"No doctor."
"Yakob."
"A doctor asks questions. Reports gunshot wounds. Every hospital in Italy will have a description of us within the hour." His voice is thready, but the certainty in it doesn't waver, and I hate that I understand the logic even as I hate the logic itself. "I’ve got a place. Here on Lipari. Isolated. My contact left us a vehicle somewhere nearby."
"Tell me about this contact."Because I don’t trust anyone right now, I refrain from adding. I barely trust him.
"Old associate. Doesn't ask questions if he's paid enough not to."
A light flickers on in one of the houses above us.
"Does everyone in your world work strictly on a cash-for-silence basis?" I whisper, looking around to make sure we’re alone.
"Mostly."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It's simple." He tips his head back against the stone wall, eyes half closed, and for a second the exhaustion in his face is so complete it frightens me more than the blood does. "Simple is safe."
"Simple sounds lonely."
He doesn't answer that one. I decide not to push, mostly because I don't trust myself not to keep pushing until something in him breaks open, and this doesn't feel like the place for that. Not crouched behind lobster traps with his blood drying under my fingernails. Later, maybe. If there is a later.
There has to be a later. I've decided that much already.
I huff a sigh. “Fine, what kind of vehicle am I looking for?”
He opens one eye and looks me over. “One with four wheels.”
I roll my eyes,
“It will have a sticker on the windscreen ‘Stefano’s Volcano Tours.’ The key will be under the back passenger side wheelarch.” He checks his wound as he says this, his face relaxing a little when he sees the bleeding has stopped.
The sky lightens by degrees, the black softening to a deep, bruised blue, as I jog around checking each truck or van I see. The seventh one has the sticker, the key exactly where Yakob said it would be.
I get in and start it up, the engine revving to life like it has been standing abandoned for too long.
Yakob has managed to get to standing without my help this time, and I pull up as close as I can to the lobster pots, noticing the smear of blood he has left behind on the wall. I leave the engine running as a snatch a bucket, fill it with sea water and then slosh it over the wall, rinsing away as much evidence that we were ever there as possible.
"You're doing better," I tell him once I’m back in the truck, mostly because I need it to be true.
His color still hasn't come back, and his breathing has gone shallow and careful, like even that costs something now.
"You should sleep," I say.
"I don't sleep."
"That's not a personality trait, Yakob, that's a medical emergency."
Something that might almost be a smile moves at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast I could have imagined it. "It's not from lack of trying."
I pull the truck forward onto the empty road and then turn to him expectantly.
“Follow the road. There’s a small house at the end of a track; we’ll have to hike the last mile or so.
The truck rumbles as I change gear, Yakob winces.
“I’m not used to driving stick.” I look over at him again, daring him to criticize my driving, but instead he half shrugs.
