Emily nodded her frightened little head.
Polanski smiled. "Well, Emily," he said.
Heaton's wife erupted. "Don't dare say her name, you bastard. Get away. Get away right now." Her anger turned to anguish with her last few words and she said them, sobbing as she spoke, also resigned to what was about to happen. She paused, briefly, somberly, her face clouding over, then said, "Please, don't do this," in a quiet, sobbing voice.
Polanski looked round at her, again, and grinned. "Emily," he said, loud enough that Heaton could hear. "What's about to happen to you is your daddy's fault. You understand that, don't you?"
"Daddy?!" Emily called.
"Don't listen to him, honey," her mother said to her. "He's bad man. Your daddy and I love you."
Emily nodded and cried, her head bobbing up and down as tears trickled down her rosy little cheeks.
"Yes, Emily, we love you," Heaton called, now looking her way, his eyes red and teary, choking on his words.
Polanski leaned back, drawing the baseball bat from her shoulder, and looked at Heaton and his wife. "Eyes straight ahead," he barked. "Or I'll make this much worse than it needs to be."
Heaton's wife gave him one last pleading look, which he ignored, then turned her head and looked at her husband. His eyes were red and streaming with tears and his bottom lip was shaking. His face was painstaking, because he knew what was about to happen, but he also knew there was nothing he could do.
He grimaced back at her and shook his head in an apologetic manner, then did as Polanski had said and looked straight ahead.
His wife frowned and looked ahead, losing respect for the man she loved, also knowing what was about to happen. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared at the empty Chesterfield, hyperventilating and praying to herself that Polanski would stop.
"Daddy," Emily called, again. "I'm scared."
Polanski smiled behind her. "You should be," he whispered and cupped his left hand around baseball bat's grip, just above his right, then swung the bat backward into the air like it was some sort of club.
"We love you Emily," Heaton and his wife both shouted, simultaneously, while sobbing and taking quick, light breaths.
The bat whipped back through the air to the sound that a skipping rope makes when flipped overhead and cracked against the back of Emily's skull like it was a baseball being knocked out of the park.
She flopped forward to floor. Blood trickled down the back and sides of her neck as she lay there face-down, not moving. Not breathing.
Heaton's wife frowned and groaned. "No. Emily. No," she cried. She was inconsolable.
At first, Heaton said nothing. He stared absently at the Chesterfield, like he was in the room all by himself. Then, the gravity of what had just happened hit him like a freight train. He felt dizzy and sick. He looked round at his daughter's body and the reality set in. That was when the anger took hold. "Bastard," he shouted, shaking his head, seething with anger. "You bastard!"
His face was now red like a tomato and there was rage in his voice. Tears ran down his cheeks and there was a disgusted, angry scowl on his face. "I'm going to fucking kill you!" he screamed at Polanski and moved to stand up. “I’m going to fucking...”
Polanski glanced at Kanchelskis, who was standing near Heaton by the right of the sofa with his hands clasped in front of his body, and nodded.
Kanchelskis unclasped his hands and stepped forward and planted a crushing punt kick into the pit of Heaton's stomach before he could finish the threat or rise to his feet.
Heaton took the guy's steel-capped toe straight into his abdomen. It felt like a blow from a sledgehammer. He groaned and folded forward to floor, contorting forward, grumbling and gurgling in a painful mess.
Polanski, then, stepped toward Heaton’s sobbing wife. He held the barrel of the bat down against her right shoulder and leaned down and sniffed the right side of her neck. "Mmm, doesn't somebody smell good," he said. "Maybe I should have some one-on-one time with you first?"
She turned her head to her left and looked away and scrunched up her face in disgust, looking over at her daughter’s body, unable to comprehend the sight.
Polanski laughed and drew the bat from her shoulder, slowly, wiping her daughter's blood on her shoulder and the strap of her light pink nightdress, then stepped toward Heaton who was lying side-on on the floor, groaning and writhing in pain.
"You just threatened to kill me," he said to him, chuckling as he spoke. "You? Kill me?" he roared. His face went red and a seething anger crept into his eyes. "A pathetic little excuse of a man like you, threatening to kill me?" His face had turned beetroot. He swung the bat up into the air as hard as he could and whipped it down to a smashing halt against Heaton's rib cage. The bat thumped off his side. There was a loud crack on impact. It sounded like a mixture of splitting wood and shattering bones.
Heaton yelped in pain.
His wife grimaced. "Tom!" she wept and looked at Polanski. "Get away from him, you bastard."
Polanski glanced over at her and laughed. "Look at this pathetic excuse of a man you're married to," he said to her, then swung the bat up into the air and smashed his ribs, again.
Heaton yelped, again. Louder than last time.
"Puny little bitch," Polanski snarled. "Couldn't even defend his daughter."
"Please, stop this," Heaton's wife pleaded, crying while she spoke. "You’ve done enough. Please?"
Polanski said nothing. He just cocked his head and grinned, then turned and swung the bat again. This time, smashing Heaton's left knee. There was another loud, bone crushing crack.
He screamed in pain and whimpered and squirmed around on the floor, shaking and kicking his legs, his stomach heaving back and forth like he was going to throw up.
Polanski placed the end of bat down hard on his neck and looked him in his agonizing, terrified eyes and smirked. Then, flicked his gaze toward his wife. "Why, isn't your wife a beautiful woman?" he said, rhetorically, speaking to both her and Heaton at the same time. "Beautiful, indeed. It's a real shame she won't be staying that way. All because of a measly one thousand dollars."
Her red, teary eyes widened and she shook her head. "Please," she said. “Please, stop this.”
Polanski lifted the bat from Heaton's neck and moved toward her.
Heaton coughed and sucked what breath he could into his lungs. He turned his head on the ground and looked her way, saliva and blood dripping from his mouth.
"Please, don't do this," she pleaded.
Polanski shook his head and smiled, wickedly. Then, swung the baseball bat backward, high into the air, like a batter ready to strike a pitch.
Heaton's wife closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
The chilling, bracing darkness would be the last thing she would ever remember.
The bat's hard wooden barrel smashed against her face. It decimated her nose, shattered her cheeks and smashed her teeth. Her head snapped backward and she slammed against the floor.
Heaton whimpered and cried.
Polanski staggered forward and stood over her body, breathing hard, having put a lot of effort into that swing. Her face was gone. Unrecognizable, it was just crimson and white. A mix of bone fragments and flesh caved into her skull. "Such a shame," he muttered and sucked a satisfied breath, then handed the baseball bat back to Kanchelskis, who was still standing calmly on the right of the Chesterfield. "Wipe that down," he said.
"Yes, Boss," the guy said and took it from his hand.
Polanski, then, looked at the other guy who was still standing on the left of the Chesterfield, his arms folded across his chest, an amused look on his face.
"Kuznetsov," he said. "Help Kanchelskis clean this mess up." He pointed down at bodies of the woman and the little girl. "Carry them out of here. Wrap them in chicken wire and put them in the trunk of one of the cars. Drive out to the docks and load them onto the boat. Take them out Belle Isle and dump them in the river."
"Yes, Boss," the guy said.
"And make sure to take the diamond ring from Mrs. Heaton's finger before you do. That'll make up for Mr. Heaton's shortfall."
Heaton groaned on the floor.
Kuznetsov nodded and stepped forward. His boots crunched on the hard marley floor. He leaned over and grabbed the woman’s limp wrist, ripped the ring from her finger and handed it to his boss.
Polanski flicked his eye over the diamond. It was big and round. It looked expensive. He smiled and tucked it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
Kanchelskis drew a black cloth from his jacket pocket and used it to wipe the blood from the baseball bat. It smeared along the its length and stained into the grain of the wood. Satisfied it was clean enough, he laid it back down behind the Chesterfield and looked down Heaton, who was stirring on the ground in front of the sofa, coughing and crying, groaning and trying to wriggle to the sofa’s front in an attempt to wedge himself up. "Boss, what do you want us to do with him?"
Polanski cocked his head and looked down at the quivering mess of a man shaking on his floor. He was coughing deep lungful coughs and spitting blood, pushing himself against the front of the Chesterfield, trying to maneuver himself up.
"Wrap him in the wire, too. And throw him in alongside his family.”
“Want us to kill him first?” Kanchelskis asked.
“No," Polanski answered. "Throw him in alive. I want him to feel the water's icy chill on his skin and experience it rushing into his lungs before he drowns."
SIX
Naomi's apartment was a fifth-floor corner unit at Lafayette Tower a few blocks east of downtown Detroit. It was spacious and warm. And modern. It had white high ceilings, Jurassic stone-colored papered walls and a mahogany wooden floor.
"Make yourself at home," Naomi said to Beck as she closed the door behind him, then slipped her handbag from her shoulder before gesturing for him to make his way through to the lounge at the end of the entrance hall.
He smiled and nodded, then walked on through.
The lounge had similar decor to the entrance. A large white leather corner sofa sat against the Jurassic stone papered walls opposite a mahogany sideboard that held a paper-thin black flat screen LED television. The ceiling was high. There was a white shaggy rug in the middle of the floor. It was speckled with a glimmer of silver.
"Can I get you a drink? Beer? Wine?" she asked him from the hallway, kicking off her shoes, before stepping through to the lounge for his answer.
He thought about it for a beat. "You got any coffee?"
"Coffee? At this time?" she asked, surprised, judgement in her eyes.
He shrugged his answer.
"I guess," she said. "How do you take it? With cream? Sugar?"
"Just cream," he replied.
"OK," she said. "Be right up." She slipped off her scarf and gloves, and walked back through to the entrance hall where she tucked them into a closet by the front door, then took off her parka coat and hung it up, too, before stepping through an open mahogany door that led to the kitchen.
Beck laid his black night bag on the floor by the front of the sofa. He unbuttoned his coat and took off his scarf and gloves, laid them in a neat bundle on top of his night bag and sat down. The sofa was firm, but comfortable. He glanced around the apartment, surveying his surroundings for the night.
There were two mahogany doors that led off to rooms on the left side of the lounge and one that led through to a room on the right beyond the far end of the sofa. Bathroom, maybe, on the left. Bedroom beside it. Another bedroom on the other side. Two-bed, one-bath. Maybe two-bath, if the master bedroom had an en-suite, he thought. He was sure a place like this would have an en-suite.
He looked out the wall-size window on the other end of the room, listening while Naomi popped what sounded like the cork from a wine bottle and fed coffee beans to a grinder on the other side of the wall behind him. He listened to the machine screech and whine as it ground the beans from hard little pellets to a thin, smooth powder. Just as Naomi had said, the window offered a practically breathtaking view of the Detroit River in the distance down below. Spotlights and neon signs from stores and restaurants on Atwater Street reflected across its white frozen surface, illuminating the cracks and creases along its surface layer of snow and ice to a yellow, blue and pink rainbowed hue.
"Hey. I'm out of cream," Naomi called from the kitchen. "Is black OK?"
Beck sighed. He hated black coffee. He thought it was thin and rough. And black. But, black or not, he wasn't a man to turn down coffee late at night in a beautiful woman's apartment. "Black's good," he answered.
"Sorry," she called. "Be right with you."
He glanced around the room, listening to the hiss of what sounded like an expensive coffee machine forcing a torrent of liquid down into a cup mixed with the sound of another liquid being poured into a glass. There was a square mahogany coffee table at the far end of the sofa, down by the side of its arm just before the door. A magazine was sitting on its surface. There was a brown enveloped letter tucked in between its pages. The edge of the letter stuck out over the edge of the magazine. There was text running along the top left, bold red capitalized letters, above the envelope window.
He leaned forward for a closer look.
The magazine was some sort of hairstyling magazine he wasn't familiar with. Its title was Style Weekly. It wasn’t one he would necessarily have known of, but then, he didn’t know of many. He never read them. He ignored the magazine and focused on the letter, wondering what it was, pondering why Naomi would have stuffed it in between the magazine's pages. He looked at the bold red letters. He could only see the first two: FI. He sat back, thinking. Wondering. FI...Final Notice. Interesting. A final notice for what?
Naomi padded into the lounge a second later. She was carrying an over-filled glass of rose wine in her right hand and a white porcelain mug of hot, steaming coffee in her left. It smelled good. She handed him the coffee and sat down on the sofa at the far end, next to the square mahogany table, letter and magazine.
"It's a nice place you got here," he said and took a sip of the coffee. It was good coffee, no doubt about it, strong and rich, but the texture was exactly as he had expected. Hard and thin.
"Thank you," she replied and took a sip of wine, flicking her eyes across every inch of his muscular physique. His arms and deltoids bulged through the sleeves of his black shirt. His pectorals looked rock hard, the chest of his shirt sucked tight across them. And his waist seemed tapered and slim. Chiseled. She smiled, her cheeks flushing with pink.
"Yours?"
She shook her head and took another drink. "No. It's rented."
He nodded and took another sip.
"The coffee, it OK for you? Do you mind it being black?"
He shook his head and lied. "No. It's fine."
"Sorry about the cream."
"Don't mention it," he said and endured another sip.
She smiled, again, and sat her wine glass down on the side table, noticed the edge of the letter sticking out from the magazine and slipped it back in. She looked at him and smiled, awkwardly, like she knew that he might have saw it.
He glanced down at the magazine and took another sip of coffee.
She quickly changed the subject. "What you did earlier," she said. "It didn't even seem to phase you. It was like you've done it before?"
He nodded. "I have. A few times."
He left it hanging as to whether he meant killing somebody or handling a bunch of gangsters.
She smiled and nodded and necked what was left of the wine, then raised her glass and gestured toward him. "I'm going for another. You want one? Or a beer, instead?"
He shook his head. "No. Coffee's good."
She pulled a face and stood up from the sofa. "You're a bad liar, Joe. You've been nursing that since I gave you it. I can tell you don’t like it black. Now, let me take it away and get you a beer, instead.”
He smiled. "Yeah. Fine," he said and handed her the relatively untou
ched cup of black coffee.
"Budweiser OK?"
"Budweiser's fine," he said.
"Great, because that's all there is. I'll be right back," she said and stepped toward the hallway and went out of sight.
He heard her open a bottle of beer and pour more wine on the other side of the wall behind him.
"So, tell me," she called from the kitchen.
"Tell you what?"
"Your story," she said, stepping back into the lounge carrying an even fuller glass of wine and a brown bottle of beer with a warm-looking red label.
Beck sighed. He hated that question. "What do you want to know?" he asked.
"Well, where you're from would be a start," she answered and handed him the beer.
"Thanks," he said and took it, then took a swig. Almost killed it in one. It was ice cold. And fresh. Just the way he liked it. "I'm from Lincoln."
Naomi sat back down, tucking her legs under her body. She took a drink, then asked if it was Lincoln in Michigan. "Lincoln, as in up in Alcona?"
"No," he said and killed the rest of the Bud. "Nebraska."
"Nebraska?" she asked, a hint of surprise in her voice, and flicked her eyes to his Bud. "Everyone from Nebraska murder beers as quickly as that?"
Beck laughed. "Just a few of us."
"Let me get you another," she said and placed her glass of wine down on the side table beside the magazine and stood up from the sofa and grabbed the bottle from his hand before he could respond. She darted through to the hallway and into the kitchen and opened what sounded like a handful of bottles, then returned a moment later with four more in her hands, moving light on her feet with an elegant, tipsy grace.
"You've gotta be kidding? Right?" Beck said, looking at her holding the four beers. "Either that or you're trying to get me drunk."
"Maybe," she giggled and handed him the four beers, then sat back down and took another gulp of wine.
"I never do," Beck replied, holding one of the bottles in his hand after placing the other three down on the mahogany wooden floor by his feet in front of the sofa.
Easy Money Page 6
