The Russian Mob

 

Driving around with a dead body in the trunk, my friends Martin, Saul Goodman and me were like a three ring circus of criminal faux pas. Our ineptitude was the real crime, and our only saving grace that we were dealing with enemies whose levels of imbecility rivaled our own: the Russian mob.

In the early gray of dawn, we parked our car on the beach, hoping to make a quick dump of the corpse in the trunk. However, the spot was near a busy overpass which had a splendid view of us and our clandestine activities. Bad enough to be burying bodies in the daytime, but this spot was a bust from the get-go. 

Random motorists were honking their horns and undoubtedly cracking jokes to their passengers about the morons who had driven out onto the beach and, oh, look, what's that they're doing with that body and those shovels?

To make matters worse, it was nearing high tide. All the work Martin was doing, digging in the wet sand with a shovel to make a nice man-sized hole, was getting undone as the tide came up, refilling the hole as fast as he could dig it. 

I got out of the car and started helping Martin with his doomed battle against the tide. We'd have to get the body into the hole quick, before the tide left us and our car stranded in quicksand. I was in the hole with water up to my knees, flailing with the shovel and making zero progress with our seaside gravedigging enterprise.

Saul Goodman pointed out that just on the other side of the overpass was a construction site with a giant excavation pit which would have made a much more suitable venue for our body disposal job. It was pre-dug, after all, and it didn't possess the inherent danger of getting us all washed out to sea.

While Martin and I tried to remain incognito, pretending we were just blokes having a fun day at the beach with Bernie, Saul went poking about the construction site. He found a few barrels and went about testing their contents by dropping his gun into them and retrieving it, sniffing for traces of chemicals in the residue.

"This one is just water," he said, wiping his gun off and moving on to another barrel.

He wasn't so lucky with the next barrel. He dropped his gun in and then fell headfirst into the barrel himself while trying to retrieve it. Like a carnival diver who'd just taken a high dive into a Dixie cup, he popped up to the surface and whisked his hair out triumphantly. 

"This one's got...Oh, shit..." he trailed off. It was a vat full of acid he'd landed in. 

Bits of his face started to melt off as he tried to wipe the corrosive liquid from his eyes. In a matter of a minute, Saul was dead. His body became an unrecognizable lump in the gooey stew. His spirit, however, persisted a moment or two in the form of an iridescent blue hologram the color of an old black and white TV image, complete with  low-res static and video glitches.

"At least there's smoking in the afterlife," he said, lighting a phantom cigarette with the tip of his finger. 

I was glad to see Saul was able to crack jokes, considering he was dead and all, but we still had a body to get rid of, and we couldn't stick around to chit-chat with our friend's apparition. Martin and I drove off the beach and found a nearby warehouse where we hastily decided to just abandon the car, body and all. 

"Maybe we should set it on fire," I suggested. It was something I'd seen done in the movies, and it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

"No time," said Martin. "The Russian mob is onto us. We've gotta make tracks, or we're gonna be getting disposed of along with our dead friend here."

We split up, and I caught a cab, while Martin disappeared into the city on foot. Within about a minute of driving, the cab picked up another passenger. It was a member of the Russian mob. The cab driver was also Russian, and it was beginning to dawn on me that I was, in fact, fucked. They turned the car around and headed back to the warehouse.

I knew I'd have to get out of the car before we got there, as their plans included dumping me and the body in the car into the pit at the construction site. Why they'd be making these plans known to me in plain English, when they could just as easily have been speaking Russian, I couldn't figure. 

"You'll have to let me out here for a minute," I told the driver. "I left a stick of butter out there on the asphalt, and it is going to melt if I don't retrieve it."

Why this ridiculous excuse worked, I have no clue, but it did, and they let me out of the cab. Maybe there's a universally understood respect for the sanctity of butter which supersedes international criminal affiliations, I don't know.

"Baht ohv course," said the driver, thickly. "I'll keep zee meetah runnink."

Why I then got back into the cab, after fetching the partially melted stick of butter, instead of running for my life, I'll really never know. The dream ended with me still in the cab, presumably about to be murdered by a couple of intern Russian mobsters.