Greg Rucka - Walking dead

Mike was the first one to respond. He came out of the hallway to my left, bleary-eyed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I'd counted on the bleariness; it was why I'd picked the hour. Nonetheless, he'd had the presence of mind to arm himself, a solid, traditional Remington pump-action shotgun, police model, in his hands, and I wondered if he and Bradley were also cops.

He saw me and he saw my gun, but, in relative terms, I had all the time in the world and he had none. I picked my shot, gave him the same one I'd given Vladek Karataev back in Batumi so many weeks ago, shattering his pelvis with a round and stealing his legs. He dropped face-first, his momentum carrying him forward on the marble floor, smearing blood.

"Bella!" he screamed.

I closed on him in two steps and then turned the third into a kick to the face. I kicked him hard, and he lost teeth. He also lost consciousness.

I started up the stairs, shouting in Georgian.

"Tiasa! It's David! David Mercer! Where are you?"

A door opened on the second floor, I couldn't see where, but I could hear it, then heard another one slam closed. Someone was running down a hallway, away from me. I kept moving, shouting Tiasa's name, racing up the steps. The hallway ran left and right, and I heard noise to the left, went that way first, stopping at the nearest door. I took the entry hard, kicking it open, the Glock ready in both hands. The room was empty. I pivoted, moved to the next one, this across the hall, a meter down, kicked it free the same way.

The door hit Bradley in the face, where he'd been about to open it, sent him staggering back. He had a pistol in his hand, but no shot, and I put one from the Glock in his knee before he could acquire one. He screamed and dropped.

That's when I saw he was naked, and that the girl in the bed was the same small blonde I'd seen while surveilling the house through my camera's lens.

God, I wanted to kill him.

I wanted to kill him all the more when he begged me not to.

He'd dropped his pistol, a Sig, the same model that I'd found in Bridgett's apartment. I kicked it away, and he clutched his knee with both hands, looking up at me.

"God don't please don't," he sobbed. "Please don't!"

The girl in the bed was staring at me, sheet pulled around her frail body. Her expression was blank, no trace of horror or pain or anger, nothing at all.

I kicked him in his wounded knee, and he screamed and flailed back, and I kicked him again, this time in the groin, then in the stomach, and then, finally, in the face. He lay bleeding on the navy blue carpet, skin torn, semiconscious. I stepped over him, grabbed the Sig from where it had fallen on the floor.

"The only reason you get to live," I said, "is because I want you to suffer."

Then I used the Sig as a hammer and hit him in the back of the head with it. The crack it made as metal met bone was nearly satisfying.

Tucking the Sig away at the small of my back, I asked the girl, "English?"

She nodded, slightly, staring at Bradley on the floor.

"People are going to come here," I told her. "Good people. By morning."

Her expression didn't change, and she nodded again, as small an acknowledgment as before.

"Tiasa," I said. "Which way?"

She pointed, indicating the right-hand hallway, the direction opposite the way I'd headed off the stairs.

"Good people will come," I promised her, and stepped back into the hall.

The house seemed to have gone silent, remained that way as I retraced my steps. Glancing down to the bottom of the stairs, Mike lay just as before. I moved into the new hallway.

"Tiasa! It's David!"

From behind one of the closed doors on the hall, I heard a rustle, a thump. I made for the sound, but this time took the entry softer, putting my body against the wall and reaching over for the handle. It turned without resistance, and then the shots came, piling one atop another, wild fire, until five holes punched through the wood, each round planting itself in the wall opposite me.

In the silence that followed, I heard someone whimper.

I pushed the door open and stepped around, raising the Glock.

Bella Downs stood in the bedroom. She was dressed in dark purple silk pajamas, a revolver in one hand and her cell phone in the other. The gun had been pointed at the door, but when she saw me she started to move it, to point it at the head of the girl huddling in the corner.

"Go away," Bella shouted at me. "Go away!"

"You stop!" I shouted back. "You point that at her and I will shoot you dead!"

The gun froze midway in its travel. Then her hand opened and it fell to the floor. I stepped in enough to catch it with my toe, pull it away from her, then went down far enough to scoop it up in my left hand. I pulled the release, swung out the cylinder. The revolver had carried only five shots. She'd used them all on the door.

"Take her," Bella Downs told me. "Just take her and go away and never come back."

"That's pretty much my plan," I said.

Then I hit her hard, across the face, with her revolver, shattering her jaw. She dropped, trying to scream, then discovered that made the pain worse. Blood gushed from her nose and mouth.

"Tiasa," I said, switching back to Georgian. "It's David, David Mercer. Yeva's husband. I'm taking you away from here."

The girl in the corner didn't rise, instead trying to make herself smaller. Bella Downs, on the floor, made sobbing sounds.

I tucked the Glock away, then knelt down, putting the revolver on the floor between me and the girl.

"Tiasa," I said. "It's me. We're leaving now. Let's go."

She raised her head slowly, afraid of being betrayed again, lied to again, used again. But when her eyes found mine, there was no relief in them, no joy on her face, no recovery to be found at all.

"Let's go," I said again.

In silence, she got to her feet, and I put a hand on her shoulder. I expected a physical response to that, a tensing of muscle, a pulling away from my grip, but neither came, and she let me guide her from the room, then down the hall, then to the stairs past Mike, still lying and bleeding on the white marble floor. We went out the front, to the Jetta, and I put her inside.

Tiasa never made a sound. Tiasa never said a word.

And Tiasa never looked back.

Thirty-five The first hints of the story were beginning to break when we stopped in Salt Lake City midmorning, after almost five hours of driving. In the motel room, while Tiasa bathed and changed into the new clothes I'd bought her, I snapped on the news, bouncing up the dial to first CNN, then MSNBC. The only item I found was on the latter.

"Acting on anonymous information, federal authorities raided a house in New Paradise, Nevada, this morning, as part of an ongoing investigation into human trafficking More on this as it develops."

That was it. That was all.

I turned the television off and the BlackBerry on, called Alena.

"You have her?" she asked.

"I have her."

"How is she?"

"She hasn't said much. She hasn't really said anything."

"May I speak with her?"

"Hold on."

I moved to the bathroom door, tapped lightly on it. The water had stopped running over ten minutes ago.

"Tiasa," I said.

She opened the door, wet black hair and jeans and a dark green T-shirt. She didn't look at me; she hadn't much looked at me, at least when she thought I was looking at her, since I'd put her in the Jetta back in New Paradise and started driving.

"Yeva wants to talk to you," I said, and handed her the phone, then moved away, giving them privacy. For almost two minutes Tiasa said nothing, listening.

Then, her voice hoarse, she said, "I understand."

She brought the phone back to me, then sat on the other bed in the room and began to put on her new sneakers. I put the phone to my ear.