Greg Rucka - Walking dead

With Alena assisting him, he began to operate.

As I was walking into a brothel in the desert outside Dubai, Alena was changing Miata's IV in Poti. While I was showing a frightened young woman Tiasa Lagidze's picture, she was holding a clamp while the vet pulled bullet fragments from Miata's liver. While I was checking out of the Marina, she was watching the vet stitch our dog closed once more. "He'll live," the vet told her. He pulled his bloodstained gloves from his hands and threw them into the trash beneath the sink. "But he'll be weeks, if not months, to recover from this. How old is he?"

"I don't know," Alena told him. "Ten? Maybe older."

"He's an old dog."

She nodded, then said, "I have money. I will pay you."

"If you like."

Alena fumbled cash from where she'd moved it to the pockets of her borrowed pants. She hadn't taken time to count it, to really examine it at all. She guessed she was holding somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred euros. She gave him two hundred of them, and the vet took the money without comment.

"We have to go," she told him.

"I would caution against moving him. You both can stay here awhile longer." The offer was a tempting one, Alena told me, an extremely tempting one. The vet clearly lived alone, and no one had come calling during the course of the operation, which led her to conclude that he didn't get much in the way of clients or visitors. Having trusted him this far, trusting him further would have been easy.

The problem was that she had no way of knowing who else might be hunting for her, if anyone else would be coming at all. Given how she'd departed Kobuleti, given that it had been the chief of police who had warned her, if there were more hunters on the trail, it wouldn't take them long to expand their search to Poti. The last thing she wanted was another fight. The second to last thing, at that moment, was to bring such a fight to the doorstep of the man who'd helped her. "You're very kind," Alena told the vet. "But we can't."

He sighed, then turned to one of his cabinets and began assembling gauze and bandages, putting them into an empty cardboard box. When he was finished, he handed it to her, everything Alena needed to make replacement dressings for Miata's-and her own-wounds.

"Simple food for him for a while," he said. "Lots of water. Watch for infection. He won't want to move about, which is good. You must let him rest."

"I will. Thank you."

The vet sighed again, looked at the dog sleeping on the table in front of them.

"I will help you carry him to your car." There was an overnight ferry from Poti to Sochi scheduled to leave at six that evening, and for extra you could get your own room. Alena bought a ticket for herself and then bribed the clerk to allow Miata on board. She bought herself a jacket, a backpack, and several bottles of water, and at five she carried Miata, still drugged and sleeping, to their tiny, run-down little cabin. She set him on the fold-down bed, changed his dressings, and waited for the ferry to depart. Six o'clock came and went, and then seven, and then eight, and just as Alena was beginning to think that this wasn't simply engine trouble but maybe something more, perhaps the occupying Russians flexing their muscles, the ferry went into motion, and they set sail across the Black Sea.

She lay down beside Miata, feeling his heart beating, listening to him breathing, and for the first time since the phone had rung that morning, she allowed herself to relax. That was when she remembered that she'd missed our check-in, and realizing that put the rest of her problems into sharp focus.

Of the money she'd taken off the dead men, two hundred and sixteen euros remained. She had no phone and no immediate access to one. She had no credit cards and no documentation. Of the cash she carried, she knew most of it would be required simply to bribe her way into Sochi.

In Sochi, she would find a phone. She would call Sargenti, and he would wire money, and she would find a place for her and Miata to hide.

Then she would call me.

And realizing there was nothing else she could do for the time being, she forced herself to fall asleep, one hand on the Walther she'd snuck on board in the crotch of her too short and too wide pants, the other on Miata's flank.

Twenty Miata licked my hand, then, exhausted from the effort, dropped his muzzle back to the blanket he lay upon and shut his eyes once more. I stroked his neck, scratched behind his ears, then rose and crossed the expansive room back to where Alena sat on the bed, knees drawn to her chest, watching me. She'd purchased clothes that fit, Levi's and a black T-shirt, her feet bare. The bandage on her upper arm peeked out from beneath the sleeve, fresh white gauze that still smelled sterile.

"Did you speak to Iashvili?" she asked.

"Oh yeah." I moved to the window, parting the curtains enough to look out. It was after midnight, and the traffic on Primorksy Boulevard was light. Somewhere nearby, I had been informed, were the famous Potemkin Steps, but if they were visible from where I was standing, I didn't see them. I let the curtains fall back.

"Did he know who they were?"

"Business associates of the men who took Tiasa."

"The men you killed in Batumi."

"That would be them, yeah."

"He had no names?"

"He told me the names didn't matter." I moved to the bed, sat down beside her and began unlacing my boots. "He says they'll try again."

"That seems possible."

I pulled my boots free, set them together on the floor, then flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. The ceilings in the Londonskaya were high, easily fourteen feet, painted yellow-gold. The hotel was Old World, built in the late 1860s, one of the finest in all of Odessa. I was pretty sure the chandelier hanging in the center of the room was real crystal and not simply cut glass.

After a moment, Alena lay down, as well. "You haven't told me about Dubai."

"It wasn't good."

"I would like to hear it."

I told her, and she listened, and when I was done she didn't speak for a long time.

Then she asked, "Did you sleep with her? Kekela?"

I turned enough to look at her. She didn't move, her face in profile.

"You really have to ask?"

She closed her eyes, then shook her head once, slightly.

"But you asked anyway."

"I apologize," she said.

I sat up, angry, knowing I should let it go but not wanting to. "Why would you ask me that? Why the hell would you ask me that?"

Her eyes remained closed, and her mouth went tight. "I apologize."

"I don't want you to apologize, I want to know why you would even think that."

She didn't say anything.

I got up again, agitated. "You're the one lying to me, I'm not lying to you."

That brought her back, and she pushed herself up enough to rest on her elbows. "I haven't lied to you."

"I know you didn't go to Tbilisi to meet Nicholas," I said. "So, yeah, you did lie to me."

Her expression washed out, turning neutral. She moved slowly to sit fully upright, her feet on the floor, her hands at her side. She was watching Miata, once again asleep.

"Yes, I did." She moved her gaze to me. "I went to see a doctor."

I stared at her. "And you couldn't tell me that? If you wanted to look into another surgery on your leg, you could have told me that. We could go back to Switzerland, or Germany; there are better places for that than Tbilisi."

"It's not my leg. I'm at thirteen weeks."

"You're at thirteen weeks of what?" I asked.

She stared at me like I was an idiot. Since I honest to God had no idea what she was talking about, I stared right back at her, waiting for an explanation.

"I'm thirteen weeks pregnant, Atticus," she said.