I don’t know what Hal thought he was gonna do, but it was obvious what Gert thought: that Hal would shoot Svetlana and her friend, and Irina as well, before letting them get away. The author burst through the door with a roar, gun at the ready, and tore down the aisle in hot pursuit.
I scurried after, not quite believing that I was running toward a man with a gun. I’d been lucky four months ago—Melissa had gotten shot and I hadn’t—but there were two guns at play here, in the hands of two men who were both probably pretty desperate—one to avoid going to jail for a long time, the other to prevent the slaughter of a woman I was beginning to think he’d rather come to like a lot—and so the chances for getting caught in the crossfire were doubled. And yet there I was, hurrying behind Gert.
Hal must have been in the process of moving the girls out of the storage room when Irina knocked, because we found them all just in front of the counter. The girls were dressed to travel, in jeans and jackets, their eyes dilated almost black. Some kind of date-rape drug, maybe; something to make them docile and cooperative. It wouldn’t do to have them belligerent and wanting to get away while they were transported, maybe even by boat, somewhere else. And they were handcuffed together, probably so that one of them couldn’t try to escape without the other. It would be impossible for them to swim, and they’d have to, to get off the island. Svetlana, at least, understood some of what was going on and had recognized her sister. Although her face was totally impassive, there were tears leaking from her eyes, running down her cheeks, and she was clinging to Irina, who clung right back. The two of them really did look very much alike, in spite of the ten-year age difference. Both tall and angular, with long dark hair, broad Slavic faces, and high cheekbones. The other young woman, attached to Svetlana’s other side, was shorter, with light, mousy brown hair and the biggest breasts I’d ever seen. At least in real life. No mystery why the bad guys had chosen her from among the available Russian brides.
Gert rocked to a stop at the end of the nearest aisle. I skidded into place next to him.
“Drop the gun,” Hal snarled. He had reached Irina’s other side and was holding her by the upper arm and pointing his gun at the side of her head. “Drop it, or I’ll blow her away right now!”
Gert hesitated. He had a clear shot, there was nothing to stop him from pumping a bullet straight into Hal’s heart, assuming his aim was good enough.... The problem was that Hal’s finger might tighten on the trigger if he got hit, and although Hal would be dead, Irina would be, too. And that would be bad.
I glanced to my right, at the line of snow globes on the shelf. If the criminals had used one to kill ICE agent Trent, maybe I could use one to bash Hal over the head. I’d have to get closer, though. I took a step back to see if maybe I could sneak out of sight and come back around the other way, but his eyes flickered to me. “Don’t move!”
I stopped. “So what happens now? We stand here and wait for your buddy to arrive?”
He blinked.
“I mean, unless you’re planning to shoot all of us, it’s not like you’re gonna get away with this.”
“Don’t give him any ideas, Avery,” Gert said, eyes and hands steady.
“I wasn’t. I was just saying how, if all three of us turn up dead, someone’s gonna notice. It’s not like Wayne and Derek won’t put it together. They know about the trafficking.”
Gert nodded. And then we stood in silence while a few more seconds ticked by. Any moment now, Hal’s accomplice would arrive. Through the door we’d considerately left unlocked when we burst through earlier. And we’d be sunk.
The others must be thinking the same thing, because I saw something move in Irina’s eyes. There was no time to interfere, and to be honest, I’m not sure I would have even if I’d realized what she planned to do. Something had to happen, someone had to do something, and Irina had obviously decided it was up to her. I guess maybe she thought if she had to sacrifice herself for her sister, then that would be all right.
At any rate, she looked at Gert for a second, whether to try to communicate something or maybe just to take one last look before going to her death, I’m not sure. And then she threw herself sideways, away from the man with the gun, starting a domino effect as she knocked over first Svetlana, and then Svetlana’s friend. They landed in a heap on the floor. Hal’s finger did tighten on the trigger of the gun, but the bullet flew over their heads and hit a dusty can of chicken broth on a shelf against the opposite wall. The can started pouring broth through a perfectly round hole in the side. Meanwhile, Gert hurled himself forward and slammed into the bad guy, knocking him to the floor.
“Run!” he yelled.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I started forward, giving the two men a wide berth, and grabbed Irina. She’s a half foot taller than me, but somehow I managed to haul her to her feet. It must be true about fear giving people supernatural strength. Between us, we managed to sort out Svetlana and her friend and get them both upright, and then we all tumbled toward the front of the store.
“Gert . . .” Irina protested as I pushed her.
“He’s fine. Go.”
Of course, he wasn’t fine. He was rolling around on the floor while Hal did his best to beat the crap out of him. Both of their guns had gone flying, and I thought for a second about running back and scooping one of them off the floor to take with us. It might come in handy as we tried to make our getaway. Then again, unless I was willing to use it—and I wasn’t sure I could shoot someone in cold blood, even in self-defense—it would be time better spent running like hell. I ran like hell.
21
We were just a few yards up the cobblestoned street, not far from the general store at all, when a shot rang out.
Irina stopped dead, and the rest of us faltered, too. When she made to turn back, though, I grabbed her. “No.”
“But Gert . . .”
“He said to run.” I gave her a push.
“But . . .”
“He’s probably right behind us. That was probably him shooting. Just keep moving. Get the girls away from here before the other guy shows up.” I pushed her again, harder. She stumbled on.
“I’ll catch up,” I called after her and dashed back toward the store.
It’s difficult to move stealthily and carefully when your heart’s threatening to knock a hole in your chest and you expect bullets to come flying at you with every step you take. I managed, though. I slipped back into the store and crept toward the back, keeping close to the shelves of groceries the whole way.
Everything was quiet. Maybe a little too quiet, as they say in the movies. Some painful groaning might have been nice; at least that way I would have known that someone was alive. As it was, I got the shock of my life when I came upon Gert, lying facedown on the floor next to the counter in a widening pool of blood.
OK, so the fact that the pool was widening was probably a good thing. It meant he wasn’t dead yet. And if I wanted to keep him that way, I had no time to waste. I bent and dug my heels in and managed to turn him over. At least if he was lying on his back, the blood might sink to the bottom and not spill out the front.
The damage looked pretty extensive—the whole front of his jacket was red—but I could see his chest move. And as far as I could make out, the bullet had hit him in the stomach, not the chest. That was probably good.
If I could have called Derek for advice, I would have, but we had dealt with a gunshot just a few months ago, and I’d seen him put pressure on the wound to keep the blood loss to a minimum. I looked around and spied a stack of souvenir towels on a shelf. They were as dusty as everything else in the store, but a little dust was probably the least of Gert’s worries right now. Ripping open his jacket, I slapped the towels against the wound in his stomach and pushed down.
Gert groaned. His eyelids fluttered and then he opened his eyes. For a second, they looked glazed, like he couldn’t remember who or where he was, or what had happened. Then he recognized me. “A’ry?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, it’s me.”
“’Rina?”
“Running. With the other girls.”
He lifted a limp hand. “Go.”
“I will. I just want to help you first.”
He shook his head. “No time. Go.”
“Fine.” I added the rest of the souvenir towels to the stack on Gert’s stomach—the blood was already soaking through the first few—and zipped up his jacket again. “Keep pressure on this if you can. I’ll get you some help as soon as I can.”
There was hardly any power at all behind his voice anymore. “Go.”
I went. Back out the door and up the cobblestoned street, dashing after Irina and the other Russian women. Before I left the little village behind, I thought I heard footsteps through the fog, heading toward the store. Not much time left, then.
I caught up to Irina and the others after a few minutes. They hadn’t been able to move as fast as I was, and they didn’t know the terrain as well, either. Svetlana and her friend were weak from malnutrition and from sitting around without getting any exercise for several weeks. Plus, they were handcuffed together and woozy from the drugs. Irina was wearing heavy hiking boots. Great for navigating tricky terrain, but not so good for running a race. Not to mention that she was reluctant to leave Gert and was sluggish as a result.
“Gert?” she asked when I caught up, her voice frantic.
“Shot. Stomach.” I couldn’t manage more than a syllable at a time. “He’ll live.” I hoped.
We made tracks the best we could away from the village, but between our various handicaps and the thick fog, we didn’t move very fast. It didn’t take long at all for the remaining bad guy to pick up our trail.
Although the fog turned out to be a blessing as well as a curse. Yes, it slowed us down, we couldn’t see where we were headed, and every so often one of us would stumble and even fall, and we’d all have to slow down enough for her—or them, in the case of Svetlana and her handcuffed friend—to get up. And we were about as stealthy as a herd of buffalo thundering through the countryside.
Thankfully we heard the footsteps before we saw anyone, and before he got close enough to see us. The Ukrainian girl whose name I didn’t know had fallen and dragged Svetlana down with her, and Irina and I had come to a fidgety stop while we waited for the two of them to pull themselves back up so we could keep running. And that’s when we heard someone behind us. Rapid footsteps, coming closer.
“Gert!” Irina said.
“Doubt it.” He hadn’t been in any condition to run when I left the store, and he’d be in worse condition now. That is, if he was still alive. The second bad guy might have decided to assure his getaway by putting another bullet in Gert before he left. Hopefully he’d been too preoccupied with tracking us to think of it, though. Either way, it wasn’t something I felt I ought to mention. “Better not let him see us. Whoever he is.”
Svetlana and her girlfriend stumbled in one direction while Irina and I scurried in the other. We flattened ourselves in the grass off to the side of the path, holding our breath and hoping against hope that our hearts weren’t beating loud enough for him to hear. And this was where the fog became more of a blessing than a curse: Bad guy number two loped past, close enough that we could see him, like a dark shadow against the swirling yellow white mist, but not close enough for him to notice us.
We waited until he was gone, swallowed up by the fog and out of sight and hearing, and then we scrambled into a group again. All of us were soaked from lying in the grass, and my previous annoyance with my wet bottom seemed like it had happened a million years ago.
“What now?” Irina asked. She looked over her shoulder. “Go back?”
“To the village? No way.”
“But what about Gert? We can’t just leave him.”
“He wanted us to get away,” I said. I didn’t want to leave him, either, especially after seeing the damage that bullet had done, but he’d told me to run. He had sacrificed himself to give us a chance to get away, and I intended to make full use of it.
“But there are boats in the village we could use to go to the mainland.”
“There are people in the village, too. Bad people.”
“What about the man in front of us?”
“We’ll go slowly,” I said. “That way we’ll hear him if he comes back.”
“Where are we going?” Svetlana asked, her accent similar but heavier than her sister’s. She seemed to be waking up a little, while her well-endowed friend was still stumbling along in a daze. The busty one was shorter, so maybe the drugs had affected her more severely.
Irina and I looked at each other. “Off the island?” Irina said.
“Ideally.” We couldn’t go to Derek’s and my house, because the bad guys knew who I was and would probably expect us to head there. We couldn’t go to back Gert’s, either, since they’d recognized him, too. Or at least the shopkeeper had recognized him. We couldn’t call anyone for help, since there was no cell service. That left taking to the water and trying to make our way to the mainland. “Gotta find a boat.”
“The village . . .” Irina tried again.
I shook my head. “We don’t know how many people know about this whole trafficking thing. The whole village could be in on it and turning a blind eye. Just like they were doing during the prohibition. Gert has a boat. He brought it back earlier, right?”
Irina nodded. “Do you know how to drive it?”
“Not exactly. But I know how to drive a car.”
“That is not the same thing,” Svetlana said.
No kidding. However . . . “I’m sure we can figure it out. If it’s between that and dying.”
Nobody answered, so I figured we were on the same page. We started moving again, more slowly, breathing shallowly and listening for signs that our pursuer—who was in front of us at this point, so we were actually, technically, pursuing him—was on his way back toward us.
I figured he’d either caught a glimpse of us earlier, on our way out of the village, or his accomplice the store owner had been alive and lucid enough to tell him who we were. Either way, I thought he must know where we were headed. He was probably on his way to Derek’s and my house to see whether we’d taken refuge there, or to Gert’s house, to look for us there. When he didn’t find us in either place, he’d either hang out and wait somewhere between the two, where he could intercept us when we got close enough, or he’d come back this way. I hoped he didn’t hurt my kitten, and I hoped even more he wouldn’t come up with the brilliant idea to torch both houses, just to prevent us from hiding inside them. On a clear day, I probably wouldn’t have minded too much—I’d have been tempted to set up a signal flare myself, if it came to that, in hopes of attracting the coast guard—but on a day like today, nobody would see the smoke anyway, and if the house burned down, Derek would have a fit.
In the end, it took us longer to get back across the island than it had taken Gert, Irina, and me to stumble to the village through the fog in the first place. And I thought that had taken a long time. What was especially ironic—and frustrating—was that while we were so desperate to get to the other side of the island and onto Gert’s boat, we had to move at a snail’s pace, with frequent detours into tall grass and between the trees to avoid being seen by our pursuer.
From time to time we’d think we heard him, and we’d split up and scurry to safety, flattening ourselves in the wet grass and holding our breath for long minutes while we waited for discovery, but there was never anyone there. He was still up ahead, and the closer we got to the south end of the island, the slower we moved.
Once we got near the path that connected our house with Gert’s, I thought for sure we’d find him. Skulking somewhere, waiting for us. I mean, he couldn’t know whether we’d try to hide out at our house or at Gert’s, and it made sense that he’d station himself somewhere between the two to intercept us. I made sure we gave that stretch a wide berth, flitting from tree to tree in the foggy forest like a sm
all band of Micmacs, two of whom were stuck together.
All in all, it was a harrowing experience. Not like facing down a man with a gun, knowing that he can pull the trigger at any moment and it’s bye-bye Avery. That’s a sharp, panicky sort of fear, quickly over with one way or the other. This was more like a nightmare, stumbling through a no-man’s-land of fog and shadows for what seemed like years, never knowing when the axe would fall but always having to be looking for it. By the time we made it out of the woods into the clearing where Gert’s house stood, I was almost wishing the guy would just show himself so I could stop anticipating.
But there was no sign of him. Not that we could see much, of course, but we left Svetlana and her friend standing by the back wall of the house, while Irina and I circled the house, going in opposite directions. If he was circling, too, he’d run into one of us sooner or later.
But he wasn’t there. Neither of us came across anyone else until we met again at the front of the house. We tried the doorknob, of course, just to be safe, and the house was still locked up nice and tight.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t just hunker down and wait until morning?” Irina murmured into my ear. “Or until the fog lifts?”
“Do you have a key?”
She shook her head. “We could break a window.”
“I think we should try to get off the island. He’s here somewhere—maybe down at Derek’s and my house, waiting for us—and if we don’t show up, sooner or later he’ll get over this way. I’d hate to be squatting inside while he’s pouring gasoline around the foundation.”
Irina turned pale. Paler. “You don’t think he’d do that, do you?”
“I hope not. But just in case he does, I’d rather not be inside.”
Irina nodded. “I’ll go around this way.” She pointed in the direction she’d been headed, the way I’d come from. “I’ll see you on the other side of the house.”
I nodded and continued in the direction I’d been going.
Mortar and Murder Page 25