by Mike Knowles
“I just found out about his house last night. I planned to go there today.”
“You need to get there now. Inside you’ll find two men, drug money, and a body. If you put your thinking cap on, Holmes, you might get a good lead out of the two men.” I hung up the phone and looked at the man approaching the OTB with his arms full. The pizza I had ordered was right on time.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Pizza Pizza delivery guy showed up eighteen minutes after I called with three sets of twins and an order of wings. Sergei was on the hook for $78.34. It took two minutes for the body of the delivery guy to come bouncing out the door. Nick had thrown him out with one hand; the other held a slice of pizza.
Pete threw the full boxes of pizza and wings at the delivery guy and walked back inside with Nick. The pizza guy picked himself up, flipped off the window, and walked away from the mess on the sidewalk. He made it three steps away before Nick was outside again. He screamed at the delivery guy and started towards him. The pizza guy put two hands up in appeasement and walked back with his head low to clean up the mess. He worked fast under the watchful eye and foot of Nick.
The mess was gone, and Nick was back inside when Pizza Hut arrived with ten medium pizzas. Sergei owed $124.18 to the Hut and its teenaged, acne-scarred, red-hat collection agency. The kid didn’t even get in the door. Nick and Pete opened the frosted glass door before he could put down the pizza and open it himself. The door came at the kid fast, and it knocked him on his ass and sent pizza everywhere.
I had the window down just enough to hear the commotion.
“Who sent you here?” Nick demanded. He had an accent that was unmistakably Russian. “Who?”
The kid crab-walked back from the door and the blond man, scrambling to get to his feet. Pete passed Nick and planted his right foot on the kid’s chest. The kid fought against the foot, but Pete just put more weight on him. The kid gave up and fell to the pavement, cracking his head.
Nick picked up each box and lifted the flap. When all he found was pizza, a rain of bread, cheese, and sauce fell on the kid. This happened nine times. Nick pulled a slice from the last box and let the cardboard fall to the ground. He told the kid to clean his shit up, and the kid nodded as best he could while still cradling the back of his head. The crack against the pavement had cut deep, and blood seeped through his hair and fingers. Nick and Pete went back inside, leaving the kid to clean up the mess one-handed. When he left, his hands and shirt were red from the sauce and the blood. I could see his confusion as he looked from hand to shirt trying to figure out how much blood he had lost. He stumbled away never knowing what was his and what belonged to Pizza Hut or why he had to give up either to the pavement.
By the dashboard clock, it was eight minutes until Domino’s showed up. This time it wasn’t an acne-speckled kid, it was a middle-aged man with a thick moustache. He wore a light blue golf shirt adorned with black-and-white checkerboard sleeves, navy shorts that gave everyone a view of his inner thigh hair, and old Velcro-strap running shoes. The untrimmed moustache, the clothes, the shitty job all led me to believe that this was a guy who was a joke to everyone he met. He wasn’t in on the joke, and he never would be. Worse, he was in front of a door that led to two men with zero sense of humour.
Fortune smiled on the man with the moustache. Nick and Pete met him at the door and told him “No” too many times to count. The delivery guy pointed to his receipt, proving that he was in the right, but Nick and Pete didn’t move. They shook their heads until Nick exploded in moustache’s face. He screamed, “No, not ours! Now get the fuck out of here!”
The delivery guy saw the Russian was serious and backed away. Nick and Pete didn’t watch him go like they did with the others, they just turned their backs and went inside.
I got out of the car and caught up to the Domino’s guy on the street. The thirty bucks in my fist would cover the $24.18 bill with enough for a good tip.
“Hey! Hey, Domino’s!”
He turned to face me, and I put on what I guessed to be my best apologetic face.
“I’m sorry about the boys. We bring a lot of cash in in the mornings, and they get too protective sometimes.”
“They didn’t have to yell. I don’t appreciate being yelled at. I wanted to work things out, but they wouldn’t let me speak. That’s not how you treat a delivery guy. I just go where they tell me. When people don’t pay, I gotta prove it was a crank call, or my boss will think I screwed up. Then I gotta eat the cost myself.”
“Let me make it up to you,” I said, showing him the money. “I’ll take the pizza. How much is it?”
Domino’s looked around. “We’re not really supposed to do it this way. Store policy is very clear. I’m not supposed to sell the pizza on the street. Business should only be transacted at the customer’s place of work or business.”
“We can go back to the store if you want. I’m sure the boys will be nicer this time.”
He thought about it for a second. “No, no, no. I’m just saying for next time. Next time you should pay at the door. It’ll be twenty-four eighteen.”
I gave him the thirty dollars and told him to keep the change. I waved him goodbye and watched him get into his Ford Taurus. When he was out of sight, I put two of the boxes down and pulled the .45 from my jacket. I zipped up the coat so my shoulder rig was invisible and put one of the pizza boxes over the gun. The Colt was in my hand, under the flat bottom of the box, invisible from view so long as I kept the box tilted forward.
I left the other two boxes on the ground and walked, bill in hand, towards the OTB. I didn’t just walk straight up to the front door — that had gone badly for the three other delivery men. Nick and Pete saw them coming and never let them get inside. I waited for a few minutes, three stores down, until a city bus came down the street. Traffic was slow enough that the bus crept along the street in the right lane. When the light turned red, the bus blocked the OTB’s view from at least half of its windows. I walked into traffic along the side of the bus facing away from the storefront and hooked around the back bumper jogging as though I was trying to cross the street before the light turned. I rounded the front of the bus and jogged straight in the front entrance.
I got five steps inside before Nick and Pete blocked my way. The OTB had an area with several windows for business as well as a bar surrounded by tables underneath huge mounted flat-screen televisions. This wasn’t a walk in, walk out, kind of place; it was a gambler’s paradise.
“No, no, no, no. No pizza. We order nothing. Leave now!” Nick yelled. Pete said nothing.
“Whoa, whoa, guys. Let’s look at the order,” I said, pulling out the Domino’s bill. “One medium pizza for Igor.”
“No pizza. No!” Nick screamed. His breath was warm in my face.
“Igor?” Pete asked. I marked him as the smart one, Nick as the violent one. Nick looked at him, confused, then looked back at me after he figured it out. “Did you say Igor?”
I checked the bill and nodded at Pete.
“Who told you that name?”
“No one told me anything — it’s on the bill along with the cost. You owe me thirteen forty-nine.”
Nick closed the distance between us, taking over the conversation again, ready for violence. “You will tell me who told you that name.” He slapped the pizza box, trying to knock it out of my hands, but it didn’t fall. He grabbed the box and tried to wrestle it away from me, but it stayed in my hands. We locked eyes for a second as he groped for the pizza and I grinned; Nick didn’t understand. He got it a second later when the .45 took his knee off his leg.
The big slug scrambled patella and cartilage and sent Nick to the floor. His scream was silent at first, but he found his voice fast. I turned on Pete, but he was already running towards the bar. Pete didn’t waste any emotion on his partner. He was surviving, just like he had been trained to do.
The .45 spat loud, obscene shots at him, but they all came up wide. Each spasm of the gun was just a littl
e off. Pete jerked up, down, left, right, making him a hard target. He threw himself over the bar, and I moved in his wake. I heard the metallic crunch of a shotgun loading. Pete came up with the shotgun levelled at his shoulder ready to shoot through whatever cover I took, but I wasn’t where he thought I was. I was like him — a survivor. I had been shot at before, and it didn’t spook me anymore. It scared me as much as it always did, but I stored the fear away while I worked. The .45 was in my hands, three metres away from where I had been standing when Pete went for cover. Pete caught sight of me, out of the corner of his eye, and realized that he had misjudged where I would be. He turned at the hips to correct his aim as I pulled the trigger. The first bullet hit Pete in the left shoulder, spinning him and the shotgun away from me. The second shot punched a dark hole into his back. Red hit the bottles behind the bar as the lead ripped through the wiry flesh. Pete went down behind the bar, and I heard the shotgun hit the floor, I heard it for a second, then a bullet ripped through my right ear.
I dove left and hit the floor hard. The wind went out of me as I hit the floor rolling. A second bullet whizzed over my head from Nick’s direction. Pete had moved so fast that I never got the chance to put Nick all the way out. I crawled behind the bar and saw Pete’s prone body. He had managed to roll himself over. His hands covered the hole in his shoulder and the exit wound on the front of his body. I crouch-walked closer and pulled a pistol from his belt — a 9mm Heckler and Koch USP. I put the gun in my coat pocket and kept moving.
“He is hard to kill,” Pete said to me, nodding over the bar towards Nick.
“Aren’t we all.”
I grabbed one of the bottles that hit the floor when I shot Pete and lobbed it over the bar. It landed with a crash. I lobbed a second and a third. With the third bottle came a grunt — I knew where Nick was. I picked up the twelve-gauge Mossberg and put my back against the wall. I put five more bottles in the air; each landed with a crash near the spot that produced the grunt. As the fifth bottle left my hand, I stood with the Mossberg and pulled the trigger. I racked the slide and shot again as I stepped away from the bar. The bottles I had thrown landed near the dining area where Nick had taken cover. The shotgun was aimed low, and it caught the edge of a table and the back of a chair as it let loose. None of the spray from the shotgun caught Nick; he had sensed what was coming after the bottles and had managed to drag his mangled leg across the floor. The barrel of the Mossberg followed the trail of blood on the floor towards the booths on the wall where Nick had taken cover from the bottles. Nick had burrowed in like a tick behind the vinyl in a spot that might have offered him a chance at surprising me if there wasn’t a crimson trail ratting him out. I racked the slide again and shot at the furniture hiding Nick from me. The twelve gauge punched a hole through the back of the booth and toppled the table.
“Okay, okay,” Nick screamed.
I put another shot in Nick’s direction.
“Stop!”
Two hands came up from behind the aerated seat, empty. I walked towards Nick and saw a matching H and K pistol two feet away from his body. His face was pale under his sweaty blond mop.
“Put your hands on your leg before you bleed out,” I said.
Nick nodded and sat up. He groaned with the effort and screamed when he put his hands to his leg. His eyes were looking glassy, and I figured shock was setting in. He didn’t even flinch when I put the butt of the shotgun between his eyes.
The OTB was suddenly quiet. I looked at my jacket and saw blood soaked into the sleeve. I took a handful of napkins from a dispenser on one of the tables still upright and put them to my ear. The sting took me by surprise, and I closed my eyes for a second. My ear didn’t feel right under the napkins — the lobe hung too low. The napkins came away red and damp, so I pressed them harder to the side of my head again. I managed to pack the tissue paper around my ear, using the blood to hold the thin white material to my head. The rest of the napkins were used to wipe down my coat. The waterproof material kept the blood from absorbing, and the napkins soaked up the beaded fluid and became heavy. I put the napkins in my pocket and took the shotgun down a single hallway leading away from the betting windows and bar. At the end of the hallway was a small backroom with an office and an emergency exit. The exit had a sticker on the door explaining that if opened the mechanism would set off an alarm. The deafening silence told me that no one had used the door.
The office door was closed, and when I tried the lock I found the handle didn’t move. I crossed to the other side of the door, closer to the exit, and knocked. No one answered.
“Nikolai and Pietro are down and bleeding to death as I speak.”
“I care not,” a voice I remembered as belonging to Sergei Vidal said.
“See if this makes you care. I got the shotgun from behind the bar in my hands. You don’t give me what I want, I’m going to fire through the walls. Twelve gauge like this should spread enough to pulp everything. You know what pulp means, Sergei?”
“I know pulp. What do you want?”
“Send Igor out. That’s all. Send him out, and we leave.”
I heard a hushed conversation and a few loud “No’s” from Igor. I racked the slide on the gun for effect and let a shotgun shell fall to the concrete floor.
“Ten seconds, Sergei, then I just let the shotgun sort it out.”
“Nine, eight, seven, six, five . . .” I shouldered the gun and got ready. If I bluffed once, Sergei would find a way to exploit it. At three, the door opened, and Igor walked out with his hands up. When Igor was beside me, I pulled him away from the doorway. I looped the shotgun under his chin and snaked my left arm around the barrel. My left hand found the back of Igor’s head, and the choke compressed. The hard metal gun on Igor’s throat clamped his carotid artery, and blood stopped flowing to Igor’s brain. Igor left his feet as I arched my back. Eight seconds later, he was unconscious.
“Set-up was just like you said, boss. Let’s get you out of here,” I said to Igor as he went limp, loud enough for Sergei to hear. I shouldered him quietly and kicked open the back door. The alarm screeched to life as my feet touched the alley gravel. I hustled Igor around the corner and onto a side street that connected with King. I was on the busy street in thirty seconds and in the car thirty seconds after that. I wasn’t worried about Sergei following me; he had to get the alarm off before someone showed up and found the bodies in the OTB. I didn’t kill Nick and Pete, because live bodies present more problems than dead ones. Dead bodies get carted off, buried, and erased. Wounded men, if they are found by the authorities, go to hospitals and get questioned. Nick and Pete would never talk to the cops, but they would still bring all kinds of heat down on Sergei unless they were dealt with quietly. Sergei couldn’t outsource this problem to anyone else — there was no time. If Sergei wanted to stay out of custody, he would have to do something about his men — and that meant giving me time to get away.
Within the hour, Igor was taped to a chair in the motel room next to mine. His clothes were in the bathroom, and the folding knife was in my hand.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The bullet had torn through the lower half of my ear, leaving a section of undamaged ear hanging. I used the knife in the bathroom to take the wrecked part of the ear off. It took two rolls of toilet paper to stop the bleeding and a piece of duct tape over some more of the cheap motel toilet paper to cover the wound.
The motel room next to mine was just as tight. Igor’s chair was at the foot of the bed, and it took up all the space between the bed and the wall. To get behind Igor required a trip over the mattress. His feet were taped to the back two legs, and his wrists were fastened to the metal frame behind his back. Over his mouth, a piece of tape kept him quiet. His eyes weren’t on me, they were on the knife.
“Feels like we’ve been here before, eh? Except last time you had me tied down.”
Igor thrashed his head, the only part of his body that he could move, and grunted at me.
“I’ve b
een reading I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” Igor’s eyes peeled away from the knife and found mine. “I figure you thought of your own solution to get that closure you wanted. One that wasn’t in the book. You figured I’m not okay, and neither are you. But you thought that if you killed me you could get okay. Sort of take out half of the equation, and everything will sort itself out.” I chuckled. The sound made Igor’s lip quiver under the tape. “I hate to break it to you, Igor, but killing never sorts anybody out. If anything, it turns you inside out even more. The more you do it the less it will help, because you keep turning off a bit more of yourself. It’s like burning nerve endings one at a time. You feel it for a minute while it dies, but pretty soon you can’t feel anything no matter how hard you try. Way I see it, you got it all wrong. We’ll never be okay. Okay isn’t for people like us. We’ve done too much wrong to too many people. Okay went out the window the first night you rode with a gun in your pocket and violence in your heart. You can never come back from that. The most you can hope for is alive. It’s not what we deserve for what we’ve done, but it’s what we get. It’s all doing wrong earns you, if you’re good enough at the bad. That was always your problem. Try as you might, you never had the gravel in your guts, but somehow you managed to defy the odds and stay above ground. Now stay put.”
I went outside and walked into my room. I powered up the cell phone and dialled Morrison while I cut through the decades-old yellowed drywall with the knife. I winced when the phone touched the ear damaged by Nick’s bullet and quickly switched the cell to the other side of my face. Morrison picked up as I finished my first cut into the wall.
“Morrison.”
I dragged the knife a foot down the wall, turned the blade, and made another long cut. “Where are you?”
“The house you told me about. It’s a fucking mess.”
“You having crime scene techs go through it?” I turned the knife again and started a cut back up the wall.
