Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  “Give my best regards to your niece,” said Yuri in Russian and he hung up the phone.

  “That was fast.”

  “I have information.”

  She paused. “And your price?”

  “Yes. Of course.” He reached down to the mini fridge. “I have been in many prisons. Each time I get out, I celebrate.”

  From the cooler he produced what appeared to be a liter of perfume. The bottle was plump and white, like a nesting dove, and its neck was long and brown-gold. Even without seeing the calligraphy on the label, Xana knew a container of Kauffman vodka when she saw one.

  He placed two tumblers on the countertop and each he filled halfway with the rare vodka.

  “You get out of prison. You celebrate,” he said, and inched one of the tumblers toward her.

  Xana stared at it and then at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You ask price. I name price.”

  Nearby, the three blocks collided as the bicycler left the store. Hayley stood by the doorway. Her arms were behind her back and her feet were lightly tapping the floor. Of course, she was unaware that her body was doing anything. Finally, she whistled her way over to the counter. The smile didn’t last very long.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Hayley,” whispered Xana, her fingers twitching, “please wait outside.”

  “What? Look, I—”

  “Wait outside!”

  Overhead, the fans whipped cool air across their faces and even across the clear hard faces of the glass tumblers.

  After an eternity, Hayley mumbled:

  “I’m going to call the office.”

  And she left the store.

  Xana locked the door behind her and pulled down the shade. That and the knockoff American flag in the window obscured all outside view of inside activity.

  Yuri lifted his tumbler in a toast. “To the cost of business-doing.”

  Xana nodded and returned to the counter, toward the other tumbler now awaiting her grasp and lips and tongue.

  “You know, it’s funny,” she remarked, gazing at the clear drink. “When I was in rehab, I met all sorts of real assholes, and one of them was this gal who insisted we call her Elle on account of the bones in her head being so jumbled that she looked like Joseph Merrick. You know, the Elephant Man?”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Of course you do. Not even the height of Soviet propaganda could insulate you from the existence of a hideous miracle like Joseph Merrick. What I’m reminded of, though, is that Elle had a thing for expensive vodka like this—and for cheap men like you.”

  “I like this woman.”

  Xana picked up her tumbler and held it aloft. In the dim light its contents glowed amber, like the furnace of a dying star. “Funny story about me and Elle. One day in the garden, she asked me if I’d ever been in a bar fight. I told her I’d been in a few and she asked me if I won any of them and before I could reply, she said that in her life she’d been in dozens of bar fights.”

  “I really like this woman.”

  “With a face like hers, I guess people just liked to take a swing at it.” With Xana’s free hand, she reached for the delicate white bottle. “This is nice. People like us—we should be so lucky to be buried in coffins this nice.”

  “People like us—we should be so lucky to be buried in coffins.”

  “The thing of it is, she said she won most of her bar fights. And then she told me how. It’s the most amazing thing. Want to know her secret?”

  Yuri sneered. “Why not?”

  Xana sneered back at him and lifted her tumbler to her lips. Yuri, well mannered, mirrored her gesture.

  She didn’t take a sip. Neither did he.

  Their eyes met.

  And Xana shoved the delicate white bottle of vodka against his hand, which held the glass that was against his mouth, and the bottle shattered from her brute force and so did his tumbler and so did seven of the brown-yellow teeth in his mouth. Shards of teeth and glass rolled down his gullet. His mouth had widened into an expanse of blood and split flesh. Yuri fell off his stool and Xana, still holding the intact remains of the vodka bottle, climbed the counter and stooped down over the old man, whose screams were whipped around the store by the overhead fans.

  “Her secret was wait till the guy takes a drink,” continued Xana, “and then make him choke on it.”

  Yuri was choking—on teeth, on blood, on bits of glass—and his eyes were gigantic with distress.

  Xana grabbed the envelope and his pen. “You get the moral of the story, Yuri? You need me to spell it out for you? Good. Now decode your gibberish and maybe I’ll call for an ambulance. How’s that price suit you?”

  Chapter 21

  Since there was a concert tonight, the floor and bleachers of the arena would normally be closed at this early hour so the custodial staff could do their job unimpeded. Normally, this would be their last pass at picking the space clean before the roadies rolled in to set up the stage for the performer.

  Normally.

  Today, though, the floor was filling up with the families and friends of the almost two hundred hostages aboard Flight 816, off-course now for almost two hours. City, county, and state policemen escorted them inside and took their information.

  Special Agent Del Purrich’s job was to assure them that their government was doing everything in its power to guarantee safe return of their loved ones. As an unctuous opportunist, if anyone could sell this bill of fare, it was Special Agent Del Purrich. He told them what they wanted to hear and they thanked him for it.

  His shtick lost its sheen once the phone calls began, and soon Del himself was making a phone call, although he first made the sensible decision of stepping away from the crowds. This proved to be a meaningless gesture, though, since Jim Christie was already on the phone getting an earful from Lieutenant Elvis Dundee, Atlanta Police Department.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” Jim interrupted, “I understand your concerns, but—”

  But nothing, because Dundee’s wrath—and the variety of expression with which he could express it—remained undaunted. Jim checked the small gray screen on his office phone. This call had already lasted ten minutes. The reason Jim had let Dundee vent his spleen in the first place was because, as in every crisis, there seemed to be a few minutes where there really was nothing else for him to do. His analysts were busy investigating leads and wouldn’t have any new intel to share until those leads had been triple-checked. The top minds at the National Counterterrorism Center were deliberating on the situation, but there wouldn’t be any declarative decisions made until at least 11 A.M. and even then, the most likely order would be for Jim and everyone else working the case to carry on while they implemented a ground-game rescue scenario that inevitably would involve special forces.

  Also, frankly, as soon as Jim heard the furious tenor in Dundee’s voice, he knew Xana had to be the cause. Only she could piss off a man this much this quickly. And so he gave Dundee the benefit of the doubt and let him prattle on and on about “disrespect for the uniform” and “refusal to follow orders” and “evading arrest” and all the while Jim reflected on the many, many complaints he had received over the years about her. Over the years, he had become very creative at burying complaints. One of the primary duties of his job, as he saw it, was to protect his agents.

  But then she had her car accident, and if ever there would be an epiphany, this had to be it. By protecting her over the years, by shielding her from consequence, he had been enabling her alcoholism. He knew that now, and with as much affirmation as he knew that no matter how much he wanted her back—for reasons both professional and personal—he had to, for her own good, keep her out.

  Vaguely, Jim became aware that the cop’s rant had ceased. Had they become disconnected? Jim checked his phone’s gray screen.

  “Well?” asked Dundee. “Do you agree with my proposal or not?”

  Jim had no idea what the man’s proposal might be�
��but was certain that he did not agree with it. He had learned long ago never to shake hands with a man on a soapbox.

  “Lieutenant,” Jim said, “you seem to me to be a man of strong convictions. That’s admirable. But do you want to know what I admire even more about you? It’s your ability to multitask.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes, sir—I admire it and I envy it—especially at a time like this. The fact that you are able to maintain order at the world’s busiest airport under lockdown during a national security crisis while at the same time complain to me for—oh—fifteen minutes now about—”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “I mean, in your shoes, the last thing I would want to do is call attention to the fact that I let a—what’s the phrase you used? Oh right. ‘Potential threat.’ If I let a potential threat sneak off from right under my nose during a national security crisis—for a person like yourself to risk that kind of wide-scale professional embarrassment—well, I’ve got to tell you—it is not something most men would be willing to do.”

  When Dundee didn’t respond, Jim knew he’d once again successfully buried a complaint against Xana Marx. He wanted to feel sick about it but all he felt in that moment, spreading outward from his chest, was warm pride.

  And he wasn’t quite finished.

  “Lieutenant, before you go, I believe you mentioned that your ‘potential threat’ was able to interview your cop-killer for five minutes. Before you threatened to send her off in chains, did she happen to share with you what he said?”

  With obvious hesitancy, Dundee relayed her story about some old and scary prison and how the Chechen’s tattoo identified him as an inmate of the prison, et cetera, et cetera. In closing, though, the police lieutenant couldn’t help but add:

  “But you know all this already, don’t you? As her superior, I’m sure she treats you with respect and has already briefed you and that you’re only asking me as a matter of due diligence.”

  Jim could practically hear the smirk on the man’s face. He didn’t bother volleying back a retort. He simply hung up, pulled himself to his feet, pulled his pants up to his ponderous belly, and strolled out to his assistant’s desk.

  “How many calls have I missed?”

  She handed him the stack of yellow slips.

  He sifted through them. He pretended he wasn’t specifically searching for calls from Xana, pretended that Dundee’s accusation of disrespect hadn’t cut deep, and then pretended to only feel mild disappointment when he didn’t read her name among the notes. But he did have two calls from Hayley…possibly cries of desperation for having been abandoned in some aberrant part of town by a wild-minded alcoholic ex-FBI agent who never should have been entrusted with any responsibility and now there was a sick teenager alone and afraid and—

  “Sir.”

  His receptionist held out her phone receiver toward him. He’d been so lost in his fear-spiral that he hadn’t even heard it ring.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Del.”

  “I’ll take it in my office.”

  Jim returned to his wide leather chair and picked up his own phone receiver. The earpiece was still warm with germs and sweat from his long call with Lieutenant Dundee.

  “How are things down there, Del? Have all the local families been situated?”

  “Well…” Del began, and then updated Jim on the latest twist in the yarn, namely the fact that the families were in open communication with the hostages. “They’ve even started receiving pictures, boss.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Of themselves, of the plane, of the hijackers.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “We’ve already seized a few of the phones and begun uploading the pictures to our database, but…”

  “But…?”

  “Well, the media arrived not too long ago.”

  “Oh, fuck me.”

  “The cops tried to curtail them…but a lot of the families want to share their stories. They want everyone to put human faces to the names of their loved ones. The news networks are lapping it up.”

  “Everybody’s got a job to do.”

  “Boss, why would the hijackers allow their pictures to be taken?”

  Jim sagged in his seat. The leather crinkled. He didn’t have a definite answer to Del’s very valid question—but he did have several hypotheses. None of them was rosy.

  On the other hand, perhaps the FBI could turn this into an opportunity…

  “I’m going to have to call you back,” Jim said, and hung up. For half a second he reconsidered his plan. It was not without risk, and he couldn’t recall any prior instance of anyone, during an airplane hijacking, having done what he was thinking of doing. There had to be a good reason for that.

  Then again, there were plenty of good reasons to stay in bed every day, and yet here he was, dressed and everything.

  His walk to the conference room must have appeared uncharacteristically anxious because his assistant called out to him from her desk and asked if he was OK.

  Honestly, he didn’t know—not yet.

  Two of his agents, Reeves and Ellis, were gathered near the center of the long table. Ostensibly they were reviewing data on the passengers—thus the almost two hundred folders arranged on the table to approximate the seat assignments on the plane—but as Jim entered, they were arguing about one passenger in particular, Julian Gaber, Seat 3A.

  “I’m just saying,” said Reeves, “we can’t ignore the evidence. Gaber was born in Saudi Arabia—”

  To which Ellis countered: “Oh, and so he must be connected to terrorism…”

  “At least I’m not letting my liberal guilt keep me from having an open mind!”

  “Boys,” said Jim.

  Their postures relaxed. “Any new developments, sir?”

  “Possibly.” Jim walked the room until he came to the head of the table. He picked up one of the two folders there. He glanced at the room’s phone. Outgoing calls from here would come up as PRIVATE CALLER and he didn’t want to risk the gentleman he was about to ring up thinking he might be a telemarketer and not answering.

  He took out his personal phone and dialed the number listed in the man’s folder.

  It rang.

  Four times.

  Christ, was it about to go to voice mail? That wouldn’t work at—

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Captain Walder,” said Jim, setting himself down in one of the conference room’s rolling chairs, “this is Special-Agent-in-Charge Jim Christie with the FBI. We need to talk.”

  Chapter 22

  When his phone rang, Larry was smoothing his wife Marie’s blond bangs off her clammy forehead. Her eyelids fluttered. As responses went, that would have to suffice. When Larry had held his son Sean’s head to his chest and kissed him on the scalp, the boy hadn’t even so much as twitched. Only a thready pulse—bum…bum…bum—on the side of the neck indicated Sean was still alive.

  All of the passengers had watched the captain storm from the flight deck and down the aisle to embrace his loved ones. This solved several mysteries. They now knew who the unconscious woman and boy in the exit rows were. They now knew why their pilot had—possibly—collaborated with the hijackers in getting them here. As to the purpose of the large-shouldered caretakers who had wheeled the somnolent pair aboard, that mystery had already been solved. They were the threshold guardians, blocking off any hope of escape through the exit row doors.

  They also were Marie and Sean’s caretakers, and right now Larry needed answers about his wife and son’s care. The rational part of his brain doubted these men even spoke English, but the rational part of his brain was very much not calling the shots at the moment.

  “What did you give them? Huh? Are they going to be OK? What poison did you inject into my child?”

  The caretaker beside Marie, whose name was Zakayev, muttered back in thick accent, “Telephone.”

  Telephone? What kind of nonsensic
al fucked-up response was that? Telephone?

  Zakayev bent down with one of his loping arms and picked up off the floor Larry’s phone, which had fallen out of his pocket. He handed the device to him and said, once again, “Telephone.”

  Larry stared at it like it was an artifact from another dimension. On a whim, he turned it on, and was prepared to return it to his pant pocket when it sang out its generic ringtone.

  Blocked number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Captain Walder. This is Special-Agent-in-Charge Jim Christie with the FBI. We need to talk.”

  The FBI. Oh God. Larry’s brain exploded with a million thoughts and shut down his ability to speak.

  “Captain Walder, let me start by telling you that we are doing everything in our power to rescue everyone on board as quickly and safely as possible. Now, many passengers have reported that there has been incidence of gunfire. Can you confirm this and has anyone on board the plane been injured?”

  “I…my copilot…Reese Rankin…he was…trying to do the right thing and they just shot him in the face.”

  “Who? Who shot him? We have some camera phone pictures but we don’t know any of the hijackers’ names yet.”

  Larry shook his head. “They’re not American. I don’t know what else to tell you. They’ve…they’ve got tattoos on their necks…like a supermarket barcode. The one who shot Reese is the leader, I think. He’s older. One of his hands…his left hand…it’s deformed or something. I tried to stop them, but…they took my wife…and son…they…”

  “Are they all right? Are they alive?”

  “Yes…”

  “That’s good. When the police conducted a sweep of your home, they found some blood. It’s good to hear they’re alive.”

  “They’re drugged…they drugged them…” At that moment, Larry matched gazes with Zakayev—but if the oaf understood what he was saying—if the oaf even cared—he sure didn’t show it.

  “Captain Walder…Larry…can I call you Larry? You can call me Jim.”

  The armed men at either end of the cabin didn’t appear the least bit fazed by all the chatting and texting in which everyone else seemed engaged.