Chapter 6 #2
“If we were going to kill you, we wouldn’t bother with the closet,” Titov pointed out. “Don’t try to fight us or run away.”
· · ·
They put Juarez in a closet with pillows; there was nothing else in it but the odor of naphthalene from long-gone mothballs.
There was enough room for her to stretch out, or sit up, or even stand, since the closet was empty.
“We will not leave you here too long,” Titov said. “Just for the planning.”
Juarez sat in the dark. When the door closed on her, she pulled up her coat sleeve, looked at her watch, and started doing some numbers.
With Juarez in the closet, Abramova went to her laptop, did ten minutes of research as the others waited.
When she was done, she called up a map on the laptop, and said to Titov, “Milwaukee. Maybe six hours from here. St. Louis is too far. This Omaha, this Des Moines, maybe too small, too peaceful. Milwaukee has many gunshot wounds, according to AI. Lev can’t move much, so I will stay here with him.
You take the doctor, take this route…”—she traced it on the laptop screen—“…south out of the city to this point, this Apple Valley exit. You put the doctor on the side of the road with her thumbs taped and the mask on her head, then you return to the highway going north back to the city and follow this I-94 east.”
“Why the detour?” Titov asked. “North, then south?”
“Because she told us about Kansas City,” Abramova said. “If you were transporting Mat to Kansas City, you would go that way. But we won’t be.”
“Ah.”
· · ·
They worked through it, all the way to Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee.
Titov looked at his watch: “We should go now. Prepare Matvey as well as we can, something soft in the back of the vehicle. Cushions from the couch. We will put the doctor in the front…thumbs taped, mask on her head.”
Orlov said, “I do not like to be the one to say this, but…”
Titov said, “We do not injure her. If we or any of us are caught by police, we hope for mercy. In a year or two, maybe we get traded. I am sure we get traded. Especially if the only one who gets hurt is Sokolov…”
“Sokolov’s not hurt. I don’t think he’s hurt,” said Nikitin. “His wife was hurt, we couldn’t see if the second shot hit anyone.”
“They are both monsters. Nobody will mourn either one,” Titov said. “But if we kill an innocent doctor…then there will be no mercy. No trade.”
“You are correct,” Abramova said. “I will put on my coat and take the couch cushions out to the car.”
· · ·
They got Orlov into the back seat, and comfortable on couch cushions, wrapped in blankets, semiconscious, feeling no pain.
Juarez, wearing the backwards mask again, her thumbs taped behind her back, was guided out to the front passenger seat.
They shut the door, but with the window open a bare half inch.
As Abramova and Titov passed the window, walking around to the driver’s side, Abramova said, “Research Medical is the easiest to get at…” She timed “Research Medical” to the moment they passed the partially open window, so that Juarez would hear them. Research Medical was in Kansas City.
At the other side of the vehicle, Titov said, “I have enough truckers to keep my eyes open for a week. I will see you back here tomorrow morning.”
“If the truckers do not make you crazy,” Abramova said. “If you start seeing two-meter rabbits, stop driving.”
The trip south, to the drop-off, took forty minutes. Juarez asked, “Are you really not going to kill me?”
“Really not,” Titov said, leaning on the Russian accent.
“Why do you do this?”
Titov thought up an appropriate reply: “We are patriots. Russian patriots. The man we are here to kill is a torturer and a murderer.” A moment later, he added, “The money is good.”
“Okay. I wondered if that came into it.”
“It does, of course. We get danger pay,” Titov said. “Not so much by American standards, but good by ours. Mostly, we are patriots.”
They drove into the night, around the west side of the Twin Cities, then south on I-35. At an Apple Valley exit, he turned west, and a hundred feet later pulled to the side of the road. Not much traffic.
He hurried around the truck, helped Juarez out onto the shoulder of the road and said, “There is a bank. You’re going down a bank.
Don’t try to walk from here before you turn the mask around.
Free your thumbs and then the mask. You are above a pond, there’s ice, I don’t know how thick, but you don’t want to fall.
There are some cars above you. Not many, but it would be sad if you were run over now. ”
Juarez said, “Got it. I can’t wish you good luck. You’re assholes.”
Made Titov smile: “You are a brave woman,” he said.
He got back in the truck, made a U-turn, and Juarez began struggling to free her thumbs.
· · ·
As the highway patrolman at the Bison hospital set off to talk to people who might have seen a black Jeep Wrangler, Titov had already dropped Juarez on the roadside, masked and taped, had turned back north on I-35, had gotten on I-94 east. Had crossed the St. Croix River and was thirty miles deep into Wisconsin, on his way to Milwaukee, when the highway patrolman confirmed the sighting of a black Jeep, and the first BOLOs went out in Minnesota.