothing more than ropes with paper leaves stapled on. The bartenders were in Tarzan garb, the waitresses sporting zebra-stripe dresses.
We nabbed a couple seats at the bar. Bar noise invaded my thoughts. I teetered on the edge. I slugged down a shot of brandy, warming the skin under my wet clothes. My nerves dulled. A security blanket of logical thought wrapped itself around me. “It’s time to move on Yashin.”
“Not yet, let’s give it a little more time.”
What the hell was his problem? We’d been having this argument for months. The lieutenant had reached the end of his rope with us. He was threatening to split us up as partners, but Paul still wouldn’t let it go. The guy was obsessed.
I wasn’t going to let Paul talk me out of it, not this time. “We have all we need. All we have to do is call Judge Saydak, and get our warrant. I want this to be over, Paul. We’ve had those cameras up for months. I’m sick of us sitting on our asses when we could have dropped the bastard a long time ago.”
Our case against Natasha’s father was airtight. We had more vids than a jury could watch-Yashin making flashlit pickups on the river; Yashin cutting piles of brown sugar on his kitchen table; bowtied waiters coming to the door and exchanging cash for butcher-paper wrapped packages.
The only thing we needed was witness statements. My plan was to run a sweep-Paul and I would pick up Yashin. We’d get vice officers to pick up all his dealers. The whole thing would be coordinated, so it all happened at the same time. We’d make their heads spin. We had vids of all his dealers making midnight buys from Yashin. We’d use the vids to turn two dealers on Yashin-first come, first served on two reduced sentences; fuck the rest of them. The first two to take our deal would authenticate our surveillance.
But Paul was still hooked on the bigger fish-Ram Bandur. Pavel Yashin and Bandur were still negotiating the sale of Yashin’s overstock from the busted Nguyen deal. Paul swore that the deal would eventually go through, and when it did, we could get Bandur.
Paul tried to disarm me with one of his smiles. “I’m telling you, we can get Bandur. Just give it a little longer.”
“We don’t have anything to pin on Bandur. You’ve been waiting for months for this deal to go down, and you don’t have shit. Even if he and Yashin come to terms, and we get the whole deal on vid, it still won’t matter. Bandur is out of our reach. He’s not a small-time drug peddler like Yashin. The guy’s a fucking kingpin. I wish we could bag the guy, but we can’t. He can buy his way out of anything we get on him. The vids we take will go missing, and we’ll go missing with them.”
Paul took a hit of his drink. He talked without looking at me. “We don’t have to arrest Bandur.”
“What are you talking about, Paul?”
“We can use the vid as an in. I’ll take it to him and offer to hand it over to him.”
“I don’t get it.”
He looked at me. “We’ve got Yashin whether we move now or later, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So we wait and maybe score some evidence on Bandur. Nothing he can’t beat on his own, but if we turned it over to him, he’d be appreciative; wouldn’t he?”
“Maybe so,” I admitted. “Where the fuck are you going with this?”
“We should make a deal with him. Bandur can rat out his competition to us, and we’ll arrest them. Think about it, we’ll make so many busts that we’ll be stars in KOP.”