Tom Callaghan - A Summer Revenge

Sooner or later, someone would pass by and discover her, or the CCTV operator would start to wonder why the woman had stood still for long. I pulled my baseball cap a little further down over my eyes and returned the way I’d come, looking down, keen to get into the twisting and unmonitored back streets of Bur Dubai without being spotted.

The Dôme was doing great business between the two of us, and Saltanat should have been given whatever the equivalent of frequent-flyer miles for coffee is. I made do with apple juice.

“As they passed me, I could see that the woman wasn’t Natasha,” Saltanat said. “The feet were too big, the boobs not big enough. And the way she carried her bag with her hand resting on the top? That told me she had something heavy in there. So I guessed she was a hitter, just like me.”

She paused, took a mouthful of scalding coffee, the way only women seem able to do.

“Except not as good.”

“Naturally,” I said.

Saltanat’s eyes narrowed and she stared at me suspiciously. “Is that some sort of backhanded compliment?”

I held up my hands, the ever-misunderstood male.

“No, you saved me. It’s a shame the rest of the plan didn’t work out. We didn’t get Natasha back, and we still don’t know where Boris and his gang are hanging out.”

Saltanat debated with herself whether to have another coffee, decided against it.

“You didn’t do so badly yourself,” she said. “It takes balls to stand still with a Glock pointed at you.”

“That wasn’t courage, it was terror,” I said and meant it most sincerely.

“It was your idea to have me stationed there in case of trouble.”

“The downside is that Boris must have realized we were working together after you stabbed the shooter,” I said. “And now he knows what you look like.”

Saltanat shrugged.

“Keeps us on our toes. It might even mean he cuts his losses.”

“So he puts Natasha under the sand, heads for the airport, disappears. You don’t complete your mission, and I don’t get to return Tynaliev’s missing millions and mistress. I don’t foresee a joyful reunion with him.”

Saltanat reached for her cigarettes, put them back in her bag. Sometimes all you want with a strong coffee is the bite of nicotine. At least that’s one simple pleasure you can still enjoy in a bar in Bishkek.

“So what’s your plan, Inspector? I’m going back to my hotel. Alone,” Saltanat said, standing up, pulling her bag onto her shoulder, giving me the frosty eye. In return, I gave her my most winning smile.

“Oh, you know me,” I said. “I’ll think of something.”

Investigations aren’t like the ones you see on TV, where a hard-bitten, hard-drinking maverick fists his way to a solution, or the latest computer technology and spy satellites track down the bad guys in nanoseconds. It’s usually all much more tedious than that, like a color-blind man trying to spot the difference between red and green.

I remember the days of cheap music cassettes, where the tapes invariably got tangled inside the machine, and even if you managed to get the tape out in one piece, you spent hours trying to rewind it with a pencil. Finally, you gave it up as a bad job, sold the machine, went for a beer with the money.

Except if you’re investigating a murder, you can’t shrug your shoulders and walk away; at least, I can’t.

So you go over what you know, pushing the pieces together in different ways, trying to find connections that probably don’t exist, hunting for motives and clues with your eyes closed. Sometimes it’s hard to spot a pattern, the way all spilled blood looks the same, whatever the victim’s blood group. But you might see recurring elements: the same weapon, the same kind of passion and need, the same desire to end someone’s life. For sex, for power and, most of all, for money.

I didn’t know if Tynaliev had killed anyone while acquiring his ten million secret dollars, and even if I found out, there would be nothing I could do about it. He was too powerful, too ruthless, and he had incriminating files on everyone who mattered or might pose a threat. Untouchable.

Tynaliev had coerced me into playing the role of pimp in order to get my job back, but once the killings started, it became a very different sort of job, one that suited my skills much more.

Kulayev was dead for sure, a blackened roast joint, and so was Atanasov, hacked into glistening chunks of fat, meat and bone in his seedy apartment. Saltanat had just slaughtered some anonymous Chechen woman, and I’d gunned down a young man, Khusun Todashev. It was all getting out of hand.

The odds were that Natasha was dead as well, maybe floating face down in the sea. And someone had certainly tried to shoot first Saltanat, and then me.

There was no way I could walk away from that much blood, that much pain. Maybe there were no innocents among the dead, no one for whom a brutal ending came as a complete surprise. That made no difference. It was time to get back to doing what I did best. Avenging the dead.

It was pointless thinking that I could reach out to Boris again, try to reconcile our mutual needs with his inevitably increasing desire for revenge. The problem was that I didn’t know how many soldiers he had, whereas he had probably guessed that Saltanat and I were flying alone. Even worse, I had no idea what any of his men looked like, so I could expect a sudden step too close, a quick turn nearby, and then I’d be joining Kulayev on ice in the morgue.

There’s only one way to proceed when you’ve got no leads, no suspects, no authority. You go out and you stir up some shit, flicking allegations that stick to the wall like blood in a slaughterhouse. You ask questions that get you into trouble, about things no one wants to talk about or have discovered, crimes no one wants to confess to. Then, when you’ve asked the question, you stay silent, keep your mouth zipped, watch people take a string of words from their own mouths, twist the fibers into a rope, tie one end to a slowly rotating ceiling fan and then step off the chair.

I knew I had to get out of my hotel room. It wasn’t just driving me crazy with its impersonal perfection, but the answers I wanted weren’t going to tap on the door like room service arriving. I tucked my gun back into my pocket, pulled the key card out of its holder, hit the lift.

I couldn’t remember the address of Natasha’s bolt-hole, but I knew it was in one of the rows of faceless seven-story apartment blocks that made up a large part of Bur Dubai. Functional, charmless and as easy to pick out a specific building as choosing a shirt with your eyes shut.

It took me a good two hours of wandering around, soaked in sweat, doubling back from time to time to make sure I wasn’t being followed, but finally I found it. No sign of the watchman, so I headed up to the apartment. The door was locked, of course, but the plastic card I keep in my wallet proved as good as a regular key. I’ve never claimed to play entirely by the rules.

At first glance, the apartment looked much the same as when I left it, but somewhere so sterile always turns up a clue or two if you know how to find it. These are places married men let for a month or two in the summer, when the wives and children go abroad to escape the Dubai summer. Sometimes a group of working girls rents one for three months, cramming four to a bedroom using cheap metal bunk beds, sharing the bills between them. As long as they’re discreet, don’t bring clients home and the neighbors don’t complain, the management looks away and out to sea and charges four times the going rate.

Time was all I had in my favor, so I checked the linings of her suitcases, the undersides of drawers, on the tops of wardrobes. I would have peered under the rugs, but there weren’t any. The fridge and freezer looked as if they’d never been used, and there were no toiletries in the bathroom, no makeup bottles and creams in front of the mirror.