Greg Rucka: Walking dead

I thought about the word. In Georgian, "friend" was megobari, which, loosely translated, meant, I will take your place in times of danger.

"Yes," I told him. "They were."

"I was teaching her to dance," Alena said. "Tiasa."

"I have to ask," the chief said. "Did you notice anything unusual? Strangers in the area? A change in Bakhar's behavior?"

"No, nothing," I said. "Everything was… everything was fine. I talked to Bakhar the day before yesterday, we were going to take Koba to the football game in Batumi next week."

"Do you know if he'd bought the tickets?"

"I was going to buy them. I was going to get them today."

The chief frowned. At the sink, Alena began gathering pieces of broken crockery.

"I'm sorry to say this," Mgelika Iashvili said. "It looks like Bakhar killed his family, then himself." Alena walked him to the door when he left, waiting there to watch as he drove away. I stayed in the kitchen. Miata trotted over from where he'd been taking the sun through the windows, and I gave him a scratch beneath the chin, stroked his neck. Alena returned and fixed me with a stare that was almost accusatory.

"He's lying," I said.

"Of course he's lying," Alena said. "He's been bought."

"Then he knows who killed them. Maybe he even knows why."

"He certainly knows who paid him."

"And maybe where Tiasa is."

"It's not our problem."

We stared at each other. I understood her anger, though the intensity of it surprised me. I knew what she was thinking. I knew why she was thinking it. I didn't like it, and I didn't go to any great length to hide that fact.

"What you did last night was foolish," she said.

"I didn't go over there planning to find the house soaked in blood. I went to help."

"I know that. I know why you went. Just as you know you shouldn't have."

"I'm not going to apologize," I said.

"I don't want an apology. An apology does us nothing. We have a home here, we have built a life. Do you want to have to leave, to run, to find somewhere new and to start again? To spend the years it will take us to rebuild? Do you want to lose all of this?"

"The only thing I fear losing is you," I said.

That stopped her, at least for the moment. Affection was still difficult for her, probably always would be, the way it dogs most survivors of abuse. Even though she knew my sincerity, believed it, speaking of it could bring her to moments of confused silence. Love was still a fragile thing for her, despite all its strength.

"You should never have gone over there at all."

"I didn't know what I would find," I said.

"It's not a question of what you found! You shouldn't have done it, Atticus!"

The mere fact that she'd used my real name was proof of how upset she was. I got out of my chair, went over to her, rested my hands on her arms. When I kissed her forehead, she closed her eyes and put her arms around me.

"They were our friends," I said, holding her.

"Yes, they were," she whispered. "And now they're gone." We spent the rest of the day going about our routines. I made my daily check of the security arrangements, the alarms, did yoga for an hour with Alena, then went for my run, leaving her to work out in the studio.

I covered eight miles, down to the water, along the beach. It was hot and growing humid, even by the waterfront, and the beach was beginning to fill. It was tourist season, and the influx had easily doubled Kobuleti's population, though that was down from the previous years. Another by-product of Russian pressure on the economy.

I passed the Gio, a cafe that, like so many others in town, turned into a bar-slash-nightclub after dark during the summer months. One night, the summer after we'd returned to Kobuleti, Iashvili had been dining there with a couple off-duty members of the force, celebrating a junior officer's impending marriage. A group of laughing teenagers attracted the policemen's attention. Iashvili thought he and his fellows were the source of amusement. The fight that followed ended with the chief shooting three of the boys in the foot. There was no official record of the event. Even the hospital where the boys had been treated refused to document the case.

Democracy was wheezing its way into the Republic of Georgia, but it still had a very long way to go. The Russian Army still maintained a presence in both Poti, further north on the coast, and in Gori, restricting traffic to Tbilisi. In the open land between the Black Sea and the capital, brigands still lurked the roads. The declaration of independence in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia made Moscow's shadow fall long and cold throughout the country.

I looped back, this time following the main street, waving at the people I knew and exchanging brief good-mornings as I went past. I no longer got the stares I once did, but the amusement at my commitment to exercise still remained. I made my way back up the road toward the house, digging down for extra speed, feeling my lungs starting to burn. At the fork in the road, I went right, heading toward home, telling myself there was nothing in Bakhar Lagidze's house that I needed to see again.

The rest of the day passed in tight silence. Late in the afternoon, when Tiasa would've come for her lesson, Alena went out to the studio again. I was working in the yard on an old Dnepr motorcycle I'd bought a couple of months earlier, Miata lazily watching me as I tried to make sense of the schematics I'd downloaded from the Internet. Alena and I had only the one car for the two of us, a forty-year-old Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan that took five minutes to start during the winter, and that could easily double as a light tank in an emergency. The Dnepr, once repaired, would hopefully serve as more reliable, if smaller, transportation.

The music in the studio came on, one of the more energetic pieces that Alena used for warming up. She'd left the door open, and the noise kept Miata and me company. After a few minutes there was a quick silence, and then the sound of John Lennon's voice as she switched to her Beatles playlist. Alena had loved the Beatles for as long as I'd known her, and she frequently danced and taught to their catalogue.

So when "Golden Slumbers" came on, I barely noticed, occupied as I was with trying to remove the dead battery from the bike without tearing my knuckles open. It's a short song, hardly a minute and a half long, and so when it repeated, I missed that, too. But somewhere around the fifth time through I registered what I was hearing, and when the song ended, and then began again almost without pause, I got to my feet, wiping my hands on my jeans. Miata lifted his head to see what I was doing, then went back to watching the squirrels.

The song had ended and begun again when I stuck my head through the doorway. Most of the space was cleared for dancing, mirrors on the barre wall. At the far end was our heavy bag, the stack of weight plates and barbells. The stereo sat in the opposite corner.

Alena was on the floor, her back to the mirror, facing the stereo. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, arms holding them close, head buried, and now that I was inside, I could hear it. In all the time I'd known her, I'd seen her cry only once. Tears weren't something she cared for, nor were they something she offered readily. And even when I had seen her cry, it had been nothing like this.

The sobs wracked her, making her shake, and it was obvious she was trying to control them, to control herself, and that she was failing, but yet unwilling to surrender. It was so utterly unexpected, so unlike her, that I spent an instant unsure of how to react. Then I went to her side, and she heard me coming, and tried harder to hide her face away. I sat on the floor beside her, the mirror glass cold against my back, and carefully put my arms around her, waiting to see if she'd resist. She didn't; she slumped against me, her whole body shaking.