A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 26

For a second, I thought a nearby car was backfiring, a curious popping sound, like an old man coughing. Then glass shattered behind us, and I pushed Saltanat down to the ground, slamming myself down hard at the same time. The scab in my shoulder split open and began to bleed. Somewhere back in the hotel, a woman screamed.

I rolled left as Saltanat threw herself to the right, snatching at our weapons as we reached the cover of a couple of cars parked nearby. I released the safety on my Yarygin, peered beneath the car in the direction of the shots. I could see feet, but I couldn’t be certain if they belonged to the gunman. No point crippling an innocent passerby, getting myself into even more trouble.

I waited for a couple of moments, finger tense on the trigger. When no further shots came, I raised my head above the hood of the car, watched Saltanat do the same.

I didn’t see any masked gunmen waiting to pick us off, so I levered myself up off the pavement. The sleeve of my jacket was torn, and the material dark where fresh blood had joined the old stain. I felt the nausea of shock rise in my stomach, dread at the knowledge death can tap you on the shoulder with unexpected precision, accurate and inevitable.

“Nice way to treat tourists,” I said.

“See anyone?” Saltanat asked. I shook my head.

“I only heard the shots,” I answered. “And a scream from inside the hotel.”

I holstered my gun, walked back to the hotel. A middle-aged man sprawled on the floor by the reception desk, not moving, while a woman frantically rubbed at one flaccid hand thrown across his chest. No point in going in, nothing we could do to help. And the local menti were sure to be on their way.

“You need to buy me a new shirt, then I can dump the jacket,” I said as we walked back to the car, not running but not loitering either.

“There are some clothes in the car,” she replied, looking straight ahead, her gun hanging unobtrusively by her side. “Let me find a pharmacy so I can clean that slight scratch you’re complaining about.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were on the far side of Jalalabad, parked outside a pharmacy, from which Saltanat emerged with everything she needed to inflict a little torture on me.

The burn of the hydrogen peroxide hurt far worse than the bullet, as Saltanat used swabs to clean away the crusted black blood. After she had finished dressing the wound and getting to work with needle and thread, I felt as if I’d gone through a five-hour interrogation at the hands of one of the Sverdlovsky station’s best, complete with slaps, kicks, and punches. But at least now I didn’t look as if I’d been rolling around on the floor of a butcher’s shop.

I struggled into the oversized shirt Saltanat had produced from the trunk.

“And now back to Bishkek, I suppose?”

She nodded and I sat back, wondering when the painkillers would kick in, if there was any way of getting out of the mess we were in. As we drove down Lenina Street, a middle-aged man with cropped gray hair and a greasy leather jacket stopped to watch our car as we passed. There was something familiar about his face, a memory I tried and failed to tug out of my past and into the daylight. Then we turned a corner and he was gone.