Yefim smiled. “I got approval from everyone on this—the Chechens, the Georgians, even that crazy Muscovite there in Brighton Beach? One you said could never run the show? He runs the show, Kirill. And he agree—you got to go.”
Kirill held both hands over the hole in his abdomen and arched his back from the pain.
Yefim gritted his teeth and then sucked his lips in against them.
“Let me tell you, Yefim. I—”
Yefim pulled the trigger twice. Kirill’s eyes snapped back into his head. He exhaled, the sound impossibly high-pitched. His eyes remained back in his head, only the whites showing. When Yefim came off the couch, the smoke exited Kirill’s mouth and the hole in his chest at the same time.
Yefim walked over to Amanda. “We let your mother live?”
“Oh, God,” Helene shrieked from her fetal position on the couch.
Amanda looked at Helene for a long time.
“I guess. Don’t call her my mother, though.”
“What about little Spanish guy?”
“He probably needs a job.”
“Hey, little fellah,” Yefim said. “You want a job?”
“Nah, man,” Tadeo said. “I’m so fucking done with this shit. I just want to go work with my uncle.”
“What’s he do?”
Tadeo’s accent suddenly disappeared. “He sells, like, insurance?”
Yefim smiled. “That’s worse than what we do. Hey, Pavel?”
Pavel laughed. It was surprisingly high-pitched, a giggle.
“Ho-kay, little man. When you leave here, you go sell insurance. I think we done killing for the day, then. Pavel?”
Pavel nodded. “My fucking ears hurt, man.”
Yefim looked up at the ceiling. “Shit-ass construction, these things. Too much tin. Boom boom. Now that I’m king, Pavel? No more trailers for us.”
Pavel said, “George Clooney no king.”
Yefim clapped his hands together. “Ha! You right there. Fuck George Clooney, eh? Maybe someday he get to play a king, but he’ll never be a king like Yefim.”
“You know that is sure, boss.”
Yefim reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a small black key. He stepped up to Amanda and said, “Hold out your wrists.”
Amanda did.
Yefim unlocked Amanda’s right handcuff and then the baby’s. “Man, look at her. She’s sleeping.”
“She doesn’t seem to mind loud noises,” Amanda said. “This kid, I swear, every day’s a surprise.”
“You telling me.” Yefim unlocked the left cuffs. “You got her?”
“I got her.”
“Hold her tight.”
“I’m holding her. She’s in a Björn, Yefim.”
“Of course. I forget.” Yefim pinched the handcuffs at their centers and pulled them away from Amanda and the baby.
Amanda rubbed her wrists and looked around at the carnage. “Well . . .”
Yefim held out his hand. “Pleasure, Miss Amanda.”
“You’re no slouch yourself, Yefim.” She shook his hand. “Oh, the cross is in Helene’s purse.”
Yefim snapped his fingers. Pavel threw him the purse. Yefim pulled out the cross and smiled. “My family, before we end up in Mordovia two hundred years ago? We live in Kiev.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “True. My father, he tells me we’re descended from Prince Yaroslav himself. This is a family heirloom, man.”
“From a prince to a king,” Pavel said.
“Oh, you too kind, man.” He rummaged in the bag and then looked at me. “Whose gun?”
“That’s mine.”
“It was in the bag the whole time? Pavel!”
Pavel held up his hands. “Spartak supposed to check woman.”
They both looked down at Spartak as his blood ran under the sectional. After a few seconds they looked at each other and shrugged.
Yefim handed me my gun like he was handing me a can of soda, and I put it in the holster behind my back. Four people had just been killed in front of me, and I felt nothing. Zip. That’s what twenty years of swimming in shit had cost me.
“Oh, wait.” Yefim reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thick black wallet. He rummaged around in it for a bit and then handed me my driver’s license. “You ever need something, you call me.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You go sell insurance like the little man?”
“Not insurance.”
“What you do, then?”
“Going back to school,” I said and realized I meant it.
He raised his eyebrows at that and then nodded. “Good idea. This is no life for you anymore.”
“No.”
“You’re old.”
“Right.”
“You have kid, wife.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re old.”
“You said that already.”
He held the cross out for me to see. “Beautiful, eh? Every time someone die for it, it gets more beautiful, I think.”
I pointed at the Latin on the bottom. “What’s that mean?”
“What you think it means?”
“Something about heaven or paradise. Eden, maybe. I don’t know.”
Yefim looked at the bodies on the couch and on the floor by his feet. He chuckled. “You like this, man. It means, ‘The place of the skull has become paradise.’ ”
“Which means what?”
“I always thought, dying isn’t death. Where you see a skull, that guy? He already in paradise. Forever, my friend.” He scratched his temple with his gun sight and sighed. “You got Blu-Ray?”
“Huh?”
“You got Blu-Ray player?”
“No.”
“Oh, man, you crazy. Pavel, tell him.”
Pavel said, “You not watching movies unless you watch the Blu-Ray. It’s the pixels. Ten-eighty dpi, Dolby True HD sound? Change your life, man.”
Yefim waved his arms at the boxes stacked above Kirill’s corpse. “I like the Sony, but Pavel swears by JVC. You take two. You watch both with your wife and daughter, tell me which you like best. Hey?”
“Sure.”
“You want PlayStation 3?”
“No, I’m good.”
“iPod?”
“Got a couple, thanks.”
“How about a Kindle, my friend?”
“Nah.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”