Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2)

Chapter Thirty

I caught my breath and went to find Mary Alice. I was moving a little slower than I used to, and she was wincing as she emerged from the compartment where we’d found Galina and Tamara with Marilyn. She was bleeding from a few new places, and a chunk of hair just over her ear was missing. I glanced over her shoulder to see a hole where the window had been.

“Tamara?”

Mary Alice wrapped a scarf around her wrist to stanch the bleeding from her knife wound. She finished, then jerked her chin towards the rust-edged opening in the train. “She needed some fresh air. Galina?”

“Same. We should find Helen.”

“Not so fast,” Mary Alice said. She rummaged in her fanny pack and brought out a handful of pills, tiny and bright red. “Take these.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re already limping and I can barely hold myself vertical. We’re too old to have days like this without a little pharmaceutical assistance.” She dropped some of the pills into my hand.

“What kind of pharmaceutical assistance?”

Mary Alice shrugged as she palmed her pills into her mouth. “Hell if I know. Nat gave them to me. Said to take them if I needed a boost.”

Knowing Natalie, the pills were probably some unholy cocktail of uppers and painkillers, but I wasn’t fussy. I’d learned a long time ago to do whatever I had to in order to finish a job. I dry-swallowed three of the pills and stuffed another two in my pocket for later.

We headed down the corridor in the direction Marilyn had run. We found Helen at the far end of the carriage, outside the compartment where we’d left Jovan Muri?’s henchman. She was carrying Marilyn’s backpack, and looked almost entirely unruffled. Only a single lock of hair was out of place, and she tucked that neatly behind one ear as she looked us up and down.

“My god,” she began.

“Don’t start with me, Helen,” Mary Alice warned. “I’ve had a challenging few minutes.”

I gestured towards the backpack. “I take it you found Marilyn?”

She nodded to the door she’d just closed. “I left her in there with a broken arm. I thought we could lock her in and let her figure out how to explain to the Montenegrin police what she’s doing with a dead man.”

“Elegant,” I said. “But we need something to hold it closed.”

Helen took off her wimple and—with a little help from the knock-off Swiss Army knife Mary Alice was carrying—cut it into strips. We used a handful of these to tie the door handle to the grille of the air vent in the wall.

“Will that hold her?” Mary Alice asked. “A broken arm might not be enough to slow her down.”

“Oh, she’s not going anywhere,” Helen assured her. “It’s a compound fracture.”

Mary Alice went a little green around the gills and held up a hand. “No details, Helen. You know I cannot handle bones sticking out of flesh.”

She shuddered and Helen turned to me. “What about Galina and Tamara?”

“Gone,” I told her.

“Well, that simplifies matters,” Helen replied. “No other bodies to worry about.”

“We need to get off this train,” I said, glancing down the corridor to where the conductor had just shuffled into the toilet compartment. “Before he finishes zipping up.”

We didn’t discuss it further; there was no need. Three women had gone flying off the train and another one was locked in a compartment with a dead man without a head. And somehow we had managed all of that without being detected. It was a minor miracle, and I made a note to drop a few euros as an offering to St. Harlampy should the opportunity arise.

“Wait a minute,” Mary Alice said. She darted back to the compartment we’d started in as Helen and I headed for the open door. I leaned out, squinting into the darkness to survey the track.

“It looks like there’s a slowdown coming. It’s our best chance for getting off,” I told Helen. “Mary Alice better hurry her ass up.”

We’d left the viaduct behind, climbing away from it into the stony mountains. I couldn’t see it then, but I knew from Helen’s Lonely Planet that those grey peaks were melting off the last of their winter snows, the lower slopes studded with scrubby-looking pines and bushes. The train track itself had a few safety lights which meant I could see a little distance. For most of the next stretch, the ground fell straight away, and jumping off the train would mean plunging into the valley below. But coming up was another tunnel—there were 254 altogether which was another thing I learned courtesy of Helen’s guidebook—and the train would slow down going in. And right where it slowed, the ground leveled up a bit, forming a shelf with a gentle slope instead of a dead drop. At the edge, where the shelf broke into the gorge, a few thorny bushes huddled together—all that would stand between us and a messy end to a truly shitty day.

I tried not to think about Nat as I calculated what would happen if we missed our window of opportunity. I glanced back. Mary Alice still wasn’t out yet, and we had seconds left. I pushed Helen in front of me. “When I count to three, jump out as far as you can,” I instructed her. “Then tuck and roll and pray to Jesus.”

She didn’t argue. She gently tossed the backpack out the door, wincing as it landed and rolled away, but that was better than it being crushed under her as she somersaulted down the slope. She gave me one last look—her lips pressed together grimly, then nodded, more to herself than me, I think. The last I saw of her was her nun’s habit fluttering out behind as she threw herself off the train. I held on as long as I could, waiting for Mary Alice, but she wasn’t showing.

“Goddammit,” I muttered. But we were out of time. I went at a run, hoping to get as much distance from the train as I could when I launched. I had a moment of weightlessness as I flew out over the little slope, then a landing on ground so fast it knocked the wind flat out of me. I would have taken a minute to get my breath back, but I was rolling, falling towards the line of brittle little bushes that marked the end of the slope. I threw out my hands, scrabbling at anything that would give me a handhold. The rocky ground slid through my fingers, pebbles tumbling and falling all around me as I rolled. Finally, my hands brushed something that wasn’t rock. I grabbed wildly at something thin and twiggy, and I held on for dear life. I was happy not to be falling anymore, but I also knew one wrong move could hurtle me through the thin wall of bushes and over the cliff. I lay perfectly still, whooping air back into my lungs.

“Billie?” From a little distance away I heard Helen’s voice, muffled and wheezing.

“I’m here,” I managed after a minute. I sounded even worse than she did.

“You alright?”

“Well, if I’m dead, I didn’t get into heaven, that much is for damned sure,” I said. I already had a few cracked ribs thanks to Galina, but with the fall, I was pretty sure they were fully broken. I tested my position carefully. Moving dislodged a few pebbles which rolled straight over the edge. It was maybe a foot away, and I eased slowly out of the bush I’d been caught in. “I have about a hundred thorns in my ass,” I called as I pushed myself to my knees. I tried not to hear the hollow sound that underscored each breath. I sounded like an old-fashioned squeeze-box.

“Same,” she called back. “But the vest cushioned the fall. What about Mary Alice?”

I was just about to tell her Mary Alice hadn’t jumped when she made a liar out of me. The only warning I had was the squawking of the chicken as Mary Alice rolled over it when the pair of them came flying down the slope, tail over teakettle. They bowled straight into another cluster of bushes, even thornier than mine, and they stopped even closer to the edge.

Mary Alice was white as new milk when we got to her, and the chicken didn’t look much better. It was standing a few feet away, as if embarrassed by Mary Alice’s predicament. Helen and I hurried the best we could to pull her out. It took both of us—she was stuck fast—and a lot of swearing on Mary Alice’s part before she was free.

She sat on the slope, puffing hard and resting her head on her knees while Helen and I did the same.

“You okay?” I asked Mary Alice.

She nodded. “Nat’s goodies are kicking in. I’ll be fine—at least for six hours or so. That’s when they’ll wear off.”

“What goodies?” Helen asked.

I handed over my last two pills. “Take these and don’t ask questions.”

“Are you going to roofie me? Am I being roofied?”

“I said not to ask questions,” I reminded her. She gulped down the pills like a cranky cat, complete with gacking noises.

“You’re being the opposite of roofied,” Mary Alice assured her. “Give it a few minutes to kick in and you’ll feel like you could lift a building.”

“Can’t wait,” Helen said brightly. Her voice was shaking a little with fatigue, and she didn’t look great—none of us did. This job was hard enough when we were twenty, but at sixty-two? It took a hell of a lot more recovery time than it had forty years before.

“Did you get the backpack?” Mary Alice asked.

Helen swung the backpack around for us to see. It was covered in dust and had collected a few thorns, but otherwise it was in decent shape. I suppose it had been designed to withstand extreme temperatures, avalanches, and yeti attacks, after all.

She worked the buckles with stiff, bloody fingers. The inside had been specially fitted to hold a padded case, not quite two feet by three. She took it out, and we held our breath as she opened it.

We couldn’t see the colors exactly; the moonlight wasn’t strong enough for that. But something about that shifting, silvery light made it even more magical. We had just missed meeting her thirty years before, and here she was, turning up again. She had been pulled from her stretcher bars and there were nail holes in the margins. I couldn’t see any other major damage, and something in my chest that had tightened when we lost her thirty years before began to ease.

We didn’t speak—you don’t speak on hallowed ground, and Leda made that rocky Montenegrin mountainside holy. She gazed serenely out at us, as unbothered as the moon by anything lesser than she was. We were grubby and human and small, and she was so much more.

I put out a fingertip to touch her. It was an unconscious urge, something about connecting with beauty, I think. But I stopped myself. She was untouchable. The centuries hadn’t diminished her. The skin was as luminous, the stare just as challenging. She’d been stolen, hidden, coveted, treasured, captured as spoils of war, and yet none of it had touched her. She endured, eternal as a goddess but vulnerable as a child. A single spark, an errant slip of the knife, could destroy her.

And it was up to us to protect her.

Helen packed her back up into her case. Wordlessly, we fitted the case back into the backpack, the spell broken.

“Where are we?” Helen asked, squinting at the moon.

I shrugged. “Somewhere past the viaduct.” I assessed what I could of the terrain in the fitful light. There was a narrow path, a goat track, that led past the edge of the bushes, switchbacking around boulders before disappearing into a pocket of trees.

“That way,” I said, pointing.

Mary Alice jerked her thumb a different direction. “Podgorica is that way.”

“So let’s just follow the railway track,” Helen suggested.

I gave them both a level look. “I’m not headed to Podgorica.”

I didn’t say her name. I didn’t have to. They knew I was going to find her. I started down the track, moving slowly. Behind me, I heard Helen hoist the backpack with a grunt and follow me.

I paused, looking up at Mary Alice. She had turned to where the chicken was staring at her with baleful, dinosaur eyes. “You coming?” Mary Alice asked.

The chicken didn’t make a move. Mary Alice started in our direction, and after a second, with a loud cluck of annoyance, the chicken came too.

We made a sorry little band, working our way down the mountain, sometimes dropping to our hands and knees where the track was too steep or the rock too rotten. There were places where the path was level and wide, carpeted with pine needles and smelling like Christmas. And there were other places where it plunged straight down like it had a death wish, nothing but slippery scree you could almost surf. And sometimes it disappeared altogether and we had to guess the best route, occasionally causing us to backtrack for a mile or so to choose a different way.

There were a few streams, running fast and clean from winter snow melting off the mountaintops. We stopped at each, drinking deeply. Helen rooted around in the pockets of her habit until she found some jerky she’d stashed. She shared it out, but it didn’t do much to fill us up. Of course, as Mary Alice pointed out more than once, we had a chicken if things got desperate, but that was just bravado talking. I knew from the way she’d gone back for the chicken, she’d never harm a feather on its head. Nat had brought the bird on board, and since she was gone, Mary Alice had taken on its care like a sacred trust.

That night stretched on, forever it seemed. We’d gone off the train before midnight, and it was a long, cold slog until the first rays of the sun crept over the mountain above us. It would be hours before the light made its way down into the valley where we were headed, but knowing it was there, rising up the other side of that relentless mountain, somehow made it bearable. We walked on, one stumbling footstep at a time, until we emerged from the last black pine thicket into the valley floor. A narrow road wound between wooded patches, and we turned to walk along it. The level grass was a miracle after hours of falling and sliding. The pills had worn off a few hours in, and we pushed through on sheer willpower after that. I was hungry, thirsty again, and numb from pushing away thoughts of Natalie. I didn’t think about her any more than I thought about my broken ribs. Sometimes pain just gets in the way of what you have to do. So you put it down until you can stand to carry it again.

After a mile or so of trudging along the road, we heard a distant rumble of engines slowly approaching. We stopped, taking stock of our situation and weighing our options.

“Hitchhike?” Helen asked.

“Who’d pick us up?” I asked. We were filthy and tattered, to say nothing of bloodstained and sporting various injuries.

“I don’t care,” Mary Alice said. “I will give them this chicken if they will give us a ride. I will give them all the money in my pockets. I will give them any sexual favors they might require. Just as long as they let us get off this road.”

I looked her over from her torn vacation Bible school sweatshirt to her face, both streaked with blood, and shook my head. “I’m not sure you could give it away, looking like that,” I told her.

“I’ll do it,” Helen said. “As long as I can just lie there.”

Before I could point out to her that she looked even worse—and was dressed like a nun—the rumble of the engines increased to a roar. There was a bend in the road, and one second they were hidden, the next they were in front of us, rolling to a stop. A group of motorcycles, the riders all dressed in heavy leathers, faces hidden by helmets.

They braked, and for just a moment, nothing happened. We looked at them, and they looked at us. The lead motorcycle had someone riding pillion, and the passenger climbed down, tugging at the helmet strap. The helmet popped off, freeing a familiar tangle of wild curls. Behind her the morning sun shone like a nimbus, haloing her head in gold. She had a face full of bruises and one arm was strapped up in a sling. She grinned in spite of her busted lip.

“You girls want a ride?” Nat asked.