37. Lily #2
I've stood in rooms for worse sentences than that one. I've heard a surgeon tell a mother that her son wouldn't be waking up. What I'd never once heard was a man deliver such a thing with pleasure, the way you set down a winning hand.
What that speech did to me is not what he had in mind.
Somewhere in the middle of that speech, I stopped being afraid in the way I'd been afraid all day, and started being something else entirely.
Because I've seen what carrying Danny did to Sacha.
I've watched him back away from a thing he wanted because he had privately sentenced himself for something that was never his to carry.
And here was the author of the sentence, sitting in a rented chair in a rented house, telling me that his life's work was to do it to him one more time, on purpose, with me as the instrument.
I decided in that chair that I would go through the ice before I would be the second body in that man's story.
I didn't say any of it out loud. What I said was, "You have rehearsed this."
"I have gone over it every night for three years, and it is very nearly the only thing that has kept me eating."
"Then you should probably know the whole picture.
" I let my eyes go over him once, slowly, from the collar to the hands.
"You are jaundiced. Not much, but it is in the sclera and it is in your palms, and the sweater is a size too big for you and it was not bought that way.
You put your hand on the arm of the chair before you sat down and again when you leaned forward.
That is the ninth intercostal on the right and it is the liver.
You have had one glass of wine in four hours and you have not finished it.
And there was a blister pack in the pocket you keep putting your hand in. "
The room got very cold.
"I am a trauma nurse," I said. "Reading bodies is the only education I have, and I'm not going to apologize for it. How long did they give you?"
For about two seconds I thought I'd gone too far and was about to find out exactly what he is.
Then Dragan Kos laughed. It was a real laugh, short and surprised. He looked at me with something close to warmth, and that was more frightening than anything else that happened in that house.
"Eleven months was the number they put on it," he said. "I have privately settled on nine."
"So you did not send anybody."
"There is no longer time for messengers." He inclined his head at me, one professional to another. "You are wasted on him, Miss Chen."
"He would agree with you. He has been saying it since the day he dug me out of a snowbank."
"Men are seldom right twice," Kos said. "He is right about that, and he will still walk out onto my ice for you. I have built the evening on both of those things."
The dusk came, and I sat in that chair and watched a mile and a half of gray ice go blue and then go dark.
At half past four the two men on the deck were called to the rail. At five they were still there. At half past five the Fisherman went out and stood with them a long time, and when he came back in he said one sentence to Kos in the other language, and I didn't need any of the words.
Nobody was walking out onto that ice.
I watched it land on Kos. It wasn't a large thing. His chin came up a half inch and he looked at the black window for perhaps four seconds longer than a calm man looks at anything. And right there I learned the one fact about those two men that Kos had never thought to check.
He had built the entire evening around a man who does what he's told.
He had never once met Sacha Volkov.
By nine the house had changed. Nobody in it was bored anymore, and frightened men damage their own security in ways that bored ones never manage. So I sat in my chair with my hands in my lap and got on with the only work available to me.
The one with the scar through his eyebrow drinks. He went out to the kitchen four times and came back warmer each time.
The young one on the deck doesn't like the cold. He comes in early on every rotation and stands with his back to the room warming his hands, and while he's at that fire nobody is watching the water side of the house.
At ten the Fisherman put on a headlamp and went down the stairs to the boathouse. He came back up in ninety seconds and said one short unhappy sentence, and after that there was a man posted at the top of those stairs. That post hadn't existed an hour earlier.
Behind the kitchen there's a service hall with a chest freezer and a mop sink in it. On the counter there's a knife block with three of its six slots empty, which means three knives are loose in that building and nobody is thinking about them.
The young one brought me soup at ten past ten and then stood there, because nobody had told him what to do with his hands.
"There is a spoon in it," he said.
"I have found it already, but thank you for checking."
He was twenty-two at the outside, with a bad shave and a coat cut for a larger man. His ears had gone the color of paper.
"You're cold," I said.
"I am on the deck. Everybody is cold."
"Everybody is not rubbing his thumb across his fingertips every forty seconds. That is your circulation telling you something." I drank some of the soup and let him stand with it. "How long before they change you over?"
"They change me over in eleven minutes." He said it the way a drowning man says the name of a boat, and then he heard himself, and his face closed. He went and put his back to the fire and stayed there.
Eleven minutes, and he handed me the number for nothing at all, because I'd asked him about his hands and nobody in that house had asked him about anything.
I ate all of the soup, because I'm seventeen days pregnant and I was going to need it, and because clearing a bowl makes a person look obedient.
Then I sat with my hands folded and went through the other list, the one I've never set down for anybody, because I'm finished being ornamental about what I know.
All of my training and every night shift since have gone into learning how a body fails.
There are places on a man's neck where the vessels come close to the skin, and there's a number of seconds after that, and I know both of them.
A thumb driven up under the jaw will drop somebody twice my size.
A knee struck from the side doesn't behave like a knee struck from the front.
Some parts of the human head are structural and the rest are decorative.
I know what a syringe of air does, and what a pen does, and what a fistful of packed snow in a mouth does.
Every hour of that knowledge has gone into holding people together.
It works both directions. Everybody in that building had made the standard mistake and filed a small woman in a chair under furniture.
I counted the doors again. I counted the men. I counted the minutes the young one comes in early and the seconds the Fisherman's back is turned. I counted the distance from my chair to the stairs, and the drop from the deck rail into the snow, which is nine feet onto a drift.
A little before midnight Kos came and stood beside my chair with his glass finally empty.
"He will come," he said. "It may not be tonight. He has more patience than I was promised, and patience is far more expensive for me than it is for him."
"You should sit down. You have been upright two hours and it is being charged to your account."
"You are a strange woman, Miss Chen."
"You are the third man this month to tell me so, and the other two were better at it."
He smiled at that. Then he looked out at the black lake, and the smile went off him, and I watched him check the time.
Sitting in that chair, I made him a promise he couldn't hear. I am nobody's dead girl. I am a nurse, and I know a hundred ways to hurt a man. I started counting the exits.