On the way I made a call to make sure the person I wanted to talk to was around.
Lin.
Chapter 38
I’d wondered why Lin had been so keen to help me find Natasha. It’s been my experience that honor among whores, like among thieves, is a myth put about to justify what they do. Once you’ve separated two working girls slicing each other’s faces with razors over who gets to fuck the fat sweaty customer, reality kicks in.
So what was the bond between Lin and Natasha? I could understand one Kyrgyz girl maybe helping another out if it didn’t cost anything and didn’t cause her problems. But Lin was Vietnamese, and to us Kyrgyz Ho Chi Min City is the other side of the world. And that’s if we’ve even heard of it.
I didn’t think it would be about sisterhood in the face of the male oppressor either.
Dog eats dog applies to bitches as well. So that left only one motive.
Money.
I’d worked out that Natasha had arrived in Dubai knowing no one, sure that Tynaliev would come after her. Recruiting another Kyrgyz woman to help her, someone to find an apartment in which to lie low, would be to risk betrayal right back to the minister. After all, we’re none of us free from the desire for a few extra slips of paper in our pocket. Any Kyrgyz would know Tynaliev’s reputation for ruthlessness and revenge, and that supplying him with the latter would pay dividends.
So that meant finding someone who wasn’t Kyrgyz. And Natasha had chosen Lin. Or perhaps Lin had spotted Natasha as a potential source of extra income, as a working girl to begin with, before discovering her true financial potential. Whichever way it had begun, I was sure they were now a partnership, and that if I found one she’d lead me to the other.
The bar was as crowded and shitty as I’d remembered it, with Asian women laughing too loudly and too soon at jokes they didn’t understand, and men with untucked shirts that they hoped hid their paunches. A few of the younger men showed off dance moves that they hoped would make them look cool, while the African girls teetered on improbable heels, watching the customers like hawks while trying to look aloof. And above it all, the relentless inhuman beat of dance music amplified beyond pain.
I elbowed my way to the bar, not really giving a fuck whose drink I spilled or what romance I interrupted.
It was several minutes before I spotted Lin, sandwiched between two middle-aged Indians, a position I imagined she would find more lucrative in private. But I wasn’t in the mood to give a damn about her kid sister’s operation or the new engine that her brother’s truck needed. I pushed my way through, took her by the arm. One of the Indian men gave me a hard stare, which disappeared abruptly once he got my service return.
“I need to talk to you, Lin,” I said as politely as I knew how, given that she was holding out on me. “So say goodnight to these two gentlemen, would you?”
With a show of reluctance, Lin picked up her Bullfrog and led me to a relatively quiet part of the bar.
“So you changed your mind about enjoying the best screw of your life?” she asked, pushing out her breasts and pouting in a way I found singularly unerotic.
“I was thinking about having a threesome,” I explained. “You, me and Natasha Sulonbekova.”
“Never heard of her,” Lin immediately replied, always a sign of lying when you’re interrogating someone. “And why waste your money on the rest, when right here you can enjoy the best?”
“Mine to waste,” I said and watched the scowl grow across her face like a blush. She turned to head back to her new boyfriends, but I grabbed her upper arm hard enough to make her realize I was serious. I squeezed and watched a flicker of pain streak across her face like lightning. I wanted her to know I was as serious as death.
“We both know you know who I’m talking about, Lin,” I said. “So far on this trip I’ve been shot at, threatened, found two bodies and watched a woman die. Oh, and I’ve killed someone myself. So I’m not in the mood to be fucked about with.”
“OK, so I know who you mean,” Lin said, pulling her arm away, obviously unimpressed by all my adventures, “and I know why you want to find her.”
“Was that so hard?” I asked, spreading my hands in a vague gesture of appeasement. “I’ll even buy you a Bullfrog to thank you for your cooperation.”
“Cash will do,” she said with a flash of her old spirit, “but a drink’s always acceptable.”
I ordered the drink, watched her discard the straw, drain half of the glass in a single swallow. I had to be impressed; Lin was obviously made of tough stuff. I guess being a Vietnamese working girl will do that to you.
“Let me finish this, and then let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk. I don’t want to shout my business to half the bar, and I don’t imagine you do either.”
That made sense; no point in telling a room full of drunks and hookers that you were on the hunt for ten million dollars.
Lin drained her glass, set it down on a table already dangerously overcrowded with Corona bottles and half-empty glasses.
“I’ve got to hit the ladies’ room first,” she said and started to make her way toward the door. I took hold of her elbow, applied pressure to the nerve with my thumb and watched the scowl resurface.
“If it’s all right with you, I’ll wait outside the door,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to have a sudden change of heart.”
“It’s the only way in and out,” she said. “But if you’re the sort of guy that enjoys hanging out around ladies’ toilets, be my guest.”
It’s always struck me that women take five times as long in a public bathroom as men. Maybe they’re more fastidious and scrub their hands afterward, check lipstick and lipgloss, and all that. I stood outside for almost twenty minutes, and was about to go in, ignoring the outrage it would cause, when Lin finally reappeared.
“Long line inside,” she explained and took my arm in hers. I ignored the knowing wink from the security guard, and we walked out into the heat.
“There’s an all-night coffee shop two blocks away,” she said, turning toward our left. “Quicker if we cut through this car park.”
I shrugged and let her lead me through row after row of sedans, trucks, SUVs, clinging to my arm for balance as she teetered on her heels.
“Maybe after we’ve had our little chat, we could have a little fun,” she said, turning her face up to me in a parody of desire. “All work and no play, you know?”
“We’ll see,” I said, forcing an equally insincere smile onto my face. In the glare of the streetlights Lin’s face was a ghastly yellow, shadows transforming it into a death mask that somehow talked, like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a nightmare.
She hugged my arm closer, and that was when Lev stepped out from behind a truck. I sensed rather than saw him, tried to pull my arm free to get to my gun, but Lin clung to me as if we were halfway down the aisle in a shotgun wedding.
I watched Lev’s fist move toward my face in a ponderous, slow-motion arc, then saw the world turn black as his knuckles kissed me, and then saw nothing at all except deep black, velvet darkness.
Chapter 39
It might have been the slap across the mouth or the ice-cold water poured over my head that brought me back into the world of the conscious; I was in no state to tell. I tried to breathe through my nose, realized it was blocked with dried blood, switched to mouth breathing instead. I focused on spitting out the sour taste that caked the inside of my cheeks. By my standards not the worst beating I’ve ever had.
An unshaded lightbulb hung above me, swinging slightly in the breeze from the air conditioning. I was tied to a chair, my hands behind my back, the rope looped tight around the chair legs. Lev had obviously done this before. Or maybe Lin was an expert in bondage and humiliation. I certainly felt humiliated by the neat trap and the sucker punch she’d led me into.
I heard footsteps behind me, heels. Lin.
“You called him while you were in the bathroom,” I said. It wasn’t a question. My voice sounded feeb
le, echoing as if down a long and unlit corridor.
“I’ve known Lev and Jamila a long time,” she said, her voice flat, factual. “They helped me out when I first arrived here, made sure I slipped under the radar, told me where to go and who to avoid. So I owed them.”
In a gesture that seemed almost tender, she wiped the water from my face. I suppose people never stop surprising you.
“They told me about some Kyrgyz guy who fought back when they tried to rob him, and I knew it had to be you. I said I’d help them get payback. I thought they’d hand out the same kind of beating you gave Lev.” She paused, wiped some of the blood from my nose. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it would come to this. But when you hurt a man’s pride in front of his woman . . .”
She let the sentence trail away, dropped the cloth in her hands to the floor.
“They’re going to kill me,” I said. Another non-question. She shrugged, said she was sorry once more. I even believed her.
I should have felt fear, anger, should have been working on an escape plan. Instead, I felt nothing but bleak resignation. You throw the dice often enough, eventually the odds turn against you. And there’s something blackly ironic about a man who spends his life wading through the squalor and misery of other people’s deaths meeting his own in a shitty room at the hands of two amateurs.
I wondered how they were going to finish me. Quickly would probably be too much to hope for, and I wondered how much pain I would have to endure before the darkness descended.
I’ve been tortured twice, once by having my hand burned on an electric grill plate, once by having a toenail pulled out and the sensitive matrix underneath burned with a cigarette. So I knew what pain felt like, the anticipation, the bladder getting ready to burst, the bowels preparing to spill. And worst of all, the sheer helplessness, a sheep dragged screaming to the slaughter.
“Welcome back, shit head.”
Lev, working up the courage to hurt me by the anger and fear blended in his voice.
“You might as well get it done,” I said, the words thick and clumsy in my mouth. “You won’t be the first or the best person to hurt me, even if you’re the last.”
A savage punch, this time to the side of my head. My ear felt as if a volcano had erupted inside, and as I twisted with the blow, I felt the chair rock and then fall, slamming me onto a bare concrete floor. I wondered if Lev’s punch had damaged my hearing.
“Don’t worry, shit head; I’ve no intention of hurting you,” Lev snarled, contradicting himself with a boot to my ribs, “and I’m certainly not going to kill you.”
“Well, that’s good news,” I said, once I’d caught my breath and wondered if he’d cracked a rib.
“I’m going to let Dubai do that for me,” Lev said, hauling the chair and me into a vertical position again. “But until then I need you to go to sleep again.”
The blow he gave me gave him what he wanted.
When I came round for a second time, I was bitterly cold and no longer indoors. My hands were still tied together and I was sprawled across the back seat of a car lurching and bouncing along a very uneven road.
“Welcome back,” Lev said. I could see his outline in the driver’s seat against the windscreen, with another figure, presumably Jamila, next to him. It was ink-black outside, and from the way the headlights leaped up and down in the darkness, I realized we were no longer in the city, but in the desert.
The expats call desert driving dune bashing, but the only things getting bashed were my kidneys. Apart from the occasional involuntary grunt as we bounced a little higher than usual, and the growl of the engine, the silence was absolute.
We drove like that for maybe an hour, with no one talking. Every now and then I heard the click of a lighter, watched the sudden flare pick out cheekbones and profiles, saw the orange spark of a cigarette. No one thought to offer one to the condemned man.
Finally I decided I’d had enough of meaningful silence.
“Where are we going, Lev? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He laughed, trying for one of those deep sinister chuckles that you hear in the movies, but only producing something that sounded like a dog sneezing.
“We’re going to play in the sand. Hide and seek. It’s a great game; you’ll love it.”
Then he laughed again, and this time he did sound like one of the bad guys. I decided to pass the time by using my tongue to check my teeth. A loose molar, but that was all the damage I could make out. The savage headache and the dizziness were much more worrying. So was the pain in my hip; I was lying on something hard. My Makarov. I wondered whether Lev had been so stupid as to not search me, or whether Lin had put it back in my pocket as a bizarre act of repentance. Somehow I favored the former option. Stupidity rules the world, after all.
We stopped, the nose of the car pointing down, so I realized we were on the crest of a sand dune. Lev opened the back door and hauled me out without ceremony. I felt the Makarov slip out of my pocket and into the sand. I felt as if my last chance had slipped away with it.
“I’m going to untie your hands,” Lev said. “You won’t be able to dig your own grave otherwise. But any smart tricks and I’ll shoot your kneecaps into splinters. You understand?”
“Clear as crystal,” I said and held my hands out in front of me. Lev decided to administer another bout of kicking and punching, just to make sure I was suitably subdued. Finally, out of breath, he untied my wrists, clearly hoping I’d try something, and was disappointed when I spent the next five minutes trying to rub some feeling back into my hands. I wondered if I’d live long enough to see the bruises I was surely going to have in the morning.
Lev threw down a spade next to me. I picked it up, debated rushing him, decided that I might as well get some exercise in before dying. So I started to dig. It’s not difficult to use a spade on sand. Where it gets tricky is stopping it trickling back into the grave you’re trying to dig. After an hour of working up a sweat to counteract the night chill, I was still only waist-deep in my future home.
Lev must have been just as bored as I was, so he called a halt, satisfied that the hole was deep enough. It was then that I started to sway, overcome with exhaustion, the rush of fear, the stink of approaching death. My eyes rolled in my head, I cried out in pain, the howl of a wolf in winter mountains, collapsed.
From a vast distance I heard Lev swear; he must have been looking forward to executing me. Sand cascaded over me as Lev readied himself to jump down beside me. As he did so, I raised the spade, edge on, toward where his face would be.
Lev saw what I was doing, but he’d already made his move and gravity did the rest for me. As he toppled forward, I braced the spade so that it bit into his face like an ax. Flesh split apart as if I’d smashed a watermelon, and I shut my eyes as warm skin and hot blood spat over me. The spade jarred in my hand as it cracked open his skull. There was a horrible splintering sound, a single choking grunt, and Lev’s body slumped beside me.
The temptation to lie still and vomit was irresistible, but I knew I had to act. I spewed out a combination of my last meal and bile as I used Lev’s body as a step to get out of the grave. Staggering toward the car, I stumbled, fell, scrabbled for the Makarov, found it and turned onto my back.
It was then that a bullet punched a hole into the car door a couple of centimeters above my head. It was instinct rather than judgment that made me return the shot, and I heard Jamila scream in pain. I didn’t know where I’d hit her, but I knew I had to stop her before she took better aim. We were too close together for her to miss a second time.
I could see her shape, like a black cloud, dark against the stars that filled the sky. I couldn’t help thinking how beautiful the night looked, eternal, far from human stupidity and greed and desire. Then reality kicked in, and I pulled the trigger three times. Each shot went home, and I heard the wet slap of blood hitting the side of the car. Then nothing.
I lay there for several year
s, debating whether to ever move again or whether to let the sun rise and kill me. Then I pulled myself up, wincing at the pain from my recent beating, and reached into the car to turn on the headlights to inspect my handiwork.
Jamila’s face was still intact, eyes open, mouth an O of shock. I’d hit her center mass, and the blood stained the front of her blouse a crimson black. One shot had taken away a kneecap, and her leg was bent at an unnatural angle, like a tree branch snapped in half during a storm.
I knew I hadn’t had a choice, but that didn’t mean I was proud of having shot a woman. I looked at Jamila, thrown down into the sand like an abandoned toy, and wondered how I had reached here, what exactly I had become.
Chapter 40
I pulled at Jamila’s corpse so that she could spend eternity next to Lev. The body fell forward so that Jamila’s arm lay across Lev’s chest. As an embrace, it perhaps lacked a little passion, but I wasn’t going to rearrange the lovers. I slid down into the grave to retrieve the spade, scrambled on the bodies to get out, started to shovel sand over the corpses. It took several shovelfuls before I could cover Jamila’s staring eyes and the catastrophe of what had been Lev’s face.
Eventually the scouring wind would either bury them deeper or leave them exposed for someone to find, the flesh desiccated and taut across cheekbones, eye sockets deep and empty. But by then I’d be long gone, back by lakes and forests, mountains and snow. Or so I hoped.
Finally, I finished, threw the spade into the back seat, conscious that it carried my fingerprints, checked for water. I found a couple of bottles, emptied the first one down my throat, the second one over my hair and face. I went round to stand in the headlights and inspected myself as best I could. Not too bad; the good thing about sand is that you can brush most of it off.
I hauled myself into the driver’s seat, feeling worse than I could remember ever feeling, trying to block out the memory of Jamila’s accusing stare. I knew that time would weaken the image, but right there and then time was something I didn’t have.
A Summer Revenge Page 16