“Very bad,” Stepan said, turning the dropper to make sure I would see the caustic liquid. “And much more, there.” He pointed at the huge steel pressure vat.
That would be for later. To dispose of my body, after they’d wrung me dry.
“Starting before your boss gets here. Not smart,” I said, the words threatening to catch in my throat.
“For Gennady,” he said. He gripped my hair and jerked my head backward. My neck strained to pull away, to thrash, but I had no leverage.
I had a perfect view of the eyedropper, three inches from my eye. The rounded edge of the first pearlescent drop expanded, grew fat.
It fell onto my cheek. For a moment nothing changed. I had an instant’s relief that they had gotten the mixture wrong, or that this had been some psych game to see if I broke down immediately.
Then the heat rose, shockingly fast. Like the red tip of a cigarette touched to my skin, but far from being smothered, the fire only increased with each second. My breath hissed through my teeth. The room went watery, tears rising as my body sought any way to expel the torment.
Another drop fell, adding to the first, the trickle now running up toward my clenched eye. My neck muscles strained to move, only succeeding in shivering and making the trickle run faster.
Stepan released my head. I shook violently, trying to throw any remaining lye away before it reached my eyelid. Beads of sweat popped from my scalp.
“Hold it.” Burke’s voice.
I blinked the water from my eyes as Burke and Stepan had a short, angry conversation in Russian. It ended with Stepan marching away to join his friend at the worktable, heels of his boots communicating fury with every step.
“I told you to stay the fuck away,” Burke said to me. From upside down, his form looked monolithic against the barn ceiling.
“Message received,” I said. “Let me walk and I’m gone.”
He didn’t bother to answer. Instead he leaned in to study the chemical burn on my cheek.
“Stepan doesn’t think ahead,” Burke said. “Normally, the face is where to start if we just want one piece of information. Melt a guy’s nose off, fry one of his eyes, and the fear does half the work for you. But—” He shrugged. “Terror scrambles people’s brains. They can’t piece thoughts together and tell you anything complicated. And your face is pretty fucked up already. I’m surprised you can even feel much through that scar tissue.”
If what I’d felt had been blunted, I couldn’t imagine what the full treatment would be like.
“Just put a bullet in my head,” I said. “There’s nothing I know that you want your buddies to hear.”
Burke moved to the center of the table to begin turning a crank. The table tilted back to horizontal and continued, my head rising.
“If Stepan had any sense he’d know it’s better to start slow,” Burke said. “With the feet.”
He said something in Russian to Stepan and the other man. Stepan walked over to the wall of the room and began to uncoil a thick green hose from a reel on the wall. The man with the earring brought a deep steel tray and set it down on the floor under my boots before jogging to help Stepan.
Burke continued his lecture. “Not just leaving the victim’s feet in the mix. That’s for shit. Once a few drops of this gets into your blood, that’s it—dead within minutes. No, you have to hose the feet down between dunks. The water helps activate the solution. Makes it even more corrosive. Painful, yeah, but it’s seeing it work that makes magic happen. Nobody alive can stay quiet while they’re watching their own feet drip off the bone.”
I spoke under my breath: “If I talk, they’ll know why I found you.”
Burke gestured: So what?
“Even if you really were my kid,” he said, “nothing I can do about it now.”
Stepan and his buddy dragged the water hose close while his partner took out a paper painter’s mask and pair of latex gloves. Burke didn’t move to put them on.
“His shoes,” Burke said, pointing. Stepan sneered, maybe at me, maybe at Burke, and knelt to start unlacing my boots. Burke said something in Russian, and the second man dropped the hose and picked up the roll of duct tape from the floor. He stepped behind me and began to unstrip the tape, winding a length around my shins to completely bind them to the table. There would be no thrashing and tipping over the tray during what was to follow.
Stepan pulled off one boot and looked up at me.
“After the feet we do your hands,” he said. “Glug glug.” His friend with the earring laughed as he came around in front to wind another loop over me.
Burke shot him in the back of the head. He fell forward, onto my legs.
Stepan turned at the sharp pop of the suppressed explosion. I saw his left eye widen in shock even as Burke’s second round shattered his skull. A spray of blood and pieces more solid than blood blinded me. Hot in my mouth. I spat, reflexively.
“Hold still,” Burke said, stopping me from trying to wipe my face with my shoulder.
I heard the whispery clink of a gravity blade and felt tension on the tape at my wrists as Burke sliced through it. I raised my hands to scrape the gore from my brow. I could see again. Stepan’s blood was already growing sticky. I felt it thick on my lids with every blink.
Burke bent over the two bodies, checking. Stepan’s leg twitched, but neither man would move again on their own.
“Why?” I croaked, my throat impossibly dry.
“I only had two bullets left,” Burke said.
Not the question I was asking. He didn’t elaborate, just resumed cutting me loose. The instant my ankles were free I stood up, tearing at the remaining tape, not waiting for him to finish. I wanted off that fucking table.
Burke crossed the room to a panel of gauges on the wall. I knelt to grab the hose. A spray nozzle at its end controlled the flow. I pulled the trigger and stuck my head under the gushing water. Through the splashing I made out the rhythmic clangs of Burke climbing a set of metal steps to the top of the vat.
By the time I was satisfied that the last of Stepan had been sluiced off me, he’d returned and was going through the pockets of the dead men, collecting their belongings in the same bag that had hooded me.
“Another ten minutes and the mix will be hot enough,” he said.
“What are we doing?” I retrieved my boot that Stepan had removed.
“What does it look like? Getting rid of these assholes.” He jabbed a thumb at the vat. “It’s already heated up. For you. Twenty, thirty hours in there and these boys will be goop.”
I started to protest, and then my brain caught up to reality. We sure as hell weren’t going to call the cops and try to explain what had happened. Stepan and his buddy were dead, thanks to Burke.
Killed with what he’d said were his last two rounds. Where had the others gone?
I went to open the interior door. A smaller room lay behind it, an office space with smeared whiteboards and one aged desk in cracked blue plastic and peeling metal. No chairs.
Another door waited, opposite the one I’d just come through. I opened it, knowing what I would find.
The third and fourth men from Stepan’s team lay on the smooth concrete floor of an empty two-car garage. Wide blooms of blood stained their running jackets; the chest of one, the spine of the other. The man who was faceup had had time to draw his gun. It lay a few feet from his outstretched hand.
Burke had killed these when he’d stepped out, supposedly to call Anatoly Liashko. He’d arranged for Stepan and the last man to have their backs to him, their hands busy, before he closed the deal on them, too.
He could have taken one of the pistols from the dead men. But maybe he only trusted his own weapon when it really counted. I followed that same rule.
Thirty-Seven
I returned to the vat room. Burke was using his knife to strip Stepan of his clothing.
“What is this place?” I said.
“Private property. The tank here came from a paint factory.�
�
“And you . . . repurposed it.”
“Gus did. He wanted a place out of the city nobody knew about, for this kinda work. It took him a couple of years to build. I’ve kept it up.”
Jesus. The question of just how many bodies had found their way into the vat, melting into a caustic slurry, came into my head before I shoved it away. No point to dwelling on it. Not when we were about to add four more to the total.
“Your jacket and blade and shit are over there.” Burke nodded to the table. “Cut the clothes off Iosef. The metal zipper and rivets won’t break down in the vat. We’ll bag ʼem.”
“What did you tell Liashko? Or did you call him at all?”
He looked up, his expression almost amused.
“You know about Anatoly, huh? Thought so. Maybe there’s more to you dogging me than your little story about lookin’ for Daddy.” Burke brought his knife up the back of Stepan’s shirt, parting the fabric like water.
“Stepan said they flew in this week. To kill me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. If this was just about killin’ you, Liashko would have left it to me. Come on.”
I helped Burke carry the bodies of the other two men from the empty garage into the main room. We stripped them and stuffed their shredded clothes into a heavy-duty plastic trash sack. All of the Russians’ personal effects—passports, phones, wallets, knives, guns—Burke tossed into the bag. He removed the American cash from the wallets first.
Four naked bloody corpses lay in as neat a row as could be expected at the base of the vat. Christ. I inhaled, not caring about the smell of fresh death that was making its first appearance.
“I actually do gotta call Anatoly,” Burke said. “He’s waiting. Fuck knows what I’m going to tell him.”
“Say that I killed them. And you killed me.”
“Some shithead burglar killed all four of his boys? All Anatoly knows about you is that you busted into my place. Stepan’s no lightweight. Liashko won’t buy that story. Not without a news story showing the cops fishing your body out of the harbor.”
I looked at the row of dead men. The idea that bloomed in my head was less a flower than a black, poisonous mold.
“What if he saw me for himself?” I said.
“Saw how?”
“If you have to call him.” I stripped off my T-shirt. “You can send pictures, too.”
“The fuck are you doing?”
He watched as I tossed my boots and socks aside, my jeans and underwear following just as quickly. Getting it over with. I walked barefoot over to Stepan. Burke’s bullet had come out through the killer’s left-rear skull, taking enough bone and brain along with it to fill a generous ice cream cone. I’d just washed some of it off my face. Now I dipped my fingers back into the gore.
Stepan’s blood was cooling but still viscous. I scooped small globs of it onto my chest. Not wiping like paint, just daubing, trying to keep the horrible red as thick as possible. I could feel gritty flecks of bone matter on my fingertips. When I’d taken what I could from Stepan, I moved to Iosef, and then the others, stealing some from each.
Burke stared. I’d learned what it took to sicken a stone killer.
The lumpy red patina extended from the hollow of my throat to my armpit. It dried rapidly against the heat of my body. I shaped the larger blobs as best I could into a rough simulation of an exit wound, as if I’d been shot in the back and the round had exploded out through my breastbone. Trickles of watery pink dripped down my ribs to my groin and thigh. I ignored them, along with the voice in my head shouting to stop. I was busy.
When I’d done what I could, I lay down next to Stepan’s body. The floor was cold enough to have made my skin prickle if my hair weren’t already standing on end. Stepan’s arm and leg felt like a partially deflated inner tube against my own limbs. Rubbery and cool. They warmed horribly against my flesh. I turned my head to one side and forced myself to relax.
“Do I pass for a cadaver?” I said, as much to distract myself as to ask.
“More than you wanna know.” Burke stepped forward with his phone held high, to capture the moment. “Hold your breath. And move your arm, it looks too—living.”
I half lidded my eyes and let them go out of focus. Burke shot pictures of the full row of bodies, then two of me, closer in. The flash blazed in my peripheral vision.
“Fuck me, that’s creepy,” Burke said, holding out the phone. I sat up to look.
My body was a shade darker than that of the dead Russians. The difference could be chalked up to genetics. The impressionistic artwork of viscera on my chest looked as violent as any of their fatal wounds. But my face in profile really hit home, the slackness and the rusty flecks around my mouth and neck that I’d missed with the hose. It looked as though my destroyed lungs had coughed out one final bloody breath. A final touch that sold the deception.
That, and my nakedness. The horrible indignity of being stripped and lined up like so many pigs for butchering. Even though that effect had been what I’d been aiming for, that my corpse must be real because no one would subject themselves to that primal disgrace, it still made me feel something close to shame.
I stood up and went to turn on the hose and spray myself clean for a second time.
“I’m calling him,” Burke said after I’d rinsed the last of the red from my body. One of the Russians’ shirts was clean of blood. I used it to towel off.
“Anatoly,” Burke said into the phone. “We have to talk.”
During the pause that followed, I gathered my clothes and mimed for Burke to turn up the volume.
“—where we may discuss,” Liashko’s voice came from the phone as I leaned closer. It was a resonant voice, even made tinny by the digital transformation. Careful enunciation cut through the thicker swaths of his accent. “Where is Stepan?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” Burke said. “Stepan is dead. So are Gennady and the others. They walked into a trap and that housebreaker you sent them after killed them.”
“No.” A flat refusal rather than an exclamation of shock. “I spoke to Stepan tonight. He said preparations were ready.”
“And where was he going after that?” Burke asked dryly.
Liashko didn’t answer.
Burke grunted to emphasize the point. “Gennady called me when they spotted Shaw. All hyper to run him down. When I got there the shooting was already over. Shaw was wounded. I finished him off.”
“The police?”
“I got them out before any cops showed,” Burke said. “Or most of them: Gennady took a fall and I couldn’t reach him. I’m at the barn now. You remember?”
“Yes. Your father’s place.”
“Here.” Burke pressed buttons on his phone. Sending his boss our impromptu photo shoot. “I have to put them in the vat, Anatoly. I’m sorry.”
There was another pause, longer. I imagined Liashko studying the row of naked, grisly bodies, with mine making a kind of exclamation point at the end.
“I must tell Iosef’s family,” he said finally.
Burke grunted assent. “At least Shaw’s dead.”
“And who hired this man? This thief?”
“Near as I can tell, Shaw works for himself. The cops held him awhile back on suspicion in a diamond robbery. His grandfather used to pull the same kinda jobs. High-end burglary. And Anatoly,” Burke chided, “you’ve put my name on a lot of those wire transfers under the import business, and had me withdrawing it in cash to grease a lot of palms. Somebody at the bank could be throwing up signals. Maybe alerting a partner like Shaw to check houses where there might be cash around. I’ve told you that’s a risky way to move your money.”
Liashko made a rumbling sound. Maybe disagreeing, maybe just chewing on the thought. “The police will investigate Gennady.”
“I’ll get rid of the traces tonight,” Burke said. He glanced at me and walked away. “It’s lousy, but we have bigger concerns,” I heard before he stepped out of earshot.
&n
bsp; I went to the table to gather my things. My wallet and multitool and everything from my pockets, including the Beretta I’d lost at the truck. One of the men must have fumbled the pistol into the rubble on the viaduct; it needed a serious cleaning to remove the grit in its barrel and works.
Burke had left the bag holding the belongings of the four killers on the floor nearby. On impulse, I slipped my hand inside to find the phone with a black enameled case we had taken off Stepan.
He’d said Liashko’s team had flown here for more than just killing me. The arms dealer had something brewing in the States. Even with my clothes back on, I was still cold.
After hanging up, Burke stood at the corner of the barn for a moment. Staring at nothing. I pretended to be engrossed in checking the pockets of my jacket.
Was his hand shaking? Fear, or rage?
As if he sensed my attention, Burke stuffed his phone in his pocket and marched to a standing supply cabinet. He returned with two respirators, green masks with twin charcoal filters like stubby white tusks.
“Put this on,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask why. If I tried, I could still smell the lye residue on my cheek.
Burke had kept the dead men’s belts separate when we’d stripped the bodies. He knotted two of them together, then did the same for the second pair. One makeshift leather rope he looped around Iosef’s ankles. The other went around his chest. I had to lift the body by the head to allow Burke to fix the belts in place. When he was done, we had two crude handles for the corpse.
Without a word we lifted Iosef and carried his limp form up the stairs one careful step at a time. A thick hinged lid on the roof of the huge vat was held shut by twist handles and sealed with a rubberized gasket. It looked like a windowless porthole. Burke adjusted his mask before turning the handles to open the lid. He stepped back as he did so, letting the first billow of fumes have its space.
I looked at Iosef. “Small opening.”
“Gus told me once he had to cut bigger guys up ʼfore he put them in the mix.”
A Dangerous Breed Page 26
