by SJ Varengo
That shit is old, she thought. It shouldn’t be that difficult to bust off of there, if I can find something big enough to smack it and get a good angle to swing my arm. She’d briefly considered just shooting it off. But with the suppressor on the gun was a little too long and awkward to easily do this, and though she could remove the bulky silencer she wasn’t keen about the sound of her round crackling through the early morning. She turned and started to walk back across the span through which she’d run, trying to find something to smash or perhaps pry the old lock loose. Using her flashlight to augment the gradually brightening sky outside the door, she saw a piece of the stone blocks from which the walls were constructed that had broken off and was lying on the ground.
As she walked to get it, she passed a recess in the wall that she hadn’t noticed while dashing toward the gate. Instantly, she knew she was in trouble. She pivoted to point the gun toward it, but it was already too late. Before she could squeeze off a shot, a man, larger by far than the one she’d killed at the beginning of this passage, caught her at the base of her skull with his own weapon, and she let out a groan as she slumped to the ground.
The thing that sucked the most about being pistol-whipped by someone who knew what they were doing was, aside from the fact that it hurt like hell, was that the resulting unconsciousness, whether brief or extended, left the victim disoriented when they eventually came to. That was what Nicole experienced now.
She was lying on the cold, musky floor of the Bucharest catacombs, and she realized that fairly quickly. The throbbing at the back of her head, nasty though it was, also served to regain a little mental ground. A gorilla had thumped her, she recalled. That memory prompted her to lie as still as she could. If the big thug was still near, disguising her degree of wakefulness was merited.
Beyond that, things were fuzzy and required a moment to piece together. Opening her eyes a narrow amount, she saw that she’d been dragged back down the passage to where she could smell the fresh air, but not see the light of the exit. She’d been banking on that to determine how long she’d been unconscious. Dawn had just been breaking when she’d reached the gate and found that she was locked in. The degree to which the sky had brightened would have given her a fairly accurate measurement of the amount of time that had passed.
Also bothering her were the two voices she was hearing nearby. They were coming from behind her, and she didn’t want to turn to see who the speakers were, still pantomiming her pistol-induced coma. She breathed slowly, regularly, letting the oxygen continue to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of her pounding head.
There was a man, whose voiced sounded louder, and a woman who, after another moment, Nicole realized wasn’t actually in the catacombs, but whose voice was actually coming through the speaker of a cell phone. They were speaking Romanian, and the woman sounded pissed.
“So you just watched him walk in and walk out? You didn’t think it might be a good idea to follow him and do the job you’d been given?”
“You said to give him the needle if he got close enough, Ileana. The fucker walked in, took a look around, and left. There was a meat wall fifty feet thick between us.”
It took Nicole a minute to translate the phrase “carne de perete”... literally “meat wall,” and she almost snickered when she figured out that he meant there were a lot of people in the way. She managed to quell the urge, then lost it altogether as she heard the woman’s next words.
“That was the husband of the woman who is hunting Bogdan. Killing him would have put her off her game, and I wouldn’t have had to lure her into those damn tunnels. I’ve told you before how much I hate them. The stale air takes the dye from my hair.”
“Well, that’s why I’m calling you. I have her.”
“What?” The woman’s voice, which Nicole had already suspected belonged to Ileana Gabor, sounded at the same time incredulous and ecstatic. “You’ve killed her?”
“No, not yet. She found the dead weapons runner, like you figured she would, but she killed my partner, who I left posted by the body.”
From the phone’s speaker came a sound that carried a heavy dose of disgust within its brief passage. “Dorin was a much better man. I wished she’d killed you instead.”
“But I have her. I hid in a cutaway and bashed her skull when she walked by. She’s lying by my feet right now.”
The voice of Ileana was silent for a long pause. Nicole thought about what she’d heard. Not only had she been right about Dan being set up when Gabor sent him to the nightclub, but about the bitch having made her completely. Viktor’s lifeless body had already suggested that… no… convinced her of that. The plan to kill Dan sloughed off the final, desperately held scrap of doubt. In the distance, Nicole heard some kind of metallic banging, a single clank, followed a moment later by a faint creaking. If the knuckle-dragger heard it as well, he gave no indication. She strained to hear any further sounds, trying to determine their nature and postulate whether they indicated good news or bad. But there was no follow-up noise, and she dismissed it as no news at all. Finally, the woman spoke again.
“I suppose the idiot husband won’t cause much trouble, though the potential is much higher since he’s inconveniently not dead. But at least you can make short work of this whore. Put one through her brain and then get the fuck out of there. The big job is about to go down, and now that Dorin is dead, I’ll have to use you to back me up when we move the model.”
“Alright,” he said. He began to say something else, but then swore as he realized Ileana had ended the call. She heard heavy footsteps as the thug approached her. A moment later, he grabbed her by the hair and yanked. She heard a surprised grunt as the man pulled his hand back, holding a big mitt full of brown hair, but found her head, now blond, was still lying on the ground. “Peruca dracului,” he muttered, tossing it on the ground directly in front of her eyes. He then twisted his fingers through her locks again, this time succeeding in pulling her head up. With the other huge hand, he slapped her cheek, hard and repeatedly.
“Wake the fuck up,” he said in English. “Wake up, fucking bitch.”
The slaps hurt and she let out a small noise that betrayed her consciousness. He let her head fall back to the floor.
“Good, you hear me now. Yes, bitch?”
Nicole was quickly losing her temper with this guy. “Fuck you,” she groaned, her throat feeling as though it already had mold growing in it.
He reached down and hit her again, this time with a closed fist. “No fuck me!” he growled. “Fuck you! Your fucking stupid husband got me in trouble. But you’ll get me out now. Do you know how? I don’t fucking care. I’ll tell you. You’re gonna be dead soon. You get me out of trouble because today is the day we move the pretty Ana Albu from Bogdan’s palace to the boat where she will meet her new master, and I will make sure that happens, both by helping Ileana move the model and our boss safely then, and by killing you now. Ileana said to kill you quick and get out of tunnel. So now, I do!”
Great, she thought, I’m about to be killed by the single stupidest henchman in the history of the profession. A rush of air escaped Nicole’s lungs as he stepped heavily on her back, making sure she didn’t try to roll away as he took aim at her head. She heard the hammer of the gun cock, and an instant later, she heard the blast.
Nicole had been shot at many times, but had never been hit, and now that the thug had shot at point blank range, she was confused. She had expected the gunshot to be followed by an internal flash as the bullet tore through her brain. It should have lasted for the briefest of instant, in which she assumed she should have felt a hint of pain, replaced quickly by darkness, by nothing at all, forever.
But instead, she felt a hot splatter of liquid on her face and neck. There was no internal flash. No nanosecond of pain. She heard, even as the single report caused her ears to ring, an obscene grunting sound, then felt a heavy weight land on top of her. Guessing now that she probably wasn’t dead, Nicole struggled to move from
under the burden, and a moment later, lifted her head. She turned it to see the big gorilla lying quite still next to her, with a very significant new hole in his face, a hole that was still gushing blood. She saw that he’d dropped his phone, and grabbing it, she activated the flash. As she looked around in utter confusion, the beam at last fell upon a third person, standing about ten feet away, his arm still extended with the shaking hand holding a smoking handgun. Moving the light to the face, she gasped in shock as she realized she was looking at her husband.
“He meant to hurt you,” Dan was stammering.
She pulled herself upright and began to move slowly toward him. She could tell at once that he was in shock.
“He meant to hurt you, Cole. His gun was pointed right at your head.”
She reached him finally, first taking the gun that he held loosely now. He surrendered it without resistance.
“He meant to hurt... to...to kill you. I couldn’t... I had to…”
“Shh, Danny. Shh,” she said, gently placing a finger over his lips. “It’s all right. I’m not hurt.”
“But he meant to...”
“He meant to, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. You saved me.”
Dan’s bleary eyes seemed to regain a trace of focus. “I did?”
“Yes, honey. You did. You saved me.”
He turned now and looked at her face. The sight of her seemed to snap him more or less out of his haze. He smiled a tiny, quivering smile. She wrapped her arms around him, and as she did, she felt him begin to sag toward the floor, still overwhelmed by what had happened, by what he’d done. She helped him slowly lower to a sitting position, sinking with him, never releasing him from her embrace. They sat for a moment, his body leaning into her, her arms steadying him as his body shook, even resting.
“Say it again,” he finally whispered.
She didn’t know what he meant for a moment, then smiled. “You saved me.”
He said nothing for a moment, then turned once more to look into her eyes.
“Fuck yeah I did!” he said at last. His words did not contain the bravado that phrase should have carried, but hearing it was a relief still. She let out a grateful laugh at the first trace of her husband’s returning sensibility, evidenced by his idiot sense of humor. Then she sighed.
“I guess we need to talk again. Let’s get out of here. I’m going to smell this place for days.”
II
And I Feel Fine
10
Regrouping
Nicole’s far greater familiarity with the city of Bucharest served them well in returning to the hotel. Although they’d managed to clean her up fairly well using Dan’s undershirt as a makeshift washcloth, she still looked, and sadly smelled, quite horrendous. Lying on the floor of an ancient catacomb tended to have that effect. So did being sprayed the gushing blood of a dying man. Dan was a little surprised at this. “I can smell it, Cole,” he’d said as they stood at a bus stop.
She knew he meant the blood. “Yes. They say it has a distinctive metallic smell. Like copper. I never really got that. To me, it’s always smelled like… a mistake. Like something that was not supposed to be out where you could smell it.”
“It smells like... death.”
Dan was doing much better than he had been after he’d first ended the gorilla, but Nicole knew he wasn’t quite out of the woods yet, so she proceeded gently. Engaging him in conversation, even morbid conversation, should keep his mind occupied, should prevent it from considering the ramifications of what had happened too deeply.
“I suppose,” she said. “I suppose you could say that. I think of something different when I think of the smell of death. But then, I generally think of stale, rotten death. That’s a horrid smell.”
“Fresh death isn’t very pleasant either, I guess.”
“No. I guess death isn’t supposed to be one of those things you want to breathe deeply.”
Nicole had decided to take the bus back north to their hotel, or at least as close as the route would take them, traveling down the same DN5 that Dan had recently thrown into turmoil by dashing across it in full morning traffic. She knew that they’d get off at the intersection of the highway and Bucharest’s homage to the American founding father, Strada Benjamin Franklin. From there, it was just a short walk back to the Anthanee Palace.
A cab, she’d reasoned, would place them in too intimate a setting with a potential witness should things turn messy, which was always a possibility when walking away from the scene of a triple murder. People on the bus were more practiced at ignoring their fellow passengers than cabbies were at ignoring their fares.
The downside was that they had to wait at a very public stop for the bus to come, and, again, although they’d wiped away the blood from Cole’s face and turned her now ruined reversible jacket to its original dinner time configuration from the night prior, she was still looking like she’d been through a rough patch. Dan, aside from the torn coat, didn’t look too bad physically but the hollow cast of his eyes was an unmistakable beacon of a man in distress. Looking into them now was tearing Nicole apart, both because she would never wish that level of pain upon anyone she loved (and she loved no one like she loved Dan), and because she knew what she had done to cause this. All of this.
One other person shared the bus stop with them, yet another of the ubiquitous old women of Bucharest. There seemed to be an endless supply and, Nicole had decided, they seemed to come in two categories. The first was the scowling crone, somehow disapproving not just of the tourists visiting her city, but also of pretty much everyone else occupying it. But the second was, happily, far more common. One had startled Nicole the night before when she’d been stalking Ileana. The short, smiling, grandmotherly type that somehow seemed worried that no one was eating quite enough. The woman who sat on the narrow bench beside which they stood was one of the latter. Twice Nicole stole a glance at her to find her looking up from the bench and smiling at them. A couple of additional peeks caught her also smiling at anyone who passed by.
A moment later, the bus arrived, and after waiting for the woman to make her way up the three stairs and find a seat, she gently guided Dan onto the mercifully uncrowded conveyance, and after she dropped their fares into the collection device, she moved them a few seats back from the door.
She let Dan slide in and sit by the window, then settled beside him, slipping her arm through his in a comfortable way that couples who’ve spent twenty or more years together know well. When the bus pulled away from the stop, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, then whispered, “You’ll feel better after you take a shower.”
He turned slowly, pointing his hollow eyes in her direction but not really seeing her. “Will I?” he whispered back.
Upon reaching the hotel, Nicole again took the lead, guiding the almost somnambular Dan quickly through the lobby and onto the mercifully waiting elevator. Once in their room, she took his clothes off and led him to the shower, which she regulated as he stood waiting, arms limp at his side. It reminded her of times when her son Tony had been very young and would be waiting to get into the tub but was not about to put any effort into helping the process along. Once she was sure the water wasn’t going to scald him, Nicole pushed Dan into the stream, then quickly undressed and joined him.
From early in their relationship, shared showers were almost universally at least foreplay. Often they turned quickly into ardent lovemaking sessions amid the soap and steam. But this shower was about therapy. This shower was as much symbolic as it was practical. Dan Porter, the most non-violent, kind-hearted man she had ever known, had just killed a man. And now it was her job to wash away the shock and pain and set him on a path that she hoped would both provide recovery and maybe further his understanding, which she still recognized was incomplete, of the world in which she lived.
It had, for the entirety of their lives together, been a world apart. She’d compartmentalized it, emotionally, from their shared existence. The shared world had be
en a happy, level progression through years that saw them grow deeply and ever more comfortably in love... sharing the upbringing of their children, building a home, a business... two businesses if one considered the Crew. The other world had been... what? What had it been?
Dan moaned as she sudsed his back, massaging his muscles while scrubbing away the sweat and dirt with a soft washcloth. She smiled at the sound. “Does that feel good, Danny?”
“It always feels good when you touch me, Coley. Today, it feels like... like you’re putting life back into me.” He turned around to face her. “How do you come back from this, Cole? How do you come back from this?”
She considered her answer, hearing the weight he’d put on the word “you.” He was not asking a rhetorical, philosophic question. He was asking for practical advice.
“You don’t totally, babe,” she said at last. “Not even when you’ve done it as many times as I have. There is always a little part of you that doesn’t return from the scene. You leave it there.”
“For the Clean Up Crew to dispose of?” he asked with a hint of ironic, albeit weak smile. Still, the slight upturn on his lips encouraged her.
“I suppose, yes. But most of you does come back. And that’s the good news. Because what you did was not evil, Danny, nor did it make you a bad person. It wasn’t even technically illegal. You were defending your wife. You saved my life. In the parlance of law, it was a ‘justifiable homicide.’”
“But it was still a homicide.”
She nodded as she gave the washcloth a squeeze, letting the suds run down through the hair on his chest. As she rubbed it in a circular motion across his pecs, she felt a little flutter. Even as he moved through the last years of his fifties, Dan kept himself fit, and in spite of the gravity of the moment, she could not keep from feeling a little aroused at the sight and feel of him. Looking down, however, she saw he was not there with her, and she realized that the excitement of knowing your man just killed to save you was not translating into any kind of macho testosterone boost on his part.