by Greg Rucka
It couldn’t have been lost on him just who, sitting at this table on a February dawn, she thought was an empty thing, and who she thought was not.
“Illya is the target,” Alena concluded. “Not the woman. Not the child.”
Dan swallowed, looked from her to me, then back to her.
“Then what do we do?” He was speaking Russian, just as she had been. “We can’t let him go, Alena! What he did must be answered!”
I cleared my throat, and both of them looked at me.
“What kind of car is Illya driving?” I asked Dan.
His opinion of me was uncensored in his expression. “The fuck?”
“What kind of car? New? Old?”
“New, brand new. Ford Mustang, a black one. Vadim wants one, too. Why the fuck does it matter what car he’s driving?”
“Air bags,” Alena said.
“Vadim’s got his own vehicle,” I said. “Another rental?”
“Yeah, we rented on the same ID, same credit cards.”
“We’re going to need another two cars, then,” I said. “Older ones. And a roll or two of duct tape, and something to keep Illya down, a good sleeping pill will do it, something like Ambien.”
Dan looked at me as if he couldn’t decide to be incredulous, outraged, or both.
“We can’t let him go home,” I explained. “And we can’t let him get away.”
“His car,” Alena told Dan. “We’ll take him at his car.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
The irony of springing an automotive ambush on Illya didn’t hit me until I hit him, or more precisely, until the moment I smashed the front end of my stolen 1978 Lincoln Town Car into the back of his probably-not-stolen and brand-spanking-new black-and-silver Ford Mustang. The cars connected with the unique bang that only comes from automobile accidents, the almost-hollow sound of metal and fiberglass cracking together, the sudden tinkling of glass and plastic hitting asphalt.
It was a good hit, not too fast, eleven miles an hour. Enough to rattle the bones, to snap me against my seat belt and send me back hard into the driver’s seat, and, more importantly, to send the Mustang forward. The new Mustangs have crap visibility out their rear, the window too small and set too high on the tail, and I couldn’t see Illya behind the wheel, but I heard the second collision as his front end met the back of Vadim’s Cadillac. The Caddie, like the Town Car, was stolen, though a couple years younger, maybe an ’82 or ’83.
I lost a second getting the seat belt off, which isn’t a long time in the concrete, but in the abstract was more than adequate for me to think about how slowly I was moving, and how badly this could turn out if I didn’t speed things up. We were on a public street, and while the daylight wasn’t broad due to the heavy cloud cover, it might as well have been. There was no place to hide, and certainly the sound of the crash would pull people from their beds or their breakfast tables, send them running to their windows to see what was happening on the street outside.
Then I was out of the car, the tire iron I’d found in the trunk in my hand, and running forward to the Mustang. Vadim was out of the Caddie, heading around its nose to come along the other side of the car, to the passenger side. I heard, then saw, the Pathfinder as it hopped up on the curb to my left, drawing even with the Mustang. Through the side window, I could see Illya still dazed, only now beginning to shake off the effects of three collisions in quick succession. While the first two—the Town Car and the Caddie—might have rattled his cage, it was the third, when his air bag had deployed, that had been the most crucial. For air bags to work, they have to work fast, and they have to be able to counter the force of the collision in their own right. Take one to the chest in a low-speed crash, and you’ll feel it.
Illya was feeling it right now.
I reached his door and tried the handle, and wasn’t at all surprised that it was locked. Inside, Illya was looking around, realizing what had happened and the trouble he was in. Opposite me, at the front passenger’s door, Vadim was working with a tire iron of his own. We hit the windows almost simultaneously, and the glass shattered in concert, raining onto the wet street and into the car. In his seat, Illya started shouting at us, gabbling fear and outrage as he leaned forward, trying to reach with his right hand to the small of his back. I spun the tire iron around, jabbed the straight end hard through the now missing window and into his side, connecting with him just below the armpit.
Illya screamed in pain, jerking away from me and towards Vadim, who had the passenger’s door open already. Seeing Vadim reaching in for him, Illya made another attempt to get at his gun, and I jabbed him with the tire iron a second time, just as hard, hitting him in the small of the back, above where he was wearing the weapon. Illya cried out again, lying down further across the seats, and Vadim grabbed hold of him by the back of his shirt and yanked.
Dan joined his son, and together the two of them pulled Illya free from the Mustang. Once they had him, they didn’t let go, dragging him flailing to the door Dan had left open on the Pathfinder. I did a quick spin around in place, checking the street, catching Alena seated behind the Pathfinder’s wheel as I did so. The traffic around us was light, not yet bloated with the morning commute, and only now really beginning to come to a stop. I didn’t see any police, and I didn’t see anyone who seemed to have witnessed the entirety of what we were doing, or at least, no one who had borne witness and therefore looked like they wanted to get involved.
“Let’s go!” Dan shouted to me.
Tire iron still in hand, I came around the back of the Mustang, jumped onto the hood of the Town Car where the two vehicles had tried to become one, and came down again beside the Pathfinder. Inside, Vadim was holding Illya in a headlock while Dan forced him to swallow two of the Ambien we’d scored. I moved around to the front of the car, climbed in beside Alena, and we were moving before I had the door closed.
In the backseat, Illya emitted a muffled sob, finally succumbing to Dan’s pressure.
“Ochen preyatna, cyka,” I told him.
We caught Route 26 out of Portland, heading east, and by the time we’d hit Gresham, Illya was fast asleep, despite his best efforts. Given the dose, he’d stay down for at least the next eight hours, which would be enough to cover our transport time. As soon as he was out, Dan gave him a thorough search, coming up with a spring-action knife in addition to the pistol he’d been carrying at the small of his back. He had a couple hundred dollars in mixed bills, maybe his wages for the night’s work, tucked into his pockets, as well.
We drove without speaking for most of the next hour, Alena at the wheel, myself beside her, Dan and Vadim in the back. The sky started to clear as we began climbing towards Mount Hood, and there was snow throughout the Cascade Range, and the trees were very green and very lush and very beautiful, and it reminded me of the little I’d seen of northern Georgia, where the Caucasus came down from the border with Russia. We stopped at a gas station in Welches to fill the tank, and Vadim and I took the opportunity to go inside to gather some supplies. He grabbed a six-pack of Budweiser and two bags of spicy Cheetos, and I made him put the Budweiser back.
“We do not want to be stopped for an open container in the car,” I told him.
Vadim pulled a face that said that I absolutely needed to lighten up, then replaced the beer and got himself six cans of Red Bull instead. I went with two bottles of clearly-from-concentrate orange juice, and another two of water, and looked for something that wasn’t purely high-fructose corn syrup. Failing that, I decided I wasn’t hungry. I also grabbed a road atlas of Oregon.
Back in the car, now with Dan at the wheel and Alena seated beside him, and Vadim and I flanking the sleeping Illya at the back, we broke out the map and took a look at our options. Thus far, we’d done pretty well relying on our improvisational skills, but what we needed to do next would require seclusion and security. We had Illya; now we needed a place to button him up and do what needed to be done next.
“What a
re you thinking?” Dan asked. He asked it in Russian, maybe to see if I could keep up. “Take him out to the middle of the high desert, maybe?”
“It’s the winter season,” I said. “We want someplace quiet and discreet, and the further from Portland and the police the better.”
“You think a vacation rental?” Alena asked.
“It worked for us in Georgia. We find a place that’s not being used right now, maybe one that looks like it’s only occupied during the summer. A fishing cabin, rather than skiing, say.”
“So near a river,” Vadim said. “Someplace near a river.”
I checked the map. “Along the Deschutes would work. If we had access to a computer we could just do a quick search for vacation rentals, plug in the communities we like the looks of, see what’s available, and see what’s not being used at the moment.”
“Hold on.” Vadim handed me the can of Red Bull he’d been working on, then dug around in his pockets until he came out with one of the new Palm Treos, began fiddling with it. “Ah, it’s going slow as shit, the coverage’s no good out here. Hang on.”
I looked to Dan, said, “Maybe we should keep moving while he does this.”
Dan started the Pathfinder again, pulling us back onto the road. Vadim stayed bent over his Treo, occasionally muttering about how long it was taking for the pages to load.
“Okay,” he said, after almost two minutes. “I’ve got a page here, it’s got towns in Central Oregon with vacation rentals. Lots of towns. Bend, Eagle Crest, Sunriver—”
“Sunriver,” I told him, checking the map.
There was another pause, this one perhaps half as long as the first, accompanied by more of his muttering about crappy connection speeds. “Got it. Lots of places. Lots of places, man, let me check availability, here…goddammit this is slow…yeah, okay, looks like about a dozen places we could use.”
“Note the addresses,” I told him. “We’ll eyeball them when we get there, pick the one we like.”
“This is amateur hour,” Dan said, mostly to himself. “We should have had a location lined up before we grabbed him.”
“We also should have known there was a woman and a child,” I told him.
Dan didn’t say anything else until we reached Sunriver.
CHAPTER
SIX
The place we liked was the third one we looked at, number 18 Cluster Cabin Lane, not more than a mile east of where the Deschutes River flowed past Sunriver. It was snowing when we arrived, and it looked like it had been snowing a lot, and keeping the roads clear up to the area around the cabin wasn’t a civic priority. We did the last part of the drive with Dan swearing, working the Pathfinder in four-wheel drive.
Then he stopped the car and Alena and I each hopped out, telling him and Vadim to stay put and keep an eye out. We’d seen absolutely no traffic coming in, and the nearest cabin was perhaps half a mile away, and it had looked as cold and empty as the one before us did now. With the car’s engine off, the only sound was that of the snow coming down.
Without a word, Alena and I each headed for the cabin, taking opposite sides for the approach. It was ugly, late sixties style, two stories tall, and on the ground floor almost an entire wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, shutters closed behind them. Not the best design for a winter place, and not the best design for the summer, either; in the first, the glass would conduct all the cold outside; in the second, it would trap heat with the sunlight. Snow had slid from the rooftop recently, plopping in a great pile along the east side of the house. In some places it came up to my knees, and once, while trudging around, it reached my hips. But the only signs that the snow had been disturbed at all were ours.
We met up again at the foot of the porch, and again stopped to listen and look around, still not speaking. It was almost eerily silent, that pure winter quiet that comes upon a heavy snow. It made the world beautiful, and it made the world even colder. Snow was melting in my hair, running down the back of my neck, and I shivered, and I saw that Alena was trying to keep her teeth from chattering. Neither of us was carrying a lot of body fat, and the weather was working on us fast.
“It’ll serve,” she decided. “How do we want to get inside? I don’t want to break any windows if we can help it.”
“We shouldn’t need to.” I pointed to the small, rectangular metal box that had been screwed into the wall of the cabin beside the front door. “If we can get that open, we’ve got the keys.”
She stepped up onto the porch, brushing snow off her shoulders, and I followed her. There were ten push buttons set into the box, each corresponding to a digit, zero to nine, running in two rows with a sliding switch set in the space between. She pushed four buttons, tried the switch, then pushed the same four, but in a different sequence, and tried the switch again. The third time, when she tried the switch, the box opened, and she removed the key.
“Eighteen eighteen?” I asked.
“Tried that first,” she said with a grin, turning to fit the key in the lock. “Then eighty-one and eighty-one. It opened with eighty-one, eighteen.”
“They should be more careful with their combinations.”
“They should.” She turned the key, gave the door a good push, and it swung open.
“Get inside and get warm,” I told her. “I’ll get the others.”
There were three bedrooms, two with queens and one with two doubles, a full bathroom, a half bath, and a fireplace in the center of the main room on the ground floor. Vadim and I carried Illya inside while Alena set about trying to get a fire started and Dan headed back into town for groceries. We weren’t going to need much; we weren’t going to be here long.
We deposited Illya in one of the bedrooms with a queen, then duct-taped his wrists and his ankles. He was still out cold, though he mumbled when I pulled off his shoes and his pants. I covered him with a blanket to keep him from catching hypothermia before the heat could fill the cabin. Vadim began searching the rest of the building, less looking for danger than looking to see what he could find, and I joined Alena at the fireplace. She had a blaze already going, and smoke curled out over the mantle, spilling out into the room.
“Bad draw,” she told me. “The chimney is cold. Soon as the fire heats the stone, the smoke will clear.”
I nodded, crouched down on my haunches in front of the flames, feeling the heat work itself into my clothes. Steam was already rising from Alena’s shirt and jeans.
She used a poker on the logs, repositioning them, saying, “Are you going to be able to do this?”
“We’re already doing it,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
The flames danced in the fireplace, famished, eating the logs. “He’s going to give us what we want. He’ll tell us what he knows.”
“Without question.” Alena turned the poker, nudging another of the logs. Sparks burst and then vanished. “I’m asking you how far you are willing to go to achieve that.”
“He’ll tell us what he knows,” I repeated, after a moment. “One way or another.”
She finished fiddling with the fire, replaced the poker in its stand, then turned her attention to me.
“Dan can do it,” Alena told me. “You don’t need to.”
“It doesn’t matter who does what, Alena. We’re all guilty for what happens to Illya next.”
“Just as he is guilty for what happened to Yasha and Tamryn and Natalie Trent.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“I didn’t think you had.” I looked away from the fire to her. “The empty thing feels nothing,” she said.
“And you are not an empty thing,” I said.
“Neither are you.”
“I know,” I said.
I was just afraid of becoming one.
Dan and I were in the room when Illya finally woke up, each of us seated in chairs at either side of the bed. We’d been waiting with the lights off—my idea, not Dan’s—and the only illumination came from the hall, a spear of gold that d
ug into the darkness. Outside, the snow was still falling steadily. If it didn’t let up soon, we could find ourselves snowed in, and I didn’t like that idea. I wanted to get this over with quickly, to get it done and then to get gone.
He came up slowly, as if he knew what was waiting for him when he was finally awake. I listened to his breathing change, the regular and gentle cadence becoming more rapid, more broken, and then the bed creaked, and creaked again. I knew he was moving, that his eyes were now open, that he’d realized he couldn’t move his hands or his feet. Then the memory hit him, what had happened, and the panic followed, and he cried out, inarticulate, and the bed creaked again, louder, and knocked back against the wall as he began thrashing about.
The lights came on, and I’d been ready for it, but Illya hadn’t, and he cried out again, wincing and trying to shield his eyes with his bound hands. He wasn’t a big man, perhaps four inches or so shorter than me, not handsome so much as pleasant-looking, with a broad face that seemed more inclined to laughter than to curses. His hair was black, and his brown eyes were so dark they might as well have been, too.
Then his vision returned enough to see Dan, and then he saw me, and Illya froze, and the look of fear and despair that flared in his face was heartbreaking.
It made me furious. It made me want to get out of my chair and take hold of his throat in one hand, and to punch him again and again with my other, and to ask how fucking dare he try to make me feel for him, care for him. It made me wish I could open my mind, that I could dump the memory of Natalie into his, that last vision of her, with bone and brain and blood on a New England dawn. To scream at him that he had done this, and in so doing had killed any hope of sympathy or mercy from me.
Dan, still seated as before, said, “Hello, Illya.”
Maybe because the words were so very innocuous they seemed to terrify Illya all the more.
