else in it.
232
‘Your husband not here?’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘Where is he?’
She didn’t answer.
‘My guess is he’s in the hospital,’ Summer said. ‘Am I right?’
Elena just looked at her.
‘Mr Trifonov helped you,’ I said. ‘Now you need to help
him.’
She said nothing.
‘If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere
else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to
know which it was.’
She said nothing.
‘This is very, very important,’ I said.
‘What if both things were bad?’ she asked.
‘The two things don’t compare,’ I said. ‘Believe me. Not even
close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?’
She didn’t answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the
trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I
could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she
had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and
education on the tube.
‘I don’t know exactly what happened,’ she said. ‘Mr Trifonov
just came here and took my husband away.’
‘When?’
‘The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a
letter from my brother in Sofia.’
I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an
hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average
of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at
Summer. She nodded. Easy.
‘How long was he here?’
‘Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced
himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.’
‘And that was it?’
She nodded.
‘What was he wearing?’
‘A leather jacket. Jeans.’
‘What kind of car was he in?’
233
‘I don’t know what it’s called. Red, and low. A sports car. It
made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.’
‘OK,’ I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved towards the
door.
‘Will my husband come back?’ Elena said.
I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty,
shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes,
and the five years with GRU.
‘I seriously doubt it,’ I said.
We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine.
I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire
cage.
‘Where did you leave the guy?’ I asked him.
‘On the road to Wilmington,’ he said.
‘When?’
‘Three o’clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and
called nine one one. I didn’t give my name.’
‘You spent three hours on him?’
He nodded, slowly. ‘I wanted to be sure he understood the
message.’
Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned
west and then north towards Wilmington. We passed the tourist
sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We
found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It
was mostly two-storey and had an ambulance entrance with a
broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor
with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door
and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them
in my pocket.
‘What was the guy’s name?’ I asked him.
‘Pickles,’ he said.
The three of us walked in together and I showed my special
unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is it
confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world,
but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is
what most civilians do when they see it.
‘Early morning of January fifth,’ I said. ‘Sometime after three
o’clock, there was an admission here.’
234
The guy rifled through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a
stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.
‘Male or female?’ he said.
‘Male.’
He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the
other all the way out.
‘John Doe,’ he said. ‘Indigent male, no ID, no insurance,
claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.’
‘That’s our guy,’ I said.
‘Your guy?’ he said, looking at my uniform.