Greg Rucka - Walking dead

"Have you been in Dubai long?" The blonde used English, and her accent was German.

"A couple of days."

She watched as the bartender delivered my drinks. "Those both for you?"

"I'm waiting for my friend to get back."

"We are very friendly," the brunette told me. Her accent was closer to Russian, but it was hard to make out over the music. "Or very nasty. Six hundred, you can have us both for two hours."

"No, thanks. I've already made arrangements for the night."

The blonde looked in the direction Kekela had disappeared. "She's not coming back."

"Did you pay her already?" the brunette asked. "How much did you pay her?"

"We're still negotiating," I lied.

The brunette laughed. "You never pay in advance," she advised. "Half, at most."

"We can beat her price." The blonde returned her attention to me. "Two-for-one offer. Where are you staying?"

I picked up my drinks and stepped away from the bar. "Nice talking to you."

They let it go, or at least I didn't hear it if either of them offered a comment as I left. The band fell silent, breaking between sets, and the noise level dropped appreciably, enough that I could make out voices. Most were in English, all were loud. I saw a youngish-looking Chinese woman dancing in the middle of a wolf pack, all of them ogling her, passed a tall African woman negotiating with an Indian, telling him that seven hundred would cover the night. He asked if she meant dirham or euros.

I found a table, set down my drinks, and felt myself being sized up by almost every set of female eyes that fell upon me. The appraisals felt clinical and made me feel like a piece of meat. The way people lurked and lunged in the black light made us all look like zombies.

Kekela emerged from the smoke. She picked up her drink and drained it in two gulps, then reached for my hand, to pull me to my feet.

"I want you to meet someone," she said.

"Who?"

"An old friend. Come on."

She dragged me after her, along the floor. A club mix had begun playing on the sound system, and more people were dancing to that than had done for the band. We skirted their edge, pushed through a clump of laughing men and women, reaching another table wedged near the back wall, by one of the stacks of speakers. Two women sat at the table, speaking to a Caucasian man. The women were both Chinese, one of them perhaps in her thirties, the other one younger, but it was hard to tell by how much. The man I put in his forties.

"She's new," the older one was telling the man. "She needs someone who can teach her."

"You're asking me to do you a favor," the man said. His English was American, the sound of it jarring. I hadn't heard an American accent outside of my own, it seemed, for a long time.

"Six hundred."

"For the night?" He shook his head. "Xia, you're asking me for a favor. Four hundred."

"Five hundred."

"Dirham?"

The older woman, Xia, nodded. Seated beside her, the younger one didn't move, didn't speak. The smile on her face looked like it had been injection-molded in a factory, and about as sincere.

"All right, done," the man decided.

Xia turned to the woman beside her, speaking quickly in Mandarin, or Cantonese, I couldn't tell. The younger woman perked up immediately at whatever was said, however, and the plastic smile turned to something approaching genuine. She rose, moving around the table, and the man got to his feet, and they headed off together.

"This is your friend?" Xia asked Kekela.

"Danil," Kekela said. "He's from Georgia, too."

Xia turned the palm of her right hand, sweeping it at the empty seats.

"Xia was the first girl I met when I got here," Kekela told me. "She's been here for ten years. She knows everything."

"She's being generous."

Kekela shook her head. "No, no. If it wasn't for you, I'd have been in a lot of trouble."

"You're very sweet, Kekela."

Kekela smiled at the other woman fondly. Now that we were closer, I could see the beginnings of lines on Xia's face, found myself revising my estimate of her age upward, into the mid-forties. Unlike the other women I'd been seeing, even Kekela, Xia's outfit was more subdued, speaking less of sex than experience.

"Kekela is my friend," Xia said to me. "And if you are hers, then I would be happy to help you."

I glanced at Kekela, and she nodded. From inside my jacket, I took the photo of Tiasa I'd printed from the security system back in Kobuleti. I unfolded it, then handed it to Xia, checking to see if anyone was watching. Nobody was paying us the slightest attention.

Xia studied the picture for several seconds. "Who is she?"

"The daughter of someone I know," I answered. "She'd have arrived a week, maybe five days ago, from Turkey."

"She looks young."

"She's fourteen."

Carefully, she folded the paper closed and set it on the table, between us. "You say 'arrived.'"

"'Shipped' might be better."

"I understand."

"Can you help me?"

Xia lifted her gaze from where she'd been watching the paper, looking first to Kekela, then to me. "I don't know."

"Xia," Kekela said, "please, he's a friend."

"I didn't say I wouldn't. I don't know if I can."

"I don't understand," I said.

"If she came here like you say, she could have been sold as a domestic anywhere in the Emirates. She could be in someone's house in Abu Dhabi, working as their servant."

"Working as their slave," I corrected. "Servants get paid."

Xia stared at me for a moment. Then she nodded. "It would make her impossible to find."

What Alena had said when I'd called her from the airport in Istanbul came back to me, the questions. It might take never, she'd said. And Xia was telling me the same thing, but this time without the qualification.

"There's another possibility," Xia said. "She could have been sold to a brothel. There are many here in Dubai, places that service the skilled laborers and other clients."

"How many specialty places?"

"Very many."

"You know who to ask," Kekela said. "You could help us."

Xia frowned, then reached out for the paper, unfolding it once more. She studied the face, small crow's-feet visible at her eyes. Then, with a sigh, she looked up at me. "May I keep this?"

I nodded. As it was, I had a second picture of Tiasa, taken off Vladek's BlackBerry. It wasn't my favorite, but I had it.

"I will ask around," Xia said. "It may take a few days."

"I'll pay for your time," I said.

"Then I will keep track of it. Kekela has my number, and I have hers. I will call if I learn anything."

"Thank you, Xia," Kekela said.

Xia gave her a small, almost maternal smile. Then she wished us both a good night.

"I have to get back to work," Xia told us.

Thirteen The UAE and Georgia share the same time zone, each of them at GMT +4. It made the math easy for me when the time came to call Alena the next day. According to our rolling schedule, she would be expecting her phone to start ringing at seventeen minutes to nine.

I'd been up for a couple hours already, having found it difficult to sleep. Rattlesnake had left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I couldn't put my finger on why, exactly. I was in no position to pass judgment on the men and women I'd seen. Any battle fought for the moral high ground I was guaranteed to lose, anyway; in the pantheon of sins one could commit, I was confident I had prostitution beat hands down.

The women I'd seen had appeared to be doing what they were doing of their own volition, but I had to wonder at the circumstances that made such a choice a viable one for them. It wasn't, as Kekela suspected, that I had an aversion to sex. I was quite fond of sex, though admittedly not as desperate for it as I'd been when I was younger. I was also a big fan of allowing consenting adults to do whatever they damn well pleased with other consenting adults. It wasn't the sex, per se.