You Don't Own Me 2 (The Russian Don 2)

Beautiful, soul stirring stuff.

I can remember playing this piece with mama. It was in another lifetime, but the notes are as alive and vivid as goldfish swimming in a pond. The sounds fill my head. I can still see her. As pure as a white swan. Ah, Mama. Tell me of the days to come, when we will walk in meadows full of wild flowers.

I breathe it into my body, and prepare myself for the task at hand.

He grunts and I turn to look down at him.

Naked. Shivering uncontrollably. Trussed up to a wooden chair. His mouth stuffed with his own smelly sock and taped shut. Tough guy. He makes another sound, frightened, desperate, turkey-like. I start walking towards him. I am furious, fucking livid. My hands are clenched and my heart is racing with adrenaline. I could kill with my bare hands, but I don’t hurry.

I stroll. I am a consummate professional.

The music reverberates in my head. I remember the first time I came into the room and found Dahlia sitting on the carpet in front of the fireplace in a toweling robe listening to this piece. She turned her head and smiled at me. ‘This is your song,’ she told me, and smiled that sweet smile of hers. Like a goddamn angel. She doesn’t smile anymore. She just lies there.

Because of this greedy, stupid monster.

I stand over him. ‘Hello, Lenny.’

His skin is very white. Without clothes he is no more than a worm, squirming, cowardly, waiting to be squashed. He makes more desperate sounds. He wants to talk. Beg. Plead. Bargain.

No dice.

‘Your death will be long and slow,’ I tell him calmly.

His eyes bulge with fear.

I kick the chair viciously and he falls backwards, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. Comical, if I had been of a mind to laugh.

With superhuman strength I pick him and the chair up, and effortlessly throw both towards the wall. The chair breaks noisily. His scream is muffled by the sock. I walk up to him and kick his lily white ass with the cold ferocity of a crocodile. Tears start pouring from his eyes. Jesus!

Then I take out my gun, a PB/6P9, Army issue. Sleek. Russian, of course. It’s old, 1967, but I like it. I grew up with it. The metal feels cold in my hand, but I know from experience it takes on human body heat very quickly. I screw on the silencer and he looks at me with begging eyes. Silly man. He has no idea. I wasn’t called the meanest son of a bitch on the face of the earth for no reason.

With a steady hand I aim the gun at his pale right kneecap. He goes crazy behind the sock. Smiling grimly, I curl my finger around the trigger, and empty my first bullet dead center into his kneecap. A professional hit, fine entry wound and bleeding only from the gaping exit mess behind his knee.

He screams and soils himself.

I take aim and put another bullet into his left knee.

He twists and turns vigorously, but he needn’t have bothered. I couldn’t have missed if I’d tried.

I gave him a Jesus wound, just above the metatarsals.

He howls and twists even more furiously.

Aim. Fire. A matching Jesus wound on the other foot.

With great precision, amazing really once you consider I haven’t done wet work in nearly twenty years, I aim and fire into all his major bones. I reload and aim it between his legs, at the pale shriveled worm nestled there. It explodes into a bloody mess. He is slobbering now, but in fact, he is not in pain. After the first shot, shock releases endorphins into the bloodstream that cause the pain to numb. Like yeast. Pain needs time to grow. In about an hour the wounds will marinate and swell up to the size of grapefruits and lemons.

Then the philharmonic orchestra of pain will play its first note.

I turn and walk away from him and the sickening smell of his shit. I put my feet up on the desk at the edge and listen to the music as I wait. I don’t think of her. She wouldn’t approve of what I am doing. But she’s too good for this world and I’m not.

‘Kiss the rain, whenever you need me,’ she once said.

‘I kissed the rain last night and you never came,’ I whisper.

From the bleeding, slowly darkening hunk of meat on the floor comes whimpers, cries, howls, growls, groans, sobs, and screams of pain. When I can no longer bear to listen to his cowardly cries, I walk over to him.

Even without his dick and every major bone in his body shattered he still desperately wants to live. I see it in his eyes.

I point my gun at him and aim.

‘See you in hell,’ I say, and fire. Bull’s eye. Right between the eyes. And you could almost call it a mercy killing.