Vladimir
I remember the first time I saw her.
Sitting on the front steps of the little row house next to ours.
Crying.
I heard the yelling and the shouting a lot from that house.
There was yelling and shouting from our house on occasion, too, of course. My brother and that Estonian bitch he lived with the first couple of years.
And of course, him yelling at me.
The cops never came though. It was that kind of neighborhood.
I watched her for a while and then finally I went out and said hello to her, in my English which was still far from perfect.
She stopped crying, interested to hear I was from Russia, and we went for a walk down to the corner shop and got two sodas.
Her questions made me smile.
Did I miss the snow?
Not much.
Were the Russian cats any different from America cats that I’d seen?
I said that I thought Russian cats were fatter, but I couldn’t imagine why that was true, because they didn’t have nearly as many kinds of cat food over there.
She considered that, and asked, do they have rainbows in Russia?
I thought about that, and said, yes, sure. Lots.
I bet you’ve never seen a bear, she said.
Sure I have, I said. In the zoo.
She insisted on paying me back for the 7-up I bought her, and she did, with change. Pennies and nickels and quarters.
I heard her father yelling at her when she came back inside.
Chastity
I helped him with English, and he helped me with math.
Believe it or not, I wanted to be a good student.
While the kids around us were fucking in vacant lots and abandoned buildings, smoking pot and taking Molly and acid and dancing all night at warehouse parties and underground clubs – clubs operated by his brother’s bosses, the Russian mobsters, incidentally – we studied together.
The other kids called us dorks.
We didn’t care.
And we did other stuff.
We went on trips to the beach and through the park, where he told me things I’d never known about plants and bugs. He loved that stuff; he was a fiend for Animal Planet and National Geographic.
The first year passed. Like they do.
He got taller. He filled out. He’d started lifting weights with his brother.
I started to get tits. Rather embarrassingly quickly, I filled out, too.
And one day, a bit more than a year after I met him, I had the hiccups, and he was trying to tickle me to make me stop hiccupping.
And we were giggling and wrestling in the park, and then we were kissing.
It was like one minute, we were kids, walking along, and then we were suddenly young adults.
Young adults full of lust.
We were making out awkwardly but passionately, and our hearts were pounding in our young chests as he held me tight, tight.
And I realized I loved him, that he was the absolute best thing in my life.
I mean, sex is dangerous enough, right?
But love?
Might as well let kids play with nuclear weapons.
And I suddenly backed off. And I looked at him, tears spilling out of my eyes, and shook my head, and I ran away.
I took my first drink that night.
Vladimir
We were both the walking wounded, of course.
My brother and her father. Two mean drunks.
They fought us, they fought each other, they fought their girlfriends, they fought their male friends, and they fought the other neighbors.
I guess my brother was luckier than her father though.
My brother got paid for beating people, sometimes.
We never had black eyes or bruised faces though.
They knew to hit you where there were no marks.
And the words, of course, hurt more. They lingered long after the lumps and bruises went away.
The first time she and I kissed is something I can still taste, still smell.
It tasted like rain in the summer.
I wasn’t angry at her, when she ran away.
But it was like losing a piece of myself. The good piece. There wasn’t even regret, there was just absence.
She went off the rails, like a lot of kids in the neighborhood.
She got drunk. She partied. She wore skin-tight tops that displayed those wonderful new breasts.
And I wasn’t angry.
She had kissed me, there had been that brief moment, and it had been so powerful I could understand how she’d been scared.
Like seeing the sun after a life underground.
I tried to talk to her a couple times at school, and she went in the opposite direction.
So I didn’t follow.
I never stopped thinking about her, that time.
I said hello to her if we passed, and she would nod and scurry away.
I thought about that kiss, and I was just glad that I’d had that moment.
I felt like I could die happily.
I studied, and I worked out. Time passed by, like it does.
I became big enough to almost hold my own against my brother, even.
Almost.
He had a lot more experience fighting than I did, of course. But I was getting better.
I thought about her.
Constantly.
I went to work for my brother, something I’d never wanted to do, because I knew I’d need the money.
For her.
I delivered drugs. Drugs which I never took myself.
Every day, as the second winter progressed, I drew a heart in the frost on the window of her bedroom, as I walked by it on the way to the bus stop.
Chastity
I lost it. I panicked.
That moment of sweetness and light made me feel tiny and worthless in comparison.
I didn’t deserve that kind of goodness in my life.
So I filled my life with badness.
It wasn’t hard to find some girls to party with.
I got drunk and smoked pot and tried other drugs and made out with a couple of other guys, but mainly I was a terrible tease. Everybody thought I was a slut – certainly I wore slutty clothes and lots of slutty pictures of me appeared on social media, doing all kind of slutty things.
But I didn’t fuck anybody.
Nobody even touched my new tits or between my legs, not for more than a few seconds. I’d squirm off and run away.
Or act like I was going to vomit. That always stopped them following me.
Of course, sometimes I really did have to vomit.
And every day I saw those hearts.
The hearts he would draw on my bedroom window.
And most days at school, or in the neighborhood, I saw him.
Getting taller and more handsome by the day.
So clear-eyed and straight-backed, quiet and noble at an age when most boys are slobbering foul-mouthed idiots, frazzled from too much internet porn and too many videogames, crazed with hormones and the cheap drugs flooding the streets of the city.
One night I had another screaming match with my father and then went to an all-night rave, and I took MDA and was making out with one of the security guys at the club, and he was sticking his hand up my short skirt.
As he got a finger in the string of my panties, I broke off and ran away, staggered through crowds, and then finally found myself in the bathroom.
Unlike a lot of such places, there was a mirror in the bathroom.
I looked in the mirror and looked at myself.
For a long time.
I drew a heart on the mirror with my finger, and I ran out of that place.
And I knew where I was going.
I went to his house and walked around to the side and climbed up on the fence near the back courtyard and knocked on his window – his bedroom was on the second floor.
He got out of bed, wearing
nothing but black boxer-briefs, and my heart was going like a jackhammer as I saw his flat stomach – not quite a six-pack, but getting there, and well-defined chest.
He opened the window and smiled.
“You don’t look surprised,” I said, hoarse, starting to cry.
“I’m not. I’ve been waiting,” he said, and offered his hand and helped me climb in the window.
Vladimir
I finally arrived at my cabin in the woods. It’s about an hour from the nearest town, in 50 acres of forest full of motion detectors and cameras. It’s one of five pretty much identical places I own across the country.
The top part is a simple three-room cabin retreat, with the usual stuff a person might expect.
It’s off the grid and hooked up with solar and has a large water storage tank. My cover story, should I get visitors, is that I am a writer and need a secluded place to write.
And indeed, if the police or someone else care to look, they will find a writer’s cabin, with a lot of books and a laptop computer with an uncompleted novel about the zombie apocalypse.
I have fun with that occasionally during my down periods.
Maybe I’ll actually publish it someday.
But there’s a secret door in the back of a closet in my cabin, and it opens to a series of doors that lock with keypads combinations and a ramp that leads down into a concrete-lined disaster-proof bunker.
That’s where I do my real work.
There are several rooms and a lot of things down there. A years’ worth of food.
Weapons, explosives, and poisons.
A safe full of cash, from many different countries. Gold and diamonds.
And cells. And cages.
And restraints, of all kinds.
I check the security system and all the cameras on my tablet computer before I drive up to the house, and there are no signs of disturbance.
I open the back of the van and walk around to the back of the house to get an industrial dolly cart and begin unloading the boxes.
Chastity
I’m being moved.
It pulls me out of my memories, and I wonder if I’d actually been asleep. I’m bumping and moving forward and sliding and now the box seems to have been put in a vertical position, because I’m standing on my feet.
My heart begins to pound as panic fills me again. Something is going to happen. But what?
The thought that he might just leave me in this box and bury me occurs to me.
And I scream some more and bang some more, but I can tell the screams aren’t anywhere except inside my head.
There’s more movement.
I remember his eyes.
His kind, sad eyes.
And then I’m on my back again. The movement ceases.
I wait. I have to remind myself to breathe.
But then the lid opens.
And air – fresh, if only by comparison to the smell of my own terror, sweat, and urine – and light floods into my face and I scream some more.
Vladimir
I open her box first.
Chastity.
Although of course that’s not her real name.
It’s okay. I don’t use my real name much anymore, either.
She’s screaming.
I’m used to screaming, but the memories of her screams, the last time I saw her, send shivers through my heart.
I turn away from her and change clothes, putting on a pair of shorts, my favorite cross-trainers, and a tight black compression top.
Time for a workout.
Chastity
I sit up.
I’m in a large windowless room with white walls.
My eyes are burning, and I rub them and look around, my back aching, and my screams dry up as I see the other two boxes.
There’s a long table on one side of the room, and he’s standing in front of it, his back to me, changing into a pair of shorts.
I see the muscles rippling in his back, and see the large ugly scars there. Three round ones, which I assume are bullet holes, and a vertical ridge of scar tissue that I guess is a cut.
He turns towards me. There are bright fluorescent lights overhead.
His green eyes meet mine with such flat, powerful intensity that I can’t look at him. I look down.
“Vladimir,” I say. “Please.”
He doesn’t answer, his eyes moving down my body as I climb out of the box.
“You said you were paid to kill me,” I say. “There has to be some kind of mistake. Why would anybody want to kill me? You can’t kill me. You couldn’t kill me, could you?”
He takes a deep breath.
Finally, he smiles. “Well, I shot my own brother,” he says. “Don’t you think I could kill you?”
Vladimir
She came to me in the night, and I held her, our hearts beating together, as she cried, and told me she was sorry, that she was just so, so scared.
I told her I knew it and she didn’t have to say it.
I knew about fear.
She trembled in my arms like a little bird, seeming so fragile and delicate even though she was nearly as tall as me.
She asked me to make love to her.
I kissed her and told her no, that we would wait until she was sober.
She cried harder.
Chastity
I find I have backed into a corner, and I’m shaking uncontrollably even though it’s not particularly cold in the underground bunker.
My bare ass and back are pressing against the wall, which is white-painted cement.
He turns to the boxes, and selects one and opens it.
The billionaire’s trophy wife, Nadia, is screaming hoarsely from the inside.
He steps back and watches her, a flicker of amusement in his green eyes.
The former Miss Russia climbs out of the box, still wearing her panties and thigh-high stockings and expensive platinum jewelry, holding her hands over her big firm tits, and she clumsily runs, staggering away, and Vladimir steps back and folds his arms and watches her.
She looks around, sees me, sees him, sees the table, sees the door, and runs for the door. There’s no knob, just a keypad.
She screams and bangs on it, screaming in Russian, some words I recognize. “Suka!” Bitch. “Blyatz!” Fuck.
Finally, she collapses on the floor, crying.
Vladimir chuckles, and walks over to her, speaking low in Russian to her. Some more words I recognize. “Girl” and “Be calm.” Devoshka, spakoyate.
She turns around and looks at him and says in English. “What do you want? Money? You can have all the money you want, just let us go. Do you know who you’re dealing with here? Do you know the connections we have? If you hurt us, you won’t be safe anywhere on the planet.”
He chuckles again. “Now, Nadia, are you going to beg, or are you going to threaten? It’s not good technique to do both at the same time.”
She doesn’t answer.
He opens a drawer on the table, and selects a large knife. It’s a very wicked looking knife, with a long black serrated blade.
I find myself wanting to scream again, but I just clutch my hands over my mouth.
Vladimir
I let the billionaire out of the box.
He’s not screaming. He climbs out slowly, looking around the room and then eyeing me with cold flinty grey eyes.
“Whoever is paying you,” he finally says, in English, “I can pay you more.”
I smile at him, pleased to see his suit trousers are stained with piss. His face and nose are swollen from my kick, and covered with dried blood.
I’m sure he’s been in tight spots before – a Russian prison when he was young, to name only one – but he hasn’t been in a tight spot recently, and the terror is bubbling just beneath his tough Russian billionaire surface.
“Tell me,” I say, “who you think I am.”
I’m speaking English, although Russian would probably be better.
He looks at me. Choosi
ng his words.
“A professional killer,” he says, finally, circling to put the coffin between me and him, and moving towards his wife, who is still cowering on the floor.
“Yes, but which professional killer? A well-connected individual like yourself must have heard some stories.”
“Prizrak,” he spits, finally.
I smile and nod. Prizrak.
Russian for ghost.
“And tell me what you’ve heard about the Ghosts, rich man?”
He shakes his head and moves towards his wife, puts his hand on her hair. Protective alpha male, or still trying to be.
“They’re the most sadistic and violent hired killers money can buy,” he says between clenched teeth. “The ones you call when you want somebody to suffer.”
I smile. “And have you used my organization before, old rich man? Is that how you know about it?”
He just stares at me as he strokes his wife’s hair and says some consoling words in Russian.
“So,” I say. “Here’s my second question. Do you think you deserve to die?”
He looks at me again and then stands up. “I don’t deserve to die any more than you do, a man who kills and tortures for money.”
I smile. “Oh, you’ve never killed for money? It’s funny, because I remember all the news stories about you when I was young in Russia. A little Google searching about your early days refreshed my memory. Rivals disappearing. People who owned businesses or property you wanted getting killed. I mean, I’m sure you haven’t killed that many people personally, but how many have you had killed?”
He looks at me, draws himself up to his full height and puffs out his chest. He puts his hand on the old school Russian mafia prison tattoos on his chest. “I did what I had to do.”
“And then I was reading about your bootleg vodka business, in the early days. How many people did you poison? And more recently, how many pensions did your investment fund destroy when it went under?”
He is circling warily, eying me now, his eyes fixed on the blade I’m carrying. Like most Russian billionaires, he’s athletic, and I’m sure he’s boxed and done judo or whatever.
“Are you killing me for some principal,” he finally says, “or for money? Because as I said, I can pay you more. Name a price.”
The Hitman and the Escort Page 4