by Andrew Post
Any port in the storm, so long as that on/off sale sign wasn’t lying.
Inside men in cowboy hats in the far corner and the bartender, a middle-aged man with thinning air, who stood looking up at the mounted TV. Amber watched two women pause their game of pool to size her up, cues in hand like sharpened spears. Whatever they were making of her right now, that opinion was about to change. Amber bellied up to the bar. The bartender tossed a coaster down in front of her with a flick of the wrist. “What’ll it be?”
“I’ll have a vodka tonic, with lime, and everybody else will have more of whatever they’re having – the rest of the night,” Amber said. And having to shout over the sudden cheers that filled the greasy little tavern, she added, “And if you wouldn’t mind, a keg of whatever you recommend loaded up in the back of my car.”
“And that is all doable, darling, but I’ll need to see the color of your money.”
Amber swatted the fistful of twenties down on the bar, and grinned. “How’s that shade of green grab you?”
* * *
Frank turned onto his street and from the corner he could see the three black SUVs sitting parked along the curb in front of his house. He made himself continue to hold the accelerator down, to take him to his driveway, and turn in. He parked in the garage and stepped out, hearing the thump of several car doors. Coming up his driveway was Bryce, his aunt being led by the two burly cousins, and three other men in more casual attire – dress shirts, no coats and ties, pressed slacks. Frank’s phone started to go off in his pocket, but he was quick to reach in and turn it to silent. Hopefully it was Jessica saying she’d convinced her mother to go to Rachel’s mom’s place. He’d check later – if he lived that long.
Bryce led the pack up Frank’s driveway, meeting Frank at the side door to the house. Frank had his keys out, but didn’t move ahead of Bryce to unlock the door. He held Bryce’s gaze, the amused little look on his young face.
“I didn’t do nothing to her,” Bryce said. “I don’t think she even saw me. But Vlad did say he saw her come home from work early and her and your ex take off like the dickens.”
“Is he still there, outside their house?”
“No,” Bryce said. “I believed you when you said you’d meet us here. We’re all here. That’s Vlad, if you don’t remember.”
Vlad, one of the giant cousins, grunted a hello at Frank.
Frank asked Bryce, “Did you not expect me to call them?”
Bryce shrugged. “You did what you had to do.” He nodded toward the side door of the house. “You gonna invite us in or what, Frank? It’s nippy out here.”
Frank glanced past Bryce at Tasha Petrosky, her wet eyes giving nothing, the small grin on her lined face always there, as if smiling that kindly grandmotherly way was its natural state. Frank unlocked the door and let the long line of bodies file into the house. He watched as the cousins eased Tasha onto Frank’s couch. Before anyone was settled in, he started for the kitchen.
“Anybody want some coffee?”
Bryce stepped in his way. “Do I need to bother to ask you if you have a gun in the house?”
“I don’t own a gun.” Frank brushed past him and filled the coffeepot under the tap and poured it into the machine and dumped in two scoops of grounds. “But you can ask if it’ll put your mind at ease, Bryce.”
“Come on out here while that’s brewing, don’t be rude to your guests by hiding in the kitchen.”
Every seat in his living room was filled. One cousin took Frank’s recliner and turned on the TV, flipping impatiently through the channels. Another, seated next to Tasha, poked through their phone. Bryce passed the one kneeling to flick through Frank’s meager DVD collection, to sit on the other side of his aunt.
Tasha, nearly buried with a young man on either side of her, stared at Frank – zeroed in on him like she could see everything he’d done, written on his bones, through his thin skin. She cleared her throat, struggling to dislodge something, and said, “We haven’t found my son.”
“Bryce told me, Missus Petrosky. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Bryce went up the hall, stepped into the bathroom, and closed the door. It felt timed, somehow. But Frank doubted, if they were about to kill him, Bryce would be okay missing it. Would how long he had to remain on this planet be determined by how long it took the asshole to go relieve himself?
Tasha’s eyes watched her nephew leave the room, then returned to Frank, dragging slowly from one point of focus to the next. Frank’s heart thudded in his chest. He folded his arms to keep his shaking hands from showing. It felt like an eternity before she spoke.
“I would like to keep this casual and friendly,” she said, her white-white dentures clicking as she spoke, each word seemingly painstakingly selected before being issued. “My husband was unafraid of bloodshed and I think it only worked to make more enemies than friends. Sometimes business does not go as it should. People are fallible. We all make mistakes. We lie when we know, in our heart, the truth is what should be said. I would like it very much if you, Mister Goode, told me what really happened to my son.”
Down the hall, the toilet flushed, a faucet hissed.
Frank cleared his throat. “I really wish I knew, Missus Petrosky. Vasily was on my operating table, right in that room right there, when I went to bed. When I woke up, I came out of my bedroom, and he was gone. It looks like he left through the side door because I found blood on the doorknob. I ran down the street but I saw no sign of him anywhere. I would’ve called—”
Tasha Petrosky held up a hand. “I asked you to tell me what really happened to Vasily. Not for you to repeat lies you’ve already told. But I understand sometimes lying, like smoking, can be a hard habit to break – something my husband found out the hard way. I will give you one more chance to explain what happened to Vasily. So, please, the truth this time, Mister Goode.”
The relative going through the DVDs paused his fingers. The cousin flipping through the channels landed on an infomercial for knives, and wasn’t watching as the demonstrators sawed a brick in half. The other well-dressed young man tucked his phone away. Bryce came back up the hall wiping his hands dry on his pants. “Don’t you own any hand towels?”
All eyes were on Frank and it felt like the house had been flung into outer space, with nothing at all going on outside these walls – a total, fathomless vacuum – just them, alone.
Frank licked his lips. “I—”
Bryce, standing very close at Frank’s side, drew his gun and pressed its cold barrel to Frank’s head, behind his right ear. “The truth, Frank.”
He thumbed back the hammer. Frank could feel the mechanism inside the gun shift against his skull. “The truth,” Bryce said, his lips brushing Frank’s ear.
“All I was going to say was…” Frank started, when his phone thrummed in his pocket, the buzz of it vibrating about as loud as a ringtone given the current plunging silence of the house.
With his free hand, Bryce snatched it from Frank’s shorts pocket and studied its screen. “You have two text messages and one voicemail. Let’s see who you’ve been talking to. First text message from Jessica, received two minutes ago: Dad, I’m home. Second text message, received one minute ago: We’re going to grandma’s. Well, nothing we didn’t already expect. Now, on to the voicemail. Let’s listen to it on speaker, shall we?”
“Frankie, it’s Louie Pescatelli. Big Robbie told me to tell you he got a call from some guy calling himself Giraffe or Hippo or some shit, saying you was in hot water. Robbie and his boys should be there in a few minutes, just hold tight, buddy, cavalry’s on its way.”
Frank had his eyes closed, ready for the sudden crack and pounding heat on his temple and the Great Whatever that waited for all of us – but it didn’t come. He opened his eyes, still alive, and saw everyone in his living room before him was getting to their feet. Bryce said, “Did you hear t
hat?”
Then Frank heard it too, struggling to pick up whatever it was through the pulse chugging hard in his ears. Car doors whacking shut. Hushed talking, getting closer. And footsteps coming up his front walk – several sets of feet.
The doorbell rang.
No one moved to answer it.
The gun barrel, pressing hard against Frank’s head, began to shake. Bryce whispered, “What the fuck do we do?”
From outside, Robbie Pescatelli boomed, “You fucking Slavs can keep as quiet as you like but we seen your cars out at the curb. You might as well open up so we can talk this over. And Frank had better be breathing.”
Frank stood, heart pounding, hands up, gun to his temple. The doorbell rang a second time. Robbie’s fists shook the house, thunder, thunder, thunder, rattling the windowpanes.
Tasha motioned at the giant galoot cousins nearest the door. “Answer it.”
The door came open and Robbie stepped into the house, silk Hawaiian shirt clinging to his girth with sweat, a curl of dark hair drooping down into his face. He walked in scowling, empty hands at his sides, leading in four of his own men.
Bryce’s cousin closed the door and the heat in the house swelled immediately. Frank couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much company over. The house was threatening to split at the seams. Robbie and his men remained near the front door, one Russian cousin standing behind them. Robbie looked through the wall of bodies between him and Frank, and locked on the ex-doctor – and shifted his dark eyes to Bryce, next to him, holding the gun on Frank.
“Ain’t no need for that, kid.”
“You think so?” Bryce said. “He fucking killed my cousin. Or you did. Somebody fucking did. And we’re gonna figure it out tonight, eye for an eye.”
Tasha Petrosky released her nephew’s arm and shuffled on small shoes across Frank’s stained carpet toward Big Robbie, having to crane her head all the way back to meet his eyes high above her. “Did you kill my son, Robert?”
“No. I didn’t,” Robbie said. “But that don’t mean I ain’t glad his ass is dead. Same as your husband – though I wish it coulda been a bullet that did him.”
Tasha’s face didn’t change. That small smile, that slight tremor that accompanied her every movement and slightest gesture. She just stared up at Robbie after what he’d said, saying nothing in return.
Robbie sighed. “That was a little harsh. I apologize, that was your old man and your kid I was talking about. I take it back. But, for the record, your old man? You can’t look me in the eye, Tasha, and tell me he wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool son of a bitch.”
Tasha still said nothing. Shivered, stared, smiled.
Robbie glanced around at Bryce’s men. “I think she’s broke, fellas. You wanna plug her in for a while and we’ll try this again?”
Robbie’s men laughed. Tasha’s men did not.
“I’m waiting for you to tell me the truth,” Tasha said up to him, at eye level with his massive gut expanding and contracting as Robbie’s powerful breaths filtered the air. She poked a skeletal finger into his silk-draped paunch, sinking it to the second knuckle. “You still haven’t said whether or not you were involved.”
The young man with the pompadour, who was standing closest to Robbie, slowly opened his motorcycle jacket. From it he produced a submachine gun, letting it hang at his side, finger curled into the trigger guard.
Through the gun pressed to Frank’s head, he could feel Bryce’s hand begin to shake at a quicker tempo now.
One of the other Russians produced a snub-nosed revolver, and like Robbie’s man, drew his weapon but didn’t aim or raise it – just let it be seen in his hand, ready.
Frank wasn’t sure if his legs were going numb from fear or if he’d actually just pissed himself.
“Look here, you dumb old fuck,” Robbie said down to Tasha, “I ain’t no fucking squealer. I know who done your son, yeah. I got the name right here on the tip of my fucking tongue. But I ain’t gonna give it to you. Now, we’re here to see after our sawbones. Which means escorting’ you cabbage-chewing assholes out of his fucking home – because by the look on his face, I don’t get the impression none of you were invited. So, if all of you wanna put your fucking shooters back in your pants and fuck the fuck off, that’d be just peachy. Otherwise, we’re gonna have some real big fucking problems in a minute.”
Tasha withdrew her finger from Robbie’s belly – the indentation of it remaining in the soft material of his shirt. “So my Vasily is dead? You know this, for sure?”
“That I do,” Robbie said, proud. “But I ain’t telling you by who.”
Frank watched Tasha’s long frail arm lower to her side, then curl around to the elastic band of her tracksuit, wrapping her bony fingers around the pearl handle of a knife. Robbie remained glaring down at her, looking at her like he could swallow her whole.
Nobody breathed.
Frank slowly took a step backward. Bryce remained with his arm out, holding the gun on the empty space where Frank had been standing – staring at the scene ahead. Frank moved backward into the kitchen, near the trickling coffee maker.
“Then if you know, you were involved, and that makes you accountable,” Tasha said. And with a flash of steel winking into Frank’s eyes from the living room, her arm moved shockingly quick, her tremors allowing her this one unmarred moment of grace, and brought the knife up and out – sinking it to its handle in Robbie’s gut.
Gasping hugely, Robbie tried stepping back, to pull himself off the knife. Tasha shuffled forward, little steps, with him – twisting the blade like trying a sticky doorknob, then wrenched, hard, to the left. A gout of blood erupted onto the floor.
In one smooth motion Robbie’s hand scrambled into his pants pocket, took out his gun, mashed it into the wrinkles of Tasha’s cheek, and fired.
Tasha Petrosky, seventy-two, crumpled to the floor, most of her jaw taken away, broken dentures leering out of her dead face where she lay – the carpet accepting the deluge of dark blood and brain spilling from her head, mopping it up.
All the remaining men looked at each other. Robbie’s men, Tasha’s men.
Bryce turned his gun from the ghost of where Frank had been standing, and took aim at Robbie. “You’re fucking dead.”
Robbie raised his gun and aimed at Bryce. “Not as dead as your fucking aunt.”
The guy in the motorcycle jacket and pompadour hoisted his submachine gun in both hands.
Robbie pressed a hand over his torn shirt and torn belly, aiming at Bryce, sweat dribbling into his eyes. “What’re you gonna do, kid? Eyeball me to death?”
Bryce fired – and set in immediate motion Frank’s living room tearing itself apart with noise. Frank leaped back further into the kitchen, threw himself to the floor, hoping his cabinets would shield him. Plaster dust and dishes in the cupboards rained down on him as the bullets tore through the house. Large caliber, small caliber. The next room, one thin wall away, for three cacophonous seconds, was a cube of condensed noise.
As quickly as it had begun, just as quickly was it over. One last small pop, a grunt, and a thump Frank felt in the floor as the last man collapsed.
Keeping low, Frank touched his shoulder, feeling something wet and hot running down his back. He glanced up and saw his coffee maker had been blown to pieces on the counter, dark coffee dribbling over the edge and onto him.
He stood, moving through the thick fog of dust and gun smoke, and peeked out into the living room. Nothing moved.
With the wall-to-wall aftermath, the still bodies and spilled blood and smoking bullet casings, no square inch of the carpet was visible. His TV spat sparks from its shattered screen. Every wall had holes peppered in lines across it. The front windows lay in shards, blood-spattered curtains curling out of the jagged holes from the wind.
His ears rang. He carefully found gaps between the b
odies to step, the wet carpet squishing under his sneakers. Bryce stared empty-eyed at the ceiling, his neck blown open to the point Frank could see his spine. He lay near his aunt, now splattered with blood that wasn’t hers. Dentures, bright white against all that red, winked out at Frank as he stepped over her.
The giant cousins were each hit several times across their chests, their injuries almost perfectly mirroring each other’s. The well-dressed kid who’d taken an interest in Frank’s DVD collection was missing the front part of his head, now bearing a flat red wreck for a face. The young guy with the leather jacket and pompadour lay against the wall, the submachine gun smoking next to him on the floor, its hot barrel melting the carpet into a dark gooey crater. He’d been shot in the cheek, ripping it from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. His teeth were showing on the one side in a lopsided rictus. They clicked as he muttered, low, “Simone…Simone, I’m sorry.…”
Simone’s baby daddy, Frank surmised, and stepped past him as Joey, presumably, faded away and slumped over, clicking exposed teeth falling still as his chin dipped to his chest and his eyes evacuated any sign of life.
Big Robbie, lying in a mound, his belly’s underside looking like it was uncoiling a long pink tongue. Robbie’s bloody hand felt around at the dangling bit of gut and tried stuffing it back inside, tucking in some of his shirt with it, feeling around blindly.
Frank knelt, his knees touching warm, blood-soaked carpet. He helped Robbie push his intestines back in. “Jesus Christ,” Frank heard himself say, through ringing ears. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Robbie lay in a heap by the blood-soaked couch. His shirt was darkening in three different spots across his chest. One of them was blowing bubbles when he inhaled, a struggling deep wheeze. His sweat-slicked face raised a little, landing dark eyes on Frank with the ex-doctor’s hand mashed deep in his belly, trying to find the source of the bleeding. There were far too many.