Kill Whitey

Raindrops struck the lake’s surface, making thousands of concentric rings. More lightning flashed overhead. I stopped the forklift at the edge of the pier. The forks stuck out over the water. The lake was deep at this point. At least fifteen feet. I’d heard it was even deeper further out, and there were sinkholes in the bottom, supposedly leading down into underwater caverns. Wouldn’t have surprised me. Central Pennsylvania is littered with limestone caverns and old mine shafts. There’s an abandoned iron ore mine out between Spring Grove and Hanover that’s supposed to be bottomless. Supposed to be haunted, too. Bullshit, of course, but people had drowned there over the years and their bodies were never found.

The engine idled choppily. I turned around and checked the gauge on the propane bottle, wiping the rain away so I could read it. The tank was almost empty, but that didn’t matter. We’d reached our destination and would go no further. At least, not together. Not thinking clearly, I turned the key to the off position. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just a combination of fear and shock and sheer exhaustion. The pain in my head returned again, throbbing in time with my pulse. The engine choked, sputtered, and then died. Silence descended. Even the thunder seemed to pause.

“End of the road, you fucker!”

Whitey didn’t respond. Didn’t move. His eyes remained closed. The blood that had been gushing from his mouth was starting to congeal.

“Hey, Whitey! Wake the hell up. We’re here. Don’t go to sleep on me now.”

Nothing.

“Shit…”

Could it be that he was finally dead, or was this just one more attempt at deceit? Unsure, I decided there was only one way to find out. I turned the key and the forklift stuttered to life again. The hydraulics squealed. The engine backfired. The chains rattled.

Whitey remained stationary—immobile.

Lifeless.

My shoulders sagged. The strength drained from my body and weariness seeped into my limbs. I closed my eyes. Rain streamed down my face. I felt robbed of my victory. Cheated out of my revenge. I thought of Darryl and Yul and how they’d died, and of Jesse, whose body, for all I knew, was lying in a ditch somewhere. I thought of the innocent cops that had been slaughtered, and the butchery at the lumber yard. I remembered Webster, and his plaintive howls during the gunfight at my apartment. And more than any of these, I thought of Sondra. Of what she’d been through. Her life. The terrors she’d faced just to come here in search of a dream, and how that dream had been trampled and pissed on instead.

So much cruelty. So much needless death. All because of one man.

The man on the end of my forklift.

Zakhar Putin, a.k.a. Whitey Putin.

And now he was dead and I felt nothing. Not vindication. Not peace. There was no solace in this death. No joy or exultation. No sense of justice or victory. All I felt was bitter resentment that he’d died before I had a chance to enjoy it. That his soul—if he even had a soul—had slipped away without me seeing it. I’d wanted him to suffer the way he’d made others suffer. The way Rasputin had suffered.

I opened my eyes, raised my head, stared out at the rain-drenched corpse dangling from the forklift, and decided that perhaps he’d suffered after all. Maybe he’d suffered more than any of us. He’d certainly felt pain. If he’d never felt it before this, then at least I’d changed that. He was fucking intimate with it now. I’d taught him all about pain—and about loss.

Sondra and the baby were safe. We didn’t have to run anymore. That was the important thing. That was all that mattered.

The thunder returned, but it was fainter this time. The storm was moving away—losing steam. But it brought with it a new sound; police sirens. The cops knew where we were. I started to reach for the key and shut the forklift off, intent on turning myself in when they arrived, but my hand froze in mid-air.

Whitey’s eyes snapped open again. He stared at me, and then blinked away the rain, as if to prove he was still alive. Maybe it was a final act of defiance. His gaze moved in the direction of the wailing sirens and then slowly drifted back to me. Slowly, he twitched his arms. Then he grasped the forks and gripped them tight. His knuckles bulged. His tendons stood out. Still staring at me, he began to pull himself closer, no longer trying to escape. Instead, he was trying to reach me.

“Whitey,” I said, “you’ve been a bad, bad boy.”

The hydraulics whined as I grabbed the controls. Whitey’s eyes grew wider. Trembling, he clung to the forks and shook his head in denial.

I was still staring into his eyes when I separated the forks, widening the space between them again. I did it slowly, and my eyes never left his.