I pointed at Scamz. “You’re about to take a one-way trip to the End of the World.”
Konstantin snapped, “Gideon, stop. Get your head on right, son.”
I barked at Scamz, “I’ll drop your ass off with your other fucking relatives. I will do the same thing I did for your old man, the
real
Scamz, you fake bitch, and leave your ass dead on ice with your fucking grand-dad and uncle. You ever come at me like that again, that’s your ass.”
Scamz reached into his backpack, pulled out a gun, held it at his side, finger on trigger.
I exploded, “Playing a goddamn piano and fucking the woman your daddy used to fuck and stealing his fucking name does not make you your fucking daddy, you bitch.”
Scamz aimed it at me.
I growled, “I dare you. I fucking dare you.”
Konstantin grimaced, swallowed his misery, and stepped into the line of fire.
He became a human shield.
Konstantin snapped, “
Synok, ne davaj emy nervy tebe trepat
.”
Son, don’t let that scum get the best of you.
I looked in Scamz’s eyes. “
On prosto suka. Svoloch
.”
He’s a fucking bitch.
The moment Scamz had raised his gun at me, Shotgun had returned the favor.
Scamz was about to die the same way his old man had died, at the wrong end of a shotgun. He knew he had stepped out of his league.
We didn’t bluff.
We didn’t con.
We killed.
And we did it without conversation or hesitation.
Scamz knew who we were and wasn’t afraid.
This just wasn’t in his favor. It would be continued at another time.
He lowered his gun.
Then he nodded, put the gun down, and reached for his backpack again.
Shotgun lowered his weapon but didn’t move his attention.
I scowled at Scamz. Then I walked away. I went to his woman.
Arizona was in severe pain. When the light in the room hit her, I saw more damage.
I groaned and my heart caught fire.
The right side of her face was scarred from forehead to chin and she had deep cuts in her jaw. On the same side of her face, it looked like sections of her hair had been pulled out. Her leg was wrapped in a makeshift splint, wasn’t sure if it was broken or just needed to be stabilized.
It looked like they had been at ground zero of a suicide bomb attack.
Debris was in her wet, mangled hair. Thousands of small pebbles polluted her long mane like glitter that had lost its shine. Pebbles dropped from her hair as more gravel and asphalt rained from her clothing. The rain that had saturated what she wore drained like piss. Particles from explosions had left rips, tears, and holes in her once-fine clothing, which now clung to her frame. She looked like a poster child for the Salvation Army.
Her face and body bruised, Arizona held her stomach, the veins like thick spiderwebs.
She was dying before my eyes.
Scamz hurried.
He dug inside his backpack again. First he dug out a laptop, flipped it open and hit the POWER button. Then he went back inside the backpack, took out a glass bottle big enough to hold five hundred milliliters of fluid. He sat on the bed next to Arizona while we watched.
It looked like the veins in her stomach were swollen, as if they were about to break.
Shotgun watched Scamz struggle to open the bottle and said, “Let me try that.”
Scamz looked at the big man, hesitated, then handed him the bottle.
Shotgun opened it like it was nothing. He handed the bottle back to Scamz.
Scamz shook the bottle, shook it hard, mixed up the contents.
Shotgun moved to the window, returned to looking out for the next wave of trouble.
Konstantin stood next to me, his hand on my shoulder, making sure I didn’t snap again.
Arizona moaned.
Across the street, the jazz kicked up louder, the trumpet leading the way.
Scamz stood over Arizona like he was a doctor, the opened bottle in his hand. He tilted the bottle, and a green solution that smelled like Pine-Sol and spoiled chicken was poured onto Arizona’s wounded flesh. He poured the fluid directly on the spots where the blood was leaking.
I snapped, “What you doing?”
Konstantin pulled me back.
Arizona’s bruised skin loosened and wrinkled like it had aged fifty years. Scamz moved around her and poured more of the green liquid around the circumference of her swollen belly.
Blood dripped from Arizona’s head as she gripped the edges of the bed. Scamz poured more fluid and Arizona pulled at the mattress, but had to stop. Both of her hands were bloody and in severe pain. Teeth clenched and breathing hard, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth, short spurts, like she was doing her best to sprint away from her agony. But her agony had the stronger pace.
The skin stretched to its limit, then snapped back, snapped back hard.
Her yell was drowned by a Billie Holiday number that played across the street.
Deep red fluids seeped out of Arizona’s broken flesh.
Arizona panted like she was about to explode.
Her stomach.
Her flesh remained wrinkled, became filled with veins, like a thousand stretch marks.
Then.
Her belly wobbled, shifted positions like it was possessed, moved to the side.
It was as if the baby she had inside her body was kicking and trying to break free.
Her unborn child moved again, shifted until its weight eased toward her ribs.
It looked unreal.
Then Scamz grabbed Arizona’s belly and pulled.
The stretched skin began to buckle, crumpled from being strained.
Scamz pulled again.
Arizona’s flesh stretched for eight inches, then stretched for ten inches.
And snapped back.
Arizona grunted with its impact.
She was in too much pain to scream.
Then Scamz got a firm grim, held Arizona’s swollen belly and pulled again, stretched Arizona’s stomach almost a foot. Her flesh separated in sections, sections that were no more than a sixteenth of an inch wide, sections that collapsed and left threads of flesh hanging on to her swollen belly. Those threads of flesh snapped one at a time, popped like guitar strings that had been strained.
The remaining skin came loose, like a scab being peeled away from skin.
Sweat drained from Arizona’s face as her swollen belly tumbled to her side.
Her skin was macerated. As if that belly had been attached to her flesh for weeks. Or months.
Across the street, the drummer kicked into a wicked solo. Shotgun’s mouth had dropped open. He said, “What the fuck kinda mess is that?”
Konstantin said the same thing in Russian.
What Arizona carried rolled from her body and landed on the mattress, the edges soaked with redness the color of blood and liquids that had the consistency of embryonic fluids. Strings of strained flesh hung from both the detached pregnancy and Arizona’s reddened skin.
Scamz yelled, “Bring the other package. Bring me the one you recovered.”
I hurried to the front room and came back with the briefcase.
By the time I returned, Scamz had a knife and was making an incision into the part of round and swollen flesh that had fallen away from Arizona’s wounded body. He cut like he was a surgeon doing a C-section, careful like he was trying not to harm a premature baby, cut like he was trying not to hit a vital organ. Scamz made a slit and dug his hands inside, like a doctor being careful as he removed a baby. Hands covered in goo that looked like coagulated blood and afterbirth, he pulled out a small black case, one that was no larger than a hardback book. It was thin. Its height, width, and depth was less than two inches by seven inches by nine inches. Scamz used the edge of his hand to move more of the goo, then found the edge of the case, ripped a plastic covering away. The case was bright red. Looked like a mini laptop. It had a green flashing light on top and a red digital readout. That had to be the sensor and GPS.
I didn’t understand what it was or how it worked. And I didn’t care.
Most of the spilled blood was from inside the faux pregnancy. It had been a work of art. Detached, it still looked real. Had been designed for a con woman by someone who knew their craft. It had weight and texture to match her flesh and was insulated with bloodlike fluids.
Arizona rolled away, was on her side.
I was five feet away, and she was almost unrecognizable. She still looked like she had been flogged and thrown into the center of an earthquake.
The pregnancy was fake, but her injures were real. The rest of the damage to her was real. Scamz took the package and got out of the way, and I moved closer to Arizona. I looked her over. She was in bad shape, still shifted and made faces like she was in labor, but none of her wounds was life threatening.
Konstantin said, “Her stomach saved her from being crushed.”
I held her hand.
The woman who had earned the moniker Queen Scamz.
A seasoned con woman who always worked a grift from an unexpected angle.
One of the packages had been attached to her body all along.
While Scamz worked at a frantic pace, I leaned down beside Arizona.
She said, “You . . . look . . . bad.”
“You don’t look too good yourself.”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I messed . . . on myself.”
It was hard to look at her face. Damn hard. Was hard to not feel uncontrollable rage.
I asked, “Where is your brother?”
It took her a moment, but she managed to whisper, “He’s . . . gone. They . . . killed him.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“His body. It’s in . . . in . . . the car.”
I cursed, then I swallowed. “Sierra?”
Arizona trembled, closed her eyes, gritted her teeth like she was being attacked by a wave of pain. She struggled to breathe. Like she was fighting some form of PTSD.
She was in a bed of sticky fluids that had been released when her stomach was removed and cut open. It mixed with her piss and bowel movement.
I was about to pick her up, wanted to carry her to the bathroom, clean her up.
But Shotgun called out, “We got some company. A whole lot of company.”
I hurried to the window. Four vehicles had stopped outside between this building and the strip of businesses and apartments across the street. They were getting out of cars right in front of Thelonious Monk jazz club.
Konstantin was at the window too. The Russian said, “Looks like Germans. Albanians. French. And it looks like they’re doing something unexpected. They’re working together.”
I cursed.
Shotgun said, “We’re almost outta ammo.”
Konstantin cursed.
The package had been delivered. We could walk away.
That was the professional thing to do.
I would love to leave bitch-ass Scamz to fend for himself.
Would love to watch a con man fight to survive in the land of assassins.
Would love for him to die here, a few hours from the End of the World.
Then I looked at Arizona.
She’d never make it out of here alive. This building would be her tomb.
I snapped, “We need to move from here.”
Scamz snapped back, “We’ve invested a year in this bloody project.”
“It’s time to walk away.”
“We have lost millions of dollars.”
“Leave it all. We can get away if we leave now.”
He snapped like he was about to go insane. “Just let me do what I’m doing. Arizona, tell me what to do. This bloody thing was set up without a bloody instruction book.”
He didn’t have a clue what to do next.
Eyes closed, mouth bloodied, lips puffed and split, Arizona coughed, struggled to get her breathing to even out. “Look for . . . pop-out connector . . . on both packages.”
“Then what?”
“I told you . . . connect them . . . daisy chain. Small package . . . is the brains. It’s a computer. Connect them . . . then . . . it pops open.”
“Then what?”
“Connect to computer. Hit CONTROL, ESCAPE, and F2. Special program . . . embedded . . . that activates firmware . . . will run on its own. Wireless card . . . make sure it’s connected.”
She panted, cursed in Tagalog, then told Scamz that he had to log on to a site used to bounce the Internet signal and make it hard to trace, then the laptops would communicate through firmware and use Web sites that, once activated, would only be good for ten minutes.
She said, “Pray we . . . have . . . signal. Pray . . . it works.”
I asked, “How long will that take?”
“After setup . . . program runs . . . takes . . . five . . . minutes.”
That was forever.
I told Shotgun and Konstantin to leave, told them to take the stairs, get to the streets.
They refused to leave without me. And I refused to leave without Arizona.
And I couldn’t carry Arizona. Wasn’t sure her body could take being carried.
We were trapped.
The sidewalks remained crowded.
The jazz played louder, with unbridled enthusiasm.
I counted fifteen men I hadn’t seen before. Fifteen healthy, well-armed men who had weapons hidden underneath their coats. Well-rested and fresh men with serious faces.
At least three held trackers.
The three men with the trackers moved up and down the street.
They eliminated the jazz club. Then they eliminated that side of the street.
They all turned and faced the apartments on this side.
All fifteen looked this way.
My body couldn’t handle another fight. Konstantin’s expression said he was in the same condition. We didn’t have what it took to be in another brute-force, no-holds-barred shoot-out.