Fuck-fuck-fuck—the static hit and everything cracked. The next thing I knew, I was in the car and Misha was driving, throwing us around the uneven, potholed pavement behind some apartment buildings. A cigarette I didn’t remember lighting glowed at me in the side mirror, but everyone was alive with no signs of poor decision-making on my part.
“Hrenwith these domestics—doesn’t even have a fucking CD player—what am I supposed to listen to, the radio?” Misha slammed his palm into the dashboard, and some questionable sounds said he wouldn’t be listening to the radio either.
“And I ran to find you, but you were already in my arms,”I mouthed. Track thirteen, an unlucky number, but I memorizedevery song a while ago and liked to go in order. “How could I not see it; you were mine all along…”
“What?” he snapped.
“Nothing. Do you know which building?”
“Wherever his car is parked. He should still be there.”
Night closed in, and streetlights grew scarcer the further we moved from the city center. Only one shone down on the Volga parked outside a building with more broken windows than whole.
“God save them if that’s a brothel and they hurt our girl…” Misha muttered.
“‘Why should I help you,’ and now it’s ‘our girl,’” I pointed out.
“She’s your only redeeming quality,” he said. “Listen, why haven’t you ever been jealous of me?”
I looked at him, and he looked at me.
“Mish,” I said. “Come on.”
“Hey I’m a good-looking guy.”
I waited.
“Blyad,” he said. “Who knows?”
“Don’t stop paying the girls to lie for you, they’ll flip. No one else knows you prefer your Anatolys to your Anas. I’m not here to out your secrets despite you being set on spreading mine,” I said, finger tapping on the grenade. “It doesn’t look like the first two floors are being used. Are there basements in these things?”
“Yeah, but they’re the first to go when the addicts move in.”
“Alright.” I moved to the podyezd. The thick smell of death radiated from the thinly cracked metal door. “Give me three minutes, then I want you to call Boris. Don’t stop calling him. I need to hear him either answer the phone, or the ringtone.”
He straightened, examining the graffiti decorating theconcrete wall. “Aren’t these the Chechen grounds?”
They were, and I hadn’t noticed. She scrambled my brains and cleared them all at once and now wasn’t the time to let myself slip, but the thought occurred that maybe Sergei never paid for Elena… maybe it was a trade.
“Woah—stay with me—” Misha’s hand closed in on my shoulder. “You’re getting that look in your eye. She hasn’t been in there long, maybe she’s alright.”
“You don’t have to go in,” I told him.
“Are you going to lose your shit?”
“Probably.”
“Well then, I gotta go in. What’s the plan?”
“Give me three minutes, then shoot anything in a nice jacket.”
“You are a fucking psychopath,” Misha muttered, theclick-clunk—tschof his machine gun underlining the irony. “Hey, you ever notice these things sound like they’re barking dogs? You know, when you fire off a bunch at once?”
“Wear ear protection more often,” I said, and slipped inside.
42
Such is Life
