Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“I cannot help you even if I could. Go see his friends in Cotton Lake. Ask them where he is.”
The man put a booted foot on the chair frame between Wolo’s knees and shoved. The chair went over backwards into the water. There was no time to call out. No time to take a breath. Wolo’s head struck the bottom and lay in the shallow end with his bare feet waggling exposed on the surface. Wolo stared up through water stained with his own blood and willed the man to return with more questions.
The man was gone. He had not stayed. He got what he came for.
Danny and Van found out two things about Oscar Dumont, the afternoon man at Skip’s.
He could take a beating.
And he didn’t know anything about the robbery.
Van dropped the plastic sack of lemons he’d been beating Oscar with and told Danny to let the man go.
Oscar sagged away to lean on the bar, a hand to his gut. For sure he’d shit blood for a few days. But he didn’t go to his knees.
“You are okay to work today?” Van said.
“I can work,” Oscar said turning his face away.
“You one tough motherfucker,” Danny said.
Van peeled five one-hundred dollar bills off his roll and laid them on the bar. The two of them went out the front to the Mercedes. Van used his throwaway to call Uncle Wolo. No answer. He tried the landline. No answer there either.
“Maybe he is taking a nap,” Danny said from the wheel.
Van tapped fingers on the console.
“Forget the pick-ups till later. Let’s go have lunch at his house,” Van said.
They found their uncle sitting at the bottom of the pool looking up at them like he was surprised to see them.
“This has something to do with the robbery,” Danny said.
“You are thinking that? Serious?” Van slapped his brother across the back of the head and wondered, for perhaps the millionth time, how they could have been born seconds apart.
They called the cleaning crew. Then they called their father.
“How’s my honey?”
“Daddy!”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too! Will I see you this weekend?”
“I hope so. I still have some work to do.”
“For your boss?”
“For my boss. But I’m going to try and get back. I promise.”
“Where are you? Far away?”
“Not too far. Florida. Do you know where Florida is?”
“Where Disneyworld is?”
“That’s right, honey.”
“Are you at Disneyworld, Daddy?”
“Without you?”
“We can go there someday?”
“We will. When I’m done with this work we’ll go to Disneyworld.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Then work hard and come home soon!”
“I will, honey. I just have to see a man and then I’m coming home.”
Symon Kharchenko sat chewing a cigar and watching surveillance video on the big screen in the den. His son Danya started to tell him that Uncle Wolo didn’t allow smoking in his house. Vanko elbowed him and gave him a sharp look.
Out by the pool the cleaning crew had Wolo out of the pool and lying on his back on the tiles. Two of them cut the tape from his arms and legs. A third opened a body bag. They’d already brought Symon the contents of his brother’s pockets. They lay in a popcorn bowl on a coffee table before the sofa.
The big screen was divided into a grid of six panels like a live action comic book page. In one panel a camera above the front door caught the couple who cleaned the house leaving. This was swiftly followed by the arrival of a man who rang the door then punched Wolo senseless. The man wore a ball cap and the bill hid his face from view. He was white and clean shaven. His clothes were cheap and plain and without distinction. Symon guessed his height at six foot give or take an inch. He was big enough to drop Wolo with a single sucker punch. Wolo, despite his age, was still a very hard man.
The camera over the pool was of no use. It was trained on the pool area but left much of the lanai out of frame. They could clearly see Wolo being slid out to the edge of the pool in the chair but the stranger was only seen from behind and above. He appeared as shadow silhouetted by the sun glare off the water and only momentarily in a corner of the frame.
Wolo went out well. Though there was no audio, Symon could tell his adopted brother remained stoic and defiant up to the moment where he was tipped back into the water. Symon turned off the image. The sight of Wolo’s pathetically wiggling toes above the slopping water was making him sick with rage.
“One white man. You told me you were looking for two niggers,” Symon said.
“You think this is about what happened at Skip’s?” Vanko said.