Kingmakers, Graduation

29. Sabrina

29

SAbrINA

J asper and I are waiting for another shipment in the asscrack of nowhere. This time the product is coming up the Moskva river. We’re waiting in a shack two hours east of the city so we can waylay the goods before they fall under the purview of the port authority.

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s cold as hell in our little hidey-hole—no heating whatsoever, and cracks in the walls as wide as a finger. The wind blows through in whistling gusts, stirring the old newspaper scattered across the floorboards.

More incessant than the wind is Zigor’s endless chatter. He can’t stand a two-minute stretch without anyone talking. Since his companions are the perpetually silent Bookends, the sulky skeleton Jasper, and me—currently wondering if I could stuff my ears with bits of newspaper without Zigor noticing—he’s got an uphill battle keeping conversation going .

He keeps disappearing to answer the “call of nature,” returning a few minutes later sniffing and rubbing his nose, twice as talkative as ever. I assume he’s taking bumps in private not for Jasper’s and my benefit, but to avoid the Bookends whose job is surely to report on him to his father as much as to protect him.

It must enrage Lev Zakharov having a son this stupid. Adrik told me that Lev clawed his way up from abject poverty, selling stolen goods out of a briefcase in Rostov-on-Don, eventually opening his own pawn shop, then a whole chain of them, and finally expanding into the world of black-market goods.

Lev is notoriously cheap, a ferocious bargainer, ancient and wrinkled as a grasshopper. When he was sixty-two, he made the one frivolous decision of his life and married a nineteen-year-old waitress. Zigor was the result. According to Adrik, the waitress soon realized she had not secured the life of luxury she hoped—Lev was so stingy that he counted the squares of toilet paper she used and forced her to run hot water through the same coffee grounds three times in a row before she could grind more. The waitress fled to Azov, leaving Zakharov with a chubby toddler to raise.

Of course, this is all legend and rumor, so who knows how much of it is true. I could ask Zigor, but then I’d have to talk to him.

Jasper has commandeered one of the only chairs in the shack. Zigor has the other, but he keeps hopping up to pace around the room, or take another stroll down to the empty dock to “look for the boatman.”

The two Bookends have seated themselves on upturned buckets. The buckets are so low that their knees jut up around their chests. They look like a pair of crouching spiders, especially with those ridiculous sunglasses they refuse to take off even indoors .

I’m sitting on a rickety three-legged table. As long as I sit cross-legged right in the middle, I don’t tumble off.

“We should have waited in the car,” Jasper complains, blowing on his hands. “It’d be warmer.”

“You need eat more!” Zigor tells him, slapping his own stomach. “I never cold.”

“Yeah, but then I’d look like you,” Jasper says.

“Is good for man to be big. Bigger the better, yes?” Zigor waggles his eyebrows at me suggestively.

“Yeah,” I say, in a bored tone. “Whenever I enter a room, I look at who’s tallest and then I fuck that person immediately.”

I pretend to scan the room, squinting at each of the men in turn.

“Looks like Tweedledee wins,” I say, nodding to the left Bookend. “Better luck next time, Zigor.”

“Ho ho! Time to get busy, Georgiy!” Zigor chortles.

The left Bookend, apparently named Georgiy, turns his head toward me, scowling behind his sunglasses. “Who this Tweedledee?” he demands.

“He’s a famous rockstar,” I say. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him.”

I could swear Jasper almost smiles before remembering to be miserable.

He’s in a worse mood than usual. Adrik pulled me aside before we left, asking me to take it easy on Jasper.

“How come? ”

“It’s a bad time of year for him,” Adrik said.

I assume he means this is when Jasper’s family died—the kind of anniversary no one wants to celebrate, but you can never forget. That would make sense, because for the last week Jasper has barely left his room. He looks so fucked up that even I feel sorry for him—hair not combed, face unshaven, shadows under his eyes dark as bruises. So thin and pale that he truly does seem determined to starve himself down to the bone.

He obviously hasn’t been sleeping. He’s keyed up and twitchy. Every time Zigor makes a loud or abrupt noise—about every two minutes—Jasper jerks in his chair. If glares could kill, Zigor would be on his twenty-eighth resurrection. I’d be on my sixth or seventh.

“How much longer?” Jasper demands of Zigor.

“How I should know?” Zigor shrugs. “No cell service.”

“He was supposed to be here an hour ago,” Jasper says, checking the time on his phone.

“You know boats …” Zigor says, making a vague gesture in the air.

To irritate Jasper, I say, “I don’t know boats. Can you explain them to me?”

Jasper shoots me my eighth fatal glare.

“Boats …” Zigor says wisely. “Sometimes fast, sometimes slow.”

“Wow.” I nod. “You’re so right.”

Another ten or twenty minutes pass in silence. And by silence, I mean no one is speaking but Zigor is making a clicking sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He’s managing to do it at precis ely the irregular interval you can’t get used to. Every time he clicks, Jasper’s eye twitches. Jasper’s leaning forward on his knees, hair falling into his face, clutching his head.

“You have HEADACHE?” Zigor booms at top volume.

I take back what I said before—Zigor’s growing on me. The enemy of my enemy is, if not exactly my friend, at least a useful annoyance.

The Bookends break out a pack of cards.

“ Vy khotite igrat’?” Tweedledee asks Zigor.

“ Nyet,” Zigor says, looking sulky.

The Bookends bet heavy, and I’m guessing Zigor already burned through his allowance. He’s been making the strippers of Moscow rich and happy.

“ Vy?” the right Bookend says to Jasper.

He shakes his head.

They don’t ask me to play. That annoys me, not because I want to play, but because they would have asked if I was a man. The Bookends treat me like furniture, or actually, more like a yappy little Pekingese brought along by Jasper for no discernible reason.

Zigor watches the Bookends methodically turning over cards on the upturned milk crate between them. With a dramatic sigh, he stomps outside again, returning a few minutes later flushed and glassy-eyed.

“We play real men’s game,” he announces, pulling his revolver from his pocket. He holds up the gun so the steel muzzle glints in the greenish light of the shack .

“Put that away,” Jasper snaps.

We’re all armed, but it’s bad form to pull out your gun and play with it. Bad form to even acknowledge it’s on your person.

Too bad, ‘cause Adrik made good on our bet—he bought me a P30L with a custom compensator, which really is the handgun from the first John Wick movie. I’d love to blow Zigor’s mind by telling him that Keanu Reeves gave it to me.

Ignoring Jasper, Zigor snaps open the drum of his revolver, letting the bullets fall to the floorboards one by one until only a single .38 remains. He spins the drum, flicking it back in place.

“You know this game?” Zigor says. “Very famous.”

“Oh yeah,” I say blandly. “Mongolian roulette.”

“You know is Russian game!” Zigor shouts. “You make me angry with these jokes—Mongolian! Pah! ”

He spits on the floorboards.

“Put it away ,” Jasper hisses. He’s still seated, but his body is stiff, turned toward Zigor now, his lips as white as his skin.

The Bookends are barely paying attention, still absorbed in their game. I doubt this is the first time Zigor’s gotten high and pulled out his revolver.

Zigor points the gun at me.

“Simple rules. We pull trigger once each. God will decide who is good and who has been naughty.”

Jasper’s fingers dig into his thighs. He’s so tense he’s almost shaking.

“Quit fucking around,” he barks .

Zigor swings the gun around so it’s pointing at Jasper instead. He takes a few steps forward, closing the gap between them.

“You want go first, Jasper? Better odds.”

“Don’t even fucking think about?—”

Jasper is cut off by the distinct click of Zigor pulling the trigger. Nothing happens—the chamber is empty. But Jasper leaps to his feet with a howl of rage, snatching the gun out of Zigor’s hand and pointing it right in his face.

“YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY?” he shrieks. “WHAT WERE YOU GONNA DO IF IT WENT OFF?”

Without thinking, perhaps without even meaning to do it, Jasper’s finger jerks on the trigger.

Instead of the same empty click, the gun fires.

A small, dark hole appears in the center of Zigor’s forehead. Zigor’s expression is one of pure astonishment, mirrored in Jasper’s shocked face. He falls backward, crashing to the floorboards with a thud that shakes the shack.

The two Bookends look up, mouths open in surprise.

I rip my gun from my waistband and shoot them each in the head, one after the other.

Zigor’s bodyguards topple off their buckets, their playing cards scattering across the floor in a flurry of hearts and spades, clubs and diamonds.

Jasper turns to me, paler than paper, mouth open in shock. “WHAT THE FUCK?”

“What the fuck YOU what the fuck!” I shout back at him .

We’re both frozen in place, staring at the carnage around us. In less than twenty seconds we went from utter boredom to three men dead on the floor, blood slowly spreading outward in bright halos from the holes in their heads.

“This is so fucking bad,” Jasper says. “Why’d you shoot the other two?”

“ ‘Cause they would have put ten bullets in your chest and brought your head back to Lev. And if I didn’t let them do that, they’d sure as fuck rat you out.”

Jasper stares at the fallen bodyguards, absorbing the truth of this.

“You’re right,” he says at last. And then a moment later, very quietly … “Thank you.”

“It’s fine,” I say brusquely. “But what the hell are we gonna do now?”

Jasper casts a swift look down the dock, checking the time on his phone.

“We need to get out of here before the boatman shows up.”

“What about the supplies?”

“We could wait till he gets here,” Jasper says. “But then we’ll have to kill him, too.”

Neither of us particularly likes that idea. It’s one thing to cap someone who’s about to shoot you and quite another to murder the equivalent of a drug Door Dasher.

“We’ll have to leave without it,” I say. “We gotta get out of here. The longer we stay, the less plausible deniability we have. ”

“And what, just leave them here?” Jasper says, looking down at the bodies.

“I’m not gonna chop ‘em up and bury ‘em. That’s a six-hour job for Zigor alone.”

Jasper seems to come to a decision. “Wipe down anything you touched,” he says. “Don’t leave anything behind.”

We look around the shack once more to see if there’s anything we missed. The wind sounds eerie and ominous in the dead quiet, no chatter from Zigor anymore. Not even the gentle flick of playing cards turning over.

“Let’s go,” Jasper says.

We practically sprint back to the SUV, pulling out of the dirt road and speeding back to civilization.

As we drive, I say to Jasper, “Quick, text Zigor.”

Jasper stares at me blankly. “He’s not gonna answer …”

“I’m aware. Text him something like, Where are you? Then do it again in an hour.”

“Oh,” Jasper says. He pulls out his phone, typing the message one-handed while holding the steering wheel with the other. He presses send, then says, “I don’t think Lev is gonna buy that.”

“What else are we supposed to do? He’s got no proof of what happened.”

“He won’t need proof,” Jasper says darkly.

That’s too true to argue. It’s not a court of law, and it’s pretty fucking obvious something hinky went down .

“Drive faster,” I say. “We need to tell Adrik.”

Jasper presses the gas, even though both of us are dreading that conversation.