Lila wasn’t going to kill the wrong man. She had scruples. And this guy just didn’t look like Arkady Volkov. She glanced for the hundredth time at the fuzzy picture on her phone, comparing it to the man holding the arm of a very elderly woman tapping a white cane on the ground as she shuffled along.
The man’s nose was straighter, chin pointier, skin tighter. No jawline scar. He could’ve had plastic surgery, as many on the run did, but he didn’t behave like a cartel underboss. These guys couldn’t give up the glitzy lifestyle, go back to being nobodies, not for long anyway. From what she’d found out, this guy had led a humdrum existence as Vladimir Ivanov, the John Smith of Russian names, apartment building manager in an émigré neighborhood in Los Angeles, for four years.
Lila had been surveilling him all week. She’d watched him ferry bags of groceries and packets of adult diapers, sweep the lobby, polish the windows. She’d smelled boiled cabbage and heard Russian TV from his ground-floor apartment, determined his habit of taking his mother? grandmother? for an afternoon stroll. Her assignment was to confirm, then kill. She still couldn’t confirm. She’d give it a few more days.
The following day was a Sunday, and the start of a heatwave. Mid-morning, Ivanov and the babushka emerged with a cooler and drove off in his beat-up Toyota. The old lady, bent low under a dowager’s hump, wore her usual widow’s weeds, her mouth puckered, hair reduced to a few snowy wisps. She looked like she’d been plucked out of a village in the Urals.
Lila followed them to Santa Monica Beach. A clue, possibly. Petroshenko had lived in a beachside villa in Mallorca before he staged a failed putsch against the European cartel boss and vanished. When the cartel thought they’d fingered him in the U.S., the boss hired Lila to exact his revenge.
Ivanov spread a blanket on the sand and gently settled the old woman on it. He pulled off his sweatshirt, rucking up a Tshirt underneath to expose a paunch wallpapered with tattoos. Lila fired off a series of photos before he yanked it down. Then he took the old lady’s feet in his lap and trimmed her toenails.
Lila’s eyes welled with tears. She had clipped her dad’s nails as he lay in a hospice bed. It was an obviously useless thing to do for a dying man, but she had to do something. She wiped her cheeks.
Back at the building on a stifling evening, Ivanov wheeled garbage bins to the curb in a sleeveless undershirt that exposed more black ink. Lila took more photos, then called it a day. Sitting in her living room, she examined the pictures. The tattoos. Didn’t she once read that old-school Russian criminals recorded their crimes on their skin?
She found a web page of Russian tattoo meanings and compared them to Ivanov’s ink. His story unfolded. Star epaulets, a good soldier. The wolf’s head on his upper arm, a safe cracker. The knife handle on his neck, a prison murder. The three-towered church, three prison terms. The cobweb on his back, drug addiction. The pirate and the sunrise on his forearms. Armed robbery and freedom. The cat with a bow. Luck and caution.
She opened the Russian magazine article on Volkov she’d previously found from the time of his disappearance, hit translate and skipped to part about his background. The details fit. Three prison terms, a street criminal and addict before ascending the ladder rungs of the European cartel.
Volkov was confirmed.
The next day she parked in front of the building, screwed the silencer onto her semi-automatic and waited. When Volkov and the old lady exited for their walk, she aimed, forefinger on the trigger. She hesitated. If she killed Volkov, what would become of the sightless old lady? Who would buy her diapers, cut her nails, cook her cabbage? She couldn’t do it.
Lila texted a message to her contact. “Not him.” She packed up her gun and left.
~ fin ~
Christina Hoag is the author of noir novels Law of the Jungle, The Blood Room, Girl on the Brink and Skin of Tattoos. Her crime and literary short stories and essays have appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Lunch Ticket, Toasted Cheese, Other Side of Hope and Shooter, among others, and have won several awards. A former journalist and Latin America correspondent, she now lives in Los Angeles.
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