to be slaughtered.”
“Enough, Uncle Sergei,” Alexi Levenshtein spoke up.
“See, your son has balls,” Sergei Borofsky shouted over the noise of the chainsaw.
Misha Levenshtein glowered at his partner. “That was always your problem, Sergei, mistaking stupidity for balls,” he shouted back. “My son has no balls. He is greedy and foolish, as is Max. What they have they have been fed by spoon, gift-wrapped. They did not work like we worked, build like we built, Sergei. Now, because they want more, more, more and get into bed with pigs and morons, everything we have worked for will come down on our heads.”
“Nothing is coming down, my old partner. After tonight… It will be as it was.”
Dissecting Dixie took less than ten minutes. When Scanlon and Pavel began to wrap Dixie’s remains in black plastic bags, Sergei Borofsky told them to leave it.
“Pavel,” he said. “The woman.”
Pavel, Dixie’s blood still spattered on his face, walked slowly over to Marla. He jerked her up by the neck and pushed her face forward toward the plastic matting. With her hands tied behind her, she stumbled face first onto the concrete floor. She struggled to get up. Pavel helped her, using her hair this time to pull her to her feet. Sergei Borofsky caught the glare in Serpe’s eye.
“Gentle, Pavel, gentle. You may move Mr. Serpe to try something unfortunate.”
He stood Marla in front of the plastic, but to the right of where the pieces of Dixie lay. Tears streamed down her swollen, freshly bloodied face. She was shaking so that her legs could not support her and she collapsed into a pile of herself.
“Easy way or hard? It’s up to you, Serpe,” Max said. “You know about the blond whore they found by the airport?”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
“Pavel enjoys his work, Mr. Serpe. And he especially likes an audience.”
Without needing to be told, Pavel knelt down and, grabbing the handcuffs, bent back Marla’s arms so that she shrieked in agony. Then he just as quickly released her.
“Do we understand one another?”
“We do,” Joe said.
“Where is the girl from the group home, the retarded one, Donna?”
“First, take Marla away from there. Frightening her like this isn’t necessary and it’s just pissing me off.”
“I could let Pavel test your will severely, so don’t take me for an ass. That would be very bad for your girlfriend,” Max warned. “But okay, Pavel, bring her back by Yuri and Stan.”
Pavel seemed almost disappointed as he walked Marla away from Dixie’s butchered carcass. All her strength and will gone, Marla sprawled out on the floor like spilled water.
“Where’s the girl, Serpe?” Borofsky asked.
“Kill Scanlon first,” was his answer. “Then I’ll tell you.”
Steve Scanlon! Everyone in the big unfinished gym seemed to have forgotten about him, but even before all heads could turn back his way, Scanlon took the first shot. And it was as if that one shot from Dixie’s forgotten. 38 was a signal for everything to happen at once.
The muscle with the MP-5 lurched backwards, blood spurting out of his neck to the rhythm of his heart. His finger flexed, the 9mm spraying out deadly puffs of metal as he collapsed on top of Marla. His partner took at least five bullets in a straight line across his abdomen. Both Borofskys were down, the elder leaking blood out of where his right eye used to be. Alexi Levenshtein lay twisted at his father’s feet, his right leg tucked under him at an impossible angle. Scanlon’s second shot caught Misha Levenshtein flush in the belly, but the old man staggered instead of going down. Then, finally, he dropped to his knees. Another second and the old man’s head cracked against the unforgiving floor.
The loud thwack, thwack, thwack of descending rotor blades covered the noise of Pavel’s 9mm. Scanlon’s head seemed to explode, pieces of it flying off in all directions. Joe, still standing, somehow immune, could feel his right leg afire. He looked down at the red puddle forming around his shoes, blood pulsing out of his femoral artery. As his leg buckled, Serpe gazed across the room to Pavel. He smiled back at Joe, tossing his handgun away. A knife appeared in its place, as if by magic. The Russian slit open his left palm and made a show of licking his own blood. He waggled his red tongue at Joe. Pavel strode over to where Serpe lay, bleeding out.
“I hope you like sushi,” the Russian said, wiping his bleeding palm across Joe’s face.
Then he raced toward where Marla struggled to free herself from beneath the corpse.
The backdoor blew off it’s hinges and helmeted men in full body armor poured in like the sea. There was a riot of noise, a chorus of guns firing at once, empty shells pinging off concrete. Joe Serpe heard only the angels singing, some of them spinning in the air above him. He looked for Vinny amongst them, but his brother was not there. Then he heard a voice calling to him as if from at the end of a long tunnel.
“Joe! Joe!”
“Vinny?” he said.
“It’s me Joe, Bob Healy.”
There was another voice. “He’s lost a lot of blood.” Then there seemed to be a million voices. Joe could hardly hear himself think.
“Marla?” Joe asked. “She’s alive.”
“Donna’s in the yard,” Joe said.
“What?”
“Donna’s in the yard, in Cain’s secret hiding spot. She’s in the oil yard.”
“It’s okay, Joe. They’ll find her. Take it easy.”
Serpe felt Bob Healy take his hand. No, he was slipping something into his hand.
“What’s this?” Joe asked, raising his closed fist.
“Something that never should have been taken away from you in the first place.”
Serpe looked back up at the ceiling, but the dance floor was empty. The band was on break. It seemed as good a time as any to sleep.
Epilogue
They found Donna in Cain’s secret place between the cyclone fence, which mistakenly marked the rear limit of the oil yard three feet short of the actual property line, and the brick wall beyond, overgrown with ivy and the skeletons of other dead vines. Even if Frank hadn’t parked the 81 Mack he used for spare parts up against the fence in the rear corner, Cain’s spot would have been safe from detection. If to the rest of the world it was an insignificant, forgotten patch of dirt, to Cain it had been as important as his hose monkey shirt or the feel of Donna’s hand in his. Cain had had the need as much as any man to carve out a corner of the world, put a flag in it, and proclaim it his own. This three by ten piece of dirt, rusted fence, brick, and weeds was his.
Near frozen and half-dead with a gash in her shoulder from where the bullet ripped into her, Donna remained absolutely silent until she heard Marla’s voice. The cops and EMTs had tried to stop the psychologist from going with Healy back to the yard to find the Down’s girl, but Marla wouldn’t hear of it. She would have the rest of her life to suffer through the trauma of reliving this night. Maybe she would get over it, maybe not. She knew, however, that she would never heal if she simply abandoned Donna.
The two woman embraced when Donna crawled out through the hole Cain had cut in the fence and out from beneath the undercarriage of the 81 Mack. They rocked there together, on the soot black, packed down snow that had never fully melted away since the night of Cain’s murder. Nothing remained of the makeshift memorial the people from the group home had constructed. That Cain’s patch of the world had provided Donna with a safe place to hide was memorial enough.
“You look bad and your breath smells,” Donna said. Marla broke down, finally.
On the following Monday, Ken Bergman was given a traditional Jewish burial. In spite of their shock and grief,
