Марк Грини - One Minute Out

It’s a common practice in my world, but to the uninitiated I imagine it feels a little off.

Instantly she recoils and smacks my hand away. “What . . . what are you doing?”

I pull my hand back to the steering wheel. “Sorry, it’s a thing we do.”

“What? Who does that? No one does that!”

I let it go. “Check yourself, are you bleeding? Are you hurt?”

Coming out of her anger and shock, she does as I ask. After a moment she says, “I . . . I don’t think I am badly injured, but I hit my head when we crashed.” Rubbing her upper arm she says, “My shoulder hurts, but I think I’m okay.”

I know from experience that if her head and shoulder hurt now, they’re going to be killing her in about twelve hours, but I don’t mention this. I have to find out if she learned anything at all in the few minutes she was in captivity. I don’t expect to find out much, but I have no idea how else to continue my pursuit of the kidnapped women without some sort of new intelligence.

But before I can speak she turns to me. “Thank . . . thank you.”

This I don’t expect. “Uh . . . sure. I thought you’d be pissed.”

“Pissed? I haven’t been drinking. Have you?”

“Mad. Angry,” I clarify, knowing she probably learned British English, so she thought I was telling her I thought she was drunk when I pulled her out of the van.

“Why would I be mad?” she asks now.

“I don’t know. I guess because I used you as bait and almost got you killed.”

She shook her head. “You saved my life. I put yours in danger by not trusting you on the rope, and still you came for me. Thank you.”

I say, “I think you are drunk.”

She looks me over a moment. “Maybe you didn’t do it for me. Maybe you did it for the women you are trying to save. But still . . . thank you.” She reaches out and squeezes my forearm, then retracts her hand and puts it back in her lap.

I ask, “Did the men say where they were taking you?”

“Not to me, no. But they did say something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Romanian is a Romance language. Albanian is not. But both are from the Balkan sprachbund .”

She’s a smart woman. I’m lost already.

And she sees it in my face, apparently. “I can’t speak Albanian, not at all, but I can understand some words and phrases.”

“And they spoke openly in front of you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not very professional of them,” I say. “In fact, we can’t trust it. It could have been disinformation.”

She picks some grit from the car crash out of the back of her arm, wipes a little blood off her hand onto her jeans. “They were very agitated after you showed up, for good reason. I don’t think they were thinking about being professional or trying to deceive me when we left the Old Town. They were all screaming at one another. At me, too.”

“Yeah, I heard. What did they say?”

“I heard the driver say something about a boat.”

“A boat?”

“Yes. He definitely said a boat, and then he said something strange. He said, very clearly, ‘next to the president.’”

“The president ?”

“Yes. I am sure of it.”

“The president of Croatia?”

“I have no idea what he was referring to.”

I pull hard to the side of the road and slam on the brakes.

Talyssa grabs the dashboard to keep from being propelled forward. “Why are we stopping?”

I don’t answer; instead I lift my phone and look at the GPS, move the map back farther west, in the direction the van was headed. After a few seconds I find what I’m looking for. “The Valamar Dubrovnik President Hotel. On the tip of the peninsula. Fifteen minutes from here.”

Talyssa looks out the window at the darkness, then back to me. “That must be it. Let’s go, then.”

I grab my pack out of the backseat, then fish through it a moment. Pulling out her phone and her pistol, I hand both items back to her.

“What . . . what is happening?”

“I’m going on alone. We will stay in communication with each other. We’re lucky you survived tonight. I’m not pushing it again.”

“But . . . my sister.”

“You can do more to help your sister by supporting me than you can running around with me.”

“You are just trying to get rid of me.”

She’s right, but I don’t admit it. “Not at all. If I find that boat they’re talking about, I’m going to need to follow it. I’m also going to need to know about the owner of it, where it might be going, that sort of thing.”

After a moment she nods. “I . . . I can help with that.”

“I know you can. Keep that phone on; I’ve got the number programmed into an app on mine that will keep me untraceable, but you will be able to reach me when you need to.”

“Okay.” She seems unsure, but right now I just want her out of danger.

I add, “Also, you may not know it yet, but you are going to be very sore tomorrow.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Not tomorrow, you won’t.”

She climbs out of the car and I follow her, then walk over to a pair of scooters parked along the street next to the hotel. Both are locked, but I pull my pick set and quickly free them both.

One is a Gilera Stalker, a little 50cc two-person two-wheeler. And the other is a Derbi Boulevard, a more powerful scooter with a 150cc engine.

“Where do I go?”

I don’t really have an answer for this. “Just get out of town. Find a little suburb, sit tight, wait for instructions from me.”

“That’s it?”

I shrug. “Pick up some ice, painkillers, bandages, and antibiotic ointment.” I add, “Trust me.”

It takes me a few minutes to hot-wire both scooters, and soon she is heading east, and I’m heading west, looking for a boat next to the President Hotel.

It’s not much to go on, but it’s all I’ve salvaged out of one hell of a shitty night, so I do my best to think positively as the aches and pains from all my activity continue to make their presence known across my body.

TWENTY-TWO

Maja was well into her second night in the bombed-out warehouse with the rest of the women and girls. It was a warm evening, but the breeze off the water coming through the blast holes in the walls and the blown-in windows made it bearable. Bedding had been brought in by the guards, and there was plenty of room to lie down on the dusty concrete floor.

Maja now lay with her head on a little pillow, her eyes tired and bleary from the stress, and she looked around the room, which was difficult with the intermittent moonlight. The female captives around her lay on blankets and mats; most slept, but a few, like Maja herself, tossed and turned.

She heard a vehicle pull up and come to a stop outside, and then she heard car doors opening and closing. The three Albanian guards sitting around the room stiffened up and then the scuffle of what sounded like a dozen pairs of shoes echoed up the ruined staircase.

She sat up, as did many of the girls around her.

She couldn’t make out the faces of the men who appeared out of the stairwell. Some seemed to be more of the group who had taken over from the Serbians, and they all carried rifles over their shoulders. But there were also four or five silhouettes that didn’t match any of the men she’d remembered seeing since arriving here.

A tall and fit man with short hair and a clean-shaven face passed through a shaft of moonlight, looking over the women, but Maja didn’t get a good look at him before he moved on towards a back wall. Others followed behind him, and she could see white faces, serious eyes, and well-made but casual clothing. She saw no weapons, but the men moved across the big dark space with true authority.