Extreme Danger

by Shannon McKenna

  Her first big dilemma. Becca circled around a big block, her mind racing. Jesus, now what? She could hardly follow the woman in.

  She reasoned it out. The front was short-term parking. Guests parked in the bigger lot out back. Therefore, Diana would have to drive her car around to the back, no matter where her room was.

  Once parked in the back, Becca fretted some more, chewing her nails. So now she could watch Diana walk from car to hotel. Big freaking deal. Becca got out, on impulse, and walked in the back door. The janitor had propped it open with a mop. Thanks, dude. No key card required.

  Once inside, there were two wings that led to the guest rooms, one to the right and one to the left. She could see through the lobby corridor, past food and beverage machines, ice machines, bathrooms, all the way to the front desk. Diana was still at the desk, checking in. Her clerk was a woman with very big red hair.

  Diana took her key card and went out to pull her car around. Becca got busy with her cell phone, making a big show of staring down into the display and texting a bogus message.

  Diana came in the back door, and turned to the right.

  Becca waited until she was sure the other woman was using the stairwell rather than the elevator, and sprinted after her. Best not to ask herself if this exercise was as stupid and pointless as it was dangerous.

  Don’t ask. Don’t wonder. Don’t stop. Just do it, damnit.

  She bounded up the stairs two at a time, peered out onto the second floor corridor. No one. Back to the stairs, two at a time, heart thudding. This time when she poked her head out of the stairwell, she saw a flash of beige, and a door closing. She exhaled. Her eyes locked onto it. Third from the end. She sneaked down the corridor. Room 317.

  OK, great. She knew the room number. What she could do with that information was a complete blank. Her mind stalled out.

  The next dilemma was what the hell to do with herself. She’d never before in her life lurked or loitered in a space where she had no right to be. Of course, she could simply check into the hotel, but then what? Hang around in the corridor till the woman came out?

  Deflated, she headed downstairs and back out to the parking lot and sat in her car, staring at the hotel. Staring at her useless phone.

  She was about to get out and go call Nick from the pay phone in the lobby when something blocked the light from the streetlamp. A gleaming black SUV with tinted windows swept past, pulling up in front of the back door.

  Diana burst out, kicking over the propped mop, and got in. The SUV sped up towards the parking lot exit. Becca jolted into action, put her car in gear, and followed, but a Jeep Cherokee pulled into the exit and proceeded to sit there like a goddamn mountain while its driver decided what to do.

  The black SUV with Diana in it accelerated on the main strip, went around the corner, and was lost to sight.

  Becca screamed, honked, gestured madly. The driver, a soccer mom type, frowned at her as if to say, what’s your damn hurry, lady, and punished her by oh-so-sloooooowly driving into the parking lot.

  Her tires squealed as she zoomed onto the empty street, turned right, looked for taillights. Nothing. There was a cross street up ahead, at the light. She peered to the right, the left, straight ahead.

  Fuck. She chose a direction at random. She came back, tried all the others, already knowing it was futile. She’d lost them.

  After over a half hour of aimless driving around, staring at parking lots and cars parked on residential streets, she finally gave up and went back to the Days Inn. She slumped down in the seat and stared out at the blank, prefab building, feeling foolish and glum. Thwarted by a soccer mom from hell. How dumb.

  So should she wait? Diana could be gone all night. For that matter, she could be gone for days, or for good. This involved Zhoglo, after all. She glanced at her watch. 10:40. She would wait another half hour before calling Nick, just in case Diana’s errand was a quick one. Not that Becca had any clue what to do if the other woman did come back.

  Oh, well. One thing at a time. She shouldn’t expect this to be easy or obvious. Diana’s car was her only point of reference. She had to come back to it sometime. Becca would chew her nails, wait, and watch.

  God, how she’d love to have something concrete to offer Nick when she finally saw him to offset the craziness of this stunt. Maybe he’d be too astonished to yell at her. Maybe he’d be impressed with her nerve and her initiative. Maybe he’d even be happy for the help.

  Uh-huh. And maybe pigs in pink tutus ice-skated in hell.

  Chapter

  20

  Sveti and little Rachel were the last ones to go into the examining room to see the American lady doctor. The oldest, and the youngest. The others had gone in, one after the other, clutching their containers of pee. Marina had passed out the containers that morning, and it had been Sveti’s stinky job to supervise the spraying and splashing of the little ones. Her one pair of pants had gotten soaked with everyone’s piss. Not that they could get much dirtier or smellier.

  All but Rachel. Marina had given her plastic bags with stickum to put over Rachel’s privates inside her diaper to collect the baby’s urine, but Rachel had tugged at them all day. None of the bags were more than slightly damp, but her diapers were soaked.

  They’d tried to send Sveti in first, but Rachel clutched and screamed so hard, Yuri shoved her back and grabbed Sasha instead. Rachel got clingier every day. Sveti couldn’t even go into the toilet without her anymore. Her back ached from carrying the baby around.

  Sasha had been back a quarter of an hour later, and slanted her an eyes-rolling grimace, making a syringe gesture at his elbow.

  Blood taking. Again. Sveti wanted to cry. The little ones would be screaming, and she was the one they all turned to for comfort. It scared her to death and it made her feel guilty. Couldn’t they understand that she was as helpless, as desperate and powerless as they were?

  But they didn’t. They clung, as if she could protect them somehow. And she couldn’t bring herself to be cold and push them away.

  She wished she could think of a way to rescue them all. Find parents for everyone. Parents like hers. Wonderful parents.

  God, how she wanted her mother.

  Yuri came out, holding Mikhail under his arm. The boy dangled, head down, unconscious. “Smelly little shithead. He fainted.” Yuri grunted and tossed the child on the nearest cot. Mikhail shivered and moaned.

  “She’s next,” he said, gesturing at Rachel, who was sucking her thumb, eyes huge in her little face.

  He grabbed Rachel and tried to pull her off Sveti’s lap, but Rachel clutched Sveti’s T-shirt and a handful of her hair, mouth opening to emit a sound so shrill and loud, Yuri jerked back, and tried to slap her. Sveti flinched to cover Rachel’s body with her own and took the blow on the side of her head. For a moment, she could hardly even hear Rachel’s ear-splitting shrieks.

  When her vision and hearing cleared, Yuri was shouting at her.

  “…brat calmed down, and bring her in with you! The doctor bitch can do the two of you together. What the fuck do I care?”

  It took frantic minutes of soothing and crooning and jiggling and cuddling, until Rachel’s shrieks damped down to hiccupping sobs. Her hot, thin little body shook in Sveti’s arms. Both of them were shaking. Rachel’s screaming jarred her badly. Sveti had grown numb to many things, but the toddler’s desperation sliced through her numbness and got to her. Probably because it was so much like her own.

  The American lady doctor didn’t look like a doctor at all. Sveti was momentarily dazzled. The woman was the first beautiful thing she’d seen in months. She looked like a magazine model or a Hollywood actress, with perfect white skin and made-up eyes. Glossy dark hair that bobbed and swung like hair on TV ads.

  She wasn’t smiling like a TV ad, though. She looked scared and tense. Sveti was skilled at gauging the emotional states of the people around her. Advance warning could save a pinch, or slap, or kick in the leg that left a bruise as big as a sauc
er.

  But the American lady doctor didn’t look like she would be violent or cruel. She was sweating, and it was fear sweat. Sveti could smell her as she examined Rachel. Heart, lungs, throat, temperature. She murmured in a low, musical voice into a shiny rod, recording numbers.

  She pawed through Rachel’s urine bags, and frowned at Sveti as if it were her fault Rachel had not peed. She wore a silver-gray silk shirt that had iridescent highlights. It looked so soft Sveti longed to touch it. There were dark, crumpled sweat crescents under the doctor’s arms. Her forehead was shiny. And her red painted lips shook with tension.

  Then she began preparing the needle and vials for the blood drawing. Rachel, unfortunately, knew exactly what was coming, and began to flop and shriek. Rachel was incredibly strong for such a tiny person. It took all Sveti had to hold the baby still. By the time the doctor finally got some blood out of her, Sveti was sobbing too.

  The doctor looked shaken. She had to lean over, put her head down. She looked pale, sick. Maybe she was a nicer person than the guards, Sveti thought. Maybe this was a chance. For help.

  Sveti struggled to remember the English she had learned from Arkady, her father’s handsome friend. Arkady had lived so many years in America, he was practically American himself. She’d learned many words from him, but a lot of what she knew had slipped away.

  She thought to ask the doctor for help with Rachel’s rashes, her ear infections. The blood that Sveti sometimes found in her diaper when she changed her. And there was more that she was forgetting. Always more. She thrashed her tired, foggy brain, trying to remember it all.

  “Baby, ear. Hurt,” she tried.

  The woman looked at her blankly and her gaze slid quickly away.

  Sveti tried again, tapping Rachel’s ear. “Baby, ear,” she repeated. She tapped Rachel’s forehead. “Hot. Night. Cries, cries, cries.”

  The woman still would not meet her eyes. She was pretending she didn’t understand. She resumed muttering into her recorder.

  Sveti lifted Rachel’s grubby little shirt to show her the angry rash on the child’s belly and chest, and spoke more loudly. “Hurts,” she said. “Medicine? Baby, medicine?” Her voice was starting to quiver.

  The lady doctor shook her head, made an irritated gesture. She said something that sounded final into the shiny rod, and made an impatient come-here gesture to Sveti, patting the examining table.

  Her turn. Sveti sighed and swallowed back her frustration, and placed the whimpering Rachel gently on the floor. She climbed up onto the examining table and stared straight into the doctor’s face, waiting for a chance to catch her eye again, but the lady was careful to keep her gaze averted. She tugged gingerly at the stained, grayish T-shirt Sveti wore and Sveti reluctantly pulled it off, revealing the grubby strip of ragged T-shirt wrapped around her chest.

  The doctor went around the table, brushed aside Sveti’s long, tangled dark hair, and started picking at the knots.

  Back before she was taken, she hadn’t had breasts at all, Sveti thought. Months ago, she could hardly wait to get them. Breasts would mean that she was finally starting to grow up, and if she could do that fast enough, she might be able to catch up with Arkady, and he could marry her. Take her to America to live with him, where she would be happy forever. What a stupid little girl she’d been. Stupid little girl daydreams. Hah.

  Now she had breasts, and she wished they would go away. They were big enough to jiggle under her shirt. She had begged Sasha for a strip of his T-shirt, which was so large it hung halfway down his legs.

  Sasha had understood perfectly, even though he would not speak. He’d torn off a strip from the bottom, and helped her tie it around her ribs as tight as they could pull it, even though it itched and chafed.

  And still, Yuri’s eyes followed her everywhere.

  The doctor had noticed the port wine birthmark on her neck. She lifted Sveti’s hair to examine it, mouth pursed, eyes squinted, and murmured again into the recorder, speaking louder over Rachel’s incessant whimpering. Sveti tried one of the words Arkady had taught her.

  “Birthmark,” she said. “Just birthmark. No hurt.”

  The lady blinked, as if a plastic doll had just come to life and spoken to her, and continued on with her examination. Listening, poking, prodding, palpating. The lungs, the heart, the throat, her belly. Then the blood taking. The hot, dark blood snaking through the plastic tube. So hot, it felt like it burned the bluish white, goose-pimpled skin of her arm. Sveti wished she could put her shirt back on. She felt so exposed, with her hair twisted back and those hateful breasts sticking out.

  The doctor lady would not meet her eyes. Would not acknowledge that she was there. It made Sveti want to scream with frustration to see the woman talking away into the stupid shiny rod, ignoring her. While evil gathered around her like a wave, rising. When it broke they would all be crushed, all of them. She stared at Rachel on the floor, playing listlessly with her tiny toes, gray with dirt.

  Her desperation swelled up until she couldn’t contain it. She grabbed the woman’s silk clad arm. “Help me,” she pleaded. “Help us. They do something bad to us. You got to help us. Please.”

  The doctor jerked her arm back, but Sveti wouldn’t let go. Her blackened nails dug into the fine fabric as she pleaded incoherently in her broken English. The doctor lady said something sharp and tried to shake her off. She clung harder. She remembered no more English, it was coming out in Ukrainian now, pouring out in a garbled rush that she had no power to stop. How afraid she was, how alone, how the little children needed her too much. She was breaking inside, something horrible waited, something evil—

  The lady was screaming now, mouth distorted, eyes wild, clawing and slapping to get free. Rachel was screaming, Sveti was screaming, everyone was screaming. Sveti flung herself off the table at the woman as she tried to get away, clasping her around the waist, and the doctor slapped at her face, and they were both crying, yelling—

  The door burst open. “What the fuck is this?”

  Marina and Yuri dragged them apart. Marina helped the sobbing, babbling lady doctor out of the room and cast a slit-eyed, malevolent glance back as Sveti as she slammed the door shut behind her.

  Leaving her with Yuri. Fear exploded inside her.

  He smacked her in the face. She hit the wall. The world spun, tipped and settled itself sideways. Then the tip of his boot smashed into her thigh. The pain made her shriek. He undid his belt, yanked it out, doubled it. “Idiot girl,” he raged. “The doctor came here to help you. And how do you thank her? You attack her! You are an animal! Filthy…dumb…animal!” The blows rained down. He shouted hoarse insults that she couldn’t understand. She cringed in the corner, making herself small as possible. Rachel shrieked her shrill, tea-kettle wail.

  Slowly, Sveti became aware that the blows had stopped. She tasted blood in her mouth. Yuri was no longer bellowing.

  She peered up from behind the hands she’d clasped over her face to protect it. He was staring down at her body, panting. Face red. His thick mouth slack and wet. He had that look on his face. That look that froze her blood, made her belly turn over with a greasy flop of dread.

  At the same time, she realized she still had on no T-shirt. Not even Sasha’s strip tied around her ribs. Just those dirty cotton pants that hung down low over her bony hip bones.

  Oh, no, no, no. Rachel’s tiny, tear-streaked face was scarlet, mouth huge, the sound huge, the sound of terror and utter despair—

  The door sprang open again. “Yuri. Come,” Marina snapped.

  “Later,” he rasped, his eyes still fixed on Sveti. “Close that fucking door. Later.”

  “Now.” Marina’s voice had the iron ring of command. “You have to take this stupid American bitch back to the hotel. The worthless cunt is falling apart. I don’t want to watch. Get away from that girl.”

  “She can wait,” Yuri snarled. “Close that door.”

  “No! Do not touch her. Go buy it outside if you want it, p
ig. Go to that truck stop on the interstate.”

  “Why not?” Yuri sounded petulant. “What difference does it make? They won’t know. What do they care?”

  “You could give her a disease,” Marina hissed. “Remember? What happened with the other one?”

  Yuri wiped his scummy wet lips with the back of his hand. Sveti could smell the foulness of his breath even from where she lay on the floor. “I don’t have any diseases,” he said, his voice sullen.

  “I will not bet my life on that, you dog,” Marina snapped. “They would kill us both. Idiot. Step away from the girl. Now.”

  Yuri muttered something filthy and sullen, and backed away, staring fixedly at Sveti. Marina shoved him out the door, and glared down at the girl, who had dragged herself into a crouch, wrapping her arms tightly around her knees. Marina grabbed the limp T-shirt from the examining table and snapped it smartly into Sveti’s face.

  The unexpected blow made her whip her head back, bonking it hard against the painted white cinder-block wall. Her eyes welled full again.

  “Stop whining.” Marina knelt down and stuck her face into Sveti’s. “And stop trying to lure him with your scrawny little tits, you stupid tart. Or there’ll be trouble. Do you understand?”

  “But I don’t want—I wasn’t—”

  Crack, a hard backhand slap connected. Sveti’s head hit the wall again. “Do you understand?”

  Yes. Sveti’s mouth formed the word, but made no sound.

  Marina tossed the shirt in Sveti’s face, and heaved her big, solid block of a body to her feet. “See that you do. Now get that whining brat out of my sight. I’m sick of looking at her.”

  She stumped out, slammed the connecting door. Locked it.

  Sveti pulled the tattered T-shirt over her shivering self, wondering how it was possible to hate someone so much and still be so grateful to her. She tried to get to her feet, but the thigh Yuri had kicked buckled under her. She finally just crawled over to Rachel, and pulled the little girl onto her lap.