The phone shivered four times across the slate while Ivan finished the cucumber, the knife ticking through it in coins so thin the board showed through them. Sergei’s name lit white on the screen. The strip of light under the cabinets was the only one burning, and past it the apartment receded into the dark, the east glass blacked out, the rooms he didn’t use. He laid the knife along the board, blotted his fingers on the towel, and answered on the fifth.
“Frosty.” Wind on the line, a car door standing open, a key chiming in an ignition. “Ivan. Listen to me. I’m out here and I didn’t do this.”
The clock on the stove read twelve past six. He had known since five which way the car was heading. “I know where you are. What didn’t you do.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.” Sergei’s breathing was hard. “They’re open. Both of them. Slava’s legs, the meat is off his legs, all of it, and Artyom’s arm ends here, it ends here, and somebody did that like me. Somebody did it like me, you understand?”
“Are you in the trailer.”
“I was in the trailer.”
“Are you in it now.”
“I’m by the car.”
“Are they cold.”
The key chimed. “No. No, Ivan. Artyom’s still coming. It’s still coming out of him.” Ivan reached over and killed the burner under the onions. “Stay by the car. Do not go back in. Whatever you wanted to take off them, leave it where it is.” Sergei said nothing while the chime cycled five more times. “Who told you about that.”
“Everybody knows. Put your hands in your pockets.”
“What?”
“Both hands. Do not call anyone.”
He hung up and dialed Oleg, who answered on the second ring with “What,” already refusing.
“Krome and Eighth. Forty minutes. Bring what you would bring to read a lab.”
“Which lab.”
“The Svyatykhs’.”
A television behind Oleg, then a chair scraping back. “I don’t go out there.”
“Forty minutes, Lyokha.” He crossed the apartment in the dark and lifted the charcoal jacket from the hall closet. The bottles stayed on their shelf. He was already in his shoes. The elevator dropped him fifty-one floors without a stop, the brass walls giving him back a tall man in charcoal with nothing in his hands, and the Mercedes waited where he’d left it, clean under the garage lights.
Eighth Street was brake lights as far as the Palmetto and then it wasn’t. He drove west with the air on high and the radio off, the vents breathing in cut grass and diesel, and somewhere past the Turnpike the buildings squatted lower and then gave up being buildings at all: pallet yards, a nursery with palm trunks racked on the gravel, a fruit stand shuttered for the night. Rain stood over the Glades in gray columns and none of it reached the road. He thought about the onions, which would be cold and glassy in the pan by the time he got back. His phone lit once on the seat. Oleg, one word: here. At the light on Krome he pulled up the feed from the pole and got a gray square, the same dead square it had shown since the afternoon.
He swung south on Krome with Oleg’s headlights in the mirror. The Svyatykh drive opened on the right, white lime-rock between two walls of Australian pine. For years he had watched that drive from the top of a pole, the gate standing open at one angle. It stood open at the same angle now. Sergei’s car was nosed in at the end of it with the driver’s door flung wide and the dome light on. The trailer beyond had one window lit. Sergei waited
by the fender with both hands in his pockets, as told, and when the headlights found him he lifted his chin, and his mouth was already moving.
Ivan brought the Mercedes around in the dust until it faced the road and cut the engine. Sergei was still talking when Ivan stepped out, fast and low, the same words from the phone. Oleg stayed in his car with the engine idling. Ivan passed Sergei without a glance and climbed the three metal steps. The trailer was close with the iron stink of blood. The lit window was the kitchen. Artyom lay nearer the door. Vyacheslav was against the laboratory bench. Ivan crouched beside the nearer body.
Want to know what Ivan finds? Continue the story in Drowsy Doll.
