37. Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter thirty-seven
Noble eased the Citro?n around a sloping curve that started up and away from the city proper into the hillsides surrounding Belgrade.
The dusty old hatchback bumped over potholes.
The steering wheel jittered in Noble’s grasp.
Something in the engine compartment rattled hard.
Just his luck, he’d kidnapped a guy who never bothered to maintenance his automobile.
“Broke my nose,” Xanders cried through a mouthful of blood. He had both hands cupped to his busted beak. Blood kept filling his palms and spilling into his lap. The smell of hot copper filled the car.
“You tried to have me killed,” Noble reminded him. “I guess that makes us even.”
“I never wanted you dead.” Xanders started to shake his head.
Droplets of blood flew from his swollen nose.
He quickly stopped. His nose was broken and his neck would be aching from the impact.
Shaking his head probably sent lances of pain shooting up into his head. His whole body would hurt tomorrow.
Serves him right, thought Noble.
“I never met you before yesterday,” Xanders said. His words came out soft and mushy. “Why would I want you dead? You’re making a mistake.”
Noble nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “So you didn’t call Captain Zeqiri right after I left and let him know I’d been at the hotel asking about Bill and Milena?”
“I swear I never called anybody,” Xanders whined. His eyes rolled in their sockets, like a frightened animal. One hand strayed toward the door handle, like he wanted to leap out. Noble pushed the accelerator down. The engine revved and Xanders’s hand drew back from the handle.
It’s one thing to say you’d leap from a moving vehicle, one thing to think about it, but working up the courage to actually bail out while a car is doing a forty mile an hour uphill climb is something else entirely. That took guts. Xanders didn’t have any.
Noble grinned as Xanders started to reach for the handle again, at odds with his desire to escape and his fear of further injury. The speedometer inched up another few kilometers per hour. Tires hummed on uneven blacktop. Dark trees whipped past.
“Give it a shot,” Noble told him. “At this speed you’d probably survive. Maybe break a couple bones, but nothing life threatening.”
Xanders hesitated, blood still dripping from his nose. His hand went to the handle and he actually gripped it this time.
“Might as well,” Noble told him. He let the Citro?n slow down a little, looked over and said, “What have you got to lose? I’m eventually going to kill you.”
All the color drained from Xanders’s face. His eyes opened wide. Noble was on the brake even before the young man threw the door open and rolled sideways. It was probably a stupid risk. Xanders could have easily broken his foolish neck, but Noble was in the mood for a little payback.
Xanders threw himself from the car. He landed with a hard thump and went rolling along like a poorly inflated soccer ball. His appendages went flying in all directions. In hindsight, Noble probably should have told him to tuck and roll.
Soon as Xanders bailed, Noble slammed the brakes to the floorboard. The back end humped up. The front bumper did a nose dive as the tires shrieked against the blacktop. When the car stopped, Noble shifted into park, pushed open his door and got out.
The hotel clerk lay in a tangled heap, his right forearm now bent at a wrong angle. The skin around the break was already swelling like a balloon slowly inflating. Xanders lay on the side of the road, clutching the broken arm and moaning in pain.
“That looks like it hurts,” Noble observed in a conversational tone.
Xanders let out a whine, rolled onto his belly and started to crawl into the weeds.
Noble took two steps, snatched Xanders by the collar and hauled him up. He dragged the kid, whimpering and moaning, back to the Citro?n. “How’d that work out for you?” Noble asked, as he shoved Xanders back into the car.
Xanders’s only response was a little sniveling sob.
Circling the front bumper, Noble climbed back behind the wheel and got the Citro?n moving again.
“Please,” Xanders begged. “I didn’t know they were going to try to kill you.”
“Sure you did,” Noble said. “Zeqiri showed up at the hotel one day asking about the American man and his Serbian wife. He wanted you to keep tabs on them, let him know when they left the hotel. He gave you a little money for your troubles, and you called him up next time you saw Bill and Milena leave, isn’t that right. ”
Xanders sniffled.
“You took the money,” Noble said.
Xanders, still holding his broken wrist, nodded.
“Only Bill and Milena never came back. Zeqiri and some of his goons showed up to clear out their room. How am I doing so far?”
Xanders didn’t respond. He had a bib of blood on his shirt and his wrist looked grotesque.
“Then Zeqiri gave you more money and told you to call him if anybody came asking about the missing couple. And after all, you need the money, right?”
Xanders nodded. “But I didn’t know they were going to hurt anybody.”
“What’d you think would happen to Bill and Milena?” Noble asked. “What’d you think would happen to me?”
Xanders fell quiet.
“I’ll tell you what happened. They drove me to a junkyard on the outskirts of town, put me in a car crusher and left me to die,” Noble said as he pulled through the gates of the scrapyard, into the narrow canyons of wrecked autos.