Russians Came Knocking

by Spangler, K. B.

  That left two men standing. The first had a ponytail, the only feature that set him apart from his partner. That, and the knife he had to Davie’s throat.

  “Thank you!” I yelled in Yiddish. “This fish is delicious!”

  (I really don’t know all that much Yiddish.)

  The man with the knife and the ponytail grabbed Davie and pulled her in front of him as his human shield; I don’t know why, as I was obviously unarmed. Reflex, I guess. The other man shouted at him—the only words I recognized were Josh Glassman—and came straight at me.

  He was taller than I was, and much heavier. Some folks assume that size guarantees a win. Nope. One of my best sparring partners is a tiny woman who’s a Rokudan in Judo, and she hands me my ass in almost every single fight. Size does make a fight a little more fun, though: whenever a big guy comes at me, I try to throw for distance. My record is eighteen feet. Unfortunately, Davie’s apartment didn’t have eighteen feet of clearance, so I had to settle for throwing the man into her toilet at the end of the hall. His head collided with the porcelain with a satisfying crunch.

  One man left.

  “Cyborg,” Ponytail spat, still holding Davie against him.

  “Yep. And you’re Russian mafia?” I asked him. “Or Army? Mafia’s more likely. Soldiers are better trained. You guys are sloppy.”

  He opened his mouth to retort, and Davie stabbed him in the leg.

  I had seen her sneak the kitchen knife from the drying rack by the sink, and I hoped she wasn’t going to get cocky. Skin and muscle are put together in layers, like armor, so stabbing someone correctly is harder than it looks. Davie not only did it right, but she twisted the handle to break off the blade inside the meat of his thigh.

  I swear, if I hadn’t been twitterpated before…

  The Russian with the ponytail still had a knife to her throat, but now Davie had a hand under his arm. She lifted his arm up and twisted to the side to put distance between the two of them, a flawless Aikido escape. He tried to recover, tried to swing the knife…

  That’s when I punched him.

  THREE

  The first words I ever said to Davie were: “Got any disinfectant? He bit my hand.”

  She looked from my hand to the four bloody teeth still rotating slowly on the floor.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I clarified.

  Davie blinked at me. “What…? No.” She shook her head and took out her cell phone, then clicked the charger a couple of times. “It’s dead,” she said.

  “The police are already on their way,” I told her. I opened her freezer and took out a bottle of vodka. “Can I use this?”

  “You’re drinking? Now?”

  “I wish,” I muttered. I held my hand over her sink and doused it in alcohol, then wrapped a paper towel around it. Bright red spots appeared, and I pressed the back of my hand against my side to stop the bleeding. I glared down at Ponytail, slumped sideways on the floor. “You better practice good oral hygiene, mister.”

  Ponytail coughed and moaned.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” I said.

  Davie kept her distance from Ponytail. “He needs a hospital.”

  I nodded. “Ambulance is on its way, too.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes moved from the man on the floor to me, then back down to him. She took a step away from me; she had suddenly remembered what I was.

  “Do you have a sweatshirt?”

  “What?” Davie was having problems focusing and was starting to tremble. The first signs of shock.

  “A sweatshirt, a big t-shirt, anything. We shouldn’t leave the scene, so I can’t get one from upstairs.”

  “What? You want…” It took her another moment before she realized what I was implying. “Oh, yes. Yes!” She shook herself and left to find a shirt. Nothing breaks the icy fingers of shock like realizing the police are about to discover you with a notorious cyborg manwhore, and one who’s half-naked to boot.

  The man by the door groaned softly. I rolled him on his face, stuffed his hands down the back of his pants, and turned him over to cinch his belt as tight as it would go. Davie returned to see me with one bare foot against his sternum and yanking hard on the leather strap with both hands.

  “Emergency handcuffs,” I explained.

  “Couldn’t you just tie him up?”

  I shrugged and went to repeat the process with the man I had thrown into the toilet. He was still unconscious. I checked his pupils, which reacted just enough so I didn’t have to worry about a severe concussion. “Not with a belt. He could wiggle out of one of those in a few seconds. This way, we’ll see him squirming long before he gets loose.”

  She kept the counter between us and pushed a crumpled wad of light blue cloth at me. I shook it out to see the Carolina ram.

  “Tar Heels?” I asked, slipping the overlarge shirt over my head. Davie nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “So…” I scrambled around for small talk, “… did you go to Chapel Hill?”

  Davie looked down at the man she had stabbed, blinked at me, and turned and walked out of the kitchen. I heard a door close, followed by the firm pop of a button lock.

  “That could have gone better,” I said to Ponytail as I shoved his hands beneath his belt.

  He groaned softly.

  “Critic,” I sighed. “You and your buddies show up—Aw hell!” I had suddenly remembered the fourth man. I checked the security cameras. Squirrelface was nowhere to be seen. I poked around The Lexington’s database and found the archived footage of him running out of the back entrance nearly three minutes before.

  Great.

  I went down the hall and knocked on the closed door. “Davie?” I said to the painted wood. “We might have a problem. One of them got away.”

  A few moments went by, then she asked: “You let him get past you?”

  “Ah…” I pressed my fingers to my forehead. Stupid, stupid Josh. “Not one of the three in your apartment. There was a fourth man in the hallway. Looks like he took a runner instead of staying to fight.”

  “Four men?” The lock popped again as she opened the door an inch. I saw one brown eye, the curve of her mouth, and little else. “I think you saved my life.”

  “Maybe,” I shrugged. “Do you know why someone would want to send these guys at you?” I backed away from the door to give her the chance to come out. She didn’t take it, but she did open it wide enough for me to see her face.

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked. When she went to shut the door, I quickly added: “It’s relevant. They didn’t come here by accident.”

  “Oh.” Davie cracked the door open again. “I’m a financial advisor,” she said.

  “Private sector?” It was mostly a rhetorical question. Her condo was outside of the reach of the average government employee. Well, maybe if she really liked squirrels.

  Davie nodded. “Mineral trading rights, mostly.”

  “Do you have any enemies?”

  “No!” She seemed horrified by the idea.

  “Let me rephrase. Do you know anyone who might benefit from your death?”

  “No, I…” She started to protest, then caught herself as a name jumped to mind.

  “Hold that thought,” I said as a sudden banging and shouting came from the entrance to her condo. “The police are here.”

  I was almost at the front door when I felt a small hand on my upper arm. Davie yanked me back, and pushed past me to let the officers into her own home.

  Oops.

  FOUR

  Let’s skip over the next two hours. Nothing’s more boring than being interrogated. The same questions, over and over again, any deviation seen as a possible sign of lying or weakness. Mind games would have made it a little more fun for me, but I don’t dick around with anyone from law enforcement. I’ve been in their shoes, and their jobs are hard enough without my being a wise-ass. Besides, I outranked each and every one of them. Even if they resented my being there,
and they did, they knew I had a lot of pull behind me. (Helpful tip: life gets a lot easier if you have connections in the Oval Office.) It was the easiest interrogation I’ve ever been through.

  Plus, I was able to leave out the part about the squirrel and my underwear.

  They didn’t let me go home, obviously. After they were done questioning me (No, officer, I wasn’t here when it started. Yes, officer, I live in the same building. No, officer, I was just walking down the hall when I saw four suspicious men… Urgh. Boring.), I ended up sprawled across Davie’s couch while she spoke to a female officer in her bedroom and the crime scene techs finished processing the scene.

  That’s when Rachel showed up.

  I hadn’t known she was coming, which means this was before we had figured out some of the basics of tracking each other. Let me think… This probably was right after Rachel had started working for First Metro.

  Rachel Peng is OACET, like me. She’s a cyborg, too. Back then she was working with First Metro, downtown D.C.’s largest police district, as a liaison between OACET and local law enforcement. Technically, she wasn’t a cop, so I hadn’t called her for help. I thought it was wisest to leave her out of it and tell her about it later. But the rumor mill is what it is: she had heard that Josh Glassman had been involved in a home invasion, and she had kicked her way into the scene.

  I could feel her anger through the link. Rachel was furious at me for not contacting her and letting her know I was safely unmurdered. She was full of misplaced concern, a holdover from back when we were still normal human beings. When we’re not talking to each other, we can feel each other through our link, and everybody in OACET would have known if I were unconscious or dead. Still, Rachel had decided to come down to The Lexington to strike terror into my heart. It was super-effective. An angry Rachel is a dangerous Rachel: at five-foot-eight and just over a hundred and twenty pounds, she’s an itty-bitty terror. The day I decide to commit suicide is the same day I set out to piss Rachel Peng off.

  Now, I’ve heard Rachel’s version of these events, and she likes to say that I was “holding court”—her term, not mine—with the Metro cops, everybody sprawled out around Davie’s living room and hanging on my every word. Okay, it was true I had ordered pizza, and I might have sent someone down to the corner store to bring back a few six-packs of… um… barley pop. And, yes, I was telling them about that time I accidentally kidnapped the French heiress, but that’s one of my best stories. So I was most certainly not holding court.

  Rachel was wearing her soldier’s face, and the rest of the room stopped laughing as she walked in. Fortunately, I was at the point in my story where the heiress and I were making our escape from the Swiss Guard by pretending that I was a voodoo priest… I know, I know. It was a terrible escape plan, just terrible. It failed catastrophically. But it did make a great story, and everybody except Rachel was soon back in hysterics. And after a few descriptions of how I tried to pass off the toy poodle as a shrunken head, Rachel was laughing, too.

  When I was done, one of the cops started in on an oh-so-slightly related tale of another kidnapping gone awry. I let him have the stage as I reached out to Rachel. Talking to each other via the link is two parts telepathy and one part empathy; talking with an angry Rachel via the link feels like you’re trying to reason with a volcano.

  “You have that stabby look,” I told her.

  She sniffed. “I don’t like learning through the grapevine that one of my best friends was nearly killed.”

  “A few skinned knuckles is nowhere close to ‘nearly killed’,” I replied. “I’m fine, Davie’s fine, and I got to beat some people up, which I rarely get to do anymore. Really, it’s been a fun night.”

  “Except it looks like the men you took down are Russian mafia,” she said, as she moved towards the stack of pizza boxes. “You know this is only just getting started.”

  “The Russian mafia is overrated. Have you heard of the Canadian ‘Ndrangheta? They’re old-time revivalist Italian mobsters. Those guys are scary. Russians will just kill you. The ‘Ndrangheta will skin you alive and cover you in honey and ants.”

  “Josh…”

  “Rachel…”

  “Fine.” She rolled her eyes. “They probably wouldn’t come after you anyhow. Everybody’s terrified of us.”

  She was right. The Mob kept the majority of their assets in banks, which meant they were vulnerable to OACET. I could probably spit in the face of the leader of the Cosa Nostra, and he’d wipe it off and buy me a drink.

  But Davie didn’t have that kind of protection.

  Davie came out of her bedroom. Her eyes were red; not an easy thing, to be assaulted in your own home. When I saw that she had been crying, there was a little skip in my chest that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  “Oh.” Rachel had caught me: she could read people like books. Rachel looked around the room, found the officer in charge, and left to speak with him.

  I walked over to Davie. She was standing just at the edge of the hallway, an older woman cajoling her to drink something. Davie saw me, and a little smile turned up the corners of her mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said to me. “The police tell me you saved my life.”

  “They said he might have saved you,” the older woman said, turning away from me. “Nobody knows what would have happened if he hadn’t shown up.”

  Excellent, I thought to myself. Business suit, expensive shoes and haircut, every inch of her looking polished even at this hour… The older woman was someone Davie knew from work, probably the head of her company’s Public Relations department. This night just kept getting better. I loved playing the game with someone in my own field.

  “I’m Josh Glassman. I’m Davie’s neighbor,” I said. “And you are?”

  It took the older woman a few moments to decide whether she wanted to be professional or rude. Professional won out. “Teresa Hemmingway,” she said, and extended her hand. “Double-m. No relation to the author.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked,” I said, shaking her hand. “He’s not one of my favorites. All cigars and metaphors.”

  Hemmingway grinned before she could stop herself. “Very true,” she said, then: “Davie, I should go. I need to do some damage control before this story hits the press.”

  Davie nodded. “Thanks for coming, Teresa.”

  “You take tomorrow off, you understand?” Hemmingway said, hugging her. “I will be very upset if I see you anywhere near the office.”

  Davie returned the hug. “Then I apologize in advance for making you angry,” Davie said. “I might be late, but I’ll be there.”

  We walked Hemmingway to the door. When it had shut behind her, Davie and I found ourselves alone for the first time. She had to look up at me: we were both barefoot, and I had nearly three inches on her.

  “This was supposed to be laundry night,” I said.

  She blinked. “You were out of shirts?”

  Before I could say something utterly charming, Rachel cut in through the link. “C’mere, Romeo,” she said. “Bring Juliet with you. We need to go over security.”

  “Metro Police would like to speak with us,” I said to Davie, and moved towards Rachel before Davie could ask questions.

  Rachel was by the fireplace, the man standing beside her wearing the familiar resigned expression of someone who had just lost a battle so decisive there was no need to go to war.

  “Miss Costello? Agent Glassman?” The officer introduced himself as Sergeant Thornton. “There are a few security concerns we need to discuss.”

  Rachel gave me a Cheshire-cat grin, and I felt an invisible finger in my side as she poked me over the link.

  “We’re still trying to identify the one who escaped, but the three men Agent Glassman apprehended claim to be members of a Russian crime syndicate. We’d like to put you both into protective custody for a few days.”

  Davie quietly sighed, then nodded. Apparently she had received The Talk about how stupid people who r
esisted police protection tended to end up as dead people. Or maybe that’s just one of those things you tend to realize when the pool of blood on your kitchen floor is being cleaned up by a guy in a uniform who is too familiar with that kind of work.

  “Safehouse or on site?” I asked.

  “On site,” Thornton said. “I don’t think there’s any real threat if you stay here. They probably didn’t know an Agent lived in the same building. They’ll be too scared to try again. No offense intended,” he added to Rachel and myself.

  “Hey, I took it as a compliment,” I replied. Rachel ignored us both.

  “We’ll have an officer stationed in the lobby,” Thornton continued.

  “Not here?” I asked, gesturing to Davie’s condo.

  He shook his head. “An officer in the lobby should be enough of a deterrent. If you think you need more manpower than that, I suggest you move to a safehouse.”

  “Then I choose to not accept police protection,” I said. “Put the officer outside of her door.” I looked at Davie and shrugged. “I’ll be fine. They won’t come after me.”

  “No,” she said, red-rimmed eyes wide. “I can’t ask that of you.”

  “You’re not,” I grinned. “I’m volunteering.”

  Which was when Davie demanded I stay in her guest bedroom until the fourth man was caught.

  A little internal alarm, one that had nothing to do with being a cyborg and everything to do with being a people person, chimed a warning. Rachel is a freaking genius at social manipulation and I had no doubt she had woven Davie and myself into police protection to give us some quality time together, but even Rachel couldn’t have planned Davie’s too-fast capitulation. I agreed on the condition that the officer would be posted inside the apartment with us, and eyebrows went up around the room. Yes, folks, the manwhore insisted on a chaperone. Make a note, tell your friends.

  FIVE

  The party resumed. A few more—okay, okay, thirty or so—cops dropped by, and they brought hard liquor. Every so often, a neighbor would call in a noise complaint and another Metro officer would join us. It was turning into a fairly decent evening.