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 Bjorn, 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 fainted. 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.
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.”
