Greg Rucka - Walking dead

"I missed you, too," I said.

"I don't love you."

"I didn't say you did."

"No, I'm saying I don't love you, not anymore. I think I did, once. I thought I did. I tried."

"I know you did."

"Maybe you do, but it took me a while to get there." She shifted in her seat, trying to adjust her hips, wincing. "For a long time-I mean a long fucking time-I thought you'd chosen her over me."

"I did."

"Wow," Bridgett said. "That was cold."

"You want me to lie to you?"

"No, actually. That's the last thing I want you to do. Seriously."

I put my glasses on once more, straightened up, remembering. Bridgett and I had tried to be lovers, before I'd ever met Alena. We'd tried very hard at it, in fact. But it hadn't worked, even when it looked like it had, and when Alena entered my life, that had become abundantly clear. Who Alena was had simply provided a convenient, if reasonable, excuse.

"You seeing anyone?" I asked Bridgett.

"Yeah, actually. That surprise you?"

"Not if it's on your terms."

That got a grin. "He's like me. Doesn't want to settle down. We call each other, email, video chat on the computer. Comes into town for two, three weeks at a time, and we have a good time together, and then he goes off and I go back to my life. I don't have to change anything for him."

"I'm happy for you."

She heard the sincerity, and accepted it, and we started talking then, in a way we never had back when we'd pretended we were sharing everything with each other. She had questions, a lot of them, and I discovered that I did, as well. We talked until England rolled out beneath us, our voices low. We remembered friends who had died, and she told me what she knew about the ones who were still living, but of all but one of them, she knew very little, having long since lost touch. Over the one we still shared, a young woman named Erika Wyatt, she scolded me, telling me that I owed her contact.

As the plane began its descent in earnest, we came around to where we started.

"You say you picked her over me."

"No, you said I picked her over you. I just agreed."

"It's the same thing, asshole."

"If you say so."

"There never really was a choice to make, though, was there?" Bridgett asked.

"I don't think you get to pick who you fall in love with," I said. "Just what you do once you've fallen."

"Oh, wow, that's deep." She reached for the pouch on the seatback by her knees. "I need an airsick bag, I'm going to puke."

"Let me know when you're done."

"You believe that?"

"Maybe. Sure sounds good," I said.

Bridgett Logan shook her head, bemused. "Seven fucking years to turn you all hardcore. And beneath it all, you're still the same."

"Am I?" I asked, because I sure as hell didn't feel it.

"Yeah," Bridgett Logan said. "You're still a hopeless fucking romantic."

Twenty-three There's an old cop saw, goes like this.

Question: How do you catch a drug dealer for the fiftieth time after he's walked free the other forty-nine?

Answer: You buy drugs from him.

Habits don't change, and even if I'd managed to give Arzu's business a bloody nose two and a half weeks earlier-something I had every reason to doubt-there was no way he'd quit and turned over a new leaf. If he had been rousted when I'd called the police on him, he certainly would have been released quickly enough, once the appropriate palms had been greased. Back on the street, he wasn't going to stop pimping, and he wasn't going to stop trafficking. The way I saw it, in fact, there were only two options. Either Arzu would return to what he'd been doing with a vengeance, eager to make up lost money and lost time, or he would return to what he'd been doing with more caution, for fear of getting burned.

I had no doubt that he knew he'd been burned, and that it'd been I who'd burned him. The attack on the house in Kobuleti guaranteed that. But when my initial searches for him in Trabzon turned up nothing, I assumed-incorrectly-that was because he had gone to ground. Maybe Arzu had heard that Kobuleti hadn't gone as well as he would've liked. Maybe he knew that three more of his and Vladek Karataev's associates were dead. He'd been greedy when I'd met him, but that wasn't the same thing as stupid. Knowing his efforts to punish me had failed, he would have concluded that the trail from Kobuleti would lead straight back to him.

It made sense that he would keep his head down, at least for a while. At least until he felt it was safe enough to raise it again.

My problem was the same as it had been all along. Tiasa didn't have the time to wait, and for that reason, neither did I. I lost most of two days trying to locate him. I hit the hotels that weren't hotels, and the brothels that didn't even try to pretend. I went back to the apartment block where Arzu had shown me the three young women, spent twelve hours on a surveillance that turned up nothing. If the location was being used for anything at all, I couldn't tell from the outside.

When I broke in at three in the morning, I found the place abandoned, and nothing that told me where I should look next.

My third morning back, walking past the tiny shops and stalls crammed onto Uzun Sokak, I saw the natasha Arzu had ordered to keep me company the night I'd first met him. I wasn't certain it was the same woman and kept my distance for a few minutes. She was even paler in the sunlight, sickly-looking and visibly shaky. Her shorts and T-shirt, both too tight, were filthy, and I watched while she was verbally abused by one stall owner, then another, each of them shouting her away from their bustling stands on the busy street.

At the third stand she approached she made her move, her hand darting out to snare a plastic sack filled with kuruyemis, dried fruits. Desperation made her foolish, and she timed it badly, and the owner caught her by the wrist before she could draw her arm back. He wasn't a big man, but there was more to him than there was to her, and he yanked her toward him hard enough to nearly take her off her feet, screaming at her in Turkish. She slammed into the side of the stand, and he twisted her arm until she cried in pain.

There were a lot of people around, shoppers and pedestrians, and those who noticed stopped to watch and listen, and seemed mightily amused. They seemed even more amused when, still holding her by her wrist in one hand, still berating her, the owner punched her in the face.

I was there by then. In Russian, I said, "Stop that."

He looked at me in some surprise. He was clearly a Turk, a local, clean-shaven and middle-aged, and I imagined he worked very hard for his living, to support his family. I could even understand why he would be tired of people stealing from him. But there was more to it, as well. The ultranationalist sentiment in Trabzon is strong, has led to violence against foreigners in the past. I didn't speak Turkish, but I'd picked up enough words here and there to know that, of all the things the man had called her, "whore" and "foreigner" had figured repeatedly and prominently.

The girl stared at me, her arm still trapped. Blood was streaming from her nose.

I took a ten-euro bill from my pocket, then picked up the same bag of kuruyemis the natasha had been trying to steal. I held the bill up for him to see, then dropped it in front of him. I handed the bag of dried fruit to the girl.

"Let her go," I said.

He let her go.

The second he released her, she ran.

The stall owner's laughter followed us both. She gave it her best effort, three blocks, cutting through alleys and dodging people. She lost one of her cheap plastic shoes at the square off Ataturk Alani, but kept going anyway, the bag of dried fruit in her hand. I grabbed the shoe without stopping, stuffing it into my windbreaker as I tried to stay with her.