Tess Gerritsen: Harvest

The four boys piled into the back seat of the car. It was cramped, andYakov had to sit halfway on Pyotr's lap.

"Can't you put your bony ass somewhere else?" grumbled Pyotr. "Where shall I put it? In your face?" Pyotr shoved him. He shoved back.

"Stop it!" ordered the woman from the front seat. "Behave yourselves."

"But there's not enough room back here," complained Pyotr.

"Then make room. And hush!" The woman glanced up at the building, towards the fourth floor. Towards Misha's flat. "Why are we waiting?" asked Aleksei. "Gregor. He's signing the papers."

"How long will it take?"

The woman sat back and stared straight ahead. "Not long."

A close call, thought Gregor as the boy Aleksei left the flat for the second time and slammed the door behind him. Had the little bastard popped in a moment later, there would be hell to pay. What was that stupid Nadiya doing, letting the brat back upstairs? He had been against using Nadiya from the start. But Reuben had insisted on a woman. People would trust a woman.

The boy's footsteps receded down the stairwell, a loud clompclomp followed by the thud of the building door.

Gregor turned to the pimp.

Misha was standing at the window, staring down at the street, at the car where his four boys sat. He pressed his hand to the glass, his fat fingers splayed in farewell. When he turned to face Gregor, his eyes were actually misted with tears.

But his first words were about the money. "Is it in the valise?"

"Yes," said Gregor. "All of it?"

"Twenty thousand American dollars. Five thousand per child. You did agree to the price."

"Yes." Misha sighed and ran a hand over his face. A face whose furrows showed only too well the effect of too much vodka, too many cigarettes. "They will be adopted by proper families?"

"Nadiya will see to it. She loves children, you know. It's why she chose this work."

Misha managed a weak smile. "Perhaps she could find me an American family."

Gregor had to get him away from the window. He pointed to the valise, which was resting on an end table. "Go ahead. Check it if you wish."

Misha went to the valise and unsnapped the catch. Inside were stacks of American bills, bound together in neat bundles. Twenty thousand dollars, enough for all the vodka a man would need to rot his liver. How cheap it is these days to buy a man's soul, thought Gregor. On the streets of this new Russia, one could barter for anything. A crate of Israeli oranges, an American television, the pleasure of a woman's body. Opportunity everywhere, for those with the talent to mine it.

Misha stood staring down at that money, his money, but not with a look of triumph. Rather, it-was a look of disgust. He closed the valise and stood with head bowed, hands resting on the hard black plastic.

Gregor stepped up behind Misha's balding head, raised the barrel of a silenced automatic, and fired two bullets into the man's brain.

Blood and grey matter spattered the far wall. Misha collapsed face-down, toppling the end table as he fell. The valise thudded onto the rug beside him.

Gregor snatched up the valise before the pooling blood could reach it. There were clumps of human tissue on the side. He went into the bathroom, used toilet paper to wipe off the splatters from the plastic, and flushed away the tissue. When he walked back into the room where Misha lay, the pool of blood had already crept across the floor and was soaking into another rug.

Gregor glanced around the room to assure himself that his work here was done and that no evidence remained. He was tempted to take the bottle of vodka with him, but decided against it. Explanations would be required as to why he had Misha's precious bottle, and Gregor had no patience for the questions of children. That was Nadiya's department.

He left the flat and went downstairs.

Nadiya and her charges were waiting in the car. She looked at him as he slid behind the wheel, the questions plain in her eyes. "You have the papers all signed?" she asked. "Yes. All of them."

Nadiya sat back, exhaling an audible sigh of relief. She has no nerves for this, thought Gregor as he started the car. No matter what Reuben said, the woman was a liability.

There were sounds of scuffling from the back seat. Gregor glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the boys were shoving each other back and forth. All except the smallest one, Yakov, who was staring straight ahead. In the mirror their gazes met, and Gregor had the eerie sensation that the eyes of an adult were staring out of that child's face.

Then the boy turned and punched his neighbour in the shoulder. Suddenly the back seat was a tangle of squirming bodies and flailing limbs.

"Behave yourselves!" said Nadiya. "Can't you keep quiet?We have a long drive to Riga."

The boys calmed down. For a moment there was silence in the back seat. Then, in the rearview mirror, Gregor saw the little one, the one with the adult eyes, jab an elbow at his neighbour.

That made Gregor smile. No reason to worry, he thought. They were, after all, merely children.

It was midnight, and Karen Terrio was fighting to keep her eyes open. Fighting to stay on the road.

She had been driving for the better part of two days now, had left right after Aunt Dorothy's funeral, and she hadn't stopped except to pull over for a quick nap or a hamburger and coffee. Lots of coffee. Her aunt's funeral had receded to a two-day-old blur of memories. Wilting gladioli. Nameless cousins. Stale finger sandwiches. Obligations, so damn many obligations.

Now all she wanted was to go home.

She knew she should pull off again, should try to catch another quick nap before pressing onward, but she was so close, only a hundred miles from Boston. At the last Dunkin Donuts, she'd tanked up on three more cups of coffee. That had helped, a little; it had given her just enough of a buzz to get her from Springfield to Sturbridge. Now the caffeine was starting to wear off, and even though she thought she was awake, every so often her head would dip in a sharp bob, and she knew she'd fallen asleep, if only for a second.

A Burger King sign beckoned from the darkness ahead. She pulled off the highway.

Inside she ordered coffee and a blueberry muffin and sat down at a table. At this hour of night, there were only a few patrons in the dining room, all of them wearing the same pasty masks of exhaustion. Highway ghosts, thought Karen. The same tired souls who seemed to haunt every highway rest stop. It was eerily quiet in that dining room, everyone focused on trying to stay awake and get back on the road.

At the next table sat a depressed-looking woman with two small children, both of them quietly chewing on cookies. Those children, so well behaved, so blond, made Karen think of her own daughters. It was their birthday tomorrow. Tonight, asleep in their beds, she thought, they are only a day away from being thirteen. A day further from their childhood.

When you wake up, she thought, I'll be home.

She refilled her coffee cup, snapped on a plastic cover, and walked out to her car.

Her head felt clear now. She could make it. An hour, fifty miles, and she'd be walking in her front door. She started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. A hundred miles, she thought. Only a hundred miles.

Twenty miles away, parked behind a 7-11,Vince Lawry and Chuck Servis finished off the last six pack. They'd been going at it for four straight hours, just a little friendly competition to see who could toss back the most Buds without puking it all up again. Chuck was ahead by one. They'd lost track of the total; they'd have to figure it out in the morning when they tallied up the beer cans mounded in the back seat.

But Chuck was definitely ahead, and he was gloating about it, which pissed Vince off, because Chuck was better at every fucking thing. And this wasn't a fair contest. Vince could've gone another round, but the Bud had run out, and now Chuck was wearing that eat-shit grin of his, even though he knew it wasn't a fair contest.