To start from the beginning go here.
With the Russian stuck, I used that second to kick his knee closest to me, slamming it into the concrete and getting a yell from him. He was no stranger to pain, though, and yanked the wrench off the freezer and swung it wildly at me, nearly connecting.
The weight of it carried him off balance and I smashed a fist into his head. It was like hitting rebar. It pushed him further off his feet, but he held onto the fridge and stayed upright, swinging the wrench my way.
It collided with the fridge again and I used that cold stop to grab the wrench with both hands and twist it out of his grasp. He slammed his other fist into my ribs and I felt the layers of bruises there collapse in on me, expelling whatever breath I had, taking me to my knees. He made to grab the wrench again.
That left two grown men, barely upright, wrestling over a tool while trying to pummel each other at any given opportunity. It was a dark and dirty business, fighting on that smooth gray floor below a single florescent, and we both knew one of us wasn’t getting out of there.
I kept a hand on the wrench and landed a good jab on him with the other, causing him to channel his pain into an iron grip on the tool. He pulled hard on it. When I was sure he was going to take it from me I let go, his own momentum carrying him back to crash on the floor.
I scrambled, found a length of hose off one of the shelves just in time to fend off the charging Russian. I used the stiff tube to deflect swings from the wrench, slapping him in the face with it like a whip. The metal ring around its mouth cut into his face, further infuriating him till he charged again, and the wrench came close enough to my face that I still remember it some nights, moving by with all the speed of a semi truck.
Miss me it did, though, his momentum spinning him until his back was \to me long enough to get the hose around his neck. I kicked out his legs and put my knee into his back and yanked with every ounce of me. We rolled around on that ground for minutes, the Russian becoming more gaunt with every passing moment and stolen breath. He managed to get on top, but I just pointed him towards the ceiling and his eventual destination. He was doing a lot of damage on his way out, but I’d have a tomorrow, which is more than I could say for him.
I choked him until I was certain he was done. When he hadn’t moved in more than a minute, I dropped the hose and placed my hands on my knees, barely standing while I caught my breath. In between gulps of air I muttered, “Jesus, I’m glad we never had to fight you bastards in a war.”
Vertebrae along my lower back protested as I stood up straight, strained enough from the struggle that I kept my eye on the dead Russian the entire time. From him, I glanced at the freezer, then in the direction of the car. There were three corpses now.
I decided to verify this, wobbling over to the freezer and lifting the lid. With the dent Ears had left in it, this was more difficult than anticipated, but I managed.
He was covered with the same frost crystals that outlined the chest’s interior, but it was a cold relief to find Sergei’s corpse in the freezer. I’m not sure why I was relieved – perhaps it was just that something actually was as I expected it to be. Wrapped in plastic, the cold bloated him even more than before. He was only recognizable by his blond hair and nose. The rest of him bared very little resemblance to the photo in the passport that I threw on top of him now.
I closed the lid, then dragged Ears closer to the freezer. Even if I could manage to get him inside, despite its prodigious volume, three human bodies weren’t going to fit. Not without some disassembly, and I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Instead, I searched through the jerrycans and containers in the backroom, checking each one until I found one that smelled of petrol. I sloshed it around to confirm it had enough contents to it and then set it by the freezer.
I returned to the car and found the trunk release. I walked to it rear, swearing and praying, neither one particularly whole-heartedly, mostly just buying more time to catch my breath. I managed to roll the corpse out of the trunk, it landing on the cement with a wet thud like a bundle of wood and porcelain wrapped in jello.
After another quick furtive glance around, I grabbed the carpet by one end and dragged it inside. Without someone to hold the other end, I was afraid the pimp would fall out, but he managed to stay in position until we were through the door and I closed it. It was only on the way to the freezer that his feet started to poke out from the bottom.
I unrolled him and he landed next to Ears in what could have been an awkward embrace. As I tore the old carpet into shreds I had a hard time keeping my eyes off Ears. I wondered if he knew Sergei, if he would have recognized him if he had opened the freezer. That caused me to wonder if Sergei’s passport would survive the coming conflagration. Either way, another foreigner was about to disappear and I wondered about how I would answer the eventual questions that would come my way. My only consolation was that finding the Russian, the French pimp, and the Ukrainian all together here was going to give someone a lot of headaches. Maybe a lot of someones.
I littered the carpet about the corpses, then for good measure placed a few more cans of petrol around the morbid pyramid I had constructed. I drained the first can on and around everything, moving quicker as I went along, increasingly worried about being interrupted and having to add another corpse to the pile.
I took out the pack of matches I had been carrying since lighting Simon’s cigarillo and tossed one, which unbelievably extinguished in the pool of petrol. I cursed and tried again and it caught on the third try. I ran, not looking back to see the black smoke I knew would be curling up to the ceiling.
I wiped my fingerprints off the service doorknob and anything I might have touched that could survive the fire as I exited. In the car, I breathed a sigh of relief that somehow the keys hadn’t wandered off. I started the engine, watching through the crack I had left in the rear door, making sure the fire was good and going before I drove off into the night.
To read the next chapter, go here.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
See author’s published work here.
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