Chapter Seventeen

Seth rubbed his temples and shut his eyes for a second. Blowing up on these kids was not going to fix the situation. What would Pete do? He had to think like Pete here.

“I swear to God, dude, we checked this guy out before getting the manure.” His cousin Jenny - oh, sorry, “J-Glass” - was staring bug-eyed at the phone camera like she was afraid Seth was going to shoot her through it. “He was totally legit, dude!”

“So you’re...you’re telling me somebody put poison in the cow manure while you weren’t watching it,” Seth said.

“Bro, I don’t know what the hell went down,” J-Glass said. “Maybe it was some 5-0 drone crap, you dig? All I know is someone poisoned our whole fucking crop…”

Seth did not dig. “Jen... J-Glass,” he said. “Can you do me a favor and shut up for a second? Please?” He had to take a breath to calm himself. “I am trying to tell you what actually happened here.”

“You got the tapes, bro?” She had a way of fidgeting with her snapback when she was nervous. It was less than endearing.

“Yeah, I have tapes showing some dumbass spreading fresh cow shit on twenty grand worth of weed!” Seth said. “Fresh cow shit has so much nitrogen in it, it’ll kill grass! That is why we specifically told you to go find some compost…”

“That’s what I did, bro!” J-Glass said. Like it would help the situation, she turned the phone camera to the greenhouse’s interior full of sad, shriveled yellow plants.

“You got fresh. Cow. Shit.” Seth rubbed his temples again. “I get that it was an accident. I get that you misunderstood the directions. Okay? But it was you, dude. You poisoned those plants.”

“Bro, I’m being framed,” J-Glass said. “I swear to God I didn’t…”

“Look, I’m gonna call you back,” Seth said. “Go pawn some stuff and come to the Clubhouse. I’ll explain it to my dad.”

He ended the call before his cousin could take any more points off his I.Q.

“Holy crap,” he said to the empty Clubhouse. “Why is this my problem?”

He knew exactly why J-Glass was his problem. This was exactly the kind of low-level bitch work he would have given to Nick or Kevin to keep him busy and make him feel like he was putting work in while the grown-ups got their shit done.

Seth sighed and opened the texts Pete had sent him. The first one, You want to do dinner out tonight?, made him smile. The second one, We gotta talk, did not.

“Goddammit,” Seth said. He hit reply and sent a Sure thing, where and when? back to Pete. He set his phone down on the table and leaned back in his wheelchair.

He’d taken to hanging out in the Clubhouse in the mornings. Afternoons, he’d retreat back to the Family House to do his homework and play video games while his brothers carried on without him. It was more or less working that way. He left the Club alone, and the Club for the most part left him alone in return.

So it was a surprise when a couple of sets of high heels came across the porch and the door burst open.

He had to take a double take at what he saw. “What the hell happened to you girls?” he said.

Masha and Yulia were clinging to each other, dressed in pajama pants under fur-lined coats too heavy for the season. Though the remains of last night’s makeup smeared their faces, they hadn’t done anything to get ready except put their hair back in hasty ponytails.

“We do not have time,” Masha said. “We have half an hour, Yuri and Mikhail get back to apartment. I have plane tickets right here.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a couple of online boarding passes. “Please, can you help us?”

Seth’s mouth hung open as he looked the girls up and down. His first instinct was to call his brothers. His brothers who had all but turned on him, his brothers who didn’t think he was a real man anymore.

He nodded at the girls. “You need someone to get you to the airport?” he said.

“Yes, please help us,” Masha said. Her eyes were red with tears, and he could see that she was shaking despite the warmth of her coat. “We have car for getting out of town, but I am too afraid to drive. It is so far away, I cannot understand the directions…”

Seth picked up the phone and redialed J-Glass.

She picked up after one ring. “Yeah?” she said.

“Hey, cuz,” Seth said. “What would you say if I told you I had an idea that would make this whole thing go away for you? Just chalk it up to a lesson learned, I talk to my dad, nothing happens to you. Yeah?”

“Oh my God, dude,” J-Glass said. “That would be righteous!”

“Get in your van and get down here now,” he said. “Fifteen minutes or less.”

“I’m on my way, dude,” J-Glass said. “I’m like, almost to the driveway.”

“Almost better mean fifteen minutes or less, kid,” Seth said. “Be there. And don’t ask any questions.”

***

Seth couldn’t blame the girls for enlisting help in getting to the airport. The rat maze getting onto the main highway gave Seth road rage under the best of circumstances.

“No, stay in this lane,” he said to J-Glass. “We need to take 46 to East 403 to avoid the toll road.”

His cousin drove a creeper van with a ratty living quarters occupying the back half. The stereo controller was duct-taped into the console, and a half-charred incense stick from the gas station stuck out of one of the A/C vents. The windows at least had a cheap tint on them, and J-Glass wasn’t exactly a prominent member of the Double Eagles.

Their lane curved off and merged with a narrow, paved county road that would take them north to the highway approaching the airport. In happier days, it had been one of Seth’s favorite places to cruise while the sun came up. Today, the sight of the road stretching out in front of him made him uneasy. Like it was claustrophobic, somehow.

The uneasy feeling did not get better when the car in front of him slowed down to a crawl.

“Jesus Christ,” J-Glass said, pounding on her horn.

“Stop,” Seth said. It occurred to him that he wasn’t armed. “Are you carrying?”

“I have, like, three grams of…”

“Do you have a gun, you fucking moron?” Seth said.

“Oh, shit,” J-Glass said. “Why do we need a gun?”

That question answered itself as the car in front of them slowed to a stop. A black van came over the hill in the oncoming lane, and it too slowed to a stop before J-Glass could get what was going on.

“Is this a roadblock?” she said.

“I’m sorry.” Masha came creeping out of the backseat. “This is only way we can get back to Russia…”

Yulia said something in Russian, and the two girls started crying again as five big guys in expensive suits got out of the two cars parked ahead of them.

So this was how Seth Novak was going to die, huh? Worked over by some assholes from the Old Country because he was the only one in the family who still cared about the Club Rules?

Maybe that wasn’t a bad way to go. At least in death some of these sons of bitches might realize he was still as much a man as any of them.

***

This was not the first time Seth had been disappointed in realizing he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t sure if this was going to be better or worse than the first time. The first time had hurt like hell.

He couldn’t tell yet how much it was going to hurt this time. Two of his captors spoke slow, choppy Serbian, and the rest of them had to slow down enough that Seth could parse most of what they were saying.

J-Glass was dead, as far as he could tell, and his brothers had been notified of where to find her body and vehicle. The girls were alive and in the other car.

So, judging by how much effort they were going to so far here, this could potentially also hurt a lot.

His hands had been bound behind with zip ties, and then again with duct tape. Duct tape alone had been enough to secure his legs. He was like a big, shitty mermaid trying not to get thrown back and forth on the floor of the van. There was a pillowcase tied around his head, but Seth had seen that it was a plain, unfurnished cargo van with nothing to cushion his body against the corrugated metal.

One of the guys kidnapping him kept telling someone—probably the driver—to keep careful on account of Seth’s fragile condition. The driver—or whoever—seemed pretty nonchalant about Seth’s fragile condition on account of how soon they’d be killing him.

The smell of gasoline on the floor of a cargo van was usually not this unsettling.

He knew these highways like he knew the layout of his own limbs, and for a while he could tell where they were going. There was the familiar curve of the highway ramp, the rhythmic thumps of the long grooves across the highway, and then eventually the tight curves of the monkey ear exit with Highway 14.

The driver spent a few loops driving up and down and around that exit. He was spastic with the brakes and steering, especially once he’d made Seth yelp with pain a couple of times.

“What do you want?” Seth said.

“What we want is not important,” one of the guys in the van said. “Right now, job is important.”

“Are you assholes working with the Scorpions now?” Seth said.

“Again,” the man said, “not important.”

He couldn’t tell what direction they’d gone up Highway 14. Distracted by the pain in his back, he wasn’t sure of exactly how long they’d been driving when they turned. He couldn’t tell if it was left or right, either. The asshole at the wheel took all of his turns with the same deliberate carelessness.

“You’re trying to get something from my brothers, huh?” Seth said.

That earned him a kick in the ribs from someone in the van with him. “No talking,” the guy said.

The kick hadn’t exactly been brutal, but it was enough to wind Seth. He gasped for air, and the van turned again. Seth rolled onto his back.

Maybe Pete would get worried when he didn’t respond to his texts. Maybe he’d check for him down at Watty’s.

The van turned again, this time onto a dirt road. Seth clenched his jaws together and braced his arms as hard as he could against the van floor. It wasn’t enough to absorb the rattling of the van, but it was better than his previous situation.

At least it was more comfortable than his previous situation. It didn’t matter what the future might hold right now. The more time Seth spent tied up on the floor of this van, the worse his situation was getting.

Somewhere above him, a couple of guys started arguing in Russian. Judging by the urgency and volume of the argument, and the timing of the van’s sudden movements, the argument concerned somebody’s driving skills.

After a sharp turn and two sharp thumps on the bottom of the van, someone hauled Seth up and sat him down on some kind of box. A thick, burly hand clasped each of his shoulders and kept him from swaying as the van bounced up the road.

“I hope you all know where you’re going, gentlemen,” Seth said. “And you better hope this van has four-wheel drive or there’s gonna be hell to pay when my brothers catch you.”

Someone made a crack about brothers in Serbian that had everyone in the van laughing except for Seth.

“You know what happens in the Old Country when you disgrace a man of honor?” one of his captors said. “When you make him look like a little bitch over some stupid shit?”

“No,” Seth said, “but I think I’m about to.”

“They start with sending your father an unmarked finger, ask him politely to apologize for insult and be making amends,” another guy cut in. “Maybe your family doesn’t want to be doing this, maybe we will be sending one of your tattoos next, prove who it is we have here.”

“Real spooky shit, cuz,” Seth said.

The hands on his shoulders tightened as the van took on a section of something it wasn’t built for. The whole thing pitched and bounced and banged up its undercarriage on rocks. At this rate, they’d be lucky if they even made it all the way to where they were supposed to be cutting up Seth.

“Do you have it in four high, you stupid son of a bitch?” Seth forced a laugh out of his banged-up ribcage. “You start cutting me up, you gonna have to eat me! You’re gonna get your asses stranded up here!”

“Shut up,” said one of the men holding his shoulders. “Maybe we set you on fire, make smoke signal to find, huh?”

“Go right ahead, cuz,” Seth said. “It ain’t like the Park Service pays people specifically to watch for fires.”

The other man at his shoulder said something quietly in a language Seth didn’t recognize.

“No more talking,” the first man said.

“Have you boys ever done a job in this part of the country?” Seth said. “You don’t know how to drive the roads, you don’t know the local police…”

Seth hadn’t been smacked in the head by a rifle butt before, so he couldn’t say for sure that’s what happened. But he could feel a new tension in the hands gripping him. He could hear a new caution in the voices muttering around him.

“You ain’t been on this road before, I can tell you…”

Another jab to the back of his head was enough to convince Seth that it was a rifle butt he was up against here. He laughed, and you could tell from the sound of it that it hurt with every tremor of his chest.

It hurt, but it was making them nervous. And right now, “making them nervous” was about the beginning and the end of everything Seth could do for his situation.