by Andrew Post
Nothing except for the two pints of your own goddamn blood you shoved into his veins, you fucking dumbass.
When the toaster sprang, Frank’s arm involuntarily delivered a punch to the toaster, spilling charred crumbs everywhere as it clattered loudly onto the bloody kitchen floor. He stood, now with broken skin across his knuckles, mind racing. He had to know. He had to go and see those two women again and ask what they do. He had to know there’d be nothing to link Vasily to him.
He heard a car door close in his driveway. Then a second, then a third, a fourth.
Frank took three deep breaths and started toward the front door before they had a chance to knock. And when they did knock, three hard booms, he didn’t answer right away. That’d seem too eager. Bryce stood smiling at Frank with two large men in leather jackets and fitted jeans – perhaps that was Russian mafia enforcer chic – and a small silver-haired woman in a satin tracksuit and both wrists heavy with thick gold jewelry. She had the same pale blue eyes as Vasily.
“Morning, Frank,” Bryce said. “This is my aunt Tasha Petrosky and my cousins Oskar and Vlad. We’re here to pick up Vasily, if he’s ready.”
“And discuss your reward for the kindness you showed my son,” the small woman with the sharp features and searching eyes said. “Bryce tells me you gave him some of your own blood to keep him alive. You are a true hero, Mister Goode.”
All four were smiling politely until Frank said, “Actually, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all night, Bryce. Come in.”
Bryce, first in, cut through Frank’s living room and paused at the pinned-back plastic wall. He turned around, eyes wide in shock. “Where is he, Frank?”
The door closed. One giant, bearded cousin remained near it while the other passed into the kitchen, glancing around, one hand on his belt. He nodded to the first cousin, then to Tasha, who had a seat on Frank’s couch and crossed her legs. She looked at him, her face giving nothing, seemingly calm as could be like she knew to expect this.
“Frank, where the fuck is Vasily?” Bryce said.
“He was here last night. When I woke up, he was just…gone. I only nodded off for a couple hours. I ran outside to look for him but he was gone. He left his clothes. I would’ve thought the cops would’ve seen him and picked him up or taken him to the hospital. I didn’t know how to reach you.” And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to…
Bryce pulled out his phone and held it to his ear, his eyes glued onto Frank. A half-breath later, ‘Dark Eyes’ started playing in the next room. Bryce tried avoiding the puddles of blood in the O.R., knelt, and fished a small white cell phone out from under the operating table. He brought it into the living room and put it in Tasha’s papery hand, who sat waiting with it open, palm up. She continued to wear the small, sharp smile despite having just heard her son was missing. She thumbed around through his phone, then with both hands and seemingly very little effort, cracked the device in half and set the pieces on Frank’s coffee table.
The silence was thick. The oscillating fan shook its head at them, at Frank, blowing the stuffy air around that smelled vaguely like a poorly maintained deli.
“I don’t know what happened,” Frank said. “I’m really sorry, Missus Petrosky, but he just wandered out in the middle of the night. I know it’s my fault, but I really tried to take good care of him. He had enough drugs in him so he’d sleep through the night. I never would’ve thought he’d wake up in the middle of night, let alone get up and walk out of the house.”
Tasha Petrosky sat with her veiny hands in her lap, her large blue eyes touring the room, peering into the operating room, then into the kitchen, then following the blood trails across the floor, then Frank a moment, then to Bryce, the cousins, then at Frank’s handful of stale-smelling old furniture.
Bryce cleared his throat. “Aunt Tasha, what should we do?”
Tasha dipped a hand into the front pocket of her tracksuit jacket, took out a cough drop, unrolled it, popped it between her lips, and clicked it around her teeth a few times before answering. “We heard nothing from the police about anyone finding Vasily. He is still missing. It’s only been a few hours. Let’s not get wound up.”
Bryce ran a hand through his hair. “I bet it was the fucking Pescatellis. I’d bet my fucking life on it.” Bryce balled a fist, looked around the room with it raised, apparently found nothing worthy of destroying, and lowered it. “Goddamn it.”
“I’m really sorry about all this,” Frank said, trying to keep a balance between slathering it on too thick and not showing enough remorse. He wanted to just say it was Simone Pescatelli but had no idea what kind of domino effect that would set in motion and if the war between the two families would eventually circle back around and crush him too or if they’d just snuff each other out. And if word got around he gave up Simone, then he’d have the Pescatellis after him with Simone, at any moment, to turn the whole thing back on Frank with her own brothers and cousins ready to do their boy work on him. So it was best to just be Switzerland in this situation, the innocent ex-doctor who just lost track of a ball-shot thug who, as far as the story went, wandered off into the night in his diaper made of gauze.
“Regardless of what happens today,” Tasha said, “that can never take away what you did last night, Mister Goode. I would like it if you gave me an estimate on what you feel is owed to you.” With a snap of her long fingers, Cousin Number One by the front door produced a billfold and brought it over to his aunt, bending for her to finger through the thick pile of bills crammed within. She looked at Frank, who was currently trying not to let it show he had no idea what to do with his hands. “Well? Please give me a figure – and don’t be humble.”
Bryce was shaking his head. “This is bullshit. He lost him, Aunt Tasha. He let him walk out of his fucking house, bleeding from the balls, in the middle of the night. And you’re gonna pay this asshole?”
“I am. Because do you think, if Mister Goode hadn’t done what he did to save your cousin’s life, he would’ve been able to walk out of this house at all? No. He wouldn’t have been able because he would’ve been dead. But I can see it in your face, Bryce, that you’re just feigning to be upset he’s gone. With your uncle and now your oldest cousin out of the picture, that leaves you. But the reins aren’t yours yet. We will find Vasily and you will go back to being his second-in-command.” She smiled a little more. “Okay, sweetheart?”
“Fine.”
“Mister Goode. We need to go begin searching for Vasily. Your fee, if you would.”
Frank swallowed. “Fifty thousand.”
Tasha’s wrinkled brow folded. “I say don’t be humble, not greedy.”
“Sorry. Ten?”
From the billfold the cousin was holding open, Tasha pinched out the entire wad and put it on the coffee table next to the halves of Vasily’s broken phone. As the cousin helped her to her feet, Bryce stomped over and snatched the money away.
“Fuck this. If he was involved in Vasily going missing then you just funded his escape,” Bryce shouted at his aunt.
Her face didn’t move. “Put that money back on the table and let’s go. Mister Goode, we will be back later in the evening to search your home. Please be home. Bryce, get Mister Goode’s telephone number so we can reach him if we find Vasily.”
Bryce shook the stack of cash in his aunt’s face. She didn’t blink. “I’m not letting you give him this,” he said. “Even if he didn’t have nothing to do with Vasily vanishing, we scared the shit outta him. He’s gonna run even if he’s guilty or not. Weren’t you, Frank? That was your plan, wasn’t it, asshole?”
“I think I liked you better when you were passed out from blood loss,” Frank said. It just fell out of his mouth. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was because he hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, maybe at this point Frank Goode truly didn’t care if he lived or died.
“What did you say to me?”
>
“I put three hours into him. You were there, Bryce. I gave him two pints, you gave him two of your own. I don’t know if it’s something from being a doctor for so long or what, but even with you threatening me, I still care about Vasily. I didn’t know him before yesterday. I don’t know what his voice sounds like when he isn’t screaming. But he was my patient and I have an interest in making sure he lives, even if he doesn’t owe me a thing.” He nodded down at the money in Bryce’s hand. “Take that. I don’t want that money anywhere near me until I see it for myself that he’s alive.”
A moment. Frank’s heart was about to pop. His feet were sweating.
“That is a very honorable gesture, Mister Goode,” Tasha said. “But I have a parrot at home that also repeats things I want to hear. Your ex-wife’s name is Rachel, right? She has her maiden name again, isn’t that right? Burke, yes?”
Frank’s bowels liquefied. “Yes. That’s her.”
“And you two had a daughter together, seventeen now, named Jessica. She works part-time at the Dairy Queen in the Mall of America, yes?”
Frank nodded. “Yes.”
“Due to start her senior year soon.”
“Yes.”
“All right. I just wanted to make sure I had my facts straight.” Tasha took one giant nephew by the arm. “Boys, let’s go home. We’ll tell everybody what’s happened and we’ll begin calling hospitals and police stations. Thank you again, Mister Goode, we’ll see you tonight.”
Bryce shoved the money into his jacket pocket. “Yeah, see you tonight, Frank.”
“Get out of my house.”
Bryce turned to follow his aunt and cousins. “Go sniff your ex-wife’s shoes, bryet.”
“Piss out a window, idiot.”
Tasha Petrosky had a single blood-stained feather stuck to the back of her tracksuit. Upon seeing it, Frank felt all the blood in his body rush toward his feet. Just as Tasha was stepping outside, Frank, feigning to hold the door for them, reached out and pinched the feather from her. Bryce noticed Frank rushing up, all smiles, and sneered at him. A spark of suspicion, but nothing more.
They left.
Frank approached the kitchen sink and calmly vomited. There was nothing to bring up but stringy yellow bile. His toaster was on the floor. The two burned slices, dotted with flies, were sponging up the blood he’d left, just enough, to make it look like a man had walked, nut-shot, out of his house. Whether he was successful, only time would tell.
Once he’d recovered, he stepped into the operating room and surveyed the state of it from the doorway. He noticed his Jerry’s Organic Grocer apron hanging on the wall by the sink. Maybe some time away from this would do him some good. Clear his head with the mindless work of arranging pears and apples in neat little pyramids. He gathered up Vasily’s shredded jeans, peeled Simone’s panties up off the floor, tossed those into a trash bag with the phone he still wasn’t sure why Tasha had snapped in two, set the bag by the door, went to the bedroom, changed out of his shorts and T-shirt, got on his work-issue polo and khaki pants, snatched up his work apron, keys, phone, sunglasses, and the trash bag, and stepped out into the sickening heat.
“Who were those people?” Missus Shulman asked, still at the same spot at the hedge.
The startle made Frank jump like he’d been shot at, his arm pinwheeling sending the plastic bag, weighed by bloody clothes, undergarments, and a broken phone, whipping over his head, snapping back around, and slapping him on the back. “Jesus.”
“Guilty conscience? Is that why you’re so flinchy, Frank?”
“No, I just figured you’d be inside. It’s getting awfully hot out.”
“You’re up to something,” she said. “Those people looked like hoodlums. Except that old broad, she seemed nice. I liked her hair. Do you have them bring old folks over so you can do nasty shit to them against their will? I heard about things like that on the news. That’s why the wife leave you? Me and the girls still can’t figure that one out. Alice has thirty down saying you’re a pedophile.”
“Goodbye, Missus Shulman,” Frank said, backed his car over the blood-smeared driveway, and began the trek across town to the grocery store.
* * *
Amber and Jolene sat in the front of the hearse watching the doors of the Mega Deluxo Super Store, waiting for ten o’clock to roll around. The combination grocery store, department store, auto body, liquor store, and fireworks outlet occupied, in cinderblock, a square quarter-mile. To stand in front of it, one could not take in its entire width straight-on with human eyes. But of all the items available at such low, low prices, Amber and Jolene were only interested in a select few, marked on a piece of torn notebook paper, the things Rhino had said they’d need.
“He seemed really nice,” Amber said. “Like he knew I was just starting out and wanted to make sure I got the right stuff. He named a few brands for us to look out for, especially when it came to the power tools.”
Jolene crushed her cigarette out in the hearse’s console ashtray. “Well, I’m very happy for you that you like your new friend. It’s ten, let’s get this over with.”
Amber and Jolene traded the hearse for a golf cart once they were inside the store. The little red electronic buggy had a basket on either side and a red button on the dash for any time you needed assistance. They’d ping the individual cart and dispatch a Mega Deluxo team member on a Segway immediately. Keeping their sunglasses on since it was about as bright inside under the fluorescent lights as it was outside, they hummed through shoes, furniture, sporting goods, and electronics before coming to the home and garden section.
“This is why every other country hates us,” Jolene said, watching row after row of specially priced junk slide past her side of the cart.
Leaning out, Amber snatched a four-pack of cigarette lighters and tossed them into her basket. “What? We need them.”
They parked at the hedge trimmers and chainsaws and got out of the cart. They took turns lifting the display-model power tools off their racks – each one kept tethered by a long black wire. None of them had their chains on them, or gas in them, so it was impossible to say how much they’d weigh when being used.
“We’ll probably be doing this inside,” Amber said, holding a chainsaw with a three-foot blade on it out in front of her, “so we should probably go electric. Plus I think they’d be quieter.”
“Do we really want to use chainsaws?” Jolene said. The thought of the back-spray when cutting up a body with the thing Amber was currently holding made her stomach pull a twitchy, gurgling somersault. “Because wouldn’t that be sort of crude and imprecise? It’ll just chew things up.”
Amber looked over each shoulder before saying anything more. They were alone in the aisle. “Buyers want the full limb because most of the time it’s what’s inside it they actually want, so the cuts can be crude. They just want the whole thing because the bigger the chunk, the longer decomposition takes.”
“That’s it,” Jolene said, nodding to herself, “I have discovered the ideal diet. It’s discussing this shit. Yep. I will never eat again.”
“Here we go. This is the one Rhino recommended. The BranchBuster 9000.”
“That thing looks nasty,” Jolene said. For a garden-care tool it had an angry appearance to it, housed in hard red plastic and its blade cruelly curved like an overly large skinning knife.
“The BranchBuster Compact Chainsaw with patented QuickNibble tooth technology,” Amber read from the box, “is perfect for trimming off smaller tree limbs of hardwood variety trees without ever any worry of damaging surrounding bark or foliage. Its narrower blade helps to get into hard-to-reach places and is perfect for dead limbs.” Amber paused. “I’m serious. That’s what it says, right there. Perfect for dead limbs.”
Jolene sighed. “I believe you.”
Amber continued reading: “It can use gas or go full electric (at a
lower RPM – extension cord not included) and has a lifetime money-back guarantee. Includes chain, oil, and carrying case. Regularly eighty-five ninety-nine, down this week for Summer Deluxo Days to sixty-two bucks. Nice. We’ll need an extension cord though.”
Into the cart’s side basket it went, along with the twenty-foot orange extension cord once they found the aisle that was hiding in. Then the set of plastic painter suits. And a little further down at housewares, two rubber mallets and a set of chisels. Amber read the how-to line of texts from Rhino as they hummed down the store’s main thoroughfare, which was painted to look like a two-lane highway: “Getting the joints to cooperate sometimes will require a chisel – I suggest one with a sharp point, not that flat tip. Insert tip and hammer it in, wiggle it, then hammer it in a little more until you hear it pop.”
“Jesus,” Jolene said.
“That’s what it says,” Amber said. “This is Rhino’s instruction, not mine.”
“Don’t you find it weird how helpful he’s being? I mean, you’ve never even met him face-to-face and he’s trusting you to not just turn all these texts over to the cops.”
“We took care of that. In every text he makes sure to mention I’m his new employee at his butcher shop and this is just cow parts we’re talking about.”