Title: Eli, My Friend
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider
Rating: PG-15
Length: 4k
Content notes: Drug use, cursing, Russian cursing, discussion of murder
Summary: Los Angeles mobster Yegor Ivanov tries to persuade his hitman Eli Morrow to stop killing so many people in his free time. Eli would much rather show Yegor his new car.

May 12, 1994 in Los Angeles: the skies an endless blue, the air washed clean by yesterday's mist of rain, the leafy trees in full green, the weeds and desert flowers in bloom, the eternally manicured lawns and tropical gardens glowing cheerful jewel-tones. The air was sweet with a wind that swept down from the mountains. A perfect day for a drive.

Yegor Sergeyevich Ivanov plied his Mercedes down the gently curving streets of a West Hollywood development, scanning the homes on either side with a critical eye: could he afford it, and if he could, would he want to. He pulled onto a broad concrete pad that served as the driveway for a white house that looked like three cake boxes haphazardly stacked together. Broad windows took in the Valley, and a three-door garage served as the first story. Could he afford it? Yes. Would he want to? Yegor preferred his houses warm, refined, classy, and built on a flat piece of land that you could surround with an electrified fence. So, no. He would not buy this house.

But to each his own.

He beeped the horn and waited in the car with the air-conditioning running, unbuttoned the cuffs of his sleeves. The garage door furthest from his car opened with a shudder and a rumble, revealing a red-and-black Porsche 911 with a hood scoop, piles of car parts arrayed on a dropcloth, and an avocado-colored American muscle car with its hood removed. Yegor shut down his Mercedes, checked the locks, and headed into the dim garage.

Eli Morrow met him as he crossed in. Instead of his usual dress shirt and sport coat, he was in an undershirt and blue jeans, ropy arms covered in greasy black smudges. His beeper still hung on his belt; that was one thing Yegor loved about Eli: always ready to work. “Yegor!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Tsovarich, c'mere, c'mere, lookit. You want a Slim Jim?”

“Yes, thank-you,” Yegor said, and Eli grabbed him by the shoulder and handed him a half-eaten stick of sausage. “Eli, my friend—”

Eli spun him bodily around and pointed him at the half-assembled green car. “Look at this,” he demanded, waving one blackened hand over the car. The windshield was cracked, there were spots of rust near the front fender. With the hood off, Yegor could see the most of the hoses and internal parts were dusty and frayed, but the engine looked jarringly new, and on top of it sat a glossy chrome blower. Clearly, they would be talking about the car first.

“New car?” Yegor prompted.

“Ain't it gorgeous?” Eli enthused.

Yegor looked back over his shoulder. Eli's collection included the Porsche, a Honda Civic he was always racing and tinkering with, a Cadillac El Dorado, and a white Ford Interceptor that did a convincing impression of a patrol car. Of all the cars, it was the Porsche that he would call gorgeous. “Yes, yes, when you put it back together,” Yegor allowed. “Very—Magnum PI.”

“Naw, you dumb Russkie. Dukes of Hazard. The Jumping General Lee,” Eli said, ghosting a greasy hand along the roofline. “69 Charger. Rare car. Very rare car. 'Cause they had to crash a car every episode shooting that stupid TV show. This one, it's a survivor. When I'm done with it, it's gonna be the real deal. Just dropped in the Hystler Hemi, installed the Roots blower. Oh and c'mere, c'mere.” Eli dragged Yegor around the back of the car by his elbow, fished a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the trunk. All the carpeted lining was ripped out, so Yegor could see the sheet metal within. “I could fit three fatties in here,” Eli announced. He banged on the steel floor with his fist. “Gonna reinforce this. Weld in some new struts. Weld sheet metal over the trunk latch and the rear lights. Gonna be absolutely escape-proof.” He slammed the trunk, scratched at a spot of bubbling paint with his thumbnail. “I'm thinking ox-blood. Or black. Dunno yet.”

If you weld over the rear light mounts, how will you change the bulbs? Yegor thought. “It will be a beautiful car,” he said instead.

“Fast, too. Fast as fuck! Get in, Yegor, you gotta experience it. American goddamn engineering!”

And so Yegor had to get in the passenger seat of Eli's half-assembled project car. The center console had been gutted and he could see right through to the firewall that contained the engine compartment. The seat was new, leather, a bucket seat mounted to the floor where a bench seat had been previously. It jiggled slightly as Yegor settled in. The shoulder belt hadn't been installed; only a lap belt held him to the seat. He tugged on it hard.

Eli swung himself in to the driver's seat, slammed the door, and twisted the ignition. The motor started up with a harsh, irregular rumble. Overlaid with the bass engine sounds was an unnerving hiss and whine.

“Is that correct noise?” Yegor demanded as Eli put the car in gear. The acceleration flung him back in the seat, which rattled under his weight. They screeched down the short driveway and out onto the residential road.

“What?” Eli yelled. “Oh, that, that's the supercharger, that's what they sound like. Oh, and if I do this,” he downshifted back to first, and the blower screamed. “Geh-hah-hah! Listen to it!” Eli pointed to a digital gauge that dangled out of the hole in the center console. “It's boosting, it's boosting, look! Five PSI!” He shifted up again to a more appropriate gear and the car stopped screaming.

Heat poured into the passenger compartment. Yegor rolled down his window with the hand crank. The car dipped and swayed and jolted on the curves.

“Eli, my friend, I called you to discuss business matters. One business matter, small but important—”

Eli gave him a warning look. “Yegor, why is it that all our friendly chats turn out to be about business.”

“Because we are friends, in business together,” Yegor rationalized.

“Yeah, well, business can wait.” Eli made it out of the housing development and turned on to a more developed, four-lane road that twisted back and forth between homes, hills, and the odd clump of aloe plants and scrub pines. He consulted a radar detector hanging from the roof and poured on the gas.

Yegor screamed. The car shrieked. The entire front end of the car rolled up a foot, the rear suspension bottomed out with a jolt and a bang. The front wheels bounced back down and when Yegor could see the road again they were pointed at oncoming traffic. Eli swerved away. The rear wheels skidded around, pointing them almost sideways, and he had to turn the wheel again. Finally they got straightened out and moving forward, in time to avoid being rear-ended by a pick-up truck. “Whoo!” Eli hooted. “You feel that?” He punched the throttle again, and the nose jumped again. Yegor yelped. This time Eli held on the gas as the nose came down, heady acceleration pinning Yegor into his seat as the palm trees and other cars whipped by faster and faster. “It goes like a raped ape!”

“Am not familiar with that expression,” Yegor said. “It goes, it goes. It goes in straight line, yes?”

“That's a geometry issue,” Eli dismissed. He let the throttle off, thankfully, and weaved through traffic at a sensible fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit. “All these big classics bump-steer. It's a design flaw in the front suspension, makes the tires toe in and out when the frame moves up and down,” he said, taking both hands off the wheel to demonstrate. “No, what I'm gonna do is, I dunno yet, it depends if I wanna configure this baby for drag racing or autocross—or, hell, outracing cops—who am I kidding, of course I'm gonna be racing cops in this thing! What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna tighten up the torsion bars, that's how Dodge did their front suspension, it's all torsion bars, a lot more adjustable than a Chevy, add a front sway bar, weld in new mounting points for the shocks, go to drop spindles, replace the shitty factory A-bars, ditch the rubber bushings...”

Yegor gripped the seat in white-knuckled fists as Eli took them out through rolling hills and rambled on about all the adjustments and replacements and cutting and welding and re-engineering he planned to do to the car to make it accelerate in a straight line and take a curve without spinning out. The car continued to shudder and sway and skid at the slightest imperfection on the roadway or touch of the steering wheel, and engine noise poured through the gap in the console.

“...And I'm gonna put a police scanner right there, behind a CD changer!” Eli finished, pointing to the hole.

“Big project,” Yegor yelled.

“It's gonna be the greatest road-racer anyone's ever seen!”

“You sound proud!”

“Hell, yes, I'm proud! A '69 Dodge! I've wanted one'a these since I was a kid!”

Eli never responded when asked about his past, so Yegor did not press him. “Now you have. Congratulations. Eli, my friend, I must talk about business that concerns us both.”

Eli looked away from the road and made eye contact with him. He had unnerving pale brown eyes, and he would stare right at people, unblinking, until they either looked away or took a swing at him. Yegor looked away, out the windshield. They were pointed at the corner of a concrete privacy wall. “Chyort voz'mi!”

Eli looked at the road again, careless, and gave the steering wheel a jerk. The rear wheels skipped around under them, overcorrecting, and he countersteered to get them back into their lane. “Well, go on then,” he said sourly. “Since you clearly won't shut up about it.”

“I hear from Yakov Ilyich that two of his girls have gone missing. He is very annoyed. He says they brought in fifty thousand per year, and nice girls, too.”

“What's that got to do with me?” Eli demanded.

“Well, you bought them.”

“No I didn't.”

“You used a credit card with one of your aliases on it. The same card, both times.”

“Wasn't me.”

“Yes, Eli, your card, you. Hotel staff saw you. 'Skinny man, scary yellow eyes.' That's you. Moving on. I heard from Pyotr Alexandrovich, who heard from Irina Mikhailovna, who heard from Brandon Handelman in the LAPD records room, Manny Fisher got his eyes and tongue cut out and other essential organs. Now this no problem but Manny supplied to Little Armenia, our mutual friend Gregor Pavelovich has business there, and now the gangsters are running around fighting over Manny's turf and Gregor's customers don't come. I don't need to know why—”

“He sold me two grand worth of baking soda!” Eli snarled. “Fucking—confectioner's sugar! I coulda kept cutting but he fucking died, he had it coming, Yegor, he was a filthy lying cheat, I shoulda choked him on his own product!”

“Reasonable, reasonable,” Yegor allowed. “But Eli. When you have problem. Come to me. Your friend. I will help you, I will stop people taking advantage of you. Easier.”

“I can take care of my fucking self,” Eli snapped. “Better my way. Make an example for all the cheats and frauds of this world—who's a guy gotta kill to get an ounce of coke around here? It's fuckin' Hollywood! I'm performing a service. I'm the fuckin' Better Business Bureau of drug dealing!”

“Moving on.”

“I don't like this conversation. You call me, you want a friendly chat, pft, 'friendly,' it's always one thing or another with you. And all you do is butt into my personal business.”

“Davin Pak, a racer. He is dead and they say he beat you.”

“He cheated!” Eli nudged the gas some more. “Anyway, that don't have nothing to do with me.”

“Found his skin all in road rash, dumped in quarry. Heart cut out.”

“Wasn't me.”

“Eli. No one stole organs in Los Angeles before we moved from Jersey. It was you.”

“Fine. Assuming it was me. Racing's a dangerous game, meet a lotta trash, piss a lotta people off. Who'd miss him?”

“His father, who paid protection money to the Black Serpents, who we have contracts with. Do you see my problem? I lie to them, I say 'no, I have no idea who killed his son,' but what if they find out? It does not take much brains to pin on you. And then it pins on me. This is not good to do to your friend!”

“Oh, poor you,” Eli sneered. “What are you, the neighborhood watch? Unclench a little.”

“It embarrasses me and it draws police attention,” Yegor said. “They are not totally stupid.”

Eli snorted.

Yegor wracked his brains for another approach. Guilt did not work on men like Eli Morrow. Intimidation was just provocation. He had to find common ground. “Eli. Just. As your friend. I am concerned you will draw attention.”

“That a threat?”

“No!” Hurriedly. “I am concerned. We are friends. Partners.” An angle occurred to him. “Are you well? Happy?”

“What?” Eli spat. “'Course I'm happy. What kinda question's that.”

Yegor looked at him, tired.

“You think I'm gonna suicide by cop? No! No, Yegor. Just—a man's got to stick up for himself, you know? The cheats and the fakes and the liars—ain't none of your business who I kill. I've got my reasons.”

“You're right,” Yegor agreed, seizing on this. “Ain't none of my business. So I don't want to know.”

“I don't go bragging about it,” Eli said, which was currently true. He'd used to. Like a cat, who dropped dead rodents in Yegor's shoes each morning.

Yegor reached over and patted Eli on the shoulder. “My friend, how about a wager.”

“What for?”

“You, me—Las Vegas, next fall.”

Eli scowled. “I hate Vegas. Fake city fulla human rubbish—wait, wait, are you offering—”

“Yes.”

“All-expenses paid trip to clean house?” Eli demanded, his pale brown eyes alight. 'Clean house' was the euphemism they used for 'murder an enemy and all his family members and most of his friends so as to prevent retaliation or testimony.' Eli loved cleaning house. But if you knew how to run a business, you didn't need to do it often. Yegor Sergeyevich Ivanov was getting quite good at running his businesses lately, which may have been why Eli had gotten bored.

“Yes,” Yegor said. “And if I win, next round of drinks with the crew is on you.”

“You know I don't drink,” Eli protested.

“That's my wager. Very favorable to you.”

“What's the terms?”

Yegor watched Eli carefully. “Six months, I don't hear about any of your private business.”

Eli scoffed. “What, you're gonna have eyes on me, you're gonna watch me? Hah-hah, gather round, comrades, all shots are on Eli the Goat—” His accent was decent but his grammar was atrocious.

“You think you cannot evade me?” Yegor challenged.

“Now you're trying to manipulate me! I'm not a damn child!”

“If you evade me, you evade police, you make no embarrassment for our friends, you are entertained, all is good. I do not manipulate you, my friend.”

Eli tilted his head this way and that, the black box between his ears ticking and sparking with calculations. At last he said, “Fine. I accept.”

“Thank-you,” Yegor said, relieved. He offered his hand, and Eli shook it.

To shake Yegor's hand, Eli had to remove his right hand from the wheel and twist his body. He also had to glance aside, taking his eyes off the road, shifting his body weight minutely, lowering his left arm. This could have been manageable had there not been a tree root raising the asphalt just as they shook hands. The bump in the road from the tree root compressed the front suspension, distorting the alignment of the Charger's front wheels and causing them to veer slightly to the left. Yegor made a choked gasp, his grip reflexively tightening on Eli's right hand, even as Eli jerked the steering wheel away. One-handed, it was more difficult to meter out the appropriate force and rate to the steering wheel. Eli swerved right and the rear tires broke traction, oversteering. They spun violently, skidding uncontrolled across the pavement at sixty miles an hour.

Yegor's seat broke loose from the floor. Centrifugal forces flung him backward, seat and all, against the back bench, coming to rest with his face crammed into the footwell behind Eli, the weight of the passenger seat pressing him helplessly into the carpet.

The car jolted over a curb, off the road, ten feet up a steep hill, almost flipping sideways. The front bumper face-planted into the sandy slope and the tires spun with a screech of rubber before the engine died with a thump. Eli stood on the clutch and they rolled back down the hill into the roadway, facing the wrong direction. An oncoming Lexus swerved to avoid hitting them head-on.

Eli cackled hysterically, a high-pitched laugh that built and built into a shriek. He slapped the steering wheel with his palm. “Yegor! Geh-haha! God, Yegor, I love this fuckin' car! Did you feel that!”

“Help,” Yegor grunted. Eli turned around in his seat, still laughing, and helped Yegor pry himself upright and disentangle himself from the passenger seat.

“You've, uh, got a smudge,” Eli said, spitting on his thumb and wiping something off Yegor's forehead. Yegor scrubbed the spot with his jacket sleeve. He was reasonably sure that was not a standard American cultural custom. Eli chuckled, twisted the ignition. “Guess I gotta reinforce that seat-mount,” he said, nodding at the passenger side floor. Yegor shoved the loose seat backward into the passenger space and buckled himself into the back bench as Eli cranked the wheel and headed off—thankfully toward home.

“Oh,” Eli grunted as he took the turn. He gripped the back of his neck. “Mighta pulled something there. But you didn't mean it, baby, did you,” he crooned to the car. “No, I know you didn't. You're just showing your spirit. That's right. That's my darlin'. Take us home, I'm'a fix you up, fix all those shortcuts from those halfwit engineers in Detroit, make you fly like a funnycar and corner like a Bugatti. Gonna give you my heart and soul, darlin', you're in good hands with Eli.” He glanced over his shoulder. “That was fun, right! Ooh, I love this car!”

“Yes, fun,” Yegor agreed, gripping the upholstery of the bench seat for dear life.

 

June 26, 1994, a warm night after a brutally hot day. Yegor Sergeyevich Ivanov and his crew of thugs and logistics analysts, and Gregor Pavelovich Luneev and his crew of thugs and insurance experts, and their cousins and girlfriends and hangers-on had gathered in a nightclub owned by Gregor Pavelovich's ally Dale Schoemacher to celebrate Yegor Sergeyevich's impending purchase of a different nightclub, and Gregor Pavelovich's receipt of 1.2 million dollars in insurance payouts for fraudulent cholesterol tests his crew had billed on behalf of unwitting south-side residents over the past year and a half. About fifty people were crowded into the VIP lounge.

Eli Morrow returned from the men's room, sniffing and rubbing his nose. Fifty expectant faces stared back at him. “What,” he said.

Yegor stood. “My friend, we have our wager—”

“What?” he demanded. “Who? No! No way am I paying for all your booze, you freeloading pubic-hairs. Fuck off!”

Yegor sighed. He waved for one of his accountants, Sasha Guryev, to deliver the bad news.

“On June 3^rd, Mateo Espinoza was found deceased—”

“This is bullshit,” Eli snarled. “Yegor, tell 'em, you know I don't fuck with the Latinos! That wasn't me!”

“—found deceased with two gunshot wounds to the head—”

“See, he wasn't mutilated, it wasn't me—”

“—and was apparently road-hauled before death. Witnesses report, and I quote, a big muscle car the color of old blood—”

“Show me these witnesses! Let 'em tell it to me to my face!”

“—and a driver yelling, si jodes con los Reyes, jodes con el diablo! as he dragged Mr. Espinoza down Olympic Boulevard.”

Eli's face went thunderous. “I don't speak Spanish.” Eli did, in fact, speak fluent Spanish; Yegor had met him through a Salvatoran gang in Jersey City. But one of the rules he and Yegor had agreed upon before moving to California was, that Eli would never be asked to clean house on their Hispanic enemies, and no one could know that he spoke Spanish. Yegor didn’t ask why. Eli’s trust was important to him.

“You must be mistaken, Sasha Ivanovich,” Yegor said with a calming little wave of his hand. “They could not hear, no way. But still. Blood-red car.”

“You owe us a round or two,” said Gregor Pavelovich.

Eli turned to Yegor with a pleading expression.

“We have our wager,” Yegor said.

“Wasn't me.”

“Yes, you.”

“No, it wasn't.”

“Yes, you! Eli, my friend, we have evidence!”

“Fuck your evidence!”

Yegor pinched his nose. “Eli,” he said sternly. “You know how we treat men who cannot keep their word.” Eli was largely responsible for all the 'treatment' performed on men who failed to keep their word to Yegor Ivanov, but Yegor and Gregor had other thugs, who were all present, eager for free alcohol, and cracking their knuckles.

Eli ground his teeth but said nothing.

“And when you break your word on our wager, what are you?” Yegor prompted. The entire ring of crooks and their friends and family looked on with interest.

Eli kicked the nearest coffee-table. “Gaaaaah!”

“Keeping your word is hard sometimes. But Eli, my friend. Perhaps next year, Las Vegas.”

“You're lying to me,” Eli hissed, his shoulders hunched. “You're a fuckin' cheat and a liar, this is rigged! Rigged!”

“Wallet,” Gregor demanded.

Yegor raised a hand, approached Eli cautiously. “Hey, hey. Discretion is difficult. Practice—”

“Don't patronize me.”

“Wallet!” Gregor repeated himself, louder.

“There is always next year.”

Eli drew himself up, shoved Yegor aside, and approached the table in front of Gregor Pavelovich. “Fine. Fine!” he snapped. He dug his wallet out of his pocket, and slammed it down on the oak tabletop. Then he whipped out his ankle knife, swung it high overhead, and impaled the wallet, driving the knife deep into the wood. “Everybody drink until you puke!” he bellowed, spinning away in disgust. “This round's on Eli Morrow. You'll owe me for this! You'll all pay!”

And he spun on his heel and stormed down the stairs.

Yegor and Gregor blinked at the wallet and knife. It was a nice sturdy double-edged number, built solely for combat. Gregor grabbed the handle and wiggled it, slowly and stiffly, out of the wood. “You'll all pay?” he echoed.

Yegor shrugged, apologetic. “He's a little temperamental. But he's my best worker, absolutely ruthless. Heart of ice.”

“He's a nut. He's going to snap and kill you one day,” Gregor said. He pulled Eli's credit cards out of the wallet and looked at the damage from the knife. Only one of them had an intact magnetic strip. There was also two hundred dollars in slightly perforated cash.

“Let me worry about him,” Yegor said. “Trust me. I can control Eli Morrow when it counts.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Gregor said. He flagged one of the waitresses, held up the usable credit card. “Grey Goose!” he demanded. “Clean American vodka! Ten bottles!”

They got only five bottles of Grey Goose because that was all Eli’s credit was good for. They spent the cash. Yegor sent Eli eight grams of free-base cocaine sealed into a ceramic Precious Moments angel as a good-will present the next morning. It was more than Eli had spent on the drinks, but it was worth it because the next time Yegor saw Eli over lunch, he was in excellent spirits, rambling on at breakneck speed about all the quirks and virtues of his modified Dodge Charger, and the humiliation apparently forgiven.

Yegor saw in the news that one of the club’s bouncers had gone missing that night he’d called in the bet. But no one had found the body yet, so apparently Eli had learned his lesson and hidden it better. Yegor didn’t bring it up and they had a pleasant meal.

The trick to managing people was to offer them what they wanted. And Eli, more than cars and cocaine, badly wanted a friend.