‘We might be able to take care of his bill,’ I said.
He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards,
like he was thinking one down, two hundred to go.
‘He’s in post-op,’ he said. He pointed towards the elevator.
‘Second floor.’
He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us
together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A
nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my
badge.
‘Pickles,’ I said.
She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across
the hallway.
‘Five minutes only,’ she said. ‘He’s very sick.’
Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened
the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in
the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big
or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in
plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW
bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long
lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray
exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a
date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were
films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The
human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it
seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had
put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by
himself.
I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice.
The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the
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look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov
was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.
‘You two wait outside,’ I said.
Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the
head of the bed.
‘How are you, asshole?’ I said.
The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating,
and trembling inside his casts.
‘That was the man,’ he said. ‘Right there. He did this to me.’
‘Did what to you?’
‘He shot me in the legs.’
I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been knee
capped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.
‘Front or side?’ I said.
‘Side,’ he said.
‘Front is worse,’ I said. ‘You were lucky. Not that you
deserved to be lucky.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘Didn’t you? I just met your wife.’
‘Foreign bitch.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs
to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.’
‘Shut up,’ I said.
‘Aren’t you going to do something?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am. Watch.’
I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets.
Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right
knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the
door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.
‘He’s very sick,’ I said.
We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage
desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the
Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but
stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.
‘I apologize,’ I said.
‘Am I in trouble?’ he said.
‘Not with me,’ I said. ‘You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very
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lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have
killed him. Then it might have been different.’
He smiled, briefly. He was calm.
‘I trained five years with GRU,’ he said. ‘I know how to kill
people. And I know how not to.’
237
SIXTEEN
W
E GAVE TRIFONOV HIS STEYR BACK AND LIVF HIM OUT AT THE
Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and
then legged it to his room and picked up his book.
Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We drove
on and parked the Humvee in the MP motor pool. Walked back