“I’ll tell you one thing, though. Y’all would have been proud of your boy. Little retard put up some fight till I snapped his skinny-assed neck. Pavel taught me how do that, snap folks necks. It’s kinda fun, hearin’ that snap. Pavel, he was in the Russian Army in one of them special forces type units. I never met no one who likes hurting people as much as Pavel.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“We caught him in the yard that night spying on us when we was doing truck transfers. I s’pose y’all figured out that’s what this is all about.”
“Yeah, I figured it out.”
“The tard said he wasn’t spying or nothing and that he had just frightened off some guy from spray painting up Frank’s trucks, but we didn’t believe him. Retards are born liars.”
“Fuck!” Joe slammed his palms against the steering wheel. “Now I get it. The Reyes kid was still in the yard when you killed Cain. He was a witness.”
“Well yeah, after he saw what we done to the tard, he ran. Stupid little wetback, all he had to do was sit tight until we was done off-loading. We wouldn’t a known he was there at all.”
“Unlike your buddy Pavel, most people don’t get hard-ons when they witness someone being beaten to death. Running probably seemed like a good idea to him at the time.”
“We had that fucking spic cornered too, but that boy climbed the fence like a monkey. We looked for him, but once he hit Union Avenue he disappeared in the dark like a cockroach. You know how them people are. Too bad for him he went and dropped the letters from his mama or we never woulda found him. Stupid ass had five hundred bucks in cash folded into them letters. Pavel told me Reyes begged for those letters to be buried with him when he stabbed him. You know what Pavel told the kid?”
“What?”
“Old Pavel told him he used the letters to wipe his ass.” Dixie laughed nervously.
The car fell into silence once again. It occurred to Joe that Dixie had no idea he was just as likely to be killed tonight as anyone. He was as much a loose end as Scanlon or the blond prostitute. Then again, clear thinking had never been Dixie’s strong suit.
“Y’all know this is Frank’s fault, right?” Dixie broke the silence. “If he had just sold Steve the damned business the way Max and Alexi wanted, shoot, none of this would have happened. The tard, Reyes, them whores. You should have seen Frank’s face when he found out I been working for Steve and the Rooskies. He looked hurt like when a girl finds out her man been stepping out on her. But we taught him a lesson good.”
“Toussant?”
“The big frog nigger cried like a baby when we had Frank do him,” Dixie chuckled. “Yeah, well, y’all kinda helped us with that.”
“You followed me and my friend into Brooklyn that night?”
“Didn’t have to. Scanlon knew right where y’all was going. Remember, he helped set that thing up. Me and Pavel just waited. Then we followed you to that park and picked the nigger up when you let him go. Stupid nig was happy to see us, got right in the car. Pavel had some fun with him for a few days.”
Serpe was confused. “But why fuck with Frank if he’d already sold out a few days before? Not just to punish him?”
“Why the fuck not? You know what it took to get him to finally sell? Steve made him a fair offer. Then they 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.