Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“He killed my boys. Did you know that?” Symon said, shrugging his broad shoulders so his jacket lay better.
He did not know that. He did not know anything.
Vanko and Danya.
Now Dimi was scared. Now he no longer felt safe.
Merry was surprised to see her dad standing on the front walk of her school.
“How about a ride home, honey?” he said into her hair after she’d leapt into his arms.
A teacher was giving Isaac the snake eye and was about to step forward through the crowd of kids rushing for the long row of school buses rumbling at the curb.
“My daddy’s home, Ms. Rodriguez!” Merry announced from his arms.
“It’s okay if I drive her?” Isaac said.
The teacher nodded before being pulled away by a shoving match between two boys arguing over who would get on board the bus first.
Isaac and Merry were in the Avalanche heading away.
“What happened to your window?” Merry said.
“Little accident,” Isaac said. The window at his door was gone. The ride back from Tampa had been a noisy one.
“Did you get hurt?”
“Nothing seeing you didn’t cure.”
“Was it your fault?”
“What if I told you it was? What if I told you that Daddy forgot his car keys and busted out the window himself?”
Merry laughed.
“Didn’t know you had a daddy that dumb, huh?”
She rocked forward against her seat belt giggling.
“Better hope you take after Mommy, huh?”
She slapped his arm to make him stop.
“You’re taking me to Granpa and Granma’s? Because this isn’t the way,” she said when she’d recovered.
“Honey. How much do you trust your Daddy?” he said, eyes on the road.
“About what?”
“About everything. How much do you trust me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you believe me? When I tell you something, you know you can believe me, right?”
“You’re my Daddy. You’d never lie to me.”
Isaac looked at her sitting by him, regarding him with searching eyes.
“Look, Daddy made a mistake. And now I have to fix it,” he said.
“Like the window?” Merry said.
“Something like that. For now I can’t have you staying with your grandparents. I need you to come with me.”
“Where to?”
“To some friends of mine. Very old friends that are like family to me. They’ll be family to you, too.”
“What about school?” she said.
“You have your books?” he said.
She patted the book bag on the seat between them.
“Then trust me, honey. You’re going to learn a whole lot more than they could ever teach you in school.”
He pulled up a ramp onto Lee Highway west. They passed under a state highway sign that read:
MISSISSIPPI.
Symon’s lawyer, a smart Jew with political ambitions, secured a copy of the Tampa police file on the sunken van. The evidence found with the three bodies within was detailed in the report. It was worth the thousand dollars Symon paid for it even if the Jew kept half the bribe intended for the evidence clerk at the police center. Billable hours was a lawyer word for theft. Symon, an old thief himself, could respect that.
The three men all suffered gunshot wounds at close range. Two of the dead, Danya Kharchenko and Vasily Gorky, died of gunshot wounds. Vanko Kharchenko was awaiting further autopsy but notes suggested he may have died of drowning.
The firearms suspected of causing the fatal wounds as well as a potentially mortal wound to V. Kharchenko’s thigh were both found within the van. Found as well was a handgun registered to V. Gorky in the state of Florida. In addition was a custom-made .45 automatic in stainless finish. The automatic was equipped with an aftermarket slide tooled without a serial number. Numbers were also absent from the parts on the rest of the weapon.
The nature of the crime scene had a negative effect on the accuracy of any forensic evidence. The van was five or more hours in muddy water before being discovered by a carload of German tourists who stopped to pee in the grass along the run-off swale. Time of death was going to be approximate. Even the hoary old crimebusting cliché of the stopped watch was thwarted by each of the three dead men wearing very high-end and very waterproof watches.