‘Why can’t you come, too?’
Zashka looked up at me, her dark eyes beseeching. I stared at her for a moment, then glanced at Tynia. Tynia nodded once. I couldn’t have asked for more.
‘Go.’
As Zashka came abreast of me, she stopped momentarily. ‘Aslan’s on his way over,’ she said. ‘He’s going to kill you if he gets the chance.’ Then she followed the other women out the door.
I watched from the window until the bus pulled away, feeling instantly lighter. If an unsuspecting Aslan walked through the door, now that I’d done what I’d come to do, it was odds-on that he wouldn’t walk out.
‘What were you going to buy with this money? A few slaves?’
I turned to find Adele standing over the older man. Though still prone, he’d turned his head far enough to fix her with a pale blue eye. ‘I have not done nothing wrong. You cannot do nothing to me.’
‘No?’ Adele crossed the room, opened the window, tossed the money out into the rain. The old man groaned, but kept his mouth shut. He was being treated to a dose of curbside justice and there was nothing more to be said.
It was raining hard when Adele and I came out of the building and the streets were deserted. There were bills plastered to the roofs and windshields of the cars parked on the block, more bills on the sidewalk. I had a crazy urge to pick them up, but then Adele tapped me on the shoulder and I saw the SUV as it turned onto the block and began to accelerate. The vehicle was running with its brights on. Magnified by the wet streets and the falling rain, the glare stretched from curb to curb.
My universe contracted into a single frame encompassing only this street at this moment in time. I reached for the Glock tucked behind my hip, knowing I didn’t have a chance. A bare fifty feet away, the truck was closing fast. We were going to come out second best here. The window was already sliding down. Behind the glare of the headlights, Aslan’s face and the gun he held leaped into focus. The pounding rain effectively drowned out the blasts when Aslan opened up, reducing the gunshots to barely audible thuds. But I saw the gunfire, a trio of muzzle flashes so distinct they might have been separated by light-years. And I saw Adele drop to the pavement and the truck’s brake lights come on as the SUV flew past me, then skidded to a halt thirty yards away.
As I raised my weapon, I fought a surge of adrenaline. I wanted to help Adele. I wanted to kill Aslan. I wanted to fly to the fucking moon.
The truck’s door opened, a foot dropped to the asphalt, a shoulder emerged. I was aiming for the head that followed when I pulled the trigger, but the round missed by a few inches, slamming through the truck’s side mirror. That was enough for Aslan. He jumped back inside and shot off toward the far corner.
I waited until the truck was out of sight before turning to Adele. She was lying on the pavement, clutching her abdomen, her breath coming in short quick gasps. I dropped to one knee beside her, remembering her Kevlar vest only when I actually touched it. The hollow-point bullet was right there, caught in the fabric and severely deformed. I pulled it out as though withdrawing a tumor.
Cradling the bullet in the palm of my hand, I offered it to Adele. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t seem to get the words past the constriction in my throat. Adele stared at the flattened chunk of lead, her face reddening as she fought for breath. Then her lungs suddenly emptied, the whoosh of air loud enough to be heard above the steady slap of rain on the sidewalk. Slowly, her breathing became more regular and she stopped gasping.
‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I had the wind knocked out of me. That’s all.’
‘Can you walk?’ I asked. ‘If you can’t, I’ll carry you. But we really need to get out of here.’
She started to rise, then slid back onto her butt, finally made it on the second try with a little help. I took her arm and we started down the street. We were soaked to the bone long before we reached the car, but Adele was moving freely by then. I slid behind the wheel, started the Nissan and turned on the heat.
‘I’m not shivering because I’m cold,’ Adele explained. ‘I’m shaking because I was frightened.’
I glanced at my left leg. It was going up and down like a piston. Alongside me, Adele removed her vest. She patted her stomach gingerly.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
‘A little bruised. That’s about it. Let’s just do what we have to do.’
What we had to do was drive into upper Manhattan, to a school on Amsterdam Avenue that’d been converted to a shelter for battered women. On an upper floor, in what had once been a gym, we found the women of Domestic Solutions. The setting was grim — floors, walls, cots, a pair of cribs — but the women seemed in fine spirits as they unpacked their few possessions and discussed the sleeping arrangements. Zashka was with them and she appeared comfortable.
‘Zashka?’ I said.
She turned to look at me, wary now. ‘Yes?’
I crooked a finger. ‘We need to talk.’
I led a resigned Zashka to a small office on the first floor. Adele remained behind. She was going to speak to the women, just in case they knew anything about Barsakov or Mynka. It was a long shot, but we were covering all the bases.
‘Sit down, Zashka.’
I pointed to a chair on the far side of a desk, waited for her to sit, then sat down myself. Though my fingers were still trembling, I made an effort to appear casual. I crossed my legs at the knee, dropped my hands to my lap, let my shoulders fall back.
Zashka held up a pack of cigarettes. ‘You mind?’
‘Knock yourself out.’
She closed her eyes when she inhaled, opened them when she blew the smoke out through her nose. ‘I got in trouble,’ she said, ‘with a Russian shylock out in Brighton Beach. I was working it off.’
‘With Aslan?’
‘Aslan needed somebody to stay twenty-four-seven with the kids and mind the ladies when they were at home. It wasn’t like he could advertise in the papers. The shy was a friend of his and they made a deal. Aslan got me for a year, me and my debt.’
She paused then, her chin coming up, mouth tightening. I waited patiently, certain she had something else to say. Finally, she cleared her throat and smiled.
‘I was good to them. To the kids. I didn’t think I would be, not havin’ kids myself, but they got to me right away. Their mothers were gone all the time. If I didn’t love them, nobody would. I know what’s that’s about, detective. I know what it is to be little and have no one to love you.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but what about their mothers? What about Tynia? How could she leave her child in the care of stranger, even a nice stranger, for six days a week?’
Zashka thought it over, then looked at me, looked straight into my eyes. ‘Two reasons. First, poor women all over the world leave their children, sometimes for years, in order to provide for them. Second, Aslan Khalid is a frightening man. You fuck with him, he will definitely kill you. One time, when the girls staged a little revolt, he threatened to blow up the warehouse with everyone in it. Myself, after listening to all his bullshit about Chechnya, I believed him.’
The window behind Zashka was covered by a white shade. Someone had painted a picture in crayons on its smooth surface, a bunny rabbit hopping through a field of crudely drawn flowers. I stared at it for a minute, then got to the point.
‘I think you were in the house when Mynka was butchered. I think maybe you even know what happened to her organs, though I can’t prove it. But what I can prove, through independent witnesses, is that you were present when Konstantine Barsakov was murdered. So there’s no room for bullshit here. You know what happened that night. The only issue is whether or not you want to tell me.’
Zashka took another pull on her cigarette. In her forties, she was fairly attractive once you got past the red hair. Her cheekbones were high, her features small and regular.
‘God, I hate that prick,’ she said.
‘Aslan?’