Walking dead ak-7

by Greg Rucka

  But maybe an extra line or four to her face, the etching just a touch deeper at the corner of the arctic blue eyes. If gray had started trying to find its way into her black hair, she'd either dyed it into submission or eliminated it altogether, strand by strand.

  "Atticus," Bridgett Logan said, and the poker face went away, and she smiled at me, her teeth very white against her oxblood lipstick.

  "Hello, Bridgett."

  "Wait right there, okay?" Her smile broadened, and she showed me her right index finger, indicating just one moment, then pivoted on her toe and headed past the counter that marked the edge of her kitchen, down the hall. I watched her go. At the end of the hall, she ducked right, into her bedroom, out of sight. For a couple of seconds there was silence, and then I heard her fumbling around.

  "It's right here," I said.

  She stuck her head out of her bedroom, saw me holding up the Sig Sauer in one hand, slide locked back. With my other hand, I held up the magazine for the pistol.

  Her smile, if anything, got larger.

  "You motherfucker," she said cheerfully, coming back down the hall.

  "I didn't want you shooting me before we had a chance to talk."

  "That's all right, that's fine." She had reached the kitchen, turning into it. I heard the sound of a drawer being opened, the clatter of cutlery.

  "Bridgett." I set the pistol and mag down on the coffee table in front of me.

  "Shut the fuck up." She found what she was looking for, turned, showing me a large carving knife, the blade maybe six inches long. "This'll do."

  "Bridgett," I said again.

  The smile was as bright as ever as she came around the edge of the counter. She was holding the knife all wrong, her right fist tight around the handle, blade pointing down, but I thought telling her that probably wouldn't help things much.

  "You really going to stab me in your living room?"

  "Yeah," she said, bending her elbow and bringing the knife up to her shoulder. She was still far enough away that I wasn't sure she was going to do it. "I think I am, actually."

  There was a knock at the door.

  Bridgett stopped her advance, the knife still up.

  "You should get that," I said.

  She looked in the direction of the door, then back to me, and the smile was no longer anywhere to be seen, most likely no longer in the borough of Manhattan, I suspected.

  "Why?" she demanded.

  "Because I think it's your sister, and I'm hoping you're marginally less inclined to murder me if there's a nun in the room."

  "I could keep her waiting in the hall, let her in after I'm finished."

  "That's true. Hard to explain, though."

  "I hate you," Bridgett Logan informed me, tossing the knife onto her couch, and moving out of sight again, this time to answer the door. I heard her greeting her sister, a mock cry of "Cashel! What a surprise! Come in, come in!" and took the time to get up enough to move the knife from the couch to the coffee table, setting it beside the pistol.

  Cashel came into sight first, Bridgett following her. Together, there was no mistaking the family resemblance, though Cashel was an inch or two shorter than her older sister's six feet, her eyes more gray than blue. She was wearing a tan blazer over a white blouse and black slacks, removing the coat as she entered. I could see the lapel pin on the blazer, the tall and thin rectangle with the engraving of a rolling hillside, a cross at its summit, the symbol of her order.

  She smiled when she saw me, and unlike Bridgett's, it was genuine. "Atticus."

  "Hello, Sister."

  Her eyes caught the implements of death and pain on the coffee table, and the smile shrank, turned wry.

  "Looks like you were correct," Cashel said.

  I shrugged.

  Bridgett, nostrils flaring, glared at her sister, then at me, then back to her sister.

  "You knew he was here? You knew he was in New York?"

  "We met for coffee this morning," Cashel said. "He said it might be best if I stopped by."

  Bridgett rounded on her sister, eyes blazing. "You know who he is? What he's become? This isn't the Boy Scout I told you about all those years ago."

  "I'm not sure he ever was," Cashel replied, moving to the couch.

  "You set me up." Bridgett bounced her look between her sister and me once more, then decided she was angrier at me, which I thought was more than fair. "You fucking set me up."

  "Yeah," I confirmed. "But I have a reason."

  "It had better be a damn good one."

  "It is to me," I said. "I need your help."

  "You have no right to ask for my help, Atticus! It's been, what, seven years? You made your choice back then. You made your decision, you walked away from everyone you knew, everything you were. You chose the bad guy over us. You have no right."

  "Not everything is black and white," I said.

  "Oh, forgive me, I thought murder was wrong, I thought it was, what's the word?" Bridgett turned to her sister. "What is it again, Sister? Oh, right! It's a sin! It's a fucking sin!"

  Cashel made a slight face. I suspected Bridgett was being liberal with her profanity simply to annoy her younger sibling.

  "God detests the sin," Cashel pointed out. "Not the sinner."

  "Do you know what he's become?" Bridgett demanded. "Do you know what he does?"

  "You don't know what I do," I pointed out.

  "You're a fucking assassin, Atticus," Bridgett said. "Spin it however you like, you kill people for money, that makes you a fucking goddamn assassin."

  Cashel looked at me.

  "I'm not," I said. "Despite what your sister may have convinced herself of, I do not sell what I can do. Have I killed people? Yes. Will I do it again? If I have to, yes. I'm not proud of it. I'm not eager for it. But that's how it is."

  Bridgett ran a hand up the side of her face, into her hair, taking a fistful of it to tug. She let it go, shaking her head.

  "I think you should listen to what he has to say," Cashel told her sister.

  "You don't know what he did." Bridgett let her hair go, shoulders slumping. All of her seemed tired, suddenly, and her voice went soft. "You don't know how many of our friends died because of what he did, because of the choice he made."

  Cashel reached out for her sister's hand, gave her fingers a squeeze. "Listen to him."

  Bridgett snorted wearily, then nodded.

  "Alena's in a hotel in Odessa," I said. "She won't be there much longer, she's looking for a place to move to, to hole up. She's alone, and I need someone I can trust to be with her, to help keep her safe."

  Bridgett's expression turned to incredulity, the fatigue dissipating in a new wave of outrage.

  "Fuck you."

  "She needs help."

  "Fuck you!" Bridgett appealed to her sister. "You know who he's talking about? You know who this woman he's talking about is? Even if you believe what he's telling us about himself, he can't say the same about her-"

  "She's pregnant," I interrupted.

  Over coffee, when I'd told Cashel that Alena was pregnant, her response had been one of genuine pleasure.

  Bridgett, not so much. I might as well have punched her, the reaction was so immediate and so physical. Her head snapped back, came around to stare at me. Her mouth opened, lower lip working, and then she closed it again. She backed up, bumping into the kitchen counter, put a hand on one of the barstools there. After a second, she took the seat.

  "Yours?" she asked, finally.

  "Yeah."

  "She's having your baby?"

  "Yeah."

  She shook her head once more, muttering, before she said, "You don't need my help. That woman, pregnant? Anyone fucks with her they'd be dead twice before they hit the ground."

  "I need someone with her I can trust. Someone who can back her up if it comes to that."

  "And is it going to come to that?"

  "I don't know. There's a chance. I've made some people very angry lately."

 
"Not including myself."

  "More recently."

  "Why can't it be you?" There was the edge of new suspicion in the question. "She's having your baby, after all."

  "Because I have to find someone first," I said. Most of what I told Bridgett about Tiasa Lagidze I'd already told her sister when we'd met for coffee in the Bronx that morning. After arriving at Kennedy the night before, I'd checked into a hotel near the airport, traveling under the Anthony Shephard ID. Jet lag had me up before five, and I'd used my laptop to find a phone number for Cashel Logan, a Sister of Incarnate Love. It hadn't taken long, but I'd waited until after seven before putting in the call, asking to meet her.

  Bridgett listened without comment, but with visible emotion. When I described the women I'd seen in Turkey, the girls I'd found in the brothel in Dubai, the fury writ itself large on her face.

  "I've done some counseling with victims of trafficking," Cashel said. "It's increased substantially in the last couple of years, as more and more cases have come to light, as law enforcement has become more aware of the crime."

  "There was that case in New Jersey," Bridgett said. "Last year, it made the Times."

  "Yes. And the arrests in Kansas and Florida."

  "This girl could be anywhere in the world," Bridgett told me.

  "Maybe. Some places more likely than others. I've got a lead I need to chase down."

  "The experience is uniformly brutal, but it is survivable," Cashel said. "You can recover from it, make a life again. But the longer the slavery, the harder the recovery. And the younger the victim, the more damage that has to be undone."

  "So you're going to rescue the girl, and you want me to protect the little lady?" Bridgett asked. "That's why you're here?"

  "If you want to put it like that," I said.

  "Once upon a time, you knew a lot of bodyguards," Bridgett said. "I'm not a bodyguard, I'm a private investigator. Why haven't you asked them? Or did you do that already and they all told you what I'm inclined to tell you?"

  "I thought about it," I answered. "But I can't trust them the way I can trust you."

  "You son of a bitch."

  "I've got nobody else."

  "And whose fault is that, Atticus?"

  "No one's but my own."

  "You would say that." She glared at me for a long time, then slid off the barstool. "Fuck it. I've always wanted to visit Ukraine. I'll go pack."

  We watched her disappear back into her bedroom.

  "This girl, Tiasa," Cashel said. "I may be able to help her, or at least put you in contact with people who can, wherever you find her. If you find her."

  "I'm going to find her, Sister."

  Sister Cashel Logan gave me a small smile.

  "I'll pray that you do, Atticus."

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two When we were waiting in the security line at Kennedy for our flight the next morning, Bridgett leaned in over my shoulder, whispering, "So what happens if I tell them Anthony Shephard is a guy named Atticus Kodiak?"

  I gave it a second's thought. "I don't know. Want to try it?"

  She snorted the exact same way Alena would've done had I said the same thing to her.

  We cleared security without a problem. In keeping with my newly established tradition, I used Vladek's BlackBerry, with a new SIM I'd purchased the previous day, to call the Londonskaya as we were waiting at the gate to board. Bridgett had gone off in search of a Starbucks, leaving me alone for the time being; at least, she'd claimed to be searching for a Starbucks. She might've been serious about ratting me out to the TSA, but that didn't seem very likely.

  Alena answered before the second ring, and I told her where I was, and what the plan was, and who I was sending to back her up. When I gave the name, Alena swore in Russian.

  "She hates me."

  "She talks a good game."

  "Logan hates me, Atticus. How can I trust her?"

  "So maybe she hates you. At least you know where you stand with her. I trust her. She'd never have agreed if she wasn't willing to see this through."

  "Perhaps." She went silent. It stretched long enough I began to wonder if the call had dropped. Then Alena said, "Did you tell her?"

  "Yeah. She was overjoyed for us."

  "You are lying."

  "Yeah, I am," I said, catching sight of Bridgett returning to the gate, a frighteningly large paper cup in one hand. "I'm gonna go. I'll call you from London, give you her ETA."

  "You're not coming with her?"

  "No. Trabzon."

  "Of course. I will wait to hear from you."

  She hung up, and I stowed the phone back in my pocket as Bridgett resumed the seat next to me. She popped the top off the cup, releasing a cloud of steam, took a sip, then sighed.

  "Black bean of life," Bridgett said. "Never used to like coffee, now I drink it all the time."

  "You're off the Altoids?" I asked. When I'd known her, she was always popping one sort of candy or another, always carrying a roll of Life Savers or a tin of some flavor of mint in a pocket. She took them the way smokers took cigarettes, but instead of feeding an addiction, it had been her way of fighting one.

  "Couple years ago."

  "No kidding?"

  "I went to the dentist, he took one look at my molars and started pricing new cars. I had fractures in three of them, had to get crowns made. That pretty much put an end to that."

  "Ah," I said.

  "Was that her? On the phone?"

  "Yeah."

  "She knows I'm coming."

  "She does now."

  "And?"

  "She was overjoyed," I said.

  "You're a fucking liar."

  I grinned.

  "What's so fucking funny?"

  "Nothing. Never mind."

  She glared at me, but I wasn't going to add anything more. After a couple seconds, she gave it up, and went back to savoring her coffee. Somewhere about halfway across the Atlantic, Bridgett woke me with a not-so-gentle punch to my shoulder. The cabin lights had been dimmed, and everyone else in business class was either dozing or hiding behind their sleep masks and noise-canceling headsets. I fumbled my glasses into place, focused on Bridgett, staring at me.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Nothing," she said. "I just wanted to hit you."

  I took my glasses off, readjusted the inadequate pillow beneath my cheek. "Fine."

  "Dick."

  I nodded, pretended to go back to sleep. She let me maintain the charade for about a minute.

  "You know what pisses me off most?" she asked.

  "That I'm still breathing," I said.

  "That I missed you."

  I rolled my head to look at her, blurry without my corrective lenses. She had the aisle seat, taken for the slight advantage in leg room she could eke out of it.

  "I missed you, too," I said.

  "I don't love you."

  "I didn't say you did."

  "No, I'm saying I don't love you, not anymore. I think I did, once. I thought I did. I tried."

  "I know you did."

  "Maybe you do, but it took me a while to get there." She shifted in her seat, trying to adjust her hips, wincing. "For a long time-I mean a long fucking time-I thought you'd chosen her over me."

  "I did."

  "Wow," Bridgett said. "That was cold."

  "You want me to lie to you?"

  "No, actually. That's the last thing I want you to do. Seriously."

  I put my glasses on once more, straightened up, remembering. Bridgett and I had tried to be lovers, before I'd ever met Alena. We'd tried very hard at it, in fact. But it hadn't worked, even when it looked like it had, and when Alena entered my life, that had become abundantly clear. Who Alena was had simply provided a convenient, if reasonable, excuse.

  "You seeing anyone?" I asked Bridgett.

  "Yeah, actually. That surprise you?"

  "Not if it's on your terms."

  That got a grin. "He's like me. Doesn't want to settle down. We call each oth
er, email, video chat on the computer. Comes into town for two, three weeks at a time, and we have a good time together, and then he goes off and I go back to my life. I don't have to change anything for him."

  "I'm happy for you."

  She heard the sincerity, and accepted it, and we started talking then, in a way we never had back when we'd pretended we were sharing everything with each other. She had questions, a lot of them, and I discovered that I did, as well. We talked until England rolled out beneath us, our voices low. We remembered friends who had died, and she told me what she knew about the ones who were still living, but of all but one of them, she knew very little, having long since lost touch. Over the one we still shared, a young woman named Erika Wyatt, she scolded me, telling me that I owed her contact.

  As the plane began its descent in earnest, we came around to where we started.

  "You say you picked her over me."

  "No, you said I picked her over you. I just agreed."

  "It's the same thing, asshole."

  "If you say so."

  "There never really was a choice to make, though, was there?" Bridgett asked.

  "I don't think you get to pick who you fall in love with," I said. "Just what you do once you've fallen."

  "Oh, wow, that's deep." She reached for the pouch on the seatback by her knees. "I need an airsick bag, I'm going to puke."

  "Let me know when you're done."

  "You believe that?"

  "Maybe. Sure sounds good," I said.

  Bridgett Logan shook her head, bemused. "Seven fucking years to turn you all hardcore. And beneath it all, you're still the same."

  "Am I?" I asked, because I sure as hell didn't feel it.

  "Yeah," Bridgett Logan said. "You're still a hopeless fucking romantic."

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-three There's an old cop saw, goes like this.

  Question: How do you catch a drug dealer for the fiftieth time after he's walked free the other forty-nine?

  Answer: You buy drugs from him.