Chapter 6
The doctor’s name was Carolyn Juarez.
She was short, stocky, middle-thirties with black hair and eyes.
Abramova pushed her on the floor of the back seat, and then sat impatiently clicking the Beretta’s safety on and off until Titov came out and got behind the wheel.
He let the Jeep roll backward down the sloping driveway to the street, where he started the engine and accelerated away.
Abramova turned in the front passenger seat and began talking to Juarez: “Now listen, doctor. Try to believe. We do not want to hurt you, but we will if we have to, if you try to harm us, or lead the police to us. Earlier today we tried to kill a man, but we failed. He is a demon. Any sane person would wish him dead. My team sometimes kills, but we are soldiers, not murderers. If we were, we would have killed the women at the hospital, because we could have, and it would have given us more time to get away. Do you understand?”
Juarez: “I understand what you said.”
“But you don’t know if you should believe us?”
Silence from Juarez.
“I’ll tell you why you should believe us,” Abramova said. “Because then you come out of this alive. These drugs you will give our friends, the painkillers—you could perhaps give one of them, a…Овердо?з.” She turned to Titov: “What do you call it?”
“Hot shot,” Titov said.
“Yes.” Back to Juarez. “You could give one of them or both of them a hot shot, but we will know that, of course. Then we will kill you as punishment for killing our friends. Now ask yourself, do you wish to be walking around alive tomorrow or the next day, or do you want to be dead?”
Silence.
“You don’t have to answer us,” Abramova said. “You should think about those options. As I say, we are soldiers, not murderers.”
· · ·
Juarez lay uncomfortably on the Jeep’s floor between the front and back seats.
She kept trying to think of what she could do to resist, but nothing occurred to her.
She’d managed to look at her watch just before the hood was pulled over her eyes and tried to count the turns the Jeep made, but she quickly lost track, both of the number and direction.
She made one decision: she would believe them when they said she wouldn’t be killed.
She’d cooperate, but she’d try to remember every single thing she could about her captors and her environment.
If she survived, she would give as much as she could to the police.
An occasional glimpse of the watch could be important.
· · ·
They went south in a hurry, anticipating a police search for the Jeep.
There was virtually no traffic. They passed through a small city, had to jog to follow the track laid down by the iPhone’s navigation system.
At one point, a patrolling police car passed them going in the opposite direction but never slowed down.
Out of the town, Titov jumped on the gas again.
The driving conditions had improved, the fog was beginning to dissipate, and they made it back in less than half an hour.
At the farmhouse, Abramova ran up the front steps and stuck her head inside. “Okay?”
Nikitin said, “Except for the bullet holes.”
She walked back to the car and she and Titov pulled Juarez out the back seat and walked her, still blind, up to the narrow porch.
“Careful, there are steps…Your toes are at the first step, step up now…”
Inside, Nikitin had moved himself to a couch, where he was lying face down, leaving behind a white sheet with a thumb-sized blood spot. He lifted his head and tried to smile at them as they came through the door with Juarez. Orlov was asleep, but not deeply.
Abramov said, “Masks.”
Nikitin had his ski mask, which he pulled over his head. Abramova got Orlov’s mask from his coat pocket, and as she tried to pull it over his head, he roused, and groaned, and said, in Russian, “This sucks.”
When all four Russians were masked, Titov helped Juarez free her hands and get out of her parka, and said, “I’m going to pull the ski mask off.”
He did that, and Juarez blinked down at the man on the floor, who was wrapped in a blanket. “He is hurt the worst,” Abramova said.
Juarez knelt next to him and peeled off the blanket. Beneath it, Orlov was still partly dressed, though his clothes had been shredded around the wounds. He was more awake now, and he said, “I worry. I don’t hurt enough. Maybe I die.”
“Shut up, we have the doctor to help,” Abramova said.
Juarez: “Help me get his clothes off, the rest of the way off.”
“We have more clothes, it’d be easier to cut them loose,” Abramova said, and she flicked out her switchblade, which made Juarez flinch.
She cut Orlov’s clothes from neckline to pants cuffs and peeled them off a piece at a time.
Juarez took a moment to examine the entry wounds, then took his blood pressure, grunted, said, “Huh.”
Next, she moved his leg, and found it still articulating—no broken bones, though there might be nerve damage.
Orlov was too disoriented to answer questions about it.
She rolled him a bit, with Abramova’s help, and pressed on his abdomen with her fingers, moving her hand around, groping, then sat back on her heels.
“I can’t help enough here. If we do nothing, he will die by morning, of shock and blood loss, depending on what’s happening inside,” she said.
“If I give him blood, painkillers, and antibiotics, he might live for four or five days and then die of sepsis. If you can get him to a good surgeon, then maybe he will live a normal life span.”
Titov: “Why can’t you—”
“I’m not a surgeon,” Juarez said. “Here’s what I can do: the wounds in his buttocks aren’t serious, except for the blood loss.
The bullet that hit his back is very serious.
Not as serious as if it hit his liver or spleen, in which case he would have already bled to death, or his spine, which could have crippled him.
The problem is, it apparently hit his bowel.
I believe I can feel the slug, the bullet, with my fingers—it nearly passed through him.
Bowel resection is a mess. If I tried to do it, I’d kill him. He’d be dead in two hours.”
Abramova: “What is our best course?”
Nikitin, an outspoken atheist, said, “We could try prayer.”
Juarez ignored him. “Your best course is to take him to a surgeon.”
“We obviously have a problem…”
Juarez: “You said you wouldn’t kill me if I actually can help you.”
“We will not,” Abramova said.
“Then, if I were you, I would take him to a big public hospital and roll him out the car door in the emergency room parking lot and leave him there,” Juarez said.
She looked down at Orlov, who was looking up at her with eyes that seemed fogged over.
“Big-city hospitals might have several gunshot wounds every night. Hennepin Medical Center, downtown, would work. A place like Kansas City, where I was a resident, the people who were shot would sometimes say not a word. Not a word. No ID on them, no telephone, no nothing. It’s not against the law to get shot, so if a man is not talking, the police have more important things to worry about.
They assume it’s down to drugs or gangs and that they’ll never find out what happened.
The hospital does the surgery, and a week or two later, the man walks out of the hospital.
The only name the hospital knows is the one they gave him.
We’d name our cases after towns: John Denver.
John Miami, John Nashville, just so we’d know who we were talking about when we reviewed their cases. ”
Titov: “What can you do now?”
“Plug the holes, put pressure on them,” Juarez said. “Give him blood, for the blood he has lost. Give him a course of antibiotics. I have painkillers. If he doesn’t get to a surgeon…four days, maybe five.”
“We will think on this,” Abramova said.
They took the medical gear out of the garbage sack, set up a rack, and began transfusing blood.
That underway, Juarez turned to Nikitin, looked at the wounds in his buttocks and asked, “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Any grinding, any catches in your walk?”
“No, but it hurts. A lot.”
“Of course it does, you’ve been shot. Like being hit by a baseball bat, it’s no joke,” Juarez said. She spent a minute manipulating his legs, testing them for bone breaks, then, satisfied, said, “You’ve been lucky.”
“This kind of luck, I should not have it every day,” Nikitin said.
Juarez examined the wound on his neck, a groove that passed just under the skin above his shirt line and emerged on the other side and went nobody knew where.
“This is a fragment, maybe not even a bullet fragment,” Juarez said, when she’d finished looking at the wound.
“Again, not much I can do for you. Not much I need to do for you. I doubt you even lost much blood. I will clean the wounds, stitch up the ones on your neck. Give you antibiotics and painkillers, and you will heal. If you go to a major hospital, they would most likely not even take the bullet out. They would do what I will do: clean, stitch, give you some drugs. You should rest quietly. Watch television.”
“That’s good, then,” Nikitin said. “I will take the drugs. Now would be very good time for that.”
Juarez cleaned, applied pressure, did some stitching, applied bandages, and gave Nikitin two opiate capsules.
Abramova said, “My ear, I think it’s nothing.”
“Nothing until it gets infected and drives you crazy,” Juarez said. “I’m here, I should take a look.”
She looked at the ear—the bullet had caught just the outer rim—cleaned the wound, put on a bandage, and told her that if she survived, a plastic surgeon could fix her ear in fifteen minutes. Finally, she told the Russians that she’d done all she could. “Gonna let me go now? Or gonna kill me?”
“Right now,” Abramova said, “We will put you in a closet, where you can’t hear us talk. We will let you go soon enough, but we don’t want you to hear our plans.”