by Greg Rucka
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 are 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 corresp
onding 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 dug 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.
"Dan…" he said, in Russian. His voice was hoarse, whether from fear or disuse, I didn't know. "Oh God, Dan, please-"
"You don't want to be talking to me," Dan told him, switching to English and looking at the pistol he was holding in his right hand, as if noticing it for the first time. It was the same gun we'd taken from Illya when we'd made the snatch ten hours ago, a cheap Taurus semiauto. "You want to talk to him."
Illya twisted his head back towards me, much the same way the Next Victim turns to look over her shoulder in horror films.
"Depending on what you say to him and how hard he has to work to get you to say it, then you'll want to talk to me," Dan told him. "So you better tell him what he wants to know, Illya. If you want anything from me at all, you better fucking well tell him what he wants to know."
Illya swallowed, then nodded. "I…I didn't know what they would do."
I stared at him, doing my damnedest at keeping anything that I was thinking, anything that I was feeling, from my face. No fury, no sympathy, no hatred, nothing. Trying to let him supply all of those things, instead, to put on me what he feared and what he hoped.
"You don't…you don't believe me," Illya said to me. His English was only mildly accented, as if he'd been working on perfecting it at the same time I'd been trying to master Russian and Georgian. "I know you don't, I can tell you don't. But I didn't know, I swear."
I looked at Dan. Dan sighed, then leaned across the bed towards me, handing over the Taurus as Illya eyed it with visible alarm. I took the pistol and nodded to Dan, and Dan got out of his chair and left the room. Illya didn't know where to look, bouncing his eyes from the pistol to Dan to me, and it was obvious that the panic he was struggling to keep at bay was gaining ground, and quickly.
It gained more ground when I racked the slide on the Taurus. I didn't point the gun at him; I didn't need to. I pointed it at the floor.
"Oh God," Illya said, switching to Russian. "Oh God oh my God please don't kill me."
Alena entered the room, moving around to stand behind me in my chair. Then Dan returned and took his seat once more, Vadim following him, picking a place at the foot of the bed. Illya struggled to sit up straighter in the bed, backing further against the headboard, as if hoping he could melt himself through the wood and the wall to freedom.
None of us said a word, all of us staring at him.
Illya began to tremble. Tears started filling his eyes, then began to spill down each cheek.
"I didn't mean to, oh God, I didn't mean to," he said, and he was unable to look at any of us, so instead he studied his hands, the duct tape wrapped thick around his wrists. "They picked me up, I was at Millat's, I was just doing some shopping and they grabbed me when I came outside, they said I had to go with them. I didn't have a choice! They showed me-they showed me IDs, like that, not…not badges, but cards. They knew who I was, Dan! They knew who I w
as, everything, they said I was an illegal, that I was a criminal, that they were going to arrest me!"
He twisted in the bed, focusing on Dan. His hands came up, as if to implore him.
"I didn't have a fucking choice, you understand, don't you? You have to understand, I would never have betrayed you for anything, but they had me, they had me, they were going to put me away, send me back!"
Behind me, I felt Alena resting her hands on my shoulders. It was a subtle movement, but Illya was strung out on his fear and his adrenaline, and he caught it, twisting back in our direction, terrified.
"This is what they said, okay? This is what they said, what they wanted, they didn't want me, they said they didn't care about me, they wanted my help, that's what they wanted. They just wanted to know where the two of you were, that was all. They just wanted me to tell them where you were, when you would be there, then they wanted me to go away. They gave me money, they told me fifty thousand dollars if I did this.
"I tried to tell them I didn't know what they were talking about, I tried to tell them they had made a mistake, but they knew! You understand? They knew about you and about her, that she was somewhere around New York, that you two were together, working together, that Dan was helping. They said that was all they wanted, only the two of you, they said Kodiak and Drama, that's what they called Natasha, they said that was it, just the two of you, that was all I had to do, just tell them where you would be, where and when you would be there. If I did that, they said that would be all, they would take care of it. I swear to God I didn't know they wanted to kill you!"
He stopped speaking abruptly, clamping his mouth closed, breathing noisily through his nose. He was still shaking, and I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he clenched his teeth.
I looked pointedly at the pistol in my hand, then back at Illya. He was lying, at least about the last part. Maybe whoever had grabbed him had never said, yes, we want Kodiak and the woman, Drama, dead, but he had been brought in by Dan as one of the bodyguards for Alena, and that should have been more than enough to explain the stakes. It was justification, that's all it was, lies to absolve himself from his guilt.
