Greg Rucka - Walking dead

I managed about an hour of sleep on the flight to Turkey. I didn't manage any on the flight to Georgia.

The journey from Dubai to what had once been my home took nineteen hours. It wouldn't have mattered if it had taken nineteen minutes.

I had arrived too late. For a long time, I don't know how long, I stood in the rain, trying to get myself to move, to do what had to be done.

I just couldn't do it.

At some point, I found myself standing in what remained of the studio, looking at myself in the blurry and broken mirror. The heat had made fractures in the glass, including a major one that bisected my reflection, splitting my head into two broken pieces, out of alignment, out of proportion. The fissure ran down, tearing off a portion of my neck before jinking again, cutting neatly across my chest. As a visual metaphor, I thought it was spot-on.

Vladek Karataev's phone was ringing.

I took it from my pocket, stared at the display telling me that some Unknown Caller wanted me to answer. One of Vladek's business associates, maybe, calling to gloat. A wrong number.

I keyed the phone to answer, put it to my ear.

Her voice came soft and anxious, her strange mutt accent of all the languages the Soviets had made her learn. She was speaking English.

"Are you all right?" I had no voice to answer, and she asked it again. "Atticus? Are you all right?"

"I am now," I told Alena.

Eighteen Kobuleti's chief of police, Mgelika Iashvili, lived by himself in a sweet-looking cottage off the town's main street, facing the beach and the Black Sea. In daylight, it was a brightly painted, almost garish, domicile, in baby blue and pine green with bright orange trim, colors meant, I presumed, to foster a sense of joyful beach festivities. At night, in the rain, it was monochrome and ugly, a gingerbread house that had been robbed of its treats.

I parked my rental across the street, killed the engine, and eyeballed the block. Most of the houses along the beach were rented to tourists during the summer season, now at its height. Lights burned in a few of them, including at least one in Mgelika Iashvili's home. By the clock in the car, it was three minutes to one in the morning, and the rain had finally stopped.

I got out, made my way across the street. There was nobody about, and the only thing I was hearing was the rustle of the Black Sea. A weak dome of light rose up from the south, where the clubs and cafes kept their doors open all hours. When I strained for it, I could catch an occasional thread of music through the noise of the tide coming in. With the departure of the rain, the summer warmth tried to return. If I hadn't been soaked to the skin, I might've been comfortable.

His car was parked out front of the house, rainwater dripping slowly off the fenders. I squatted down and took a look beneath, and the ground below seemed as wet as everywhere else. I put a hand to the hood, felt it cool, though it might've been the rain as much as time that was responsible for that.

I went to the door and raised my hand to knock, then saw it was already slightly ajar. I checked the street again, and nothing had changed, and I didn't see any vehicles parked nearby other than my own, and I didn't know what to make of it. Paranoia and common sense began to wrestle around in my skull.

Paranoia won, and I prodded the door open further with my foot, then slipped through as quietly as I could. The entrance dumped straight into a small living room, the layout not dissimilar to what my house had been. Nothing looked to be out of place, and it was clear that Iashvili had a taste for both the modern and the expensive.

I moved forward, passing the open door to the bedroom. Music was playing softly inside, some jazz fusion. When I looked I saw that the bed was unmade and empty. I held there for a second, listening for movement that wasn't my own, anything that would tell me if there was another body present, and nothing came back. He'd been here, had been here recently, but there was no sign of the man.

At the far end of the kitchen was the back door, ajar the way the front had been. An empty bottle of wine stood in the sink, along with a set of dirty dishes. Nothing was broken, nothing was stained with blood.

I went out the back, down a short run of stairs and onto the rocky beach, wondering if the chief of police had been expecting me to come calling. "Where are you?" Alena had asked.

"Kobuleti."

Her inhale was sharp in my ear. "It's not safe. Get out of there."

I tried not to laugh, but the relief at simply hearing her voice made it impossible. I'm sure I sounded just shy of hysterical. "No kidding. Where are you?"

"Sochi."

"Russia."

"I had to take the ferry from Poti. I'm heading west tomorrow, I have a room booked at the Londonskaya, in Odessa, name Angelika Radkova." She paused for breath, and I realized that tension was releasing for her much as it had for me. "Meet me there."

"I will," I said.

For a few seconds, we listened to the sound of each other breathing, the proof of life.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Men came. Three of them, just after sunrise yesterday. Iashvili called to warn me. He woke me up. Miata and I would have died in the fire if he hadn't."

"He warned you?"

"Yes."

"They weren't looking for you," I said.

"Whether for me or for you, it doesn't matter. They came to kill whoever they found."

"Either I owe Mgelika thanks, or he owes me an explanation."

"Or both."

I had stepped out of the ruined studio as we'd been speaking, now took another look around the place that had been our home for almost six years. I'd liked Georgia; I'd liked Kobuleti; I'd liked it enough that I'd been willing to spend the rest of my life here with Alena.

We'd never come back, I realized.

"I'll want an explanation before I consider gratitude," I said. "He knew they were coming. He just as likely pointed them at you."

"The Londonskaya," Alena said. "In Odessa."

"Tomorrow night."

"Did you find her? Was she in Dubai?"

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"I'll see you tomorrow night," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Please." He was on the beach, maybe twenty meters from his home, and when I first saw him I thought he was dead, facedown near the edge of the tide.

Then I saw he was moving.

Then I saw the woman he was moving with.

She saw me first, but that was mostly because she was on her back, and by the time she noticed me, I was practically standing on top of them. When she saw me, she screamed.

Iashvili stopped mid-stroke, looking down at her, confused, then up to see me. It was hard to make out his expression, but I was pretty sure alarmed was a good place to start. He scrambled backward, onto his haunches and then onto his backside. He still had the muscles of a weight lifter, the solid core, barrel chest, and girder-thick arms. The woman rolled, gathering the blanket she'd been lying on around her.

"Hi, Chief." I spoke in Georgian. "We need to talk."

"David! Jesus Christ!"

I turned to the woman, who'd succeeded in concealing most of herself with the blanket. It was hard to tell, but I put her in her forties, attractively so.

"Mgelika and I have some things to discuss," I told her. "Why don't you go wait for him in the house?"

She looked at Iashvili, still sitting on his ass on the rocky beach. He hadn't taken his eyes off me. "'Lika?"

The chief and I stared at each other, and then he reached for his shorts, discarded nearby, saying, "Yeah, go back inside, Vicca. Open another bottle of wine, okay? I won't be long."

Vicca looked at me doubtfully, then back to Iashvili. "You're sure?"

He was standing now, shorts firmly in place. He held out his hand to her, and she took it, allowed him to help her to her feet.