“Bigger than me?”
“A lot bigger.” Donna stretched her arm up toward the ceiling.
“Did Cain say anything about him?”
“Cain didn’t like him. He was mean to Cain.”
“Fuck!”
“Marla, Joe said a bad word! Joe said a bad word!”
Marla kept out of it.
“I’m sorry, Donna. Forgive me.”
“It’s okay.” She smiled impishly. “Cain said bad words sometimes. He said you and Frank taught him good.” Joe felt his face reddening.
“Do you think you know this other man?” Marla asked. “Dixie.”
“That’s the name Cain said. That’s the name!” Donna drummed both palms against Marla’s desk in celebration.
“You did great, Donna,” Joe said. “Thank you. Someday, maybe, if I come by and take you and Marla to the oil place, do you think you can show me Cain’s secret hiding place?”
“Can I sit in the truck and pretend?”
“Sure.”
“Marla, can I go back to my room now?”
“Go ahead. Tomorrow we can talk about how telling the secrets felt, okay?”
“Okay.”
Donna didn’t hesitate. She trundled out of the office without looking back.
Tatiyana blew a crimson red kiss at the mirror in room 217. She hated losing her steady gig. Frank had been her only work for months. It was easy work and it paid very well. She had even grown fond of Frank. So fond that she hated involving that fat blond pig with her tattoos and sloppy pussy, but it hadn’t been her choice. Her employers had grown impatient with her. Now it was back to the old grind, entertaining potential business partners and visitors from home. There was the knock at the door. Oddly, Tatiyana felt nervous. Now she smiled at her reflection. What was there to be nervous about? She had been letting anonymous men shove their cocks in her for food and money since she was a thirteen year old girl.
“One moment,” she said, letting out her breath slowly.
He was a big man with filthy hands and that sick smile certain johns have. She never saw that smile on Frank’s face. Frank never looked at her like a lab specimen. Then again, Frank didn’t know until the very end that she was a whore. But even after he saw the tapes, he simply looked wounded. To most of the men who “visited” her, Tatiyana was a sort of freebie, something to use in anyway they chose. Those were the ones who smiled that smile.
Tatiyana opened her mouth to welcome him in. He wasn’t interested in welcomes, grabbing her by the hair and pushing her back into the room. He used his free hand to slam the door behind him. When she tried to speak again, he twisted her hair harder.
“Suck my cock, bitch!”
She did, just in the hope that he would let go of her hair. He did not, but relaxed his grip enough so that the pain was gone. When he was hard, he tightened his grip on her hair once again, dragging her to the bed. Finally, he let go of her hair.
“Bend over and let me see your cunt!”
She did. He ripped her underwear apart as if it were made of tissue paper and then rammed himself inside her. It hurt, but she could tell it wouldn’t last long, not with how he was pounding against her ass. Then he let out a snort and a sorry groan. He was done. He fell down on the bed next to her. She didn’t hesitate, quickly running into the bathroom.
Before stepping into the shower, she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. She suddenly looked very old and tired for twenty-six. She had parted ways with God at the age of twelve, but found herself praying for him to let her find a way out of the game.
As she stepped out of the shower, a heavy fist slammed into her nose, snapping the cartilage into several pieces. Reflexively, Tatiyana put her hands up to her face as she collapsed backward, her warm blood pouring down her chin. The back of her head smacked hard against the shower wall, cracking the vinyl lining. Tears and blood had blinded her so that she could not see her executioner’s face, but she could feel his calloused hands flipping her onto her stomach. She flailed at him. He swatted her arms away and placed his knee on her spine, cupping his hands under her chin. First, her windpipe collapsed as he snapped her head back. Then her spine cracked.
In that split second before she lost consciousness forever, Tatiyana thought God had finally answered her prayers. She was out of the game.
Saturday, March 6th, 2004
Bob Healy moved around the house picking up six months worth of newspapers, TV Guides, magazines, etc. George was right about the house being a mess, and papers were an easy place to start, but Bob’s sudden cleaning had more to do with nervous energy than anything else. Joe Serpe was on the way over. Finally, after three weeks, they had some concrete pieces to the puzzle, something more than guesses on which to hang their hats. Then the phone rang and some of the puzzle pieces began to change shape. “Hey big brother.” It was George. “If you’re calling me, it’s not good news,” Bob said. “Good and bad.”
“Christ, not again.”
“You want to read about it in the papers tomorrow or hear about it now?”
“Okay, George.”
“Good news first. The results are in from the second tests on the blood splatter samples from the Reyes murder scene. Your hunch was right on. They found a second contributor in one of the blood samples.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“It wasn’t the Strohmeyer kid.”
“I knew it,” Healy said.
“Hey, don’t get weepy on me, big brother. It’s not like the kid was Mother Theresa. He did beat some poor drunk Mexican to death with a shovel.”
“I know. It just confuses the issue. So who is-”
“So far, he’s a John Doe,” George said.
“That’s just great.”
“Well, maybe John Doe’s not the right name. Maybe Ivan Doesky would be more accurate. Seems the second contributor was of Slavic descent.”
“Russian?”
“Could be. Why?”
“What, I can’t be curious?”
“For the last few weeks whenever you get curious, I get headaches. So what is it?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“The flip side of maybe nothing is maybe something.”
“Shit, little brother, the doorbell’s ringing. I gotta go.” Click.
Bob Healy was lying about the doorbell, but just as he put the phone back in its cradle Joe Serpe knocked on the front door.
They sat at the kitchen table, Joe Serpe doing most of the talking.
“Here’s what I think happened,” he said. “Steve Scanlon has a source for black market oil and he was using Frank’s yard to do illegal truck transfers from a nine thousand gallon tanker to his trucks. That’s what Cain and Donna saw that night.”
“Why use Frank’s yard and not his own?”
