Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

"You think you can escape the wrath to come!”

The Dunker was bellowing his usual line — this time at Nikolai himself. Franz was there — he saw the whole thing. He had taken Tawny to the shore. She’d not been with us the first time we went; she’d been wanting to go for a long time. The summer was over, really, and pretty soon it would be too cool to go and sit on the sand, so one day Franz asked her to go with him, and she went.

            He said they sat on the sand, watching the Dunker still out there grabbing whoever would brave the chilly water. He even came out and said hello to Franz and Tawny, told them to tell Torstein hello. There weren’t that many people on the beach because it was fall and the weather was not warm ...

            “When I saw Nikolai arrive with his girlfriend and her daughter, I knew he only brought them because he thought there wouldn’t be anybody there to look at them. Typical brooding Slav thing.”

            The “girlfriend” was actually Nikolai’s sister-in-law. Franz said she’d been his mistress for years, and she was training her teenaged daughter to take her place, which was a pretty weird deal if you ask me. Franz said in the mob, you never knew. It might be the niece was no relation to Nikolai at all the way the “sister-in-law” got around.

            But I guess the Dunker thought it was weird, too, because he recognized Nikolai and started preaching at him! He told him it wasn’t right for him to be with his brother’s wife — or to make a living selling drugs and guns, either. “Yah, yah, you shoulda heard him,” Franz said. “It was real wrath of God stuff — You’re paving the road to your own destruction! And all like that.”

            Nikolai wasn’t taking any crap, though, he got up and got in the Dunker’s face, telling him if he and his Dunker boys didn’t back down and shut up, the Dunker was the one on the road to destruction. Franz said it made no difference at all to the Dunker, he kept right on shouting that Nikolai, his girlfriend, and quite possibly the teenaged niece, too, were all swimming in a cesspool and would die from the crap they were ingesting.

            “It was pretty good stuff,” Franz said with admiration. “But I could see it was getting Nikolai pretty mad. And the girl, the niece, she was peeved because she wanted to get in the water — and ol’ Nik didn’t want the Dunker grabbing her, you know. I didn’t want Nikolai to see me there, and for sure I didn’t want him to see Tawny, so I made her catch the bus home.”

            When Franz got back from the bus stop, the Dunker was in mid-sermon about the evils of Nikolai’s business, and he was saying that neither he, nor his Dunker followers, were ever going to back down until they had exposed to the whole world what kind of sick and twisted dealings Nikolai had with evildoers all over the city. Nikolai even took a swing at him, and the Dunker grabbed his hand and twisted his wrist until the mobster fell to his knees! His bodyguards came running, but Nikolai waved them back, got up, dusted himself off, and walked away.

            Franz is a jittery kind of guy, and even now he was cutting his eyes from me to Pete and Jack, the first folks he met when he came back from the shore, his hands shaking a little.

            “That wasn’t cool, man,” he said. “I knew if Nikolai walked away, there was something bad coming. After a while the Dunker got back in the surf, and Nikolai and his — party, I guess you could say, the two ladies and his bodyguards, you know — set up a cabana and some beach chairs, but I could see the Dunker was still watching them close, he was really putting the evil eye on them. I wanted to go tell him to lay off, and I should have, you know, I should have, but I was scared. I didn’t want to get into it with Nikolai.”

            According to Franz, everything was quiet for a while. He was hanging out by the boardwalk, near enough to watch what was happening under Nikolai’s tent and with the Dunker out in the water. The niece, the teenager, she was whining to Nikolai and her mother about wanting to swim, and Nikolai was still telling her to shut the hell up — finally he told her to go ahead if she wanted, but to stay away from the Dunker. Of course, she made a beeline for where the Dunker was waiting for any unwary swimmers to happen by, and Nikolai went running after her.

            “She went splashing into the surf, like she wanted the Dunker to grab her. Remember before, in the summer, when she’d been buzzing him on her jet ski and all? What was it with this kid and the Dunker?”

            Franz looked up at us, like he expected us to have some kind of answer, but what did we know?

            “What happened?” Pete asked.

            “He grabbed her! He grabbed her and dunked her under, and she started shrieking and giggling like a fool, and Nikolai, he hollered something in Russian, pulled a gun out of his shorts pocket, and opened fire.”

            We were all staring at Franz now, our mouths hanging open.

            “He shot the Dunker?” Pete asked.

            “Oh yah,” Franz said. “He shot him as many times as he had bullets, I don’t know, four, six times.”

            “But is he all right?” Jack asked, looking over his shoulder for Torstein. We were on the edge of the park where Franz had found us, and Torstein was still hovering around with his friends, dragonflying between the different groups who’d come to Story Hour and stayed late.

            “No man,” Franz said. “He’s dead.”

            “Dead?!” Pete said. “He can’t be dead.” Which, it was a dumb thing to say, but it’s how we all felt. The Dunker couldn’t be dead because he was so big and loud and brave and alive.

            “Dead,” Franz said again, glancing up to us, looking around us for Torstein. “It’s gonna be on the news, in the papers. We gotta tell him.”

            “Are you sure?” I asked. “Sure he’s dead?”

            “Yah. The police came, and an ambulance, but it was too late. And the devil of it is, they’re saying Nikolai thought the Dunker was trying to drown his niece. They’re not charging him with any crime.”

            That’s how it played in the newspaper and the TV news: Nikolai had taken his sister-in-law and her teenaged daughter to the shore for the afternoon. A madman had attacked the teen and tried to drown her. Nikolai had shot him dead and saved her.

“I bet Nikolai went there to kill him anyway,” Franz said. “The Dunkers had been making trouble for him anyway, and he was sick of it.”

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