‘I take it there’s no one back there in the restroom.’
‘You take it right.’
‘Good. I’m tired.’ She put the Beretta away in its shoulder holster, wincing a little at the pain the movement caused her.
‘You okay?’
She looked down at her left shoulder, where the slug had torn through. Blood leaked slowly down the arm of her ruined jacket. The numbness was fading out now to a solid, thumping ache. She flexed her left hand, lifted it and grimaced a little at the pain.
‘Yeah, he tagged me. Flesh wound, I’ll live.’
‘You want me to take a look at it?’
‘No, I don’t fucking want you to take a look at it.’ She hesitated, gestured what might have been apology. Her voice softened. ‘RimSec are on their way. It’ll wait.’
‘I heard the car. Did he get away?’
She grimaced. ‘Yeah. Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.’
‘Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers you know.’
And then the breath seemed to come out of Marsalis as if he’d been punctured. He went to the bar, got behind it and laid the revolver carefully down on the scarred wood.
‘Thank Christ that’s over,’ he said feelingly. ‘You want a drink.’
‘No, I don’t want a fucking drink. He got away.’
Marsalis turned to survey the piled assortment of bottles behind him. His eyes found her in the mirror.
‘Yeah, but look on the bright side. We’re neither of us dead, which is a big fucking improvement on what I was expecting ten minutes ago.’
She shivered a little. Shook it off. Marsalis picked out a bottle from the multitude, and a couple of shot glasses from below the bar. He set the glasses up on the bartop and drizzled amber-coloured liquor into them.
‘Look, humour me. Least I owe you for saving my life back there is a couple of stolen whiskies. And you look like you could use them.’
‘Oh, hey, thanks a lot. I save your fucking life, you tell me I look like shit?’
He made a wobbling plane of his hand, tilted it back and forth. ‘Bit pale, let’s say.’
‘Fuck you.’ She picked up the glass.
He matched her, clinked the glasses together very gently. Said very quietly, ‘I owe you, Sevgi.’
She sipped and swallowed. ‘Call it quits for the skaters. You don’t owe me a thing.’
‘Oh, but I do. Those guys in New York were trying to kill me as well as you, that was self-defence. This is different. Cheers.’
They both drained their glasses. Sevgi leaned on the bar opposite him and felt the warmth work its way down into her belly. He lifted the bottle, querying. She shook her head.
‘Like I said, RimSec should be here any minute,’ she said. ‘I called them back around the time your friends made their entrance. Would have stormed in a little earlier but I was hoping for some back-up.’
‘Well.’ He looked at his hands and she saw they were trembling a little. It did something to the pit of her stomach to see that. He looked up again, grinned. ‘Pretty good timing anyway. How the hell did you wind up here?’
‘I saw you walk out the hotel. I was just arriving.’ She nodded at the corpses on the floor between them. ‘Saw the teardrop with these guys pull out and go after your taxi. Took me a few seconds to flag one down myself. Then when I got down here, I saw them sit outside the bar and wait. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, what you’d be doing all the way out of town like this, if these guys were with you or not. Only called it in when I heard shots and they headed on over. Which reminds me, what the fuck were you doing down here?’
He looked away from her, into a corner. ‘Just looking for a fight.’
‘Yeah? Looks like you found a good one.’
He said nothing.
‘So who were they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You called him something.’ A sudden, cop sharpness spiked in her mind, ruined the moment with its objections. ‘Back when he went for the gun. I heard you. On-something.’
‘Onbekend, yeah. It’s his name. He introduced himself, while he was getting ready to kill me.’ Marsalis frowned to himself. ‘He was a thirteen.’
‘He told you that?’
‘It came up in the conversation, yeah.’
She shivered again. ‘Bit of a coincidence.’
‘Isn’t it. Speaking of which, what were you doing back at the hotel watching me?’
‘Oh, yeah. That.’ She nodded, let the satisfaction of being right warm her into a faint smile of her own. ‘Came to tell you. NYPD tracked down the third skater and brought him in. He says their target was Ortiz all along. Not you.’
Marsalis blinked. ‘Ortiz?’
‘Yeah. Seems you and me just got caught in the crossfire. Sort of puts Norton in the clear, doesn’t it. Paranoia aside, I mean.’
‘Are you sure about this? I mean, did NYPD check if—’
‘Marsalis, just fucking drop it.’ Her weariness seemed to be building. Or maybe the whisky had been a bad idea. Either way, her eyes were starting to ache. ‘Better yet, just think about apologising, if you know how that’s done. You were fucking wrong. End of fucking story.’
‘Don’t gloat, Ertekin. It’s not attractive, remember.’
And she had to laugh then, even through the crushing weight of the tiredness. In the distance, she heard a RimSec siren approaching.
‘And I’m not looking to get laid,’ she said.
‘Yeah, you are.’
She chuckled. ‘No, I’m fucking not.’
‘You are.’
‘Am fucking not, you—’
She coughed hard, caught off guard by the abrupt violence of it. Shook her head and found her eyes flooded with sudden tears. She heard Marsalis produce a chuckle of his own.
‘Well, maybe not then. I wouldn’t want to—’
Another shiver ripped through her, stronger. In the wake of the coughing, her head was suddenly aching. She frowned and put a hand to the side of her brow.
‘Sevgi?’
She looked up, gave him a puzzled smile. The shivering was still there, she hadn’t shaken it at all. The siren was louder now, but it seemed to get stuck inside her head and the noise it made there scraped. ‘I don’t feel too good.’
His face went mask-like with shock.
‘What did he shoot you with, Sevgi?’
‘I don’t—’
‘Did you see the gun he shot you with?’ He was round the bar, at her side as she shook her head sleepily.
‘No. He got away. Like I said.’
He turned her, put his hands on either side of her face. His voice was tight and urgent. ‘Listen to me, Sevgi. You have to stay awake. You’re going to start feeling very tired in the next—’
‘Going to?’ She giggled. ‘Fuck, Marsalis, I could sleep for a month right here on this fucking floor.’
‘No, you stay awake.’ He shook her head. ‘Listen, they’re coming, they’ll be here. We’ll get you to the hospital. Just don’t fucking flake on me.’
‘What are you talking about? I’m not going to—’
She stopped because she saw, noticed groggily, that his eyes were tear-sheened like her own. She frowned, and the skin on her face felt hot and thick and stiff, she had to force expression into it like pushing a hand into a tight, new glove. She made a small, amused sound.
‘Hey, Marsalis,’ she slurred, trying not to. ‘What’s the matter? You feeling bad as well?’
The RimSec medical team took her out in a stretcher, got her in the helicopter. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. One minute Marsalis was cradling her in the corpse-strewn shithole bar, the next they were out in the chilly air and she was looking straight up at the shrouded stars. Awareness was a flapping cloth behind her eyes, there then gone, gone then back again. She tried to crane her neck and see what was going on around her, but it was all a blur of shouts and lights and hurrying busy figures. The clatter of the helicopter rotors just added to what was now a splitting headache.