Free Side by Side by John Ramsey Miller Page B

could keep quiet no longer. Mr. Laughlin didn’t know Russians as well as Peanut did, having watched the History Channel. “You commies have been pulling this bluff crap since World War II,” Peanut said, guffawing. He gestured with his hands in the air. “Ask for something crazy as hell, then threaten something insane like maybe a nuclear war, then y’all take the best deal going backwards you can get. You’re the world’s biggest bluffers.” He wagged his finger and smiled. “Ballsy sons of bitches. I’ll give you that. But it don’t play here in America. Not any longer.”
    Peanut knew he had the bastard’s game pegged, and he was sure Sarnov knew he knew it. The Russian had lost his ability to shock them with a sky-high demand.
    Sarnov pinched the cigarette’s filter between his thumb and index finger, held it up level with his face, and stared at the smoke flowing from its tip. “Negotiations are over. Ross, tell your howling monkey to shut up while you are ahead.”
    Peanut bristled. “You mean to sit there and poke a barky stick up our butts and say smile? Buddy, the damned Berlin Wall came a-tumbling down. In case you didn’t notice, you lost.”
    Sarnov tilted his head, breaking off his gaze on the cigarette, and, looking at Ross, said, “I never allow hired help to sit in on business meetings. If I require their presence, I do not allow them to speak, and to insult a guest would demand severe punishment. You should explain to your help the fact that you are winning here. It costs you a little bit of money; we get a fair settlement and we don’t have to bury anybody. And, for the benefit of the severely misinformed, the fact is that the Wall came down to allow us better access to business opportunities.”
    “I don’t threaten easy,” Peanut growled, rising from the ottoman, looming like a thunderstorm over the narrow Russian seated on the couch. His anger had canceled his ability to reason beyond the present. “You communist piece of—” He was already swinging his fist down at Sarnov’s face, knowing that the man was as good as unconscious.
    It was odd the way Peanut’s perspective suddenly changed and, before the lights went out, he was somehow looking up at a fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling.

14
     

    The North Carolina Piedmont, once a sleepy southern backwater with one hand on the plow, one on a loom, gold ore in its pocket, eyes on the Bible, and its nose to the grindstone, had become over the centuries the nation’s second-largest banking center.
    Winter was fond of most of the additions to Charlotte’s skyline in the years since he had come to North Carolina to work in the satellite office of the United States Marshals Service, serving under Hank Trammel. The vast majority of the additions to the skyline seemed to have crossed the city’s “traditional Presbyterian brick-solid” with a sense of whimsy. Towering buildings like Bank of America’s headquarters and the Hearst Tower looked like inhabitable sculpture. Trammel liked to say the city was looking like the set for a Batman movie.
    The Westin Hotel, one of Charlotte’s newer buildings, was a sleek glass-skinned structure with the visual warmth of an ice cube.
    Winter parked in the deck, grabbed his overnighter from the passenger’s seat, and strode across the courtyard, going inside through one of the glass doors opened by a man in a black suit. At the front desk, he dropped his name and the clerk handed him a pair of electronic keys to room 412. No check-in required. As was his habit, he scanned the lobby for anything worth noting, allowing his mind to sort and file away its impressions.
    He took the elevator up to the fourth floor, used the key and entered a room that could have been in any first-class hotel in the world. He set his bag on the bed, opened it, took out his shoulder rig and slipped it on. He unrolled a microfiber windbreaker and put it on over the weapon.
    Winter had turned in his federal