Vasily
Vasily
It comes as no surprise that Artyom ruins my day.
Again.
I apparently ruined a big day for him yesterday, but that only makes me angrier.
While I was fucking Ana on camera for my entire world to see, my brother was getting married to the girl he’s been seeing for nearly a decade, and he didn’t bother to tell me, let alone invite me. Apparently, I’m that embarrassing for him now, kept around solely to clean up messes.
Ana is passed out with her head on my lap. I had to wake her up three times during the movie she chose, a strange nineteenth century version of a Shakespearean play which I must have enjoyed more than she did. She said it was critical she watch it and thanked me every time I woke her, so I think I did the right thing, but the movie’s since ended, so I’m letting her sleep.
I want to go to bed, but it’s early. Regardless of the long days I’ve been having, I know my brain is going to resist. Worse, I feel that itch. It’ll be so easy for me to sneak a hit and drift off to paradise, and lying in bed will have me dwelling on it.
Just scrolling through the streaming services searching for something that will catch my interest is enough to have me craving. I shift in my seat, and Ana makes a soft grumbling sound and resettles herself. That’s enough of a reminder that I can’t do anything. I spent my whole day with her curbing every impulse to poke a fight for silly reasons even though her presence is enough to calm the worst of it. I feel like a wounded pet begging their human for help but attacking when they attempt to do what they need to.
I rub her arm lightly to ease my hackles as I give up on the TV and scroll through my phone. I cave and read the string of messages from Artyom, telling myself his threats of driving Ana home himself and then forcing me back into his house— I’m twenty-six years old; I am absolutely not moving back into my childhood bedroom— are all empty or he doesn’t have the power to do it.
He does. He’d put Dima in a bad situation since he can’t afford our apartment on his own, and I honestly do think returning Ana right now would make that situation worse, but he has that power. I just need to resist him until Tony quiets down or something else bigger pops up.
At 10:17, I receive the text, “We need you,” from him, and fuck that. He was the one who gave Dima permission to run off to Jacksonville without having someone ready to cover his responsibilities. I’ve been doing the work of two people all week. I’m taking the night off. Protection can be collected tomorrow.
The next text rolls in a minute later.
Artyom
I’m serious. There’s a body.
Fuck.
Three guns are pointed at me and Kostya when we arrive at the far end of a parking lot of a mostly abandoned strip mall. One of guns belongs to the Calaveras de Oro. The other two are IRA. The Calaveras boys have an IRA goon bound and gagged in their midst, but there are only four of them, and the IRA, as light as their membership is here, has the Blazing Hell MC on their side and are currently numbering eight, counting the one who’s been captured. They’re squaring off, everyone’s got at least one gun pointing somewhere, and down at the opposite end are two of my boys. It’s like some fucked-up wedding and I’m the bride, but I don’t want anyone on either side of the aisle to be my family.
I don’t bother to put my hands up or whatever they expect me to do. In fact, I reach into my pocket deliberately as I walk down the divide between the rival groups to Vladimir and Alex, pull out my cigarettes, and light one up.
“You crazy fuck,” Alex chuckles as Vladimir gestures for me to share.
I hand him my lit cigarette and get a second going for myself as I kneel down at the corpse by their feet. A woman on her side, her cotton candy pink wig obscuring her face from me. From her clothes, I’d guess a sex worker. The glittery top is a bit too much to be a bra, the lime green band gathered at her waist not enough to be a full dress. No panties, so I pull out a small package from the duffel bag I’ve brought with me and unfurl a drop cloth. No one’s going to touch the body my brothers stand sentinel over, not yet, but she’s a human being. She deserves some dignity right now.
I kneel down to get a better look. Darker complexion than me, but it’s night and the nearest streetlamp is twenty yards away. I couldn’t guess at her race. From my bag, I pull out a flashlight and a pen to push her hair out of her face.
Young. About Ana’s age. They never would have been friends. Despite the predicament Ana’s currently in and the kind heart that she has, she would never understand that this girl is the opposite side of her coin, the only difference between them the way the men who own them peddle their sex and the way those men talk of their value. But in a different world, one not nearly as fucked up as this one we’ve all found ourselves in? Yeah, they could have been friends. Classmates, at least.
There’s blood leaking from the girl’s nose, a thin trail that’s stopped running but still glistens, leaking straight onto the asphalt. She hasn’t been moved. With my pen, I shift the synthetic hair around beneath her head and see a puddle forming, but not from her nose. Her skull. Lifting the cap of the wig, I find smooth, silky black hair pulled back taut. I still do my best not to move anything in case they do want the cops involved — we have an arrangement with the locals that as long as we keep things moving out of Flagstaff, they play fair with us, so it’s a courtesy that we don’t tamper with their crime scenes — but I need to see better what happened. The dark hair makes it hard to see blood, but she looks dry. No staining or holes in the wig cap until I get pretty far back. The bleeding isn’t from a gunshot, then. Either she hit her head landing hard on the asphalt or someone bludgeoned her and she happened to fall on the side she was hit on.
I’m no expert, but I’m leaning toward the former. She would have had to stay upright after getting hit in the skull hard enough to bust it open. Otherwise, she would have fallen the other way. Running the flashlight over her better, I see more evidence of this. She’s got abrasions all over her body. Most of them are simple scuffs, and they’re scattered randomly. Places that stick out just right. Her nose. Her hip. The top knuckle of her toes, unprotected by the shoes that were strapped on solidly enough that they stayed through whatever happened. I shine my flashlight around and notice fresh burnt rubber with a shimmer of random glitter and sequins leading to the body.
“I’ll tell you what happened, man!” Hector, one of the Hispanic men who I know to be higher ranking in the Calaveras, yells at me. I hold my hand up for silence. I want to figure it out for myself first.
I do one more exam of the body before making my decision and pointing my flashlight at the gagged boy. “His story.”
“He’s a fucking liar,” Hector yells again. He points his gun at their captive. “Imma waste him.”
“No. My fucking city, my goddamn car lot. Drop gag.”
Hector glowers at me, but the arrangements we have are as fragile as a spiderweb. If one strand is severed, the entire thing collapses.
“She attacked me, I swear!” the IRA boy says as soon as the gag is taken out of his mouth. “I hired her, and we were having a little fun in the back seat of my car, and then she tried to bite my dick off. I–I panicked and clocked her with my gun to get her off me, and then she had a seizure and died.”
“Happen here?” I ask, shining my light on the burnt rubber.
He nods quickly. “Yeah, man, I swear. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I just had to get her off me, and then I panicked.”
I shine my light on Hector. “You story.”
“He murdered my cousin!” Hector yells, his hand shaking. That kind of shaky hand is apt to pull a trigger, and I don’t know if he’s already cocked the gun or not. “She’s a good girl, man. She’s not–she’s not—” He waves the gun at the body now, which means he’s also waving it at Alex and Vladimir.
“Eyes on me, man,” I say, approaching slowly with my hands out just enough from my side that he can see I’m not carrying anything. I went ahead and crushed a Xanax into that smallest bump of coke in all of Flagstaff that Dima left me with to get my brain back in the right gear, and I’m thankful for that when Hector points not just his eyes but his gun at me.
It’s fine. Everything is copacetic. It’s all going to work out because this is not my day to die in Flagstaff. It’s not my time yet.
“Is lies, I know this,” I promise Hector in my usual accent, which is also a lie, but it’s my persona. It’s my mask. “Now I need yours.”
His lie. He’s about to lie to me, I already know this, but I need to hear it.
“That’s not her. She didn’t dress like that. She wasn’t a whore. This fuck staged the whole thing. He murdered her because he’s a fucking freak, and then he staged it to make her look like a dead whore because he knows no one fucking cares about dead Mexican whores.”
Yep, lies. Including that last line. Because I do care.
I look between the two of them and then back at the body, deciding for myself how to handle this. They’re both dirty. They both did things that led to her death. They’re both responsible, but not equally.
“You, boy-o, your name.”
“Ian,” the murderer says. He did murder that girl.
“Ian, Ian, Ian. Roll sleeves.” Seems it’s a day for that.
One of Hector’s men does it, showing off Ian’s track marks for me. They’re older, though. Nothing from tonight. He hasn’t shot up there in a few weeks. That doesn’t mean he’s any cleaner than I am, but it’s enough for me.
“Her name— ah ah ah,” I say to Hector before he can respond. “Ian, her name.”
He stares at me as he says, “How would I know?” but I hear the tremor and see the sweat renewing on his forehead. It’s a high stress moment, he could just be having an internal meltdown so everything’s freaking out right now, but I think he knows I’ve put it together. And since I’m not a cop, I don’t need a warrant and there won’t be a trial by jury, a good guess is going to be enough here.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know it.”
I pull out a knife and stab him right in the thigh. “Tell. Me.”
“I don’t know!” he shrieks. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Bring here,” I tell the men holding him as I march back to the body and flip her hair out of her face so he can see it.
He looks away. Because he fucking knows her. She wasn’t shooting up in her arms. No, Hector would have known his supposedly innocent cousin was keeping shit from him. That’s why she was working on our side of Flagstaff, too. No, I saw it when I was looking at the abrasions on her toes. That’s where a lot of junkies shoot up if they’re trying to hide it.
“Tell me name.”
He shakes his head but can’t even speak now.
I rip him away from the Calaveras and kick his knees out so he falls right next to her, landing on his hands and knees, his face inches from her body.
It’s his breaking point. He starts mumbling his apologies to her, and again and again, he says, “Renata.” I look to his escorts, and they both nod.
“You two, junk buddies,” I tell Ian. “But tonight, on my street. Why?” I yell to his crew, who still have their guns pulled but have started lowering them since I arrived to mediate this clusterfuck.
One of them says, “Meeting with your guys,” and that’s on me for not knowing. I guess I dipped out on some stuff. I’m not sorry. I needed today.
“Okay. You see her, you want, da? She friend, but you want fucky.”
“I wanted to help her,” Ian whines. “She needed money. I had cash.”
“She said no, no fucky friends. You got mad. You choke.”
“What? No!”
“Stupid shit,” I spit at him. “Print on neck.”
He looks at the body and finally sees the handprint blooming there. “I’m sorry. I panicked. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I swear.”
“You don’t accidentally choke a bitch,” Alex chortles, the sound dying the instant he sees my glare. “Sorry. Sorry!” he yells to Hector.
“There’s more,” I say. “Dump body on my land. My land . Why? You knew her, her family. You stage this.”
“It wasn’t personal, I swear.”
“ Da , was. You have dumping ground but no use. Use my lot.” I kneel down next to him, grab a hank of his brown hair and force his head to the side so I can whisper against his ear softly so no one else can hear me. “O’Connor told you to do this. She did reject you, but not this time. You’ve been holding a grudge, and O’Connor knew this would start a war. You doped her and attempted to strangle her. Maybe you thought she was dead, but I doubt it. You knew she was still alive when you pushed her out of your car. You drove fast enough to kill her, so she bled out on asphalt. But she knew. She knew you would murder her. She attacked first. Her broken fingernails, your blood, flesh.”
“I loved her,” Ian sniffles. “If she’d just loved me back, we would have been fine. I was gonna marry her.”
He was never going to marry her. He didn’t even love her, not really. And if Hector really cared about her, she wouldn’t have ended up here. Kseniya got into trouble enough, she’s a free spirit who could not be stopped, so we always knew where she was when she was younger, just to track. No interference, just tracking.
I pull the drop cloth off of poor Renata, who didn’t deserve any of this and just needed someone to watch out for her. Maybe she would have still gone down a bad path, maybe she would have still found the junk like I did. Some balls just can’t be stopped once they start rolling. But she would have had a better chance of getting out of it if someone had just loved her enough.
Ian sobs at the sight of her corpse fully exposed once again. That’s how he left her to be found. That’s on him.
I reach into my bag, grab a shirt.
Grab my gun, my pristine gun that I wear gloves for whenever I clean it, with the shirt.
Jam the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger before anyone can stop me or even move away. But the cops won’t notice the odd shadows in the splatter of blood, bone, and brains from people standing around him. They’ll just see it on Renata’s body.
He lands next to her, and once his hand stills, I nudge the gun into it. Murder-suicide.
“You leave, we call in,” I yell to the rival gangs. “Hector, I see your women, my streets, I call in, too. Keep them on your turf.” I don’t need more dead Mexican sex workers. Fuck.
“You just killed one of ours,” shouts an IRA guy. I recognize him as one of the ones usually shadowing Daniels, the leader in these parts. “What do you plan to do about that?”
“Tell Daniels he want war, he fire first shot.”