by Greg Rucka
Miata was unconscious but breathing when she got back to him. With the jacket and the belt, she fashioned a pressure dressing as best as she could around the Doberman, then lifted him and carefully brought him to the Audi. She laid him across the backseat, then climbed behind the wheel and spun the car around, chewing dirt and gravel with the tires, leaving our still-burning home behind.
She headed north, pushing the Audi as fast as she dared given the road, covering the almost fifty kilometers to Poti in thirteen minutes. She couldn't stay in Kobuleti, she knew, and heading south to Batumi had instinctively seemed like a bad idea; I had left bodies in Batumi, and she was certain the men who had come to Kobuleti and what had happened there ten days earlier were connected. Batumi was out.
She needed a doctor or a vet, and she needed one fast, and that left Poti as the only option. So she raced along the coast road, swerving around the sparse early morning traffic and flooring it whenever there was opportunity, all the while talking to Miata, all the while telling him that she would take care of him, the way she had before.
For Alena, the situation had kindled a disturbing sense of déjà vu. Miata had become her dog in very similar circumstances, when she had taken money from one man who dealt and packaged large amounts of cocaine to kill another who did the exact same thing. The target in question had guarded his workplace with a variety of booby traps and dogs. The booby traps were one thing, but the dogs had posed a problem entirely of their own. Each had been treated in the same way, abused and beaten, their vocal cords severed. Dogs need their voices, and denying them it can drive them mad, which, of course, was just what the dealer in question had desired.
When Alena had come for his reckoning, she'd had to deal with the dogs first, and most of them she'd been forced to kill. After all had been said and done, only Miata was still alive, though wounded. Then, like now, she had loaded him into a car—a Mazda Miata—and rushed him to a doctor.
It was twenty minutes to seven in the morning when she arrived in Poti, and she lost another ten minutes driving the city's confusing streets, desperately trying to find someone to help her. The first two civilians she saw fled from her when she stopped, and it wasn't until after the second that she realized why, how she must've looked to them, stained with blood and smoke and sweat, in her underwear, the wheezing Doberman across the backseat of the car.
The third time she asked for help, she held out a fistful of the bills she'd taken off the dead men, and that helped overcome fear long enough for her to acquire directions to a veterinarian. By the time she actually reached the doctor's home-slash-office it was three minutes to seven, and Miata's breathing had gone from labored and rapid to shallow and dangerously slow.
She parked the car literally in front of the house, less than a meter from the door, leaning repeatedly and hard on the horn before getting out of the vehicle. The man who emerged from the house was bleary with sleep, silver-haired and stocky.
“My dog's been shot,” Alena told him, already opening the back door.
The doctor balked, not unreasonably, given what he was seeing. Alena lifted Miata out of the car, brushed past him, heading inside. There was an examination room just through the door to her left. The man followed her, watched as she lay Miata gingerly on the table.
“Help him,” she told the doctor. “Please.”
Then she went back outside to the car. She was gone less than thirty seconds, and when she came back, she saw that the vet had unfastened the belt around the makeshift bandage, had begun examining the wound. Then he noticed she'd returned and said, “It's not good. I don't know if I can save him.”
“You can.”
The vet saw the Walther that Alena had just retrieved from the Audi. Whether it was the sight of the gun, or her tone of voice, or both, or neither, the man hesitated for only a second before setting to work, quickly trying to save the Doberman's life.
“I didn't point it at him,” Alena hastened to clarify. “I never pointed the gun at him.”
I told her that given how she must've looked at the time, she damn well knew that showing the gun to him was more than enough. She shrugged, then continued.
For the first couple of minutes while the vet struggled to get Miata stabilized, Alena did nothing but stand there, watching. The adrenaline was dropping away like a wave retreating from the shore, uncovering all the aches and sores it had been concealing, the searing pain from the wounds on her arm and leg. She was afraid to sit down, afraid to leave the room to tend to her own needs, suspicious that the vet would capitalize on her absence.
After several minutes, the vet said, “I have to operate on your dog.”
“Go ahead.”
“I'll need you to help me.”
“Tell me.”
The man looked at her. She thought he was in his fifties, perhaps. The gun in her hand made her feel guilty, the lack of clothing made her feel ashamed.
“You have to get clean first,” the vet told her. “There's a bathroom in the back, and some clothes in my daughter's room. Wash up, then come back.”
She didn't move.
“Did you do this to him?” the vet asked, sharply.
“No.” The question confused her at first, and then she remembered the gun again. “No! He was trying to protect me.”
“Then you have no reason to fear me.” The vet indicated a roll of gauze on one of the nearby tables, a pile of bandages. “Take these, get clean. Hurry.”
She did as instructed, using the bathroom first to hastily wash herself off. The bleeding on her arm and leg resumed when she went to clean the wounds, and she bandaged herself as best as she was able. The daughter's room, she thought, hadn't seen use in quite some time, and the clothing she found there seemed to bear that out. She pulled on a pair of pants that were both too short and too wide for her, secured them in place with a beaded belt. She stuck the Walther in her waistband, at the front.
When she returned, the vet was still attending Miata, now delivering plasma to the dog through an IV he'd set up. He acknowledged Alena's return, then told her to come and stand beside him.
“Do what I tell you, when I tell you.”
With Alena assisting him, he began to operate.
As I was walking into a brothel in the desert outside Dubai, Alena was changing Miata's IV in Poti. While I was showing a frightened young woman Tiasa Lagidze's picture, she was holding a clamp while the vet pulled bullet fragments from Miata's liver. While I was checking out of the Marina, she was watching the vet stitch our dog closed once more.
“He'll live,” the vet told her. He pulled his bloodstained gloves from his hands and threw them into the trash beneath the sink. “But he'll be weeks, if not months, to recover from this. How old is he?”
“I don't know,” Alena told him. “Ten? Maybe older.”
“He's an old dog.”
She nodded, then said, “I have money. I will pay you.”
“If you like.”
Alena fumbled cash from where she'd moved it to the pockets of her borrowed pants. She hadn't taken time to count it, to really examine it at all. She guessed she was holding somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred euros. She gave him two hundred of them, and the vet took the money without comment.
“We have to go,” she told him.
“I would caution against moving him. You both can stay here awhile longer.”
The offer was a tempting one, Alena told me, an extremely tempting one. The vet clearly lived alone, and no one had come calling during the course of the operation, which led her to conclude that he didn't get much in the way of clients or visitors. Having trusted him this far, trusting him further would have been easy.
The problem was that she had no way of knowing who else might be hunting for her, if anyone else would be coming at all. Given how she'd departed Kobuleti, given that it had been the chief of police who had warned her, if there were more hunters on the trail, it wouldn't take them long to expand their search to Poti. The las
t thing she wanted was another fight. The second to last thing, at that moment, was to bring such a fight to the doorstep of the man who'd helped her.
“You're very kind,” Alena told the vet. “But we can't.”
He sighed, then turned to one of his cabinets and began assembling gauze and bandages, putting them into an empty cardboard box. When he was finished, he handed it to her, everything Alena needed to make replacement dressings for Miata's—and her own—wounds.
“Simple food for him for a while,” he said. “Lots of water. Watch for infection. He won't want to move about, which is good. You must let him rest.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The vet sighed again, looked at the dog sleeping on the table in front of them.
“I will help you carry him to your car.”
There was an overnight ferry from Poti to Sochi scheduled to leave at six that evening, and for extra you could get your own room. Alena bought a ticket for herself and then bribed the clerk to allow Miata on board. She bought herself a jacket, a backpack, and several bottles of water, and at five she carried Miata, still drugged and sleeping, to their tiny, run-down little cabin. She set him on the fold-down bed, changed his dressings, and waited for the ferry to depart. Six o'clock came and went, and then seven, and then eight, and just as Alena was beginning to think that this wasn't simply engine trouble but maybe something more, perhaps the occupying Russians flexing their muscles, the ferry went into motion, and they set sail across the Black Sea.
She lay down beside Miata, feeling his heart beating, listening to him breathing, and for the first time since the phone had rung that morning, she allowed herself to relax. That was when she remembered that she'd missed our check-in, and realizing that put the rest of her problems into sharp focus.
Of the money she'd taken off the dead men, two hundred and sixteen euros remained. She had no phone and no immediate access to one. She had no credit cards and no documentation. Of the cash she carried, she knew most of it would be required simply to bribe her way into Sochi.
In Sochi, she would find a phone. She would call Sargenti, and he would wire money, and she would find a place for her and Miata to hide.
Then she would call me.
And realizing there was nothing else she could do for the time being, she forced herself to fall asleep, one hand on the Walther she'd snuck on board in the crotch of her too short and too wide pants, the other on Miata's flank.
CHAPTER
Twenty
Miata licked my hand, then, exhausted from the effort, dropped his muzzle back to the blanket he lay upon and shut his eyes once more. I stroked his neck, scratched behind his ears, then rose and crossed the expansive room back to where Alena sat on the bed, knees drawn to her chest, watching me. She'd purchased clothes that fit, Levi's and a black T-shirt, her feet bare. The bandage on her upper arm peeked out from beneath the sleeve, fresh white gauze that still smelled sterile.
“Did you speak to Iashvili?” she asked.
“Oh yeah.” I moved to the window, parting the curtains enough to look out. It was after midnight, and the traffic on Primorksy Boulevard was light. Somewhere nearby, I had been informed, were the famous Potemkin Steps, but if they were visible from where I was standing, I didn't see them. I let the curtains fall back.
“Did he know who they were?”
“Business associates of the men who took Tiasa.”
“The men you killed in Batumi.”
“That would be them, yeah.”
“He had no names?”
“He told me the names didn't matter.” I moved to the bed, sat down beside her and began unlacing my boots. “He says they'll try again.”
“That seems possible.”
I pulled my boots free, set them together on the floor, then flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. The ceilings in the Londonskaya were high, easily fourteen feet, painted yellow-gold. The hotel was Old World, built in the late 1860s, one of the finest in all of Odessa. I was pretty sure the chandelier hanging in the center of the room was real crystal and not simply cut glass.
After a moment, Alena lay down, as well. “You haven't told me about Dubai.”
“It wasn't good.”
“I would like to hear it.”
I told her, and she listened, and when I was done she didn't speak for a long time.
Then she asked, “Did you sleep with her? Kekela?”
I turned enough to look at her. She didn't move, her face in profile.
“You really have to ask?”
She closed her eyes, then shook her head once, slightly.
“But you asked anyway.”
“I apologize,” she said.
I sat up, angry, knowing I should let it go but not wanting to. “Why would you ask me that? Why the hell would you ask me that?”
Her eyes remained closed, and her mouth went tight. “I apologize.”
“I don't want you to apologize, I want to know why you would even think that.”
She didn't say anything.
I got up again, agitated. “You're the one lying to me, I'm not lying to you.”
That brought her back, and she pushed herself up enough to rest on her elbows. “I haven't lied to you.”
“I know you didn't go to Tbilisi to meet Nicholas,” I said. “So, yeah, you did lie to me.”
Her expression washed out, turning neutral. She moved slowly to sit fully upright, her feet on the floor, her hands at her side. She was watching Miata, once again asleep.
“Yes, I did.” She moved her gaze to me. “I went to see a doctor.”
I stared at her. “And you couldn't tell me that? If you wanted to look into another surgery on your leg, you could have told me that. We could go back to Switzerland, or Germany; there are better places for that than Tbilisi.”
“It's not my leg. I'm at thirteen weeks.”
“You're at thirteen weeks of what?” I asked.
She stared at me like I was an idiot. Since I honest to God had no idea what she was talking about, I stared right back at her, waiting for an explanation.
“I'm thirteen weeks pregnant, Atticus,” she said.
I kept staring at her, still waiting for an explanation, because I was sure I hadn't heard that right. “What?”
“I'm pregnant.”
The words rolled around my head for a few seconds.
“Say something.”
“I…”
“You what?”
“… thirteen weeks?”
“Fourteen now, I think.”
I went back to her side. The way I was feeling, oddly enough, reminded me of how I'd felt in the shower when I'd returned from Batumi after Vladek Karataev had died, but without the dry heaves. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes. I put my glasses on again.
“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her.
“Fears.” She was looking at Miata again, not at me.
“More than one?”
She almost laughed. “Too many to count.”
“I'm listening.”
“We never even talked about it, not once. It was never something we'd even discussed, it had never seemed a possibility.” Alena took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I lived my life from the moment the Soviets took me out of the orphanage in Magadan until the moment I met you believing I would live a life alone. That was simply the way it was. Twenty-five years, I was alone, and that was fine, because they made me someone who was supposed to be that way. I was supposed to be alone, always, until I was dead.”
She turned to meet my eyes, then, and she hadn't been lying at all. She was scared, and I could see it.
“Then I met you, and you loved me, and I will never, ever know why. And I am not alone with you, even when we are apart. I could not have allowed myself to imagine it, you see? More than I would have dreamed, if I had been allowed to dream. And to have a child with you, to be a mother?”
She laughed, not because it was funny, but because, I think, the irony wa
s so strong it actually hurt her.
“Me? A mother?”
I thought about her with Tiasa, the care she'd shown her, the time she'd given her. The way they had talked when they thought I couldn't hear them. The way Alena had taught her, the tenderness she'd failed to hide behind not-quite-stern-enough rebukes. The way they had played.
“I think,” I said, “that you could be a very good mother.”
She blinked at me, her face smoothing. “I didn't think you would want it. I didn't think you would want me to have a baby.”
“I don't want you to have a baby,” I told her. “I want you to have our baby.”
Then I put my arms around her, and I laid her down on the bed, and tried to show her just how much I meant it.
She was still sleeping when I awoke the next morning, and I let her be. Miata was awake, and up, though he seemed unsteady on his feet, and I dressed and took him out of the hotel for a very short walk, just long enough for him to relieve himself. He was slower on the way back, and when we returned to the room he went straight to his blanket and curled up on it once again. I put some water in one of the bowls Alena had secured for him, and put some kibble in the other. He didn't seem to have much appetite, but he drank the water readily enough.
I got cleaned up and prepared for the day ahead, thinking that I didn't know what the day ahead would bring. I knew enough about human trafficking to know that Ukraine wasn't exactly the safest place for us to be hiding at the moment, but then again, fleeing to Canada didn't seem to be an immediate option, either.