Greg Rucka - Critical Space

"Does he have fuel now?" Alena asked.

Jerry grunted an affirmative. "He tells me he's already sold it to someone else, one of the other yachts in the harbor."

Alena looked at me again, then reached for her crutches. I watched as she got herself back to her feet, struggling with her wounded leg. It took her almost twenty seconds to stand, and once she did, she settled the crutches beneath her arms.

"Where is Albert?" she asked Jerry.

"He has an office in one of the abandoned warehouses near the edge of town," he said. "But you won't have any luck convincing him. I tried, I offered him twice what I normally pay him. He's not selling."

"Which warehouse?"

Jerry pointed out one of the less-abused structures near the edge of the harbor. "That one, with the green paint. His office is in the back."

"Be ready to leave once we're refueled," Alena said, and she began making her way to the gangplank.

Albert's office was behind a thin wooden door with a frosted glass panel set in it. The window once had the word "manager" stenciled on the glass, but at some point the glass had cracked and the "m" was distorted, and a shard where the second "a" had been painted was missing. It hadn't been more than a half a mile walk from The Lutra to the warehouse, but when we reached the door, Alena was perspiring and breathing hard. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she nodded at me.

I knocked on the door, and when a man inside said to come in, I opened it.

Albert was older than I'd thought he would be, maybe in his mid-sixties, white, but with the leather skin that comes from living years under a strong sun. His hair was more white than gray, his face lined like someone had worked him rather viciously in clay before bringing him to life. The office was as weathered as he, and when he came around his rickety particleboard desk to greet us, I heard the furniture creak. When he smiled at us, I saw that he was missing two incisors, and had a third capped in gold.

"Something I can do for you?" His accent was something between South London and North Jamaica.

"Are you Albert?" Alena asked.

He nodded, smiled again, looking from Alena to me.

"Jerry needs his ship refueled."

Maybe it was because she was on crutches, or maybe it was sexist, but Albert directed his response to me. "I already told Jerry, I can't help. Fuel I've got is spoken for, that's the way it is."

"Where is it?"

He glanced at her. "Why?"

"Do you refuel from a boat, do you use a truck, how do you do it?"

"A truck," he said, looking at Alena curiously. "But as I said, it's spoken for."

"You will move the truck to the dock and refuel The Lutra."

Albert laughed.

I saw it coming, saw the shift of weight indicating that she was going into motion, but by then, she already had.

Alena moved her weight almost entirely to the left crutch and swept the right one up sharply in between Albert's legs. The blow struck him squarely in the testicles, and it crumpled him forward, and he lost his balance. As swiftly as she'd struck, she pulled the crutch free and jabbed again, this time higher, hitting Albert just beneath the collarbone. He didn't have much air left, but what he had came out in a gurgle, and he fell back against the desk. The particleboard tore beneath him as he rode it onto the floor.

She lowered the crutch and covered the distance to Albert with one move, set the tip of the right crutch against his body again, resting it just above his stomach.

Albert's eyes were wide, bulging almost comically, and he wheezed in short spurts.

"If I push down, you will die," Alena told him.

Albert's expression indicated that he absolutely believed her.

"To live, you will do the following – you will get the keys to the truck. You will drive myself and my companion to The Lutra. You will refuel The Lutra. You will never mention us to anyone, ever. Do you understand?"

He nodded, then nodded again.

Alena moved the crutch from Albert's solar plexus. He avoided her gaze, tried to catch mine, silently pleading for help. What he saw gave him no comfort.

"I'm with her," I told him.

We left the South Caicos less than sixty minutes later, leaving Albert in the cab of his truck, parked on the pier. Jerry paid him for the fuel.

It took another day to reach Miami, and from there Alena, Bridgett, Miata, and I caught a flight to New York, landing at Kennedy. Not once during the trip did Bridgett speak to Alena, and for her part Alena never tried to engage her in conversation. From Bridgett's expression, I guessed she had a good idea of what had transpired in Cockburn Harbour, but she said nothing to me about that, either. I'm sure she thought that we'd left a body in our wake, and there seemed no point in my trying to explain otherwise.

It made for a fairly tense trip.

After we'd picked up Miata and moved out to the curb, Bridgett asked if I was headed home.

"Not yet," I said.

"You want me to tell anyone you're back?"

"I'll handle it."

"I'll rephrase. Is there anyone you don't want me to tell that you're back?"

"No."

"All right, then." She glanced at Alena, who was leaning on her crutches a couple feet away, talking to Miata in the dog carrier. Assured that she was out of earshot, Bridgett turned back to me. "You change your mind, all you have to do is call a cop," she said, and she headed for the taxi stand and climbed into a waiting cab.

We rented a car, and from the airport Alena directed me to one of her caches. It was in Queens, a tiny storage facility that abutted onto a junkyard and had easy access to the Cross Island Parkway. When we arrived, she told the manager that her name was Kim Gallagher, and that she needed to pick up some things for her brother. She showed him a current New York State driver's license to prove her identity, and when he checked his files, he saw that, indeed, her brother had given her permission to access the locker.

We brought the car in close, parked, and as we got out, I asked, "How many of these do you have?"

"In the five boroughs? Four." She handed me the key, leaning on her crutches. "At one point I had six, but one was broken into last year, and the other has most likely been compromised, so I won't go near it. This one is very clean, I haven't visited it in six years. It's never been used."

I unlocked the door and ran it up on its rails, and before we stepped inside she used one of her crutches to pull a piece of fishing line out of the darkness. The string had been run about five inches high, across the opening, and there was still tension on it.

"Safety," she said. "If it's broken, I know someone has been inside."

"Unless they replaced it."

"Unless they replaced it, yes. I don't think anyone has."

We stepped inside and I pulled the string that ran to the single bulb hung in the space. It was low wattage and didn't penetrate to the corners, but it didn't need to, because all that was inside were two pieces of luggage, a large blue duffel and a smaller black rolling bag. I put them in the car, closed the locker again, and we stopped at the manager's on the way out to return the key with thanks.

In Manhattan we checked into the SoHo Grand and got ourselves into a large room on one of the pet-friendly floors. I stuck with the Paul Lieberg identity; Alena called herself Jessica Bethier.

Before we headed up, I gave the FedEx envelope I'd been carrying in my go-bag to the young woman who checked us in, asked if she could send it out that afternoon. She assured me it would be no trouble at all.

Our room had a king bed and a couch that would convert to a queen. As soon as we were inside, Alena opened the carrier and Miata sprang out and stretched, then began snuffling his way through all of the corners. The hotel directory actually had a separate menu for pets, and Alena used it to order him something to drink and eat. The food arrived in under ten minutes, and Miata dove into his bowls. Once she saw that he was happy, Alena sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her crutches up after her. I opened the bags we'd taken from the cache and dumped them out on the bed, and Alena and I began going through the pile. She'd cached a couple changes of clothes, three pistols, and one HK PDW submachine gun. There were also three wads of well-used bills, twenties and tens bound with rubber bands.