Mortar and Murder (34 page)

We were just a few yards up the cobblestoned street, not far from the general store at all, when a shot rang out.

Irina stopped dead, and the rest of us faltered, too. When she made to turn back, though, I grabbed her. “No.”

“But Gert . . .”

“He said to run.” I gave her a push.

“But . . .”

“He’s probably right behind us. That was probably him shooting. Just keep moving. Get the girls away from here before the other guy shows up.” I pushed her again, harder. She stumbled on.

“I’ll catch up,” I called after her and dashed back toward the store.

It’s difficult to move stealthily and carefully when your heart’s threatening to knock a hole in your chest and you expect bullets to come flying at you with every step you take. I managed, though. I slipped back into the store and crept toward the back, keeping close to the shelves of groceries the whole way.

Everything was quiet. Maybe a little too quiet, as they say in the movies. Some painful groaning might have been nice; at least that way I would have known that someone was alive. As it was, I got the shock of my life when I came upon Gert, lying facedown on the floor next to the counter in a widening pool of blood.

OK, so the fact that the pool was widening was probably a good thing. It meant he wasn’t dead yet. And if I wanted to keep him that way, I had no time to waste. I bent and dug my heels in and managed to turn him over. At least if he was lying on his back, the blood might sink to the bottom and not spill out the front.

The damage looked pretty extensive—the whole front of his jacket was red—but I could see his chest move. And as far as I could make out, the bullet had hit him in the stomach, not the chest. That was probably good.

If I could have called Derek for advice, I would have, but we had dealt with a gunshot just a few months ago, and I’d seen him put pressure on the wound to keep the blood loss to a minimum. I looked around and spied a stack of souvenir towels on a shelf. They were as dusty as everything else in the store, but a little dust was probably the least of Gert’s worries right now. Ripping open his jacket, I slapped the towels against the wound in his stomach and pushed down.

Gert groaned. His eyelids fluttered and then he opened his eyes. For a second, they looked glazed, like he couldn’t remember who or where he was, or what had happened. Then he recognized me. “A’ry?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“’Rina?”

“Running. With the other girls.”

He lifted a limp hand. “Go.”

“I will. I just want to help you first.”

He shook his head. “No time. Go.”

“Fine.” I added the rest of the souvenir towels to the stack on Gert’s stomach—the blood was already soaking through the first few—and zipped up his jacket again. “Keep pressure on this if you can. I’ll get you some help as soon as I can.”

There was hardly any power at all behind his voice anymore. “Go.”

I went. Back out the door and up the cobblestoned street, dashing after Irina and the other Russian women. Before I left the little village behind, I thought I heard footsteps through the fog, heading toward the store. Not much time left, then.

I caught up to Irina and the others after a few minutes. They hadn’t been able to move as fast as I was, and they didn’t know the terrain as well, either. Svetlana and her friend were weak from malnutrition and from sitting around without getting any exercise for several weeks. Plus, they were handcuffed together and woozy from the drugs. Irina was wearing heavy hiking boots. Great for navigating tricky terrain, but not so good for running a race. Not to mention that she was reluctant to leave Gert and was sluggish as a result.

“Gert?” she asked when I caught up, her voice frantic.

“Shot. Stomach.” I couldn’t manage more than a syllable at a time. “He’ll live.” I hoped.

We made tracks the best we could away from the village, but between our various handicaps and the thick fog, we didn’t move very fast. It didn’t take long at all for the remaining bad guy to pick up our trail.

Although the fog turned out to be a blessing as well as a curse. Yes, it slowed us down, we couldn’t see where we were headed, and every so often one of us would stumble and even fall, and we’d all have to slow down enough for her—or them, in the case of Svetlana and her handcuffed friend—to get up. And we were about as stealthy as a herd of buffalo thundering through the countryside.

Thankfully we heard the footsteps before we saw anyone, and before he got close enough to see us. The Ukrainian girl whose name I didn’t know had fallen and dragged Svetlana down with her, and Irina and I had come to a fidgety stop while we waited for the two of them to pull themselves back up so we could keep running. And that’s when we heard someone behind us. Rapid footsteps, coming closer.

“Gert!” Irina said.

“Doubt it.” He hadn’t been in any condition to run when I left the store, and he’d be in worse condition now. That is, if he was still alive. The second bad guy might have decided to assure his getaway by putting another bullet in Gert before he left. Hopefully he’d been too preoccupied with tracking us to think of it, though. Either way, it wasn’t something I felt I ought to mention. “Better not let him see us. Whoever he is.”

Svetlana and her girlfriend stumbled in one direction while Irina and I scurried in the other. We flattened ourselves in the grass off to the side of the path, holding our breath and hoping against hope that our hearts weren’t beating loud enough for him to hear. And this was where the fog became more of a blessing than a curse: Bad guy number two loped past, close enough that we could see him, like a dark shadow against the swirling yellow white mist, but not close enough for him to notice us.

We waited until he was gone, swallowed up by the fog and out of sight and hearing, and then we scrambled into a group again. All of us were soaked from lying in the grass, and my previous annoyance with my wet bottom seemed like it had happened a million years ago.

“What now?” Irina asked. She looked over her shoulder. “Go back?”

“To the village? No way.”

“But what about Gert? We can’t just leave him.”

“He wanted us to get away,” I said. I didn’t want to leave him, either, especially after seeing the damage that bullet had done, but he’d told me to run. He had sacrificed himself to give us a chance to get away, and I intended to make full use of it.

“But there are boats in the village we could use to go to the mainland.”

“There are people in the village, too. Bad people.”

“What about the man in front of us?”

“We’ll go slowly,” I said. “That way we’ll hear him if he comes back.”

“Where are we going?” Svetlana asked, her accent similar but heavier than her sister’s. She seemed to be waking up a little, while her well-endowed friend was still stumbling along in a daze. The busty one was shorter, so maybe the drugs had affected her more severely.

Irina and I looked at each other. “Off the island?” Irina said.

“Ideally.” We couldn’t go to Derek’s and my house, because the bad guys knew who I was and would probably expect us to head there. We couldn’t go to back Gert’s, either, since they’d recognized him, too. Or at least the shopkeeper had recognized him. We couldn’t call anyone for help, since there was no cell service. That left taking to the water and trying to make our way to the mainland. “Gotta find a boat.”

“The village . . .” Irina tried again.

I shook my head. “We don’t know how many people know about this whole trafficking thing. The whole village could be in on it and turning a blind eye. Just like they were doing during the prohibition. Gert has a boat. He brought it back earlier, right?”

Irina nodded. “Do you know how to drive it?”

“Not exactly. But I know how to drive a car.”

“That is not the same thing,” Svetlana said.

No kidding. However . . . “I’m sure we can figure it out. If it’s between that and dying.”

Nobody answered, so I figured we were on the same page. We started moving again, more slowly, breathing shallowly and listening for signs that our pursuer—who was in front of us at this point, so we were actually, technically, pursuing him—was on his way back toward us.

I figured he’d either caught a glimpse of us earlier, on our way out of the village, or his accomplice the store owner had been alive and lucid enough to tell him who we were. Either way, I thought he must know where we were headed. He was probably on his way to Derek’s and my house to see whether we’d taken refuge there, or to Gert’s house, to look for us there. When he didn’t find us in either place, he’d either hang out and wait somewhere between the two, where he could intercept us when we got close enough, or he’d come back this way. I hoped he didn’t hurt my kitten, and I hoped even more he wouldn’t come up with the brilliant idea to torch both houses, just to prevent us from hiding inside them. On a clear day, I probably wouldn’t have minded too much—I’d have been tempted to set up a signal flare myself, if it came to that, in hopes of attracting the coast guard—but on a day like today, nobody would see the smoke anyway, and if the house burned down, Derek would have a fit.

In the end, it took us longer to get back across the island than it had taken Gert, Irina, and me to stumble to the village through the fog in the first place. And I thought
that
had taken a long time. What was especially ironic—and frustrating—was that while we were so desperate to get to the other side of the island and onto Gert’s boat, we had to move at a snail’s pace, with frequent detours into tall grass and between the trees to avoid being seen by our pursuer.

From time to time we’d think we heard him, and we’d split up and scurry to safety, flattening ourselves in the wet grass and holding our breath for long minutes while we waited for discovery, but there was never anyone there. He was still up ahead, and the closer we got to the south end of the island, the slower we moved.

Once we got near the path that connected our house with Gert’s, I thought for sure we’d find him. Skulking somewhere, waiting for us. I mean, he couldn’t know whether we’d try to hide out at our house or at Gert’s, and it made sense that he’d station himself somewhere between the two to intercept us. I made sure we gave that stretch a wide berth, flitting from tree to tree in the foggy forest like a small band of Micmacs, two of whom were stuck together.

All in all, it was a harrowing experience. Not like facing down a man with a gun, knowing that he can pull the trigger at any moment and it’s bye-bye Avery. That’s a sharp, panicky sort of fear, quickly over with one way or the other. This was more like a nightmare, stumbling through a no-man’s-land of fog and shadows for what seemed like years, never knowing when the axe would fall but always having to be looking for it. By the time we made it out of the woods into the clearing where Gert’s house stood, I was almost wishing the guy would just show himself so I could stop anticipating.

But there was no sign of him. Not that we could see much, of course, but we left Svetlana and her friend standing by the back wall of the house, while Irina and I circled the house, going in opposite directions. If he was circling, too, he’d run into one of us sooner or later.

But he wasn’t there. Neither of us came across anyone else until we met again at the front of the house. We tried the doorknob, of course, just to be safe, and the house was still locked up nice and tight.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t just hunker down and wait until morning?” Irina murmured into my ear. “Or until the fog lifts?”

“Do you have a key?”

She shook her head. “We could break a window.”

“I think we should try to get off the island. He’s here somewhere—maybe down at Derek’s and my house, waiting for us—and if we don’t show up, sooner or later he’ll get over this way. I’d hate to be squatting inside while he’s pouring gasoline around the foundation.”

Irina turned pale. Paler. “You don’t think he’d do that, do you?”

“I hope not. But just in case he does, I’d rather not be inside.”

Irina nodded. “I’ll go around this way.” She pointed in the direction she’d been headed, the way I’d come from. “I’ll see you on the other side of the house.”

I nodded and continued in the direction I’d been going.

Part of me had worried that by the time we got back to the two Russian women, the bad guy would have come out of the woodwork to join them, but he was nowhere to be seen, and Svetlana assured us they hadn’t seen a sign of anyone. Her friend was starting to look a little more with it now, too. Enough for me to ask, “What’s your name?”

“This is Olga,” Svetlana said.

“So Katya was the one who died?”

Both women’s eyes filled with tears. Obviously their captors hadn’t bothered to tell them about the drowning. I gave myself a hard mental kick.
Way to go, Avery.
Just what we needed, for the two of them to be distracted and weeping in addition to shackled together and drugged.

Irina was explaining the situation—at least I assumed she was—in rapid-fire Russian. Or maybe Ukrainian. That’s assuming there’s a difference. I waited for her to finish and then told her to tell them that if it hadn’t been for Katya getting away and us finding her body, we wouldn’t have known that the two of them were there on the island, and we wouldn’t have come to rescue them. So although it was sad that Katya had died, she had been instrumental in helping them get away from the bad guys.

“And we’re not away ourselves quite yet, so let’s wait to talk about this until we’re safe, OK?”

They nodded.

“Does either of you know how to drive a boat?”

They shook their heads.

“What about you?” I turned to Irina.

“Sorry.”

“I don’t, either, but I’ve watched Derek drive the motorboat a lot. It’s small and has an outboard motor in the back, with a string that you pull to start it. And a steering wheel. Have you been on Gert’s boat at all?”