blackmailed his ass and he still wouldn’t sell. Stubborn fuck, dug in his heels. You know how Frank is.”
“I know,” Joe said.
“Yeah well, Frank is a tough guy, but he ain’t never dealt with no one like Pavel. They brought Frank to one of the Borofsky’s strip clubs after it closed. They sat him in the office. It’s got one of them two-way mirrors, so you can see the action on the floor without people being able to see in.”
“I was a cop, Dixie. I know all about how they work.”
“So this dancer comes on stage and only Pavel is sitting all alone in the audience. He gives her a hundred dollar bill and she blows him. He hands her another bill and a mask and she starts dancing for him, rubbing her pussy up against the pole and all. Only the mask ain’t like a Halloween mask or nothing. It’s a picture of Frank’s wife’s face glued on cardboard. When she was done dancing, Pavel handed her another hundred and got up on stage with her. He stood behind her, stuck a blade in her, slit her open from the pussy to her neck. Pavel said he got hard watching her try to stop her guts from falling out. So when she’s twitching on the dance floor, Pavel dipped his hand inside her and writes Tina on the two-way mirror in her blood for Frank to see. He told me so much spilled out of her onto the stage that they had to close the club the next day. Frank didn’t need no more motivating to sell after that. The Borofskys was going to have Frank killed in prison, but he did them a favor.”
Joe was no longer interested in talking. The thought of Marla being in the hands of Dixie’s sadistic friend was beginning to get to him. Suddenly, the answers to the questions which had haunted Joe Serpe for weeks no longer seemed very important. Apparently, Dixie, too, was all talked out.
It was a pretty long ride, the silence making it longer. The Lincoln’s right turn signal popped on about a quarter mile from exit 68. Joe followed as the lead car made a sweeping right turn back under the L.I.E. onto William Floyd Parkway. As they proceeded north they passed the entrance to Brookhaven National Lab and continued through miles of forest on either side of the dark parkway. There seemed to be more deer crossing signs on the road than automobiles. Joe was pretty unfamiliar with this part of Long Island. They passed by places with quaint names like Whiskey Road. There was nothing quaint about tonight. People were going to die tonight-he and Marla, probably. Dixie for sure. Others too. And the further north they went, the further away from anything familiar to Joe, the less hopeful he felt.
Again, the Navigator’s right turn signal popped on. Joe saw signs indicating they were headed toward Wading River, close to where New York State and the local utility had wasted billions of dollars constructing a nuclear power plant that would never produce a single watt of electricity. That’s the thing about mistakes, Joe thought, it only takes a few people to make them, but everybody pays. Joe followed for a few more miles and he began to see signs for Calverton National Cemetery. They didn’t make it as far as the cemetery, not yet, anyway.
The black SUV turned into an unlit strip mall along route 25A. Its driver didn’t park, but dimmed his lights and continued around to the rear of the attached buildings. From what Serpe could see, this was new construction. There were no visible store signs and lines hadn’t even been painted on the blacktop. There were at least two other vehicles parked in the back; Steve Scanlon’s Chevy Blazer was one of them. Joe killed the ignition and waited. As he did, he noticed a backdoor open and a shaft of light cut a rectangle out of the night. Four men, one shoving Marla ahead of him, walked into building. Joe decided the time was now and attempted to reach under his seat to get at the Glock Healy had gifted him.
“Y’all looking for this?” Dixie asked, waving the Glock up so Serpe could see it in the rearview mirror. “I saw it under the seat when I laid down back here. Good thing too, ‘cause I bet you’d have killed me dead by now. Wouldn’t have been a fair fight when all I got is this old. 38.” Dixie pressed the. 38 hard against Joe’s neck. “Now get the fuck out of the car, Joey.”
Serpe had no cards left to play and did as he was told, walking slowly toward the back door.
“Wait a second,” Dixie said. “Maybe I can save your behind if y’all was to tell me where that mongoloid bitch got to. Max and Alexi and their daddies want to know that real bad.”
“Go fuck yourself! Even if I told you, it wouldn’t save your worthless fucking life.”
Dixie drove the heel of his free hand into Serpe’s left kidney. Joe went down in a heap, coughing, gasping for breath, retching.
“Pavel taught me that,” Dixie bragged like a proud student. “Funny, ain’t it, the way humans is wired up? Hit a man in his kidneys and it takes his breath away. Makes him sick to his stomach and turns his legs into jelly. Don’t make no sense, does it? You’d be pissing blood too, but I don’t s’pose y’all have to worry about that. Before we go in I guess I should thank y’all for planting that crack on the nigger. You ever watch someone get killed after smoking rock? What a rush. Now get the fuck up.”
Once inside, Joe’s last flicker of hope was extinguished. Marla knelt on the floor, hands cuffed behind her. She was between two steroid giants with dull, lifeless eyes and scar-tissue faces. One held a shiny. 45 at his side. The other held an MP-5 with a silencer. He cradled the 9mm assault rifle like an experienced wet nurse, with the casual professionalism of a man who understood his job perfectly. Neither of these men nor their weapons particularly frightened Serpe.
The third man, however, the man who stood behind Marla flicking his thumb against the blade of a knife, was cause for concern. He was not nearly the size of the other muscle, but he had bright blue eyes, crazy, hungry eyes. This must be Pavel, Joe thought. Pavel smiled at Serpe, nodding his head to the right. Joe now understood the smile, for a few yards to his left lay sheets of plastic vapor barrier and two chainsaws. You didn’t have to have a vivid imagination to figure out how things were going to play out.
Along with the muscle, the full cast of characters seemed to be there: Scanlon, Dixie, of course, Misha Levenshtein, and another gray-haired old-timer Serpe figured was Sergei Borofsky. There were also two well-kept men in their early forties in attendance. These were the sons, Joe guessed. One looked the image of Borofsky. The other was reminiscent of Levenshtein.
“Dixie, bring Mr. Serpe over by the plastic,” said the elder Borofsky.
Dixie obeyed, but apparently not fast enough to suit his masters.
“Come on, Dixie. Come on! Listen to my father,” Borofsky’s son barked, clapping his hands. “Let’s go.”
Dixie did as ordered, but they were still displeased.
“No,” the son said, “step away from him, we don’t want his blood on you, Dixie.”
“Whatever y’all say, Max.”
Joe Serpe had fantasized about the moment of his death many times. Undercover detectives have good reason to think about their own mortality. So do men who transport hazardous materials for a living. How many times during the three years he worked for Frank had he looked at the million gallon storage tanks of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and oil as he loaded the tugboat, and wondered when a single spark would blow him into orbit?
“Listen,” Joe said. “If you’re going to kill me, at least-”
“Shhhh!” Sergei Borofsky put his index finger to his lips, his eyes as cold as a shark’s. “We’re going to kill you, but not yet.”
Ffifft. Ffffft. Ffffft. Ffffft. Ffffft. The MP-5 whispered deadly nothings in Dixie’s ear.
And the hulking man collapsed back onto the plastic matting, stone dead.
Serpe looked at Steve Scanlon. The retired firefighter’s eyes were suddenly very frightened. Joe felt his face crinkle into a smile at Scanlon’s realization.
“Pavel, you and Steve do the honors,” Max Borofsky ordered in unaccented English.
Scanlon and Pavel stepped forward, slipped on latex gloves and long Tyvek aprons.
“Only one saw,” Pavel barked. “You hold him when I tell you.”
Meanwhile, Pavel yanked the cord on the chainsaw and it started right up. He revved its motor for effect and to get a feel for its power.
“Hold him by the hair like this.” Pavel demonstrated with the flare of a seasoned practitioner.
Steve grabbed Dixie’s hair, held the dead man’s head up. The saw made quick work of it, tearing through the neck, spitting out shards of flesh and bone as it went. When the blade ripped through the last inch of connective tissue, Scanlon stumbled backwards, Dixie’s severed head in his hand. The headless torso thumped down, blood oozing onto the plastic. Marla lurched forward, vomiting her guts up. She had company. Misha Levenshtein lost his last few meals as well.
“You were always soft, Misha,” the elder Borofsky scolded. “Always the weak one. Look at our sons. Max and Alexi don’t act like women. Always, you wanted the money, but never to do the dirty work. You should have been an accountant, Misha. It was the Jews like you that let the Nazis march them out of Kiev into the forests like sheep
