Moonlight Mile

  “Mockingbird?” I tried.

  She thrust out her bottom lip in a gesture of acceptance. “And if that mockingbird don’t fly, Momma gonna buy you a . . .”

  Another look for the room. Claire continued to wail.

  “Corvette,” Tadeo said.

  She frowned at him.

  “Diamond ring,” Yefim said.

  “That doesn’t rhyme.”

  “And yet I am sure it is correct.”

  Claire’s wailing hit a new pitch, the banshee-shrieking Amanda had mentioned.

  Kirill, sitting on the couch, snorted a line of blow off the compact mirror and said, “Make her stop.”

  Violeta said, “I’m trying.” She touched Claire’s head again. “Ssssshhhhh.” She hissed it, over and over—“Sssssshhhhhhhh! Ssssssshhhhhh!”

  This did not make things better.

  Kirill winced and snorted another line. He placed a hand to his ear and winced harder. “Shut her up.”

  “Ssssssshhhhhhhh! Ssssssssshhhhhhh! I don’t know what the fuck to do. You said you would hire a nanny.”

  “I hire the nanny. But I don’t bring her here. Shut her up.”

  “Ssssssshhhhhh!”

  By now Tadeo and Kenny both had their hands over their ears and Pavel and Yefim made various faces of discomfort. Only Helene seemed oblivious, her eyes on the DVD players and the iPods.

  I said to Amanda, “Pacifier?”

  “Right pocket.”

  I held my hand by her pocket, looked at Yefim. “May I?”

  “Shit, my friend, absolutely.”

  I reached into Amanda’s pocket and pulled out the pacifier.

  “Ssssssshhhhhhhhh!” Violeta was screaming it now.

  I pulled the plastic cover off the pacifier, movement that drove a spike into my burned palm. My eyes watered and widened, but I reached over Amanda’s shoulder and plopped the pacifier into the baby’s mouth.

  The volume in the room immediately plummeted. Claire sucked the pacifier back and forth against her lips.

  “Better,” Kirill said.

  Violeta ran both palms down her cheeks. “You have spoiled her.”

  Amanda said, “Excuse me?”

  “You have spoiled her. This is why she screams like this. She will learn not to do that.”

  Amanda said, “She’s four weeks old, you fucking moron.”

  “Don’t swear in front of the baby,” I reminded her.

  She met my eyes and hers were bright and warm. “My bad.”

  “What did you call me?” Violeta looked back at her husband. “Did you hear her?”

  Kirill yawned into his fist.

  Violeta stepped in close to Amanda and stared at her with those ravaged eyes of hers.

  “Cut it off,” Violeta said.

  “What?” Yefim said.

  “Cut it off her.”

  “You cannot cut those cuffs,” Yefim said. “Burn them off, maybe.”

  Kirill lit a new cigarette with the butt of an old one, squinting around the smoke. “Then burn them off.”

  “We’ll end up burning the girl.”

  Violeta said, “Not if you cut off her hands.”

  Yefim said, “Mrs. Borzakov?”

  Violeta kept her eyes on Amanda, their faces so close their noses almost touched. “We’ll shoot her first. Then we cut off her hands. Then we find a way to take the handcuffs off the bambina.” She looked back at her husband. “Yes?”

  Kirill was looking up at the TV. “What?”

  “Escuche! Escuche!” Violeta slapped her own chest. “I’m here, Kirill.” She slapped her chest again, harder. “I exist.” One more slap. “I live in your life.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “What now?”

  “We shoot the girl, cut off her hands.”

  “Okay, darling.” Kirill waved toward the other end of the trailer. “Do it in the back bedroom.”

  Yefim reached for Amanda, who didn’t so much as flinch.

  “Let me,” Violeta said.

  Yefim’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “I want to do it,” Violeta said, her eyes never leaving Amanda’s face. “She would prefer a woman do it. I know her.”

  “Let her do it,” Kirill said to Yefim and waved a tired hand.

  Through the entire conversation about her own murder, Amanda didn’t make a sound. She didn’t shake, she didn’t blanch. She stared at the two of them, unblinking.

  Helene said, “What? Wait a minute. What’s going on here?”

  Helene’s bag was still at her feet. They’d never checked her for a weapon, and my .45 was in there. It would take me four steps to reach the bag. Then I’d have to reach in, thumb off the safety, and point it at someone. I figured that even in the most optimistic scenario, Pavel and Yefim would empty a good two dozen rounds into me before I cleared the gun from the bag.

  I stayed where I was.

  “What’s going on?” Helene said again, but no one listened to her.

  Violeta kissed Amanda’s cheek and ran her hand over Claire’s head.

  “Mrs. Borzakov?” Yefim said. “You ever fire this gun before?”

  She went over to Yefim. “What gun?”

  “This one,” he said. “It’s a forty-caliber automatic.”

  “I like revolvers.”

  “I don’t have a revolver right now.”

  “Okay.” She sighed and brushed her hair back off her shoulders. “Show me this gun.”

  Yefim put the gun in Violeta’s hands and showed her where the safety was. “It pulls a bit to the left,” he said. “In this space? It will be loud.”

  Helene said to Kenny, “You promised no one would get hurt.”

  Kenny said to Kirill, “Yeah, Mr. Borzakov. We had, like, a deal.”

  “No deal with you.” Kirill waved his hand. “Pavel.”

  Pavel pointed a Makarov pistol at Helene and Kenny. “Take them in back, too, Kirill?”

  “Yes,” Kirill said. “What did you do with the other girl?”

  Pavel gestured at the baby. “Baby’s mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She no bother, boss. She’s in the living room. Spartak take care of her, soon as I tell him.”

  “Good, good.”

  Yefim finished showing Violeta how to use the gun. “You got it now?”

  “I got it.”

  “Are you sure, Mrs. Borzakov?”

  She let go of the gun. “I’m sure, I’m sure. You think I’m stupid, Yefim?”

  “Tiny bit, yes.” Yefim tilted the muzzle up and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered Violeta’s head in the soft skin under the palate. It exited the top of her head and followed a starburst of blood and bone into the ceiling. Her newsboy hat disappeared behind the couch. Her knees buckled left, then right, and she fell on the sectional and slid from there to the floor.

  Kirill started to get off the couch, but Yefim shot him in the stomach. Kirill let loose a sound I’d once heard a dog make when it was hit by a car.

  Spartak came through the curtain with a revolver extended and Pavel shot him in the temple as Spartak was in mid-stride. Spartak took a half-step with his brains dripping pink and red down the mirrored wall, and then he fell face-forward on the floor by my foot, his mouth open and huffing.

  After a few seconds, no more huffing.

  Pavel swung his arm and pointed at Kenny’s chest.

  “Wait,” Kenny said to Pavel. “Hold on.”

  Pavel looked over at Yefim. Yefim flicked his eyes to Amanda. After a second or two, he looked back at Pavel and blinked once.

  Pavel fired a round into Kenny’s chest and Kenny jerked in place like he’d been hit with a cattle prod.

  Helene screamed.

  Tadeo said, “No, no, no, no, no,” his eyes clenched.

  Kenny raised an arm and looked around, his eyes wild and so terribly afraid. Pavel took one step forward and fired another round into Kenny’s forehead and Kenny stopped moving.

  Helene curled into a fetal positio
n on the sectional and screamed herself into silence, her mouth open and soaking wet, the spittle dripping off her chin, but no sound coming out as she looked at Kenny lying dead as dead got on the carpet beside Spartak. Pavel trained his gun on her but didn’t pull the trigger. Tadeo dropped off the couch and landed on his knees and started praying.

  Kirill pawed the couch like he was trying to find the remote in the dark. He grunted, over and over, the blood slopping all over his white sweater and tan pants. He opened his mouth and gulped at the air, his eyes on the ceiling as Yefim put one knee on the couch beside him and pressed the muzzle of his Springfield XD against Kirill’s heart.

  “I loved you like a father, but you go become a fucking embarrassment, man. Too much shit up your nose, I think. Too much vodka, eh?”

  Kirill said, “Who will work with you if you kill your own boss? Who will trust you?”

  Yefim smiled. “I got approval from everyone on this—the Chechens, the Georgians, even that crazy Muscovite there in Brighton Beach? One you said could never run the show? He runs the show, Kirill. And he agree—you got to go.”

  Kirill held both hands over the hole in his abdomen and arched his back from the pain.

  Yefim gritted his teeth and then sucked his lips in against them.

  “Let me tell you, Yefim. I—”

  Yefim pulled the trigger twice. Kirill’s eyes snapped back into his head. He exhaled, the sound impossibly high-pitched. His eyes remained back in his head, only the whites showing. When Yefim came off the couch, the smoke exited Kirill’s mouth and the hole in his chest at the same time.

  Yefim walked over to Amanda. “We let your mother live?”

  “Oh, God,” Helene shrieked from her fetal position on the couch.

  Amanda looked at Helene for a long time.

  “I guess. Don’t call her my mother, though.”

  “What about little Spanish guy?”

  “He probably needs a job.”

  “Hey, little fellah,” Yefim said. “You want a job?”

  “Nah, man,” Tadeo said. “I’m so fucking done with this shit. I just want to go work with my uncle.”

  “What’s he do?”

  Tadeo’s accent suddenly disappeared. “He sells, like, insurance?”

  Yefim smiled. “That’s worse than what we do. Hey, Pavel?”

  Pavel laughed. It was surprisingly high-pitched, a giggle.

  “Ho-kay, little man. When you leave here, you go sell insurance. I think we done killing for the day, then. Pavel?”

  Pavel nodded. “My fucking ears hurt, man.”

  Yefim looked up at the ceiling. “Shit-ass construction, these things. Too much tin. Boom boom. Now that I’m king, Pavel? No more trailers for us.”

  Pavel said, “George Clooney no king.”

  Yefim clapped his hands together. “Ha! You right there. Fuck George Clooney, eh? Maybe someday he get to play a king, but he’ll never be a king like Yefim.”

  “You know that is sure, boss.”

  Yefim reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a small black key. He stepped up to Amanda and said, “Hold out your wrists.”

  Amanda did.

  Yefim unlocked Amanda’s right handcuff and then the baby’s. “Man, look at her. She’s sleeping.”

  “She doesn’t seem to mind loud noises,” Amanda said. “This kid, I swear, every day’s a surprise.”

  “You telling me.” Yefim unlocked the left cuffs. “You got her?”

  “I got her.”

  “Hold her tight.”

  “I’m holding her. She’s in a Björn, Yefim.”

  “Of course. I forget.” Yefim pinched the handcuffs at their centers and pulled them away from Amanda and the baby.

  Amanda rubbed her wrists and looked around at the carnage. “Well . . .”

  Yefim held out his hand. “Pleasure, Miss Amanda.”

  “You’re no slouch yourself, Yefim.” She shook his hand. “Oh, the cross is in Helene’s purse.”

  Yefim snapped his fingers. Pavel threw him the purse. Yefim pulled out the cross and smiled. “My family, before we end up in Mordovia two hundred years ago? We live in Kiev.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “True. My father, he tells me we’re descended from Prince Yaroslav himself. This is a family heirloom, man.”

  “From a prince to a king,” Pavel said.

  “Oh, you too kind, man.” He rummaged in the bag and then looked at me. “Whose gun?”

  “That’s mine.”

  “It was in the bag the whole time? Pavel!”

  Pavel held up his hands. “Spartak supposed to check woman.”

  They both looked down at Spartak as his blood ran under the sectional. After a few seconds they looked at each other and shrugged.

  Yefim handed me my gun like he was handing me a can of soda, and I put it in the holster behind my back. Four people had just been killed in front of me, and I felt nothing. Zip. That’s what twenty years of swimming in shit had cost me.

  “Oh, wait.” Yefim reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thick black wallet. He rummaged around in it for a bit and then handed me my driver’s license. “You ever need something, you call me.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “You go sell insurance like the little man?”

  “Not insurance.”

  “What you do, then?”

  “Going back to school,” I said and realized I meant it.

  He raised his eyebrows at that and then nodded. “Good idea. This is no life for you anymore.”

  “No.”

  “You’re old.”

  “Right.”

  “You have kid, wife.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re old.”

  “You said that already.”

  He held the cross out for me to see. “Beautiful, eh? Every time someone die for it, it gets more beautiful, I think.”

  I pointed at the Latin on the bottom. “What’s that mean?”

  “What you think it means?”

  “Something about heaven or paradise. Eden, maybe. I don’t know.”

  Yefim looked at the bodies on the couch and on the floor by his feet. He chuckled. “You like this, man. It means, ‘The place of the skull has become paradise.’ ”

  “Which means what?”

  “I always thought, dying isn’t death. Where you see a skull, that guy? He already in paradise. Forever, my friend.” He scratched his temple with his gun sight and sighed. “You got Blu-Ray?”

  “Huh?”

  “You got Blu-Ray player?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, man, you crazy. Pavel, tell him.”

  Pavel said, “You not watching movies unless you watch the Blu-Ray. It’s the pixels. Ten-eighty dpi, Dolby True HD sound? Change your life, man.”

  Yefim waved his arms at the boxes stacked above Kirill’s corpse. “I like the Sony, but Pavel swears by JVC. You take two. You watch both with your wife and daughter, tell me which you like best. Hey?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want PlayStation 3?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “iPod?”

  “Got a couple, thanks.”

  “How about a Kindle, my friend?”

  “Nah.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He shook his head several times. “I can’t give those fucking things away.”

  I held out my good hand. “Take care, Yefim.”

  He clapped both my shoulders hard and kissed me on both cheeks. He still smelled of ham and vinegar. He hugged me and pounded his fists on my back. Only then did he shake my hand.

  “You, too, my good friend, you hump.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  All in all, it was an interesting Christmas Eve.

  We were delayed getting out of the trailer park, because both Helene and Tadeo soiled themselves when Yefim and Pavel shot four people to death in the time it took to light a cigarette. Then Tadeo f
ainted. It happened just after Yefim and I discussed Blu-Rays and Kindles. We exchanged our Russian man-hug and heard a thump and looked over to see Tadeo lying on the floor of the trailer, breathing like a fish that had ridden a wave into shore but forgot to ride it back out.

  “You ask me,” Yefim said, “I’m not sure this little man can handle the insurance business.”

  We stood by the Suburban for a minute—Amanda, the baby, Sophie, and me. Sophie shivered and smoked and looked at me apologetically, either for the smoking or the shaking, I couldn’t tell. Pavel had told us to stay put and then he’d gone back inside the trailer. When he returned, he carried two Blu-Ray players.

  Inside, someone fired up a chain saw.

  Pavel handed me the Blu-Ray players. “You enjoy. Do svidanya.”

  “Do svidanya.”

  I went to the back of the Suburban and then called to Pavel as he reached for the door of the trailer. “We don’t have the car keys.”

  He looked back at me.

  “Kenny had them. They’re still in one of his pockets.”

  “Give me minute.”

  “Hey, Pavel?”

  He looked back, one hand on the door.

  “You have any ice in there?” I held up my scorched palm.

  “I take a look.” He went back into the trailer.

  I put the Blu-Ray players on the ground at the back of the Suburban, and my phone rang. I read the caller ID: ANGIE CELL. I flipped the phone open as fast as I could and walked away from the Suburban toward the river.

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Hi,” she said. “How’s Boston?”

  “It’s nice here right now. The weather.” I reached the river-bank, stood watching the brown Charles slosh along, ice chips surfing along the top every now and then. “Thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine degrees. Blue sky. Feels more like Thanksgiving. How’s it there?”

  “It’s about fifty-five. Gabby loves it, man. All the squares, the horse-drawn carriages, the trees. She can’t get enough.”

  “So you’re going to stay?”

  “Hell, no. It’s Christmas Eve. We’re at the airport. We board in an hour.”

  “I never gave you an all-clear.”

  “Yeah, but Bubba did.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “He said it was just as easy to shoot Russians in Boston.”

  “A solid point. All right, then, come home.”

  “You done?”