Chapter 41 Vitali Static #2
“Crazy motherfucker,” he spat, raised arms trembling. “Put that fucking thing down!”
I had to catch my bearings because I didn’t remember getting that far.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Where’s who, you piece of shit!” His shifty ferret eyes dropped to his right, where he undoubtedly had a quick draw mount under the tabletop.
The Stetchkin APS has a muzzle velocity of 340 meters per second.
The plywood backing to his desk couldn’t have been more than a centimeter thick, which would give it a loss of maybe 30 meters at my range.
I didn’t need those numbers, but sometimes I couldn’t help but think in those terms because 310 m/s was how fast the bullet ripped through Sergei’s dick, and I was a good shot, even with small targets. What do you know? Dreams do come true.
The second bullet went in a few centimeters to the left, where I’d guessed his gun to be. I couldn’t hear the metallic clink because Sergei was screaming, but as I circled around, the mount was blown out.
“Where is she?” I asked again, pinching his stupid fucking face together.
His high blood pressure would kill him before I could, judging by the redness of his face, and he wasn’t answering. I threw open a drawer, then another. I knew it’d be there, but the sight of the cellphone still caught me by surprise and that sticker spiked the static.
The next thing I knew was Sergei’s head had a nice new hole about the shape of a 9mm round and he for sure wasn’t going to answer any more questions.
“Blyad…” I had to start talking myself down. Katya needed me to talk myself down.
“I get in the car to run away, but the scent of you is in the leather…” I recited, tucking her phone into my jacket.
Chloé Dae, track eight on the album Katya gave me for New Year’s.
“‘And the radio plays every song you gave me,’” I mumbled, slipping out into the hall. I heard people moving and, in a moment, they would see me. So I fell against the wall and waited.
“Vitali—you see the shooter?” a voice called.
“Went out the back window,” I said. “Got Sergei in the head.”
And then I walked out, hoping the secretary liked me enough to keep her mouth shut for a few minutes. My Kotik would have never talked, because my Kotik is loyal.
Misha waited leaning against the Lada, arms crossed, but the back door was cracked and I knew he had the machine gun in there and ready to go. Just in case.
“The job open?” he asked, the cigarette in his mouth shifting.
“Feel free to apply. You find Boris?”
He nodded. “He went to the industrial brothels.”
“FUCK.”
Fuck-fuck-fuck—the static hit and everything cracked.
The next thing I knew, I was in the car and Misha was driving, throwing us around the uneven, potholed pavement behind some apartment buildings.
A cigarette I didn’t remember lighting glowed at me in the side mirror, but everyone was alive with no signs of poor decision-making on my part.
“Hren with these domestics—doesn’t even have a fucking CD player—what am I supposed to listen to, the radio?” Misha slammed his palm into the dashboard, and some questionable sounds said he wouldn’t be listening to the radio either.
“And I ran to find you, but you were already in my arms,” I mouthed. Track thirteen, an unlucky number, but I memorized every song a while ago and liked to go in order. “How could I not see it; you were mine all along…”
“What?” he snapped.
“Nothing. Do you know which building?”
“Wherever his car is parked. He should still be there.”
Night closed in, and streetlights grew scarcer the further we moved from the city center. Only one shone down on the Volga parked outside a building with more broken windows than whole.
“God save them if that’s a brothel and they hurt our girl…” Misha muttered.
“‘Why should I help you,’ and now it’s ‘our girl,’” I pointed out.
“She’s your only redeeming quality,” he said. “Listen, why haven’t you ever been jealous of me?”
I looked at him, and he looked at me.
“Mish,” I said. “Come on.”
“Hey I’m a good-looking guy.”
I waited.
“Blyad,” he said. “Who knows?”
“Don’t stop paying the girls to lie for you, they’ll flip.
No one else knows you prefer your Anatolys to your Anas.
I’m not here to out your secrets despite you being set on spreading mine,” I said, finger tapping on the grenade.
“It doesn’t look like the first two floors are being used. Are there basements in these things?”
“Yeah, but they’re the first to go when the addicts move in.”
“Alright.” I moved to the podyezd. The thick smell of death radiated from the thinly cracked metal door. “Give me three minutes, then I want you to call Boris. Don’t stop calling him. I need to hear him either answer the phone, or the ringtone.”
He straightened, examining the graffiti decorating the concrete wall. “Aren’t these the Chechen grounds?”
They were, and I hadn’t noticed. She scrambled my brains and cleared them all at once and now wasn’t the time to let myself slip, but the thought occurred that maybe Sergei never paid for Elena… maybe it was a trade.
“Woah—stay with me—” Misha’s hand closed in on my shoulder. “You’re getting that look in your eye. She hasn’t been in there long, maybe she’s alright.”
“You don’t have to go in,” I told him.
“Are you going to lose your shit?”
“Probably.”
“Well then, I gotta go in. What’s the plan?”
“Give me three minutes, then shoot anything in a nice jacket.”
“You are a fucking psychopath,” Misha muttered, the click-clunk—tsch of his machine gun underlining the irony. “Hey, you ever notice these things sound like they’re barking dogs? You know, when you fire off a bunch at once?”
“Wear ear protection more often,” I said, and slipped inside.