2. "Seven Steps to Heaven"

            Grushenka Mayakovsky entered Tibor’s around 8:45 in the evening, allowing just enough time to be noticed before the band started their first set. She knew that the piano player was meticulous about his regular Thursday performance, always starting precisely at 9:00 PM. She wanted just enough time for the patrons to notice her grand entrance, but not enough time to focus on her presence. Although it was a damp and foggy spring evening, she wore a simple but stylish little white dress. She gave the appearance of having just walked off a yacht for an evening out on the town. The light scoop-neck dress suggested rather than screamed sexuality. Her skirt was a leg-flaunting length, revealing a pair of athletic, elongated limbs. Three quarter length sleeves covered her unforgettable tattoos. The dress hugged her breasts and waist, working a complete harmony with her five foot eight body, producing her desired effect. The overhead lights had not yet dimmed, and the curious - men with fantasies, and women with envy – lingered longer than normal at this otherworldly beauty. Her blond hair tonight cascading down her back, with bangs running close to her eyebrows, she looked like an actress from a sixties French film. As she nonchalantly walked the length of the humid brick room toward an empty seat at the bar, she doubted that anyone noticed the nondescript bag that she carried; which was stuffed with a black nylon raincoat, baseball cap, a bottle of tranquilizers, a 25 mm Beretta, and a silencer.

            Before she sat down, the bartender was wiping the area in front of her as if preparing for royalty. She gave him a flirty smile and ordered a vodka martini. “I bet you want Stoli.”

            “Why would you say that?” she asked in perfect Mid-Atlantic English.

            “Because you look like you’re Russian; a beautiful woman, a long way from home, searching for adventure.”

            She laughed, “I hear that all the time, and I wish it were true. No, I’m from a small town outside Philadelphia – New Hope. The closest I’ve ever been to Russia was the time I had lunch at the Russian Tea Room next to Carnegie Hall when my senior class went on a fieldtrip to New York.”

            The bartender laughed, and said, “Hi. I’m Brad. I’ll be your bartender tonight.” He laughed at his lame joke. Grushenka smiled long enough for Brad to feel that another lame joke would make him look like a jerk in front of this woman. She asked, “Well Brad, would you be kind enough to give me a very large glass of ice water?”

            “Absolutely.” She knew that he would do anything to break the silence, and laughed to herself at how all too often men were merely overgrown little boys. Guys like Brad were too easy, and she almost felt sorry for the shmuck. But manipulating the Brads of the world was necessary in her line of work. Brad brought her ice water in a pint glass reserved for draft beer. He said, “The band is starting now; I have to be quiet. What’s your name?”

            “You can call me Kay.”

            “O kay,” he automatically said, and then winced.

            But Grushenka didn’t notice. She saw an empty table toward the back of the bar, and took her drinks to the secluded spot away from the small stage. The lights dimmed, the stage spots turned on, and three musicians walked out. The oldest of the three, with stylish gray hair, wore a black tee shirt and sports jacket. He introduced the band. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We’re Riverrun, and we will be playing some music for your consideration tonight.”

            “For my consideration,” she thought.

            She needed to focus, and while the band warmed up she anchored her attention on the musicians. The drummer, short, muscular, black, reminded Grushenka of the vicious pit bull that she’d have to deal with later. The geeky bass player looked like he escaped from a North African reformatory. The piano player she couldn’t figure out. He seemed different – older, self-assured, but somewhat secretive. That thought was interrupted as the trio began to play. First a short gallop on the piano, followed by a sequence of notes that sounded like rhythmic counting: one two three four five six seven, a pause, then five six seven, back to one two three four five six seven, repeating the pause, then five six seven. The piano player took off on a solo that lost her. She had no appreciation for jazz. It was more agreeable to her ear than the patriotic claptrap she was raised with, but it gave her no pleasure. Yet this complex music being played helped keep her fear under control. She drank from the water until the glass was almost empty, then took mouthfuls of her martini and spit it in the water. Grushenka was being careful. She couldn’t afford to feel even slightly intoxicated, and she didn’t want anyone to notice that she didn’t drink her martini. She shifted her focus again, concentrating on the sounds of the melody, the intricate interplay between the musicians, the way tempos shifted as each musician took their several solos. Relaxing now, she noticed how the sounds mingled with the gaudy neon beer signs on the walls, creating colorful, chromatic ambiance. She felt the level of adrenalin rise as it coursed through her nerves, and she used the techniques she learned from her mentor to control the surge of energy by merging the auditory with the visual stimuli. This music was the perfect calming catalyst. She looked at her watch – 9:15 – time to get to work.

            The song ended, the crowd applauded, and Grushenka ducked, unnoticed, into the ladies’ room near her table. She tucked her hair into the baseball cap, put on the long nylon raincoat, and silently slipped out of the club. Oleg Zalupskayev lived in a house about a 20 minute walk from the club. Grushenka used the walk to clear her head and review her plan. Thursday was Zalupskayev’s weekly tweak and twinkle, the only evening that he spends alone and away from business after his regularly scheduled massage and blowjob at Angel Massage. “He may be a shit,” Grushenka thought, “but in some ways he was a dumb shit, and that predictability was going to get him dead tonight.”

            She reached Zalupskayev’s house and looked at her watch again: 9:45. She had 15 minutes to sneak into his house, pick the locks of his garage door, and climb the stairs to the kitchen. Knowing that Zalupskayev would take Vlad with him to the massage parlor – he loved showing off the stupid tricks that dog would do- she planned to put a heavy dose of Telazol and Acepromazine in whatever meat she found in his fridge to tranquilize or maybe kill the dog. She would wait for Zalupskayev to enter through his front door and free Vlad from his leash. She would then throw the drugged meat toward Vlad, distracting him, and while the dog scarfed down his surprise treat she would shoot Zalupskayev point blank. This was a simple revenge hit, and there was no need to make it look otherwise. She would leave his dead body in the kitchen.

            She put on tight leather gloves, screwed the silencer onto the Beretta, and put it in the pocket of her raincoat. She had trouble picking the garage lock in the dark. She fumbled with her picks, worried that she was losing valuable time,  before the lock finally surrendered. She walked up the dark steps and opened the door leading to the kitchen. “Strange. Zalupskayev left the kitchen lights on,” Grushanka thought as she quickly moved toward the enormous stainless steel Thermador. She opened one of the French doors, and removed some raw kielbasa. Before she could stuff the pills into the casing, the pit bull appeared out of nowhere, ran down the hall, and immediately sunk his teeth into her left leg. Grushenka was surprised. “Shit, Zalupskayev stayed home tonight!” The pain in her calf was like the penetration of heated ice picks, but Grushenka kept her cool. She pulled the Beretta out of her pocket and shot the dog twice with two quiet bursts. THUP - in the jaw, the bullet shattering tooth and bone, releasing its grip from her leg. THUP - in the back of the neck to finish the job. Blood gurgled from its mouth and nostrils, forming a pool underneath its lifeless head, soaking the dropped kielbasa, and moving toward the fridge. Vlad grunted one last time, puked blood, then died.

            Before Grushenka could turn her attention away from the cluster of death at her feet she felt a hard pain in her kidneys, her gun leaping from her right hand and landing in the puddle of blood next to the dead dog. Zalupskayev lifted the aluminum baseball bat and took a swing at her head. She quickly ducked, her instincts taking charge, and she launched herself into Zalupskayev’s paunch, knocking him into the granite island in the kitchen. He dropped the bat and fell to the floor with the plopping sound of a garbage bag of full of entrails. She noticed that he was wearing a silk robe, which exposed his huge gut and tiny genitals. Efficiency overruled her impulse to humiliate. Noticing that he was wearing glasses, she took an apple from the table, moved closer and threw it at his face. The surprise distracted his attention away from the bloody gun. She quickly dove for it, grabbing the Beretta with her left hand. The weapon was slippery; getting a hold of it was like trying to wrangle a live fish. Valuable seconds were being lost. “Blat-Kurva” he cursed. Zalupskayev grabbed the aluminum bat, crawled on hands and knees over to her, close enough to smash her skull. She made a spinning move in the blood, reversing her vulnerable head with her lethal feet, and as Zalupskayev swung the bat she kicked him in the nose, smashing it, but not before the blow hit her in the area where she had been bitten. She winced in pain, wiped some of the blood off the gun with her skirt, fired, and put two slugs in Zalupskayev’s head.

            Grushenka took a couple of deep breaths to decelerate the adrenalin coursing through her body, and assessed the scene. She had accomplished her mission. The svoloch was dead. He wouldn’t be maiming other women any longer. But it was a messy job, not her style.

            She managed to get up, and collected the four bullet casings. In the sink Grushenka washed her gloved hands, her nylon raincoat, the casings and Beretta. She put on the damp raincoat over her bloody dress. She unscrewed the silencer, putting it the right pocket of her nylon raincoat, the gun and four casings in the left.  Walking past the bloody corpses she caught a glimpse of herself in a gaudy gilded mirror mounted above the breakfast nook. Her hair was a tangle of knots and blood. She needed to get out of there fast, find a way to get home. She realized that she couldn’t go back to the jazz bar in her bloody state, and hoped that her entrance earlier would be enough of an alibi if she were ever a suspect in a police investigation of this killing. She also had to do something about the dog bite before it got infected.

            She retraced her path down the seven steps to the garage, then cautiously slipped out the door. Only when she was out of the house did she take off the leather gloves and deposit them in her pocket. The fog had turned to a light rain. She zipped up the raincoat, and pulled the hood over her bloody nest of hair. It was hard for her to walk. Pain shot from the wound in her leg, ganged up with the dull throb of her kidneys, hitting her brain with a debilitating force. She staggered through the street, careful to remain in the shadows, losing strength with every agonizing step. Thoughts of her impoverished life in Russia, her brutal childhood, and her first murder surfaced from the pain. She was losing strength and focus. As she headed toward the area of the harbor that was lined with condos she stumbled, breaking her fall with her hands on the concrete sidewalk. She understood that her body was shutting down. If she could find a safe place to sleep for a couple of hours she would be able to regain her strength, find her car before sunrise, and drive to the safe house where Doctor Lax would treat her wounds in secrecy and she could hide out for a few days.

            She spotted a terraced entrance to what looked like a small, isolated brick warehouse. Expending the last of her energy, she navigated her broken body towards the dark refuge. She tried the doorknob. It was locked. Resigning herself to not having any other options. She put her back to the door, gingerly slid down into safety, and fell asleep.