Greg Rucka: Walking dead

She continued to cry, and I continued to hold her, and Paul continued to sing, and I wondered if this was grief, or something more. I couldn't leave it alone.

The next morning, when I reached the fork in the road, I went left instead of right. There wasn't much sign of crime scene investigation as I approached the house. The front door still hung open, the splintered and burst wood from the rounds that had torn through it all the more garish. Bakhar's car remained where it had been the other night. I slowed to a walk, feeling sweat dripping off me into the dust. A dark brown puddle had dried on the dirt road, where the man I'd shot had bled out. When I listened, I could hear the buzzing of flies from inside.

There was no police tape, nothing saying that I could not enter, not that the presence of an official sign would've stopped me. There was a curious sense of deja vu when I stepped inside, triggered, perhaps, by the shift in the illumination, the transition from bright sunlight without to the shadows within. A cloud of flies, swarming over the still-tacky puddle in the entry-way, scattered and then almost as quickly re-formed, ignoring me.

The house had already had one full day to cook in the summer heat, and it reeked. Whatever tracks I may have made had been obliterated by the multiple police boots that had tromped up and down the hall since the discovery of the bodies. I wondered, idly, who had called the crime in to the police, how they had been notified. Conceivably, it could've taken days before anyone noticed what had happened here.

Unsure of what exactly all my questions were, I started searching for answers in the kids' rooms first. I spent nearly five hours on the search, with a couple of breaks in between to grasp some fresh air and clear my head. In Koba's and Tiasa's rooms I found nothing extraordinary, only sad. Koba had an eight-year-old's collection of detritus, scraps of paper covered with drawings of spaceships and football players. He'd taped a crude family portrait he'd drawn on the inside of his bedroom door, the house small in comparison to the figures. In it, he'd drawn himself biggest of all, smiling with lots of teeth. His sister had been smallest, but not by much, almost as tall as he'd drawn Ia.

Tiasa's room was harder. Books, schoolwork, magazines. A DVD Alena had lent her of a Savion Glover tap performance. A bottle of cheap perfume, and a brand new lipstick. I didn't find a diary. If I had, I doubt I could've brought myself to read it.

It was in the master bedroom that I began to concentrate my efforts. There was nothing in the cliches-no documents taped to the back of the furniture, nothing beneath the mattress or submerged in the toilet tank. In the back of the closet I found a nylon carry-all, the kind of thing to hold towels and swimsuits for a day at the beach. This one held three pairs of underwear, three clean shirts, three pairs of socks, a pair of pants, and a toothbrush. It also held just shy of five thousand euros, a loaded 9mm Makarov, and two passports, one Russian, the other Romanian. The pictures inside each matched Bakhar, even if the names didn't.

There was also a small, tattered address book. When I flipped through it, the entries were all in Georgian, first names and phone numbers. Some of the country codes I recognized-Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Germany, England-and some I didn't.

I put it aside, wondering why it was Bakhar Lagidze needed a go-bag.

The only other item of interest I found was in Bakhar's tackle box, the same one he always took with him fishing. Beneath the top compartment, wrapped in an oily rag, was another pistol, this one a small Czech semi-auto. The gun was a cheap one, poorly maintained, and nothing I would have trusted my life to in a pinch. Bakhar clearly seemed to have thought otherwise.

That was all I found. Alena was in the kitchen when I got home, putting together a salad, and I let her know I was back, though she'd already determined that from Miata's reaction the moment I'd come onto our property. I dropped the go-bag on our bed, stripped and took a quick shower. When I returned, Alena had the contents dumped out, examining them. She shot me an accusing glare as I passed her but said nothing until after I'd finished getting dressed, and then, when she did, failed to deliver the admonishment I'd expected from her expression.

"I have to go to Tbilisi tomorrow morning," she said, tossing Bakhar's Russian passport back onto the pile, and picking up the address book.

"Why?"

"Nicholas is meeting me at the Marriott." She leafed through the little book in her hands, flipping the pages slowly.

"We saw him in March," I said, surprised. Nicholas Sargenti, to grossly oversimplify things, was our banker.

"Yes. I want him to free up some more funds, just in case we need them quickly." She looked up from the book to read my expression, and then added, as if it needed further explanation, "In case we have to run."

I tucked in my shirt, thinking. In the world Alena and I had made for ourselves, Nicholas Sargenti was the hidden facilitator. When Alena had been working, it was he who had arranged contact protocols, had retrieved job offers, passing them along to her through varied and elaborate cutouts and dead-drops. He had been her hidden necessity, able to provide papers and identities on short notice, and all of them entirely legitimate. From his office in Monaco, he had moved the substantial amounts of money required for her to do her job around the world quietly and quickly, deftly funding each cover. While we rarely availed ourselves of his other services these days, Nicholas still handled the majority of our finances.

Alena had never admitted to him what it was she got paid tens of millions of dollars to do, and he had never asked, but he was smart enough to do everything else, which meant he was smart enough to have figured it out. Which meant he was a risk to us, albeit a very calculated, necessary one. For that reason, face-to-face meetings with him were always planned with great care, their number limited. That Alena had arranged to meet him only three months after last seeing him concerned me, but not nearly as much as the fact that she was meeting him in-country, in the capital. It was sloppy, and that was utterly unlike her.

"I'll come with you," I said.

"Better if you don't. If Iashvili comes back with more questions and we're both gone, it will look worse than it already does."

"It doesn't look bad right now. You heard him, he's calling it a murder-suicide and putting it all on Bakhar."

"Even so." She indicated the spilled contents of the go-bag on the bed with her free hand. "Did you find anything else?"

"Bakhar kept a pistol in his tackle box," I said, aware she was changing the subject. "Piece-of-crap little Czech thing."

"That is not so unusual, that he would bring a weapon for self-defense."

"Maybe. Wouldn't do him much good at the bottom of a tackle box."

"That implies a level of tradecraft that isn't evident here."

"He had a go-bag."

"A very bad go-bag. Too many clothes. Not enough cash. No credit cards. And this." She held up the address book. "If this is a list of contacts in whatever his business was, this is very unprofessional."

I held up a hand, began counting on my fingers. "Drugs, guns-"

"It doesn't matter," Alena interrupted, dropping the address book on the bed. "Whatever it was he was into, his sins caught up with him. Come, dinner's ready."

She walked out of the bedroom. I stared at the scattered clothes, the two passports, the address book, the gun. I thought about my own go-bag, waiting on the top shelf in the front closet, resting beside Alena's.

Wondering how much longer I had before my sins caught up with me.

Four Alena took the car, leaving before dawn. If things went well, she could do the drive to Tbilisi in four hours. If things went the way they normally did, it would take her closer to eight, accounting for the appropriate checkpoints and shakedowns. I didn't fear for her well-being. Anyone who tried to take something from her she wasn't willing to give would draw back a bloody stump, and that was only if she allowed them to keep their life.