“Hold on,” I said. I held my hand up to stop him. “Let’s start over. Let me ask the questions. Don’t just vomit random information at me.”
“Okay,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He seemed antsy and ready to divulge any information he had for me instead of letting me pull it from him.
“First, who is Dimitri? What is his background? And if you tell me he’s Russian, I’m going to slap you.”
Gage laughed, visibly relaxing a little in his seat. “Dimitri works for a man named Ivan. Yes, they are both Russian. Ivan is a local mob boss; he’s pretty big news. He has ties to the Russian mob, and we think that’s where Dimitri came from. He’s Ivan’s right hand man, and he’s what some guys would call an enforcer. I think he likes to think of himself as an assassin, but that didn’t work out too well.”
“Wait, he tried to kill you?” I asked, my jaw practically hitting the table.
“Yep. That’s how he wound up in our basement,” Gage explained to me.
“Why the hell was he trying to kill you, Gage?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And to think, I was working for this guy. I was getting mixed up in his world of mob bosses and hitmen. I had told myself that I didn’t need to know this much, but I was eating up everything he could tell me.
“We’ve been working to shut own Ivan’s drug operation for a while now,” Gage explained, “and not too long ago, we broke up a pretty big deal between him and a long-time client. So, of course, it just makes sense to send someone to handle that situation,” he explained.
“I see.” I did see. I saw more than I wanted to. He hadn’t said anything but I could tell that he was telling me his guys had taken over part of Ivan’s drug operation. That client they’d shut him out with had become their client, surely.
“So, why do you want to know where Ivan is?” I asked him. “Revenge for sending Dimitri after you?”
“There’s some of that, certainly,” Gage admitted. “But really, we just want to take him down. We’ve been working on taking him out for a long time now, and now that we’ve got one of his men—his top man—we’re finally in the right position to do that.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you just pulled me right in the middle of some sort of turf war,” I stated, summing up the information he’d just given me. “Ivan is the other boss, and his organization is threatening your business, so you’re pulling me in to help you get information from one of Ivan’s top guys to help you shut down his organization.”
“Something like that,” Gage agreed.
“This is not what I had in mind when I got my degree,” I told him, laughing nervously. I had gone from sitting across the table from a biker with the body of a god to sitting across the table from the violent leader of a motorcycle gang, a criminal organization in the midst of trying to eliminate their competition.
“Well, I tried to tell you that you didn’t want to know what you were really helping me do here,” Gage countered.
“Good point. But why tell me now?” I asked.
“Because I felt like you wanted to know,” he told me. “And I feel like you deserve to know what you’re doing here. You’re helping us shut down a violent criminal organization that law enforcement is either powerless against or just clueless about, because they’re not doing anything.”
“Stop,” I told him. “Don’t say another word about it, Gage. I don’t want to know anything else. I just want to talk to Dimitri and get you the information you need on Ivan so I can go home.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “You don’t think you know too much already?” he asked in a vaguely threatening tone.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I snapped at him. “Are you threatening me, Gage? Is that what this is? Are you trying to tell me that now that I know more about what’s going on, I won’t be able to leave at all? It certainly sounds like that’s what you’re doing.”
He waved a hand dismissively between us. “Don’t worry. I was just teasing.”
“You didn’t sound like you were teasing.”
“I know. My voice doesn’t carry humor well,” he said with a dry laugh.
Likely excuse, I thought. I couldn’t believe I had tried to convince myself to trust this man. Unfortunately, it seemed like I didn’t have much choice in my current position but to try to trust him.