When Alena had come for his reckoning, she'd had to deal with the dogs first, and most of them she'd been forced to kill. After all had been said and done, only Miata was still alive, though wounded. Then, like now, she had loaded him into a car-a Mazda Miata-and rushed him to a doctor.
It was twenty minutes to seven in the morning when she arrived in Poti, and she lost another ten minutes driving the city's confusing streets, desperately trying to find someone to help her. The first two civilians she saw fled from her when she stopped, and it wasn't until after the second that she realized why, how she must've looked to them, stained with blood and smoke and sweat, in her underwear, the wheezing Doberman across the backseat of the car.
The third time she asked for help, she held out a fistful of the bills she'd taken off the dead men, and that helped overcome fear long enough for her to acquire directions to a veterinarian. By the time she actually reached the doctor's home-slash-office it was three minutes to seven, and Miata's breathing had gone from labored and rapid to shallow and dangerously slow.
She parked the car literally in front of the house, less than a meter from the door, leaning repeatedly and hard on the horn before getting out of the vehicle. The man who emerged from the house was bleary with sleep, silver-haired and stocky.
"My dog's been shot," Alena told him, already opening the back door.
The doctor balked, not unreasonably, given what he was seeing. Alena lifted Miata out of the car, brushed past him, heading inside. There was an examination room just through the door to her left. The man followed her, watched as she lay Miata gingerly on the table.
"Help him," she told the doctor. "Please."
Then she went back outside to the car. She was gone less than thirty seconds, and when she came back, she saw that the vet had unfastened the belt around the makeshift bandage, had begun examining the wound. Then he noticed she'd returned and said, "It's not good. I don't know if I can save him."
"You can."
The vet saw the Walther that Alena had just retrieved from the Audi. Whether it was the sight of the gun, or her tone of voice, or both, or neither, the man hesitated for only a second before setting to work, quickly trying to save the Doberman's life. "I didn't point it at him," Alena hastened to clarify. "I never pointed the gun at him."
I told her that given how she must've looked at the time, she damn well knew that showing the gun to him was more than enough. She shrugged, then continued. For the first couple of minutes while the vet struggled to get Miata stabilized, Alena did nothing but stand there, watching. The adrenaline was dropping away like a wave retreating from the shore, uncovering all the aches and sores it had been concealing, the searing pain from the wounds on her arm and leg. She was afraid to sit down, afraid to leave the room to tend to her own needs, suspicious that the vet would capitalize on her absence.
After several minutes, the vet said, "I have to operate on your dog."
"Go ahead."
"I'll need you to help me."
"Tell me."
The man looked at her. She thought he was in his fifties, perhaps. The gun in her hand made her feel guilty, the lack of clothing made her feel ashamed.
"You have to get clean first," the vet told her. "There's a bathroom in the back, and some clothes in my daughter's room. Wash up, then come back."
She didn't move.
"Did you do this to him?" the vet asked, sharply.
"No." The question confused her at first, and then she remembered the gun again. "No! He was trying to protect me."
"Then you have no reason to fear me." The vet indicated a roll of gauze on one of the nearby tables, a pile of bandages. "Take these, get clean. Hurry."
She did as instructed, using the bathroom first to hastily wash herself off. The bleeding on her arm and leg resumed when she went to clean the wounds, and she bandaged herself as best as she was able. The daughter's room, she thought, hadn't seen use in quite some time, and the clothing she found there seemed to bear that out. She pulled on a pair of pants that were both too short and too wide for her, secured them in place with a beaded belt. She stuck the Walther in her waistband, at the front.
When she returned, the vet was still attending Miata, now delivering plasma to the dog through an IV he'd set up. He acknowledged Alena's return, then told her to come and stand beside him.
"Do what I tell you, when I tell you."
With Alena assisting him, he began to operate.
As I was walking into a brothel in the desert outside Dubai, Alena was changing Miata's IV in Poti. While I was showing a frightened young woman Tiasa Lagidze's picture, she was holding a clamp while the vet pulled bullet fragments from Miata's liver. While I was checking out of the Marina, she was watching the vet stitch our dog closed once more. "He'll live," the vet told her. He pulled his bloodstained gloves from his hands and threw them into the trash beneath the sink. "But he'll be weeks, if not months, to recover from this. How old is he?"
"I don't know," Alena told him. "Ten? Maybe older."
"He's an old dog."
She nodded, then said, "I have money. I will pay you."
"If you like."
Alena fumbled cash from where she'd moved it to the pockets of her borrowed pants. She hadn't taken time to count it, to really examine it at all. She guessed she was holding somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred euros. She gave him two hundred of them, and the vet took the money without comment.
"We have to go," she told him.
"I would caution against moving him. You both can stay here awhile longer." The offer was a tempting one, Alena told me, an extremely tempting one. The vet clearly lived alone, and no one had come calling during the course of the operation, which led her to conclude that he didn't get much in the way of clients or visitors. Having trusted him this far, trusting him further would have been easy.
The problem was that she had no way of knowing who else might be hunting for her, if anyone else would be coming at all. Given how she'd departed Kobuleti, given that it had been the chief of police who had warned her, if there were more hunters on the trail, it wouldn't take them long to expand their search to Poti. The last thing she wanted was another fight. The second to last thing, at that moment, was to bring such a fight to the doorstep of the man who'd helped her. "You're very kind," Alena told the vet. "But we can't."
He sighed, then turned to one of his cabinets and began assembling gauze and bandages, putting them into an empty cardboard box. When he was finished, he handed it to her, everything Alena needed to make replacement dressings for Miata's-and her own-wounds.
"Simple food for him for a while," he said. "Lots of water. Watch for infection. He won't want to move about, which is good. You must let him rest."
"I will. Thank you."
The vet sighed again, looked at the dog sleeping on the table in front of them.
"I will help you carry him to your car." There was an overnight ferry from Poti to Sochi scheduled to leave at six that evening, and for extra you could get your own room. Alena bought a ticket for herself and then bribed the clerk to allow Miata on board. She bought herself a jacket, a backpack, and several bottles of water, and at five she carried Miata, still drugged and sleeping, to their tiny, run-down little cabin. She set him on the fold-down bed, changed his dressings, and waited for the ferry to depart. Six o'clock came and went, and then seven, and then eight, and just as Alena was beginning to think that this wasn't simply engine trouble but maybe something more, perhaps the occupying Russians flexing their muscles, the ferry went into motion, and they set sail across the Black Sea.
She lay down beside Miata, feeling his heart beating, listening to him breathing, and for the first time since the phone had rung that morning, she allowed herself to relax. That was when she remembered that she'd missed our check-in, and realizing that put the rest of her problems into sharp focus.