Sold to the Bratva King novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Accidents, Never Murders

"Did anybody die?" I asked.

Both men turned to look at me.

"No," Matvei said.

"Swear it."

"Nobody died. One of my longshoremen opened another man's scalp with a box cutter over a card game. Scalps bleed like a faucet. The man is at the emergency room with twenty stitches and a very bad attitude."

I looked at his face for a long time. He let me.

"Then I'll do it," I said.

"You don't have to do anything."

"I know. That's why I'm doing it."

At four in the morning I stood on the loading floor of a Zorin warehouse on Summer Street.

My borrowed coveralls were rolled up six times at the ankles.

The floor was concrete, old and porous. The blood had spread in a wide fan and run downhill toward a drain.

Someone had tried to mop it. They'd used hot water.

Hot water cooks blood into concrete. It's the first mistake everybody makes.

Three of Matvei's men stood against the wall watching me, big men with scraped knuckles and tattooed hands.

One of them had blood on his own shoes and didn't know it.

"Cold water," I said. "Two buckets. And whatever peroxide you've got, and all the salt in the break room."

They looked at Matvei.

"You heard her," he said.

They ran.

I worked for two hours on my knees.

Cold water first, then peroxide, until the stain foamed pink and lifted.

Then salt and a stiff brush in the seams, where the cops always look.

I pulled the drain cover and scrubbed down inside it to my elbow.

I found the box cutter wedged under a pallet.

I didn't touch it. I pointed at it until somebody else picked it up.

I made the man with the blood on his shoes take them off and throw them in the dumpster.

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