by Greg Rucka
“He rents it out,” Bridgett told me in the car. She drove the way she'd always done, far too fast, even though the rented Ford clearly hadn't been built for it. At least she was staying on the correct side of the road. “We've got it for as long as we need.”
“You left Alena there alone?” I asked. I was feeling lightheaded, and it took me a couple of seconds to formulate the question.
“You say it like I had a fucking choice in the matter, Atticus. That bitch doesn't give choices, she makes up her mind and that's pretty much it. I swear to God, I tell her left, she says right just to be contrary.”
“Miata.”
“Yeah, she didn't want to leave the dog. The dog's company, by the way, I enjoy considerably more than hers.”
I couldn't think of anything to say, and so stayed quiet. It was warm and the road vibration was comforting. I could feel myself starting to nod off again.
Bridgett glanced over at me, frowning. “How bad is it?”
“He took her to Nevada,” I said. “Gave me the location of the handoff I'll head there next.”
“I'm not sure you're heading anywhere next. You don't look good.”
“You don't like my tie?” I asked, and laughed, because I thought I was being very clever.
“You're in shock.”
I considered that, or at least tried to. It seemed reasonable. I'd had to use the lavatory on the plane twice in flight to repack the wound on my side. Absorbent though the gauze was, I'd been in danger of soaking through my expensive new shirt. The idea of walking through Dublin customs as a bloodstain spread out from my middle hadn't seemed a very good one.
“I lost a lot of blood,” I said, slowly. “Think I'm still leaking.”
“You need a doctor.”
I shook my head. My mouth was dry, maybe because I was going shocky, maybe from sleep-induced cottonmouth. I was thirsty. “Too many questions.”
“Answering questions is better than being dead.”
“I'll be all right. Just need a safe place for a day or two. Just to get repaired. Get some sleep.”
“‘Repaired’? You sound like you're a fucking car.”
“Vroom vroom,” I said.
The house was an old stone cottage, weathered and small, its front door painted bright red, and the same color had been applied to the shutters fastened open at the windows. A dry stone fence marked the property from the narrow road, a fast-moving stream flowing just beyond, crossed by a metal grate bridge. The actual farmland itself was overgrown and unkept, disused.
“Seamus makes more renting the place to tourists than working the land,” Bridgett explained.
“Seamus is your cousin.”
“Seamus is my cousin, yes.”
“Seamus,” I said.
“We're Irish, fuck off,” Bridgett said. She parked the Ford with its nose facing the road, yanked the parking brake.
The red door opened, Alena moving into it, concealing her right side behind the frame for a moment before stepping out. She had a shotgun with her, double-barreled, more suited for downing birds than people, but if it worked for Dick Cheney, it would sure as hell work for her. I got out of the car carefully. Bridgett had already grabbed my bag.
“He was stabbed,” Bridgett told Alena.
“Cut, not stabbed,” I corrected. “Stabbed would've been worse.”
Alena's mouth tightened to a line, her lips losing their color.
“He's in shock. He's going to decompensate.”
She held out a hand for me, and I reached for it, but she took me by my elbow instead.
“Nice shotgun,” I mumbled.
“It's what was here.” Alena guided me through the door. It was considerably darker inside, the windows small, the lights low-wattage. Alena led me to a bedroom, and I started to remove my suit coat, but she stopped me, growling a warning.
“Where?” she asked.
“Left palm, right upper forearm, left oblique,” I managed. “Left oblique's still bleeding.”
“Stop moving.” She came around behind me, carefully began tugging the sleeve off my arm. Bridgett had moved into the doorway, watching, and I heard paws on the dark hardwood, saw Miata peer around her knee at me.
“Hey, buddy,” I told him.
Alena helped me with the shirt, and I saw that I'd leaked through it despite all my precautions. She told me to lie down, and I did so for what seemed like the first time in three days, felt my whole body shudder, almost a spasm, as muscles I hadn't known were clenched suddenly relaxed.
“Make yourself useful,” Alena told Bridgett, shoving a pillow beneath my legs to elevate them. “Water, towels.”
“Bitch,” Bridgett said, cheerfully, but left the doorway. Miata hesitated, then came into the bedroom and lay down beside the bed.
“You could make an effort,” I told Alena.
“She's just standing there, she shouldn't need to be told to help,” Alena said. “This one on your side I don't like. You are tearing it when you move.”
“We should probably do something about that.”
She knelt down on her haunches, putting the wound at eye level, careful not to touch it. “Only blood?”
“Far as I know.”
“So maybe the peritoneum was not perforated.” She hissed softly. “I don't want to risk infection, or further infection. We need to sterilize, and we'll need to stitch it.”
“Can you do that yourself?” Bridgett had a couple of towels over one arm, was carrying a porcelain bowl with a matching porcelain pitcher resting in it.
“I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies,” I said.
Both women glared at me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
Bridgett handed Alena a small bottle of antibacterial hand wash. “This help?”
“We need things,” Alena said, taking the bottle. She squirted a generous amount onto her hands, began rubbing them vigorously together. “Ringer's solution and a catheter. Betadine or some other sterile wash. Saline, a lot of it. Needle-nose pliers. Thin needle, thin thread, silk is ideal. Antibiotics if we can get them, a Z-Pak would be best.”
“I should be able to get all that in Galway. Everything but the Ringer's, at least.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“Fucking,” said Bridgett. “Bitch.”
It was dark in the room when Bridgett returned, to find Alena sitting beside me, still holding the towel she was using as a bandage to apply pressure to the wound. I'd either slept or passed out since Bridgett had left, depending on whether one wanted to be charitable.
Bridgett flipped on the lights, then moved to the foot of the bed to dump out the contents of the plastic shopping bag she was carrying. Alena stopped her.
“Show me.”
The look Bridgett gave her would've dropped a charging rhino. With a deliberation verging on surliness, she began removing items from the bag, one at a time. Alena told her where she wanted each set down. When she produced two bags of Ringer's solution and a catheter, Alena actually made a noise of approval.
“Did I get everything, ma'am?” Bridgett asked.
“We're going to need more light,” Alena replied. “And a candle or lighter.”
It took Bridgett a couple of minutes to gather the items and then return, during which time Alena left the bandage at my side to use the antiseptic wash on my arm and hook up the first bag of Ringer's. Bridgett returned as the catheter was going in, and she winced visibly at the sight. She asked Alena where she wanted the lamp she was carrying, placed it as directed.
In my daze, I realized something.
“When was the last time you did this?”
“Long time ago. Afghanistan.” She actually smiled at me. “The vet in Poti was a good reminder.”
“You are motherfucking kidding me,” Bridgett said. “Let's take him to the goddamn hospital!”
“It's the same procedure,” said Alena. “We can do this. Come here.”
Together, they
rolled me onto my right side, propping me up with more pillows. When Alena pulled the towel away from the wound, it pulled the clot that had formed with it, causing fresh pain and bringing fresh blood. She dumped all of one of the bottles of saline on the wound, irrigating it, soaking the bed and the pillows in the process with a mixture of blood and salt water. Then she dumped the antiseptic wash into the basin, scrubbing her hands and forearms. I smelled fire, saw Bridgett prepping the needle. When it was ready, she offered the pliers to Alena.
“No,” Alena said, washing the length of thread she'd prepared in the basin. “We might cross-contaminate. You will stitch.”
“The fuck you say,” Bridgett said.
“I will hold the wound closed, you will do the stitching.”
“Not me, sister.”
“Ebi tvoyu boga dush mat'! Yes, you! Come here!”
“I can't sew him shut! I can't do it!”
I managed to raise my head, focused as best I could on Bridgett. I wasn't sure I was following. “You've got a hoop through your nostril. You have a half pound's worth of earrings in each of your ears.”
“That's different! I didn't have to give myself the piercings!”
“You used to fucking shoot heroin, Bridgett,” I said. “Don't tell me you're afraid of needles.”
“Why do you think I'm scared of them, motherfucker?”
Alena swore in Russian again, this time to herself. I thought for certain the next thing she'd say in English would be a threat, and I was still present enough to know that if it was, things would go all the way downhill.
“Please, Bridgett,” Alena said. “I need your help.”
Bridgett stared at her. “Don't try to play me. Never fucking do that, okay?”
“Okay.”
It took another second, then Bridgett moved out of my line of sight, to join Alena behind me. There was more explanation from Alena, what she wanted Bridgett to do, and then I felt the needle pushing through my skin, and it surprised me because it hurt a hell of a lot more than I'd expected. They worked slowly and carefully, and that didn't help, either. It hurt enough that I hadn't realized they were finished until they were moving the pillows, rolling me onto my back.
“Done?” I asked.
“Done,” Alena told me.
“Good,” I said, and fell asleep then and there, in my blood-and saline-soaked bed.
CHAPTER
Twenty-eight
The day after they closed the wound in my side, Bridgett drove me back to Dublin, this time to drop me off at the airport, rather than to pick me up. I was clean-shaven, wearing my new suit and a clean shirt, with a new pair of glasses that Bridgett had gotten made for me at a one-hour place while I'd been sleeping most of the previous day away. The stitches in my side itched, the skin tight, and again I was suffering cotton-mouth, but now it was due to the antibiotics I was taking, and not from the fact that I was in compensated shock. While I'd been unconscious, Alena and Bridgett had also sewn up the cut in my forearm. My palm they'd left to a bandage and more superglue.
“You have any reason to believe this place you're going to in Nevada will get you what you want?”
“None at all,” I said. “But I think the information is accurate.”
“Why's that?”
“Because the guy who gave it to me believed I would kill him if it wasn't.”
“Did you?” She didn't take her eyes off the road.
“No,” I said.
Bridgett slowed to pay the toll over the River Liffey. Dublin spread out to the east, hidden in the rain. As she accelerated again, she said, “Guy sells people into slavery.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Explain this to me.”
“Explain what?”
“That fucker didn't deserve to live. But you let him go.”
“You think I should have punched his ticket?”
“If anyone was going to do it…”
“I thought about it,” I admitted. “This other guy, too, Arzu Kaya. Pure piece of human excrement, that one. I thought about killing them both.”
“But you didn't.”
I shook my head.
“Why didn't you?”
“It's not about them,” I said. “It's about me.”
I'd booked my flight as Matthew Twigg, flying Continental to Seattle via Newark. Maybe it was because I'd been doing so damn much travel, maybe it was because I'd be flying into the U.S. again, but I took extra precautions this time to reinforce my cover. I abandoned the duffel that had seen me through the last four weeks of globe-trotting, exchanging it for a nice leather two-piece set, one rolling bag, the other a messenger. The rolling bag I loaded with clothes and appropriate toiletries. The messenger carried my laptop and its attendant cables, as well as copies of The Financial Times and The Economist. I still had Bakhar's little black book and Vladek Karataev's BlackBerry, as well. The little black book I kept in the messenger bag. The BlackBerry I put in a case on my hip, even going so far as to buy a Bluetooth headset for it.
Just your run-of-the-mill globe-trotting financial wizard, that was me.
The problem wasn't with the paper, per se, but with the itineraries. One-way tickets raise eyebrows amongst those who look for such things. While the passport that Nicholas Sargenti had supplied for Matthew Twigg had plenty of international travel attributed to it already, nowhere was there an entry stamp for Ireland. In and of itself, that wasn't extraordinary; most of the EU didn't bother for travel between member nations. But it was another anomaly, along with the one-way itinerary, and it made me nervous.
And sure enough, I was popped coming through customs in Newark.
“How long have you been away, Mr. Twigg?”
“Ten days,” I said. “Had a deal to close in Dublin, then took a day to visit the Rock of Cashel.”
He nodded slightly, flipping slowly through my passport beneath the purple glow of the blacklight by his terminal. There were plenty of ways he could determine that I was lying, but none of them were quick. Despite whatever efforts governments made to convince people of the contrary, his terminal didn't have a global database of travelers and their itineraries.
“They didn't stamp your entry,” the agent said. “Next time you want to make sure they do, all right?”
“They didn't?”
“Nah, I'm not seeing it.”
He marked my passport, whacked it with his stamp, and handed it back.
“Welcome home,” he told me.
I followed the connecting flight all the way through to SeaTac. It was after ten when I arrived, and I found myself a room at a budget hotel near the airport, booked myself on the earliest flight I could find the next morning to Las Vegas. I took a shower, careful to keep the stitches on my arm and side dry, which actually took some doing, and when I was finished, I felt like I still had a film of soap and sweat clinging to my body. I set the alarm on the BlackBerry to wake me with plenty of time for the flight, then killed the lights and lay on my back on the bed, with the television on low for company.
Theunis Mesick hadn't been able to give me much. He had been, he explained, the middleman. Arzu had handled the money, arranged the sales, as he had arranged the sale of Tiasa. Mesick's job had been to transport her from Trabzon and to take her, via Amsterdam, to the U.S. For doing this, Arzu had paid him almost twenty thousand euros. Mesick had been smart enough not to mention anything else he might have done with Tiasa, which had probably saved his life; if he'd confirmed what I suspected, that he, like all the men before him, had raped her, I'd likely have killed him then and there, and to hell with the rumblings of my conscience.
Mesick had simply been another link in the supply chain, and his information supported that. The only names he knew were Arzu's and Karataev's. He'd been given a phone number to use once he'd reached Las Vegas with Tiasa and told to call it using a prepaid cell phone. When he did, instead of a person, he always reached an answering machine. He would leave a message with the number of his phone, and within
an hour of doing so would receive a text message telling him when and where to make the delivery.
It was a clean system, very difficult to trace back, and one that left nothing incriminating in its wake.
Mesick had been sincerely unable to remember the number, despite my threats, but it didn't really matter. The number he was told to call had never been the same one twice. Even had he been able to recall it, I was certain that all it would get me would be an out-of-service message. If the people on this end of the supply line weren't all using prepaid cell phones as well, they were fools. And I knew already that they weren't.
What Mesick had given me instead were directions to the drop site, where he'd brought Tiasa. Why he could recall that and not a phone number I didn't know, and it made me suspicious.
That Arzu had set me up by sending me to Mesick wasn't lost on me. Nor was the fact that I'd left both men alive. But Mesick was convinced Arzu was dead. Unless Arzu managed to buy himself out of lockup, there was no reason for Mesick to believe otherwise. And if I believed Mesick's information—and I didn't see much choice—then Mesick had no way of warning whoever had Tiasa that I was coming.
It wasn't ideal at all, but it was as close to a level playing field as I was likely to get.
It was 101 degrees when I arrived in Las Vegas at eight in the morning. By the time I'd rented a car and checked into a hotel room well away from the Strip, it was ten, the mercury was kissing 108 and still climbing.
My rental had a Magellan GPS unit, and I used it, in conjunction with a newly purchased map, to plot myself a course out of town, heading northeast on Interstate 15. Vegas thinned, then dwindled, giving way to new developments peppering both sides of the highway, some of them left only partially constructed. The housing crash had clearly taken a boot to the nuts of Las Vegas.
Mesick hadn't had an address as much as a location, and with only his directions to go by, the doubt came gleefully creeping back as the Mojave Desert stretched itself out on all sides. After half an hour I passed the turnoff to the Valley of Fire Highway, and that was in keeping with what he'd told me. I stuck to the interstate as he had done, wondering what Tiasa had seen of the landscape, what she had made of this alien world. Wondering if she had been afraid still, or again, or if she'd felt nothing, turned numb by it all.