Juarez examined the wound on his neck, a groove that passed just under the skin above his shirt line and emerged on the other side and went nobody knew where.
“This is a fragment, maybe not even a bullet fragment,” Juarez said, when she’d finished looking at the wound. “Again, not much I can do for you. Not much Ineedto do for you. I doubt you even lost much blood. I will clean the wounds, stitch up the ones on your neck. Give you antibiotics and painkillers, and you will heal. If you go to a major hospital, they would most likely not even take the bullet out. They would do what I will do: clean, stitch, give you some drugs. You should rest quietly. Watch television.”
“That’s good, then,” Nikitin said. “I will take the drugs. Now would be very good time for that.”
Juarez cleaned, applied pressure, did some stitching, applied bandages, and gave Nikitin two opiate capsules.
Abramova said, “My ear, I think it’s nothing.”
“Nothing until it gets infected and drives you crazy,” Juarez said. “I’m here, I should take a look.”
She looked at the ear—the bullet had caught just the outer rim—cleaned the wound, put on a bandage, and told her that if she survived, a plastic surgeon could fix her ear in fifteen minutes. Finally, she told the Russians that she’d done all she could. “Gonna let me go now? Or gonna kill me?”
“Right now,” Abramova said, “We will put you in a closet, where you can’t hear us talk. We will let you go soon enough, but we don’t want you to hear our plans.”
“If we were going to kill you, we wouldn’t bother with the closet,” Titov pointed out. “Don’t try to fight us or run away.”
• • •
They put Juarezin a closet with pillows; there was nothing else in it but the odor of naphthalene from long-gone mothballs. There was enough room for her to stretch out, or sit up, or even stand, since the closet was empty. “We will not leave you here too long,” Titov said. “Just for the planning.”
Juarez sat in the dark. When the door closed on her, she pulled up her coat sleeve, looked at her watch, and started doing some numbers.
With Juarez in the closet, Abramova went to her laptop, did ten minutes of research as the others waited. When she was done, she called up a map on the laptop, and said to Titov, “Milwaukee. Maybe six hours from here. St. Louis is too far. This Omaha, this Des Moines, maybe too small, too peaceful. Milwaukee has many gunshot wounds, according to AI. Lev can’t move much, so I will stay here with him. You take the doctor, take this route…”—she traced it onthe laptop screen—“…south out of the city to this point, this Apple Valley exit. You put the doctor on the side of the road with her thumbs taped and the mask on her head, then you return to the highway going north back to the city and follow this I-94 east.”
“Why the detour?” Titov asked. “North, then south?”
“Because she told us about Kansas City,” Abramova said. “If you were transporting Mat to Kansas City, you would go that way. But we won’t be.”
“Ah.”
• • •
They worked throughit, all the way to Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee. Titov looked at his watch: “We should go now. Prepare Matvey as well as we can, something soft in the back of the vehicle. Cushions from the couch. We will put the doctor in the front…thumbs taped, mask on her head.”
Orlov said, “I do not like to be the one to say this, but…”
Titov said, “We do not injure her. If we or any of us are caught by police, we hope for mercy. In a year or two, maybe we get traded. I am sure we get traded. Especially if the only one who gets hurt is Sokolov…”
“Sokolov’s not hurt. I don’t think he’s hurt,” said Nikitin. “His wife was hurt, we couldn’t see if the second shot hit anyone.”
“They are both monsters. Nobody will mourn either one,” Titov said. “But if we kill an innocent doctor…then there will be no mercy. No trade.”
“You are correct,” Abramova said. “I will put on my coat and take the couch cushions out to the car.”
• • •
They got Orlovinto the back seat, and comfortable on couch cushions, wrapped in blankets, semiconscious, feeling no pain. Juarez, wearing the backwards mask again, her thumbs taped behind her back, was guided out to the front passenger seat. They shut the door, but with the window open a bare half inch.
As Abramova and Titov passed the window, walking around to the driver’s side, Abramova said, “Research Medical is the easiest to get at…” She timed “Research Medical” to the moment they passed the partially open window, so that Juarez would hear them. Research Medical was in Kansas City.
At the other side of the vehicle, Titov said, “I have enough truckers to keep my eyes open for a week. I will see you back here tomorrow morning.”
“If the truckers do not make you crazy,” Abramova said. “If you start seeing two-meter rabbits, stop driving.”
The trip south, to the drop-off, took forty minutes. Juarez asked, “Are you really not going to kill me?”
“Really not,” Titov said, leaning on the Russian accent.
