Greg Rucka: Walking dead

"You're always going so fast," he said. "Every time I see you. Sprinting."

"Tail end of the run," I explained. "Last push."

He nodded, then used the fishing pole to gesture up the road, at the woods. "You and your wife, you're in the little house, right?"

I crossed the road closer to where he stood, nodding. It was easier than using words, and I was somewhat breathless, and it gave me a few more seconds to think things through. Alena took her run in the afternoon, preferring to leave it before dinner, and it was as likely as not that he'd seen her taking the same route I did.

He used the pole again, this time to gesture in the direction of his home. "We're in the Party house, the old Russian's place. Fucking Russians, we had to tear out half of everything just to make it into a home."

"Yeah, we're always working on our place," I said.

He nodded, commiserating with a lifetime commitment to home improvement, then set down his pole so it leaned against his side and offered me his hand. "Bakhar. Bakhar Lagidze."

"David," I lied. "David Mercer."

We shook hands.

"American?"

"Canadian," I lied, again. "You're local?"

"Born in Tbilisi. You speak our language very well."

"My wife taught me."

"She's Georgian, too?"

I nodded. The lies were so practiced they didn't require any thought on my part. "But she grew up in Moscow. She used to dance."

Bakhar Lagidze's eyes lit up. They were blue, deep set in his lined face. His mustache, mostly black, had strays of gray emerging. I put him in his early forties, maybe five years older than I was.

"She should meet Tiasa! She's my daughter, she wants to dance, like the Bolshoi. Your wife teaches, right?"

"A little," I admitted. Alena had begun taking on students, only a handful of them, since we'd last returned from the U.S. She'd posted flyers in the cafes in town, initially as a means of reinforcing our cover, establishing a meager supplemental income that we didn't really need. It was my suspicion that she enjoyed teaching, though she had yet to admit as much to me. "You should bring her by."

"Maybe Ia will bring her over."

"Ia?"

"My wife." Bakhar's smiled broadened, showing stained teeth and genuine pleasure. "Wonderful to meet you, David. Nice to meet the neighbors."

"Good to meet you, too," I told him.

It wasn't until I was home, under the needle-spray of the shower, that it occurred to me that Bakhar Lagidze had most likely done to us what we had done to him. He'd checked us out, just enough to be sure his neighbors didn't pose him a threat.

He'd been right.

The threat had come from another source entirely. I stepped in blood when I stepped into the house. There was a lot of it, and I could smell it, along with the lingering of gunpowder. The moonlight outside wasn't enough. I was going to have to turn on a light.

When it came on, I could see the puddle, spent brass glittering in and around it. The blood broke into a smear, leading down the hall. Like our home, Bakhar's was only one story. Unlike ours, it was large, as befitted a family of four. On entry, the hall opened to a common room that doubled for dining, and then, off that, was the kitchen. Following the hall led to the master bedroom, and then the corridor went ninety degrees to the left, to the bathroom and the two other bedrooms.

Miata snuffed at the air behind me, hesitating.

"Home," I told him, and pointed the way. He looked at me sorrowfully, then dropped his head and went.

The smear ran straight to the master bedroom, its door wide open. I tried to be careful where I stepped as I followed the trail down the hall. My blood-covered soles dried on the carpet, and for a second I thought they might be a problem later, but then I thought about the general state of law enforcement in Georgia in general, and Kobuleti in particular, and admitted that I was most likely worrying about nothing. Forensic science hadn't ever been high on the national agenda, and since the war in South Ossetia and the subsequent Russian stranglehold on the country, it had fallen even further.

A table lamp had fallen in the bedroom, its light still on, and it illuminated from below. Somehow it made the scene inside the more horrible.

The blood had been Bakhar's, but I'd already guessed that, and maybe that was why I thought I'd find less of it in here. I was wrong. There was more.

There was a lot more.

He'd been shot in the hall, through the front door, perhaps as he'd come to answer it. I hadn't seen a gun anywhere on the floor and I wasn't seeing one in the bedroom, so if he'd been expecting trouble and had come to answer it with some of his own, the men who'd killed him had taken the weapon. They'd hit Bakhar in the chest, perhaps as many as four times from what I could see. Then they'd entered and taken hold of him, likely by his hair, and dragged him to the master bedroom, where they'd propped him on his bed.

At that point they'd gone to work on him with a knife.

He was still recognizable to me, but barely. Stabs and slashes covered his face, chest, and groin, though I couldn't see any on his arms or hands, nothing that resembled a defensive wound. It would have been nice to believe that meant he'd already died before they brought out the blade, that he hadn't tried to defend himself because there'd been nothing left of him to defend. But it was just as likely that he'd been dying instead of dead, and from the two Land Cruisers I knew there had been at least four of them who had come for the killing, and certainly two could've held his arms while a third set to carving.

The knife had been entirely unnecessary, and the savagery of it spoke clearly of cruelty and rage. His neck had been cut so badly it seemed now barely able to keep his head with his body. Blood, brain, and flecks of bone glistened in the macabre light. I could see the pearl gray of his cervical vertebrae in the mass of red meat that had been his throat.

This wasn't simply murder.

This was looking at hatred, pure and plain. "Dancers," Ia Lagidze said mildly. "Very flexible."

This was perhaps a year ago, sitting in the small kitchen of our house, the tail end of winter outside, rain pelting the windows. We'd built a freestanding gym about fifty feet from the house to suit our own needs, but it doubled as a dance studio, and that was where Alena gave lessons. She was in there now with Tiasa and maybe two or three other girls from town.

I tried to keep from spit-taking my tea, instead forced it down without choking, and stared at Ia, sitting across the kitchen table from me. She gauged my reaction with a smirk that blossomed into a self-congratulatory grin.

"Don't tell me she isn't, David," Ia said, giggling. "You and Yeva must be at it all the time, just the two of you here." She glanced over at her son, Koba, who was sitting by the cast-iron stove, playing pinball on my laptop as a reward for finishing his homework while they waited for Tiasa to finish. The boy didn't acknowledge that he'd heard his mother, and even if he had, being seven, he was hopefully oblivious to such innuendo.

Ia leaned closer, putting a friendly hand on my arm, adding conspiratorially, "Baki and I used to be like that all the time, before the children came."

"Flexible?" I asked.

Ia laughed, sitting back, taking her tea up again. "That and other things." She sipped through a smile, memory perhaps, and then her face lit again. "Oh! Bakhar has tickets for the Dinamo game this weekend in Batumi, he's taking Koba and he has an extra, he wanted me to ask if you cared to join them."

"Who're they playing?" I asked, more out of reflex than interest.

Koba answered without pausing from his game. "Spartaki!"

"We're all going down," Ia said. "Tiasa and I are going shopping, then we'll meet my boys after the game for dinner. You should come! Yeva should come! She could go shopping with us!"