"Vladek," I said. "That's your name?"
"Fucking cunt, fuck you!"
"I just cut your femoral, Vladek," I told him. "You can't walk. You can barely crawl. Your friends are dead. We're far enough from the port that no one heard a grenade go off, which means we're far enough that no one will hear you no matter how loud you yell. Right now, my foot is the only thing keeping you from bleeding out."
Then I showed him his phone.
"You want this back, you talk to me."
It was all across his face how much he hated me and my offer. He was sweating now, and he licked his lips once, twice, and I knew his mouth had gone dry, knew he was going into shock.
"You're running out of time," I told him.
He swore again, then said, "Tourniquet. Put a tourniquet on it first."
"No."
He swore once more, but this time it was quieter, and more at himself and his position than at me.
"She went out yesterday, before dawn," Vladek Karataev said. "On the boat to Trabzon. She's already in Turkey."
"Why there? Why'd you send her there?"
"She went with the others."
"What others?"
His eyes focused. "What's it to you? Who the fuck are you?"
"A friend of Bakhar's," I said. "What others? Why did you send her to Turkey?"
He began coughing, and it must have hurt like hell to do it with a shattered pelvic girdle, but he didn't stop. After a moment, I realized he was laughing, not coughing, and he was laughing at me. Then pain caught up to the joke, and his noises subsided.
"That shit had it coming," Vladek told me, and he smiled. "He fucking sold us to the police, Bakhar got what he had coming. Gave it to his daughter, too. We all did."
I didn't say anything.
"You won't find her." The smile turned into a grin. One of his incisors was missing, another was gold. "She's pretty and young. She's already been sold. Some fat Arab sheikh already has her wiping his floors and sucking her own shit off his cock."
My arm felt cold where it was covered in blood, like it had been dunked in a bath of ice. My head pulsed with pain, my left ear still ringing sharply. The backs of my thighs and shoulders throbbed, and for the first time I was aware that what I thought was sweat running down my back probably wasn't sweat at all.
He really loved the reaction he got, the look on my face that I couldn't hide, and didn't bother to try to.
"What the fuck you think this is?" he asked, as if assessing me for brain damage. "You fucking think Bakhar was living in that shithole town because he liked the beach? Coward, fucking coward was hiding from us, he knew what he had done. So we paid him back, we paid him in full."
I still didn't speak, but this time it was because I didn't think I could.
"He sold them, too, you understand me? He sold more girls than you've ever seen, and then the fucking Americans leaned on Tbilisi, and Tbilisi leaned on us, and he sold us out. Your friend. Fuck you! That was your friend!"
He was shouting at the end, furious at Bakhar, at me, at his wounds and the injustice of a world that would punish him like this. I watched his chest heave as he tried to replace his spent breath, glaring at me, the hostility as naked as it had been on Bakhar's body.
I moved my foot off his thigh, watched the blood begin to flood out of the wound I'd made, spreading beneath his leg.
"Give me a name," I said. "The captain of the boat, the contact in Turkey, something. I want a name."
The glare stayed as before. He knew the way that I knew that he would never get a tourniquet or the phone. He knew he was done, and he knew that giving me anything more wouldn't change that.
I took out my gun.
"You'll never find her," Vladek Karataev said.
"You'll never know," I told him, and shot him twice in the face.
CHAPTER
Seven Halfway back to Kobuleti, after crossing the Supsa River, I took the Land Cruiser off-road, heading inland, headlights off. It was closing on two in the morning, the moon beginning to move toward setting, but there was more than enough to see by as long as I drove slow. I followed the river-bank for four kilometers, passing farms and their distant houses, before reaching woodlands. Then I turned the nose of the car to the river and parked. When I moved to get out of the car, I realized that my shirt had stuck to the seatback as well as to me, and when it came free I felt my back start bleeding again.
I opened the doors and the rear, then found a rock big enough to weight the accelerator, put the car in gear, and let it go into the water. The Land Cruiser did pretty well for itself, got about six meters into the Supsa before stalling out, and it was already turning slowly in the current, beginning to drift, when I turned away and headed for home on foot. I followed E amp;E procedure as I moved, staying away from the roads and anything that advertised people, going through the woods.
It required concentration, and that was good, because it meant that I didn't think about Bakhar, and who he was, what he had done, what he had been. It meant I didn't think about Tiasa, what had happened to her, what was being done to her right now. It was dawn when I reached home, and Miata came to meet me, licking my hands and following close to heel when I went indoors. Alena hadn't returned yet, and even though that was expected, it was also profoundly disappointing. I needed her.
I checked the security, rearmed the system, then went to the gun locker and reloaded my gun. I put everything I'd gathered on my trip in Bakhar's go-bag-the money, the two knives, and the BlackBerry, along with its battery, which I'd removed before leaving the road. Then I went into the bathroom and started the shower. I stripped down at the mirror, twisting around in an attempt to catalogue my injuries. There were bruises and scrapes acquired from the fistfight and the desperate motion before and after. Most of my blood was from the grenade, minor shrapnel mixed with pebbles and dirt that had carried enough velocity to penetrate cloth and skin, but none too deep. I picked what I could out of my body, got my legs clean, but there was a spot on my upper back that I just couldn't reach. Fresh blood leaked out of me where I reopened my wounds.
Then I got under the shower and watched as blood, mine and others', spiraled down the drain. After a couple of minutes I got the shakes, and decided that sitting might be a better idea, so I slumped down in a corner and tried to ride it out. Then I got the dry heaves.
It was to be expected. The only thing that surprised me was that it had taken this long for everything to catch up. I was asleep when Alena returned home, deep in a bone-tired coma, and she woke me with a touch, saying my name. She was sitting beside me on the bed, a hand on my back, and I had a vague sense that she had been there awhile, but perhaps it was only a dream. The lamp was on, but otherwise, the room was dark.
"Welcome home," I said.
"I'll get the kit," Alena told me. "Stay still."
She rose and left the room, and I decided that staying still didn't mean I couldn't reach for my glasses. I had them on when she came back carrying one of the two homemade first aid kits we had in the house. They were closer to the jump bags you'd find on an ambulance than the kind of thing you could buy in a store, filled with bandages and tape and gauze, even two liters of Ringer's solution. Alena opened the kit and came out with a clamp and a set of forceps, set them aside and went to work dumping Betadine on my back.
"Tell me," she said.
I told her.
When I had finished, so had she, smoothing the last of the tape down across the bandage. The three fragments of shrapnel she'd dug out of me sat on the open gauze wrapper, black and sharp. She scooped up the paper, crumpling it before setting it aside, then checked my legs, her fingers careful as she examined the rest of my wounds.