Mafia Trilogy 03 - The Scythe (20 page)

When he called out to her, she didn’t budge.

“Is she alive?” he asked the men who pushed him inside the office.

“Drugged sleep.”

They stood him over the square piece of plastic and cuffed his ankles and then his hands. The whole time he stared at his woman, tears filling his eyes. His lower lip quivered with the sadness that they had become instead of the happily married couple who had once toured Rome on their honeymoon.

He didn’t resist as the men secured him. One of the men remained near the door, a long gun, probably an AK-47, pointed at him.

After a few moments, his hands were bound behind his back and attached to a chain lodged to the wall. His feet couldn’t move more than an inch as the ankle restraints were fastened to a chain that was also bolted to the wall.

In one quick movement, his stolen golf shirt was ripped from his body. Then one of the men produced a large knife and sliced off the hoodie, careful not to touch Darwin. He almost thanked the man for his tenderness, then thought better of it.

Small gifts.

He may not have a phobia of knives anymore, but he still didn’t want one slicing through his skin. His neurosis had evolved to a natural fear of knives.

They started on his pants.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

He didn’t even get a grunt for an answer. A moment later, his pants were removed and he stood in his underwear, the manacles already chaffing his skin.

Outside, the summer air was super-heated. Inside, air conditioners cooled the room, producing goose bumps on his flesh. He shivered and glanced over at Rosina. She looked so good, resting. He remembered watching her rest when they were first together, a lifetime ago. They had had such great times together.

He stared at her through water-covered eyes and pledged that he would do whatever he could to get them both out of this mess and make things right. They would deal with the trauma on their own time, tilling their garden, sipping wine in the evenings, eating pasta as the sun dropped over Italy. Their day would come, he was sure of it, even though the odds were completely against them.

The worst pain he had ever felt pierced his consciousness as it tore into his skin. He yanked away from it, but the cuffs that held him only gave an inch.

He screamed and looked at the Russian to see what he was doing. The idiot had stuck a large fish hook with a barbed tip into Darwin’s right triceps.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” he shouted through his clenched teeth. “I’m already tied up.”

“Did not you hear the boss?”

“No, I
did not
hear the boss.”

“He said no handcuffs.”

“Then take these off, asshole. Untie me.”

“We will. In time.”

The man brought another fishhook up from a metal container on the floor and eased it into the other triceps.

Darwin pulled against the chains that held him, but there was no use. He couldn’t get his arm away from the hook.

He panted, his breathing shallow as his face flushed and sweat beaded up all over his body.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough. You don’t need to do any more. You’ve made your point.”

Blood trickled from each wound. The man used a long piece of wood, like a chopstick, to dab at the blood, applying a clear liquid on the wounded flesh. A moment later, the blood clotted and stopped flowing.

“Super Glue,” the Russian said, holding it up.

“Are you done having fun yet?”

The man shook his head.

“Why do this? You’ve already got me secured.”

“The boss, he say all the hooks.” He turned to look in the box, then back at Darwin, smiling. “I have too many to count. But it okay, soon you sleep. Once you all hooked up, I take handcuffs and ankle cuffs off. Trust me, you won’t move or try to escape. If you do, your skin come off.”

“I will kill you. Trust me, you will be the first to be cut in half.”

He wagged his finger in Darwin’s face. “You die first.”

Unnerved by how the man kept smiling, Darwin watched him gather another hook. They were for a large ocean fish of some kind. The size of a rounded coat hanger found on the back of a door or in an elementary school, except these had a pointy tip with a barbed end aimed the other way. Trying to dislodge them would rip and tear and do more damage than when they entered the flesh.

Darwin shouted until his voice was hoarse as the man forced the hooks into his flesh, slowly easing through the skin, smiling with each one, as if this was his dessert after a hard day at the office. Then he would seal the wound with Super Glue.

The sentry at the door had lowered his weapon and watched with amusement. Rosina slept on the mattress, oblivious to what was happening to her husband five feet away.

The pain of the small hooks entering his skin became unbearable as the Russian did one after another in his shoulder blades and lower back. His stomach gave out. The protein bars came up as he vomited on the floor, splashing his feet. The second bout flowed from his mouth as he almost passed out, leaving trails of bile down his chest and underwear.

The Russian didn’t seem to notice the vomit. He stepped in it and continued his insane violation of Darwin’s flesh. The sentry brought a wooden stool over and set it under Darwin’s knees to help support his weight when he collapsed.

As a hook entered his cheek, the sharp tip probed the inside of his teeth.

That was the end for Darwin.

He passed out and dropped twelve inches, as far as the chains would allow, his knees stopping on the wooden stool.

Chapter 20

Water splashed across his face. He snapped his eyes open and gasped. He thrashed for a second until the pain returned and he locked his body up, holding still. Instead of screaming, he moaned. With a hook piercing each cheek, it would painful to scream with an open mouth.

They hooked him up everywhere. Pain seemed to be what his body had become. Nothing but pain.

As he adjusted his weight, Yuri kicked the wooden stool out from under his knees. The chains snapped behind him as they took all his weight. From the way he had been suspended, dangling in the cuffs and chains for so long, his toes had fallen asleep. Now, as blood coursed through them, they ached, pins and needles tingling and making him want to move them. The plastic crinkled under his feet as he moved his toes.

He closed his eyes and focused on his body, on the pain. They must have set a hook in his skin every six inches or so. At least that’s what it felt like. There was a certain numbness where the hooks were embedded. The sharp pain of them entering his flesh was gone, but it still hurt when he moved.

He opened his eyes and tried to move his head enough to see the damage they caused, but couldn’t.

“I was afraid you were going back under.”

Two large men flanked Yuri. One of them sported a buzz cut, tattoos on his arms, and a large bird tattoo on his chest. The other had a long and hard nose that appeared to have been broken a few times. Both men looked like something he would see entering a boxing ring—a bare-knuckle ring.

“We’re going to take the cuffs off now,” Yuri said. “We need you awake for that.”

Darwin moaned. It seemed involuntary now. He couldn’t open his mouth to speak because of the hook in each cheek.

Something moved behind him. He wanted to tell them to get out of there. Don’t bump into him.

Then a piece of metal clicked and a slight pressure was added to the hooks in his back. There were more clicks.

Yuri reached in a pocket and pulled out a small mirror.

“Let me show you what we’re doing,” he said.

He held the mirror up. The Russian who had impaled him with the hooks applied chains to the end of the hooks in his back. Darwin watched in horror as six chains we’re clipped into place, two at his shoulder blades, two near the middle of his back and two at the small of his back. He had two smaller chains added to his triceps hooks. Yuri lowered the mirror and allowed Darwin to watch as four more chains were connected to the hooks in his hamstrings and his calf muscles. Twelve hooks embedded in his flesh, connected to twelve chains locking him to the wall.

“There,” Yuri said. “I think that should do it.”

The Russian who had hooked him up walked from behind Darwin and unlocked the handcuffs. When he pulled them off, his weight adjusted again and his pain threshold increased to the red zone. His sanity slipped a notch, and he understood in that moment that he would never be the same. If he walked away from this, he knew he would be a changed man. The scars on his body would pale in comparison to the mental scars.

His ankle cuffs were unlocked and pulled away.

He stood on his own two feet which were almost awake, held only by the chains clipped to the hooks. If Darwin were to step forward and walk, all twelve hooks would shred his flesh.

Yuri turned to one of his guards. “Call Sven and have two double coffins prepared for Darwin and Rosina.”

The guard nodded and stepped out of the office.

“What’s … a double coffin?” Darwin asked, keeping his mouth closed for the most part. He struggled to hold himself upright on weak limbs, knowing if his knees gave out, he would fall and rip out large chunks of meat.

“It is one of my most used means of disposal.”

Yuri stepped to the side. Darwin followed his movement slowly, until Rosina came into view. She was still asleep, but had moved since the last time he’d seen her.

“A man out of Buffalo is credited with designing the double coffin,” Yuri said. “When he has a client at the funeral home, they are buried in what appears to be a normal looking coffin. Underneath is a cavern where I can bury my enemies without suspicion. There’s actually a legit funeral and everything.” Yuri pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket. His remaining bodyguard leaned in with a lighter. After he had it lit, he held it aloft, blew smoke out of his mouth and looked down at Rosina’s sleeping form. “You two will be buried in the bottom of two different double coffins, and Mrs. Smith or John Doe, or whoever’s funeral it is, will be none the wiser. Brilliant, eh?”

He puffed hard on the cigar.

“No one will ever find the body,” he added. “What would make the authorities exhume a coffin of a man or woman who has no affiliation with us?”

The pain became a constant, like a strong toothache that just wouldn’t go away. It came in waves and only increased when he moved, which was frequently to adjust his weight from leg to leg.

“There’s a Russian saying that says, ‘The house is burning and the clock is ticking.’ Do you know what this means?”

Darwin didn’t reply.

“It means you have to keep making money every minute. As we speak, I have people making money for me. The clock is always ticking and the house is always burning. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle.”

He puffed on his cigar until the tip glowed.

“I got my start robbing jewelers.” He moved to Rosina and sat on her mattress. “We would dress up as ultra-orthodox Jews. The fake beards, side curls, black hats and coats, you know, the whole thing. We’d get the retailer to pull out expensive jewels while we chatted away in Yiddish. One of us would distract the jeweler while the other would switch the jewels with fakes. After an excuse to leave, we’d walk out with thousands in jewels and no way for them to identify us. It was brilliant.”

Darwin shifted to the other foot. A wave of nausea passed over him. His stomach twisted and tightened. Dizziness followed.

I don’t know how much longer I can do this.

“I remember the day we got caught,” Yuri continued. “It was stupid of us, really.” He had a faraway look on his face as he thought back. “We had taken the train to another part of New York to hit a pack of jewelers we’d never seen before. On the way back at the train station, as we were getting ready to board, a police officer stopped us.” His clouded eyes focused and he turned to Darwin. “Do you know why?”

“Because you’re an asshole,” Darwin mumbled through the hooks.

Yuri smiled. “I like you, I really do.” He puffed on the cigar. “I’m going to miss you. I have never met anyone as formidable as you, Darwin.” He blew the smoke out. Rosina continued to sleep her drug-induced slumber beside him. “They caught us because it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Observant Jews are strictly forbidden to travel. The security guard was Jewish and asked if we were, now get this,
Observant Jews.
Can you believe it?”

“No.”

“There was a gun fight. I spent time in jail. I stopped robbing jewelers when I got out. Started thinking bigger. And here I am.”

“Impressive.”

Yuri eyed him sideways. “You’re being sarcastic again.”

“What are you doing?” Darwin asked. “Why tell me all this shit?”