Free A Spring Betrayal by Tom Callaghan

current inmates at Penitentiary One had enjoyed a few shots of the good stuff there in theirday. If I had my way, I’d weld the steel door shut, with all the regulars locked inside, and push a bowl of plov inside twice a day. To call it a shithole full of shits was to insult shits and shitholes everywhere. But it was the best place to push and shove, rattle some cages, see what shakes loose.
    The sky had grown steadily darker while we’d been talking, storm clouds tumbling and spilling down from the mountains. The first drops of rain began to fall, cautiously at first, then with increasing violence. We ran back to the car, and I felt a curious exhilaration. The sense of helplessness I’d had ever since we unearthed the dead babies was melting away. I didn’t know if we’d solve anything, avenge anyone, but we were at the beginning of something fresh.
    Saltanat was with me, as a comrade, if nothing more; the rain fell more heavily, and the windshield wipers could not sweep clear the blurred future that lay ahead of us.
    After repeating the same series of alleyways and passages in reverse, we emerged onto Chui Prospekt, heading east. Pools of water that had already formed on the road reflected traffic lights, reds, yellows, and greens vivid against gunmetal gray. The giant red and yellow flag by Ala-Too Square flapped in desperation, threatening to rip apart and fly away. The air crackled with electricity, tense, dangerous. My Yarygin sat cold and heavy against my hip.
    “I should check on my apartment, get some clothes,” I said. “What time are you meeting your squealer?”
    “Not for a couple of hours. We’ve got time.”
    The tires of the Lexus threw up sprays of water that sparkled in the air. We turned right, onto Ibraimova, toward my apartment block, a khrushchyovka pre-cast concrete relic from the country’s days as a far-distant outpost of the Soviet Empire, named after the Soviet premier who’d ordered their building throughout the USSR. As we drove up toward the top end of Ibraimova, to make a U-turn, I looked over toward my building.
    “Don’t turn,” I said. “Keep going straight and go right at the top.”
    Saltanat nodded, kept the Lexus over to the right, pulling into the filling station just beyond the Blonder pub, then down a narrow road lined with birch trees.
    “Stop, but keep the engine running,” I instructed, looking out of the window back toward my building. We were parked very near where I’d found Yekaterina Tynalieva’s body a few months ago, and the coincidence didn’t escape either of us. Nothing left there now to show anything had ever happened. How quickly we die and are forgotten.
    “Problem?” Saltanat asked. She opened the glove compartment, and I saw the dull metal sheen of a Makarov.
    “Two police cars, tucked away by the trees next to my place.”
    “Why would they be waiting for you?”
    “A question I’d like answered,” I said, and reached in my pocket for my cell phone. I called up the contact list, memorized a number, removed the battery.
    “Give me your phone,” I said. Saltanat reached into her jacket, pulled out an elegant smartphone, and handed it to me.
    “Apple? Uzbek security must be raking it in. All those children forced to pick cotton instead of going to school,” I said.
    Saltanat glared at me.
    “Bought and paid for. By me. Okay?”
    I raised a hand to appease her, dialed the number, heard the ringing tone, waited until a familiar voice answered.
    “Usupov. You know who this is. No need to say my name. Can you talk?”
    “Yes. Where are you? You’re in Bishkek?”
    “No need to know exactly where right now. I just want answers to a couple of questions.”
    “If I can.”
    Usupov’s voice was strained, cautious. I’d always seen him, if not as a friend, then at least as an ally in the cause of doing the right thing. After our last conversation in Karakol, I wasn’t so sure where his loyalties lay anymore, but there was no one else I