Critical Space

by Greg Rucka

  "Are you Albert?" Alena asked.

  He nodded, smiled again, looking from Alena to me.

  "Jerry needs his ship refueled."

  Maybe it was because she was on crutches, or maybe it was sexist, but Albert directed his response to me. "I already told Jerry, I can't help. Fuel I've got is spoken for, that's the way it is."

  "Where is it?"

  He glanced at her. "Why?"

  "Do you refuel from a boat, do you use a truck, how do you do it?"

  "A truck," he said, looking at Alena curiously. "But as I said, it's spoken for."

  "You will move the truck to the dock and refuel The Lutra."

  Albert laughed.

  I saw it coming, saw the shift of weight indicating that she was going into motion, but by then, she already had.

  Alena moved her weight almost entirely to the left crutch and swept the right one up sharply in between Albert's legs. The blow struck him squarely in the testicles, and it crumpled him forward, and he lost his balance. As swiftly as she'd struck, she pulled the crutch free and jabbed again, this time higher, hitting Albert just beneath the collarbone. He didn't have much air left, but what he had came out in a gurgle, and he fell back against the desk. The particleboard tore beneath him as he rode it onto the floor.

  She lowered the crutch and covered the distance to Albert with one move, set the tip of the right crutch against his body again, resting it just above his stomach.

  Albert's eyes were wide, bulging almost comically, and he wheezed in short spurts.

  "If I push down, you will die," Alena told him.

  Albert's expression indicated that he absolutely believed her.

  "To live, you will do the following -- you will get the keys to the truck. You will drive myself and my companion to The Lutra. You will refuel The Lutra. You will never mention us to anyone, ever. Do you understand?"

  He nodded, then nodded again.

  Alena moved the crutch from Albert's solar plexus. He avoided her gaze, tried to catch mine, silently pleading for help. What he saw gave him no comfort.

  "I'm with her," I told him.

  * * *

  We left the South Caicos less than sixty minutes later, leaving Albert in the cab of his truck, parked on the pier. Jerry paid him for the fuel.

  It took another day to reach Miami, and from there Alena, Bridgett, Miata, and I caught a flight to New York, landing at Kennedy. Not once during the trip did Bridgett speak to Alena, and for her part Alena never tried to engage her in conversation. From Bridgett's expression, I guessed she had a good idea of what had transpired in Cockburn Harbour, but she said nothing to me about that, either. I'm sure she thought that we'd left a body in our wake, and there seemed no point in my trying to explain otherwise.

  It made for a fairly tense trip.

  After we'd picked up Miata and moved out to the curb, Bridgett asked if I was headed home.

  "Not yet," I said.

  "You want me to tell anyone you're back?"

  "I'll handle it."

  "I'll rephrase. Is there anyone you don't want me to tell that you're back?"

  "No."

  "All right, then." She glanced at Alena, who was leaning on her crutches a couple feet away, talking to Miata in the dog carrier. Assured that she was out of earshot, Bridgett turned back to me. "You change your mind, all you have to do is call a cop," she said, and she headed for the taxi stand and climbed into a waiting cab.

  * * *

  We rented a car, and from the airport Alena directed me to one of her caches. It was in Queens, a tiny storage facility that abutted onto a junkyard and had easy access to the Cross Island Parkway. When we arrived, she told the manager that her name was Kim Gallagher, and that she needed to pick up some things for her brother. She showed him a current New York State driver's license to prove her identity, and when he checked his files, he saw that, indeed, her brother had given her permission to access the locker.

  We brought the car in close, parked, and as we got out, I asked, "How many of these do you have?"

  "In the five boroughs? Four." She handed me the key, leaning on her crutches. "At one point I had six, but one was broken into last year, and the other has most likely been compromised, so I won't go near it. This one is very clean, I haven't visited it in six years. It's never been used."

  I unlocked the door and ran it up on its rails, and before we stepped inside she used one of her crutches to pull a piece of fishing line out of the darkness. The string had been run about five inches high, across the opening, and there was still tension on it.

  "Safety," she said. "If it's broken, I know someone has been inside."

  "Unless they replaced it."

  "Unless they replaced it, yes. I don't think anyone has."

  We stepped inside and I pulled the string that ran to the single bulb hung in the space. It was low wattage and didn't penetrate to the corners, but it didn't need to, because all that was inside were two pieces of luggage, a large blue duffel and a smaller black rolling bag. I put them in the car, closed the locker again, and we stopped at the manager's on the way out to return the key with thanks.

  In Manhattan we checked into the SoHo Grand and got ourselves into a large room on one of the pet-friendly floors. I stuck with the Paul Lieberg identity; Alena called herself Jessica Bethier.

  Before we headed up, I gave the FedEx envelope I'd been carrying in my go-bag to the young woman who checked us in, asked if she could send it out that afternoon. She assured me it would be no trouble at all.

  Our room had a king bed and a couch that would convert to a queen. As soon as we were inside, Alena opened the carrier and Miata sprang out and stretched, then began snuffling his way through all of the corners. The hotel directory actually had a separate menu for pets, and Alena used it to order him something to drink and eat. The food arrived in under ten minutes, and Miata dove into his bowls. Once she saw that he was happy, Alena sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her crutches up after her. I opened the bags we'd taken from the cache and dumped them out on the bed, and Alena and I began going through the pile. She'd cached a couple changes of clothes, three pistols, and one HK PDW submachine gun. There were also three wads of well-used bills, twenties and tens bound with rubber bands.

  "How much is there?" I asked.

  "Here? A little under fifteen."

  "And there's money in every cache?"

  "Always. The U.S. is expensive."

  "Oxford works the same way?"

  "I'd expect he does. Money is pretty integral to the work." She started loading the pistols. "It's time we talked about what we're doing."

  "I want to get you someplace secure, somewhere that you can recover from your injury."

  She had been sliding bullets into the cylinder of a Colt revolver, and now she stopped and looked up at where I stood. "I will not recover. My left leg below the knee is permanently crippled. It cannot support my weight, it will never support it again."

  To prove the point, she extended and raised her leg, then set it on the bed, her foot pointed at me. She reached down and pulled up the cuff of her pant leg, folding it back quickly to just below her knee. A large gauze rectangle was taped to her shin. She pulled it free, then turned her ankle to give me the full view. The stitches ran from just above her ankle to almost behind her knee, a zigzag of thread thick and black with dried blood. Her calf was only half as wide as it should have been.

  "I've lost a large portion of my lower leg," Alena said, her face entirely neutral. "It's possible that the tibia and the fibula were both splintered, if not broken. The doctor in Kingstown did the best he could without a hospital and without more skill, and there is no infection, and the skin is knitting. But I will never walk on this leg again, not without assistance."

  "We can get you proper medical help," I said. "Not some backroom surgeon. We can get you someone who knows what they are doing."

  She folded the gauze back into place over the stitches, began rolling her pant leg down. "A
tticus, even if you are correct, what you are saying requires time and money. Money I have. Time I do not. Oxford is on his way here, if not in New York already."

  "All the more reason to get you someplace secure."

  "I have not disputed that." She picked up the Colt, slid another round into the cylinder. "What do you suggest?"

  "I want to bring in my colleagues," I said.

  She finished loading the revolver, closing the cylinder with a push, a calm motion, very controlled. "Will you tell them who I am?"

  "Yes."

  She turned the gun in her hand, looking at it thoughtfully. "I will not go to prison. I will not allow that."

  "They're my friends. They'll respect my wishes. If I tell them to keep it quiet, they'll honor that."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  "Sure enough to bet my life on it?"

  "Yes."

  She smiled, setting the gun back onto the bed.

  "You must have very good friends," she said.

  "Absolutely not," Dale Matsui told me. "No way. I can't believe you'd even ask us to do this!"

  He looked around the table, to Corry and Natalie, and then to Special Agent Scott Fowler, to see if they were going to offer him support. From their expressions, I suspected he would get it.

  It was nearly midnight, and we were at the back of The Stoned Crow in Greenwich Village, the same bar where once, months ago, Lady Ainsley-Hunter was supposed to join students from NYU in merry pitchers of beer. All around us on the walls were representations of crows, paintings and pictures, some literal, some more loosely interpreted. Over Corry's head hung a poster from The Crow movie, and farther down the wall was a promotional flyer for a concert by the band of the same name.

  It had taken a couple of hours to assemble everyone because I'd had to go carefully, unsure of who Oxford might already have under surveillance. In the end I'd made contact through Scott, thinking that he would be the most risky for Oxford to mark, and therefore the least likely to watch. Scott had taken it pretty well, saying only, "I was wondering when you'd call," and then he'd agreed to contact the others. He'd arrived at the bar first, with Natalie close on his heels, but he'd had just enough time to pull me aside.

  "Gracey and Bowles are looking for you," he'd said. "We really need to talk."

  Now he was staying silent, and I suspected he'd let the conversation run its course before weighing in with his own opinion and whatever facts he himself had.

  Corry said, "I'm with Dale, Atticus."

  "She's a paying client," I said. "Like any other."

  "Uh, no, I don't think so," Dale said.

  "Look, we take money to protect people we don't like all the time. It's never been our job to pass judgments..."

  "Okay, hypocrisy readings are off the charts," Corry said. "Perhaps you may recall you're the guy who was complaining about spoiled-brat movie stars. Those are jobs you were all too willing to turn down."

  "I never turned them down, I just never liked them," I replied.

  Dale was shaking his head. "It's a personal choice, Atticus. I'm not going to protect the Grand Wizard of the KKK. I don't give a damn about how professional I'm being or not. I'd have thought you would agree with that."

  "She's not who you think she is."

  "She's the woman who nearly killed me twice," Dale replied. "So you tell me, Atticus -- who am I supposed to think she is? How am I supposed to get past that?"

  "I did," I said.

  Natalie, who had been watching me closely the whole time, looked down at her beer, and I realized it had been the wrong thing to say.

  "Yeah," Corry said, quieter. "Yeah, you did. And frankly, that's a problem for us."

  "You've put us in a really bad position," Dale said. "You've put the whole firm at risk. If this gets out, what you've been doing, of what happened to Havel, of where you were and who you were with..."

  "Wait just a fucking second," I said. I hadn't gotten as far as telling them about Havel. I hadn't told them about Oxford yet. I'd gotten only as far as telling them who my principal was and that I needed their help.

  Natalie turned the glass of beer between her hands. "Bridgett came by the office this afternoon. She had us call Scott."

  Hell, I thought.

  "She told us everything that happened," Corry said.

  "No, she didn't. She told you what she thinks happened. But she's got her facts assed up."

  "Is Havel dead?"

  "Yes."

  "Were you living with Drama for over three months?"

  "Yes."

  "Was it more important to you to keep Drama from the authorities than it was to report the murder of a woman who was, ostensibly, if not a friend, at least an acquaintance?"

  "Where are you going with this, Corry?"

  He didn't like my tone, which was understandable, I suppose, because I certainly wasn't liking his. He put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, and Scott had to adjust how he was sitting to keep his eyes on me. I still couldn't get a bead off of him, of what he was thinking.

  "You've abused your friendship with everyone at this table," Corry told me. "We've spent over a quarter of a year worried sick about you, waiting for a word or a sign that you were all right. We were your friends, and you abused our friendship. Did you even consider us?"

  "I thought about you guys all the time," I said. "I wasn't in a position where I could just pick up the phone and call."

  "You were absent for four months, dammit! Four fucking months! You should have found a way!"

  "I couldn't! God dammit, if I had she would never have trusted me! If I had you wouldn't have understood! Don't you think I fucking agonized over this?"

  Corry straightened, leaning back in his seat. He moved his beer around on the table, then lifted it and drained the glass dry.

  Dale said, "Did you really think we'd greet you as the conquering hero?"

  "I thought you'd give me the benefit of the doubt."

  "We are giving you the benefit of the doubt," Corry said. "We're here, now."

  "And when we're done, is Scott going to throw me down and slap the cuffs on?"

  Natalie made a delicate snort. "Oh, please."

  Corry spread his hands, as if sweeping all of our words from the air. "Okay, let's just forget the personal for a second. Let's talk about the professional. Do you know what happens to us if this gets out? We lose everything we've gained, everything we've worked hard for. We're back where we were when Trent had us blacklisted. You have no idea how we had to scramble after you vanished, Atticus, you have no idea the damage control we had to do. We lost two jobs as a result of your disappearance, and there was major footwork involved in keeping three others."

  "Bottom line," I said.

  That made him really angry. "Yes, bottom line. And you know what? I don't think I'm in that great a minority on this. I have a wife and a child and another on the way..."

  "Esme's pregnant?"

  "Yes, she's three months along, and you know what, Atticus? I want to keep a roof over my family's head, I want to send my children to college, I want to keep them fed and clothed and give them the things I never had. And to do that I need money, and I'd prefer to earn that money doing something I enjoy, something I take pride in. Like it or not, KTMH is a business. You had a responsibility to that, and you abdicated it."

  "Then there's a solution," I said. "Buy me out."

  Natalie looked across the table at Dale. She said, "I told you."

  "I'm serious," I said. "Buy me out. What you don't seem to get, Corry, is that I do understand what you're saying, I do understand your concerns, and I sure as hell do know how this could look. I don't want to see the firm die, certainly not through any action of mine."

  "Then why are you doing this?" Corry demanded.

  "Because I have agreed to protect this life, I agreed to do this job. And because I believe her life is worth protecting."

  There was silence at the table for a minute.

 
"I can't do this, Atticus," Dale said, finally. "I'm sorry, man. You're my friend, we were legs together, dammit. But I cannot do this thing."

  "Neither can I," Corry said.

  We all looked at Natalie. "You'll sell us your share of the firm?" she asked.

  "Draw it up tomorrow morning, I'll sign it tomorrow afternoon," I told her.

  "Then once it's signed, I'll take the job," she said.

  Both Dale and Corry opened their mouths, objections flying, but she cut them off.

  "We've each got our own shares, we've each got our own jobs in the firm. I'm taking this one. But I agree with Atticus. We don't judge our principals. We protect them to the best of our abilities. That's always been the job."

  "This goes bad for him, it'll be bad for you," Corry said. "And that'll be bad for us."

  "If that's what happens, I'll deal with it."

  Neither of them said anything. At the back of the booth, Scott hadn't moved.

  Dale slid out of his seat, taking his coat from the peg on the side of the booth. He put it on and headed out of the bar. Corry followed, but he stopped while zipping up his coat.

  "When it's all said and done, you know this isn't personal."

  "I'm remembering when you were working for Sentinel," I said to him. "The way you hated Trent and how everything was about the bottom line."

  He frowned. "If you can change, so can I."

  "Hell yeah," I said.

  He offered me his hand, and I shook it, then watched him walk away.

  Scott cleared his throat. "Hi, remember me? I'm the guy whose face you lied in."

  "I'm sorry about that, Scott."

  "I figured you were, but I wanted to hear it."

  "So," Natalie said. "When do we start?"

  "I'm working on getting a house," I said. "She's got some connections. I want to button her up, then we'll start working this thing."

  "Working it how?"

  "How much did Bridgett tell you?"

  Natalie looked at Scott, and Scott held up a hand, ticking off points. "Drama. Oxford. Book. Sex. Stockholm Syndrome."

  "She really doesn't want to believe I'm doing this of my own volition," I said.

  "She thinks you think it's your own volition, but no, she really doesn't," Natalie agreed.