“I have to work here after you do whatever you do.”
“I’ve got good news for you,” I said, slipping a grenade into my pocket. “There’s about to be a job opening with its own office.”
Sergei expected me, but not yet. I had no doubts my apartment was being watched, but without Misha I wouldn’t have found out for a while, and Sergei wouldn’t have told anyone to watch for me in case someone decided to snitch.
Didn’t matter; I went into a back window while Misha went inquiring in the front. The girl who did the secretarial work liked me, so she only smiled and didn’t ask questions when I knocked a plant off the windowsill while climbing in. I thought about how angry Kotik would be if she knew, and it gave me a shiver. I loved it when she got jealous. Made me hard to know she’d fight for me with her little fists if it came to it.
And she’d be more likely to forgive it if she found out about the times I wasn’t so good at controlling my own jealousy.
The door to his office stood ajar, and for a moment I had to pull back and think—if this was a misunderstanding, or maybe she just left her phone, it would be a shame to—
The record skipped.
TV static.
The next thing I knew, the gun was drawn and pointing at Sergei’s chest. The fat fuck’s face twisted into craters with sparse patches of facial hair and canyoned jowls.
“Crazy motherfucker,” he spat, raised arms trembling. “Put that fucking thing down!”
I had to catch my bearings because I didn’t remember getting that far.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Where’s who, you piece of shit!” His shifty ferret eyes dropped to his right, where he undoubtedly had a quick draw mount under the tabletop.
The Stetchkin APS has a muzzle velocity of 340 meters per second. The plywood backing to his desk couldn’t have been more than a centimeter thick, which would give it a loss of maybe 30 meters at my range. I didn’t need those numbers, but sometimes I couldn’t help but think in those terms because 310 m/s was how fast the bullet ripped through Sergei’s dick, and I was a good shot, even with small targets. What do you know? Dreams do come true.
The second bullet went in a few centimeters to the left, where I’d guessed his gun to be. I couldn’t hear the metallic clink because Sergei was screaming, but as I circled around, the mount was blown out.
“Where is she?” I asked again, pinching his stupid fucking face together.
His high blood pressure would kill him before I could, judging by the redness of his face, and he wasn’t answering. I threw open a drawer, then another. I knew it’d be there, but the sight of the cellphone still caught me by surprise and that sticker spiked the static.
The next thing I knew was Sergei’s head had a nice new hole about the shape of a 9mm round and he for sure wasn’t going to answer any more questions.
“Blyad…” I had to start talking myself down. Katya needed me to talk myself down.
“I get in the car to run away, but the scent of you is in the leather…”I recited, tucking her phone into my jacket.
Chloé Dae, track eight on the album Katya gave me for New Year’s.
“‘And the radio plays every song you gave me,’” I mumbled, slipping out into the hall. I heard people moving and, in a moment, they would see me. So I fell against the wall and waited.
“Vitali—you see the shooter?” a voice called.
“Went out the back window,” I said. “Got Sergei in the head.”
And then I walked out, hoping the secretary liked me enough to keep her mouth shut for a few minutes. My Kotik would have never talked, because my Kotik is loyal.
Misha waited leaning against the Lada, arms crossed, but the back door was cracked and I knew he had the machine gun in there and ready to go. Just in case.
“The job open?” he asked, the cigarette in his mouth shifting.
“Feel free to apply. You find Boris?”
He nodded. “He went to the industrial brothels.”
“FUCK.”
