by Jonas Saul
“You’re holding blades. A month ago you would’ve killed the person who got that close to you with those. Rosina told me all about you and your phobias.”
A wave of anger pounded through him. At that moment he felt no amount of bullets would stop him if he decided to cover the waxed wooden floor with Yuri’s blood.
“It’s over, Yuri. Tell me where she is. We will walk away and I won’t kill you. Any other option will not turn out so well for you.”
“I believe you. I do. You always back up what you say. But before I bring her in here, I wanted to tell you how predictable you are.”
Darwin rubbed the blades against each other and took a step toward Yuri. The metallic sound of the blades echoed throughout the large room.
“You fell face first into my trap,” Yuri said. “I want to thank you for that.”
Darwin took another step.
“Of course my bartender would tell you I’m at the strip club where Arkady is. I wanted to offer you the pleasure of killing that asshole for me. He was too uncontrollable. I made sure everyone thought I was staying at the Park Hotel. I even joked with Arkady that if he saw you, he could give you the room number. What a fool he was that he didn’t see the big picture.”
Darwin continued to move closer to the four men.
“I was surprised when you connected me to the adult store in North York and I didn’t think you would kill my man in the back parking lot, but that’s okay. I understand. You’re angry.”
Darwin’s face flushed with heat. The nails of his fingers wrapped around the handles of the scythes so tight they dug into the palm of his hands.
“I sent word out on the street that if The Scythe—I love that you took on that particular moniker—came asking about me, to tell him to come here.” He laughed. “A stolen police car? Really?”
Darwin stood twenty feet away now.
“Stop where you are.” Yuri’s face tightened, his eyes hardening. “You will have a bullet in each leg with one more step.”
Darwin stopped, not willing to test Yuri yet. None of the men had pulled weapons out, though. He could run and leap on Yuri, cut the life out of his throat in seconds and be done with it, but still, he halted.
A red beam, like a laser light, flashed across his eyes. He looked up at the steel beams that lined the ceiling, crisscrossing every which way.
Seven men hung suspended in various poses. All of them had weapons pointed at Darwin.
When he looked down at his chest, red lights moved below his neck where the snipers had taken careful aim.
“Place the scythes on the floor,” Yuri said.
Rosina wasn’t here. She wasn’t in this room and they hadn’t shot him yet. He took a step back. No one fired. He took another step and then turned and walked to the double doors, every second waiting for a bullet in his back.
At the door, he yanked on the handle but nothing happened.
“Last chance. Drop the scythes or they will be taken from you.”
He put his shoulder into the door. It was like body checking solid steel.
He gazed across the room. Four men from the upper beams were shimmying down ropes. When they landed, weapons came up and took aim on Darwin. They moved forward while the other men used the ropes to descend.
Unless the FBI was about to storm the convention center a day earlier than what their intel suggested, Darwin realized that his wife and he were dead.
Yuri motioned some kind of silent order with his hand.
A gun went off and the scythe in Darwin’s right hand was torn away. Another shot and the left one zinged into the wall behind him.
The vibration resonated through his hand and up his arm but he didn’t cry out.
A moment later he was surrounded by the first four armed men to come down from the beams.
Maybe this is a blessing. No more running, no more trying to stay alive and outwit the Mafia.
The nightmarish ride had taken its toll. A part of him was happy it would be coming to an end.
“Bring him to the office,” Yuri ordered as he walked away. “He can wait with his wife.”
“Do you want him handcuffed like her or strung up on the hooks?”
Yuri stopped and turned back. “String him up with all fourteen hooks for his wife to see when she wakes. They both die tomorrow, so it won’t matter much, but I’ll enjoy it.”
Chapter 19
Since Florida, which seemed a lifetime ago, Darwin finally got to see his wife. They brought him to a room in the back of the convention center that would normally serve as an office but was large enough to be the size of two standard hotel rooms.
Inside the room was exactly what he expected. Chains hung suspended from the beams in the ceiling. More chains dangled from wall mounts behind a square chunk of plastic taped to the floor. A metal table off to the side held a variety of implements that looked like something only a Nazi doctor would love. Darwin remembered the dirt-laden socks Scythe had used on his back and the bloody urine he’d experienced afterward. What lay on the table would get his blood flowing from a lot more places than just his bladder.
Rosina lay spread out on a makeshift bed, her hands cuffed to a chain that was attached to a steel necklace at least an inch thick.
When he called out to her, she didn’t budge.
“Is she alive?” he asked the men who pushed him inside the office.
“Drugged sleep.”
They stood him over the square piece of plastic and cuffed his ankles and then his hands. The whole time he stared at his woman, tears filling his eyes. His lower lip quivered with the sadness that they had become instead of the happily married couple who had once toured Rome on their honeymoon.
He didn’t resist as the men secured him. One of the men remained near the door, a long gun, probably an AK-47, pointed at him.
After a few moments, his hands were bound behind his back and attached to a chain lodged to the wall. His feet couldn’t move more than an inch as the ankle restraints were fastened to a chain that was also bolted to the wall.
In one quick movement, his stolen golf shirt was ripped from his body. Then one of the men produced a large knife and sliced off the hoodie, careful not to touch Darwin. He almost thanked the man for his tenderness, then thought better of it.
Small gifts.
He may not have a phobia of knives anymore, but he still didn’t want one slicing through his skin. His neurosis had evolved to a natural fear of knives.
They started on his pants.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
He didn’t even get a grunt for an answer. A moment later, his pants were removed and he stood in his underwear, the manacles already chaffing his skin.
Outside, the summer air was super-heated. Inside, air conditioners cooled the room, producing goose bumps on his flesh. He shivered and glanced over at Rosina. She looked so good, resting. He remembered watching her rest when they were first together, a lifetime ago. They had had such great times together.
He stared at her through water-covered eyes and pledged that he would do whatever he could to get them both out of this mess and make things right. They would deal with the trauma on their own time, tilling their garden, sipping wine in the evenings, eating pasta as the sun dropped over Italy. Their day would come, he was sure of it, even though the odds were completely against them.
The worst pain he had ever felt pierced his consciousness as it tore into his skin. He yanked away from it, but the cuffs that held him only gave an inch.
He screamed and looked at the Russian to see what he was doing. The idiot had stuck a large fish hook with a barbed tip into Darwin’s right triceps.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” he shouted through his clenched teeth. “I’m already tied up.”
“Did not you hear the boss?”
“No, I did not hear the boss.”
“He said no handcuffs.”
“Then take these off, asshole. Untie me.”
> “We will. In time.”
The man brought another fishhook up from a metal container on the floor and eased it into the other triceps.
Darwin pulled against the chains that held him, but there was no use. He couldn’t get his arm away from the hook.
He panted, his breathing shallow as his face flushed and sweat beaded up all over his body.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough. You don’t need to do any more. You’ve made your point.”
Blood trickled from each wound. The man used a long piece of wood, like a chopstick, to dab at the blood, applying a clear liquid on the wounded flesh. A moment later, the blood clotted and stopped flowing.
“Super Glue,” the Russian said, holding it up.
“Are you done having fun yet?”
The man shook his head.
“Why do this? You’ve already got me secured.”
“The boss, he say all the hooks.” He turned to look in the box, then back at Darwin, smiling. “I have too many to count. But it okay, soon you sleep. Once you all hooked up, I take handcuffs and ankle cuffs off. Trust me, you won’t move or try to escape. If you do, your skin come off.”
“I will kill you. Trust me, you will be the first to be cut in half.”
He wagged his finger in Darwin’s face. “You die first.”
Unnerved by how the man kept smiling, Darwin watched him gather another hook. They were for a large ocean fish of some kind. The size of a rounded coat hanger found on the back of a door or in an elementary school, except these had a pointy tip with a barbed end aimed the other way. Trying to dislodge them would rip and tear and do more damage than when they entered the flesh.
Darwin shouted until his voice was hoarse as the man forced the hooks into his flesh, slowly easing through the skin, smiling with each one, as if this was his dessert after a hard day at the office. Then he would seal the wound with Super Glue.
The sentry at the door had lowered his weapon and watched with amusement. Rosina slept on the mattress, oblivious to what was happening to her husband five feet away.
The pain of the small hooks entering his skin became unbearable as the Russian did one after another in his shoulder blades and lower back. His stomach gave out. The protein bars came up as he vomited on the floor, splashing his feet. The second bout flowed from his mouth as he almost passed out, leaving trails of bile down his chest and underwear.
The Russian didn’t seem to notice the vomit. He stepped in it and continued his insane violation of Darwin’s flesh. The sentry brought a wooden stool over and set it under Darwin’s knees to help support his weight when he collapsed.
As a hook entered his cheek, the sharp tip probed the inside of his teeth.
That was the end for Darwin.
He passed out and dropped twelve inches, as far as the chains would allow, his knees stopping on the wooden stool.
Chapter 20
Water splashed across his face. He snapped his eyes open and gasped. He thrashed for a second until the pain returned and he locked his body up, holding still. Instead of screaming, he moaned. With a hook piercing each cheek, it would painful to scream with an open mouth.
They hooked him up everywhere. Pain seemed to be what his body had become. Nothing but pain.
As he adjusted his weight, Yuri kicked the wooden stool out from under his knees. The chains snapped behind him as they took all his weight. From the way he had been suspended, dangling in the cuffs and chains for so long, his toes had fallen asleep. Now, as blood coursed through them, they ached, pins and needles tingling and making him want to move them. The plastic crinkled under his feet as he moved his toes.
He closed his eyes and focused on his body, on the pain. They must have set a hook in his skin every six inches or so. At least that’s what it felt like. There was a certain numbness where the hooks were embedded. The sharp pain of them entering his flesh was gone, but it still hurt when he moved.
He opened his eyes and tried to move his head enough to see the damage they caused, but couldn’t.
“I was afraid you were going back under.”
Two large men flanked Yuri. One of them sported a buzz cut, tattoos on his arms, and a large bird tattoo on his chest. The other had a long and hard nose that appeared to have been broken a few times. Both men looked like something he would see entering a boxing ring—a bare-knuckle ring.
“We’re going to take the cuffs off now,” Yuri said. “We need you awake for that.”
Darwin moaned. It seemed involuntary now. He couldn’t open his mouth to speak because of the hook in each cheek.
Something moved behind him. He wanted to tell them to get out of there. Don’t bump into him.
Then a piece of metal clicked and a slight pressure was added to the hooks in his back. There were more clicks.
Yuri reached in a pocket and pulled out a small mirror.
“Let me show you what we’re doing,” he said.
He held the mirror up. The Russian who had impaled him with the hooks applied chains to the end of the hooks in his back. Darwin watched in horror as six chains we’re clipped into place, two at his shoulder blades, two near the middle of his back and two at the small of his back. He had two smaller chains added to his triceps hooks. Yuri lowered the mirror and allowed Darwin to watch as four more chains were connected to the hooks in his hamstrings and his calf muscles. Twelve hooks embedded in his flesh, connected to twelve chains locking him to the wall.
“There,” Yuri said. “I think that should do it.”
The Russian who had hooked him up walked from behind Darwin and unlocked the handcuffs. When he pulled them off, his weight adjusted again and his pain threshold increased to the red zone. His sanity slipped a notch, and he understood in that moment that he would never be the same. If he walked away from this, he knew he would be a changed man. The scars on his body would pale in comparison to the mental scars.
His ankle cuffs were unlocked and pulled away.
He stood on his own two feet which were almost awake, held only by the chains clipped to the hooks. If Darwin were to step forward and walk, all twelve hooks would shred his flesh.
Yuri turned to one of his guards. “Call Sven and have two double coffins prepared for Darwin and Rosina.”
The guard nodded and stepped out of the office.
“What’s … a double coffin?” Darwin asked, keeping his mouth closed for the most part. He struggled to hold himself upright on weak limbs, knowing if his knees gave out, he would fall and rip out large chunks of meat.
“It is one of my most used means of disposal.”
Yuri stepped to the side. Darwin followed his movement slowly, until Rosina came into view. She was still asleep, but had moved since the last time he’d seen her.
“A man out of Buffalo is credited with designing the double coffin,” Yuri said. “When he has a client at the funeral home, they are buried in what appears to be a normal looking coffin. Underneath is a cavern where I can bury my enemies without suspicion. There’s actually a legit funeral and everything.” Yuri pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket. His remaining bodyguard leaned in with a lighter. After he had it lit, he held it aloft, blew smoke out of his mouth and looked down at Rosina’s sleeping form. “You two will be buried in the bottom of two different double coffins, and Mrs. Smith or John Doe, or whoever’s funeral it is, will be none the wiser. Brilliant, eh?”
He puffed hard on the cigar.
“No one will ever find the body,” he added. “What would make the authorities exhume a coffin of a man or woman who has no affiliation with us?”
The pain became a constant, like a strong toothache that just wouldn’t go away. It came in waves and only increased when he moved, which was frequently to adjust his weight from leg to leg.
“There’s a Russian saying that says, ‘The house is burning and the clock is ticking.’ Do you know what this means?”
Darwin didn’t reply.
“It means you have to keep making money every
minute. As we speak, I have people making money for me. The clock is always ticking and the house is always burning. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle.”
He puffed on his cigar until the tip glowed.
“I got my start robbing jewelers.” He moved to Rosina and sat on her mattress. “We would dress up as ultra-orthodox Jews. The fake beards, side curls, black hats and coats, you know, the whole thing. We’d get the retailer to pull out expensive jewels while we chatted away in Yiddish. One of us would distract the jeweler while the other would switch the jewels with fakes. After an excuse to leave, we’d walk out with thousands in jewels and no way for them to identify us. It was brilliant.”
