Free Walking Dead by Greg Rucka Page A

them in any other place, had known they were taken by any other person than Vladek, it would have meant nothing.
     
But sitting at the desk in my hotel room at the Zorlu Grand Hotel, looking at them, I could only see them as the record they undoubtedly were. The women he had taken and trafficked, one after another, kept for posterity on his phone.
     
There were thirty-seven of them, and I made myself look at them all.
     
The last picture was of Tiasa. She looked at the camera with tears running down her face, snot leaking from her nose, clearly trying to stop crying.
     
Vladek had taken the picture after he'd raped her. I knew that, because he had the video of it, taken the same way he'dtaken the photograph. Some dirty room in a dirty building with a mattress on the floor and four men taking turns with a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't defend herself and had nowhere to run.
     
In Batumi, with a puncture in his femoral, Vladek had told me what he'd done to her, and I'd known he was telling the truth, but I had hoped he wasn't. I'd hoped he was throwing spite and hatred at me, trying to deliver wounds with the only weapon he'd had left. That's what I'd hoped.
     
I turned off the video before I saw more, but I'd already seen too much.
     
I should've known better than to hope.
     
     
The day after I met Arzu, he called me at the hotel. It was twenty-two minutes past four in the afternoon.
     
“David,” he said, “I think we're in business.”
     
     
    CHAPTER
Nine
There were three women in the room, and if you added all their ages together, you could probably break fifty years old.
     
Barely.
     
None of them was Tiasa. Two sat on a couch, at opposite ends from each other, strangers bound by common fear. The third one sat on a rickety chair in the opposite corner, almost in profile, watching me without turning her head. All of them wore clean, if worn and used, clothes, and all of them looked fed, and all of them looked bewildered and haunted by their circumstance.
     
“What do you think?” Arzu asked.
     
I forced my eyes to linger on the women, and in doing soabsorbed more details. A broken fingernail. A bruise around one wrist. A clenched jaw. Finally, I looked at Arzu, and showed him a grin to demonstrate my pleasure. Then I put the grin away, so he could see that, too.
     
“They're all older than I was hoping,” I told him.
     
He looked sincerely apologetic. “These are the youngest I could get. Give me another week or two, maybe I can find others.”
     
“And I asked for four, not three.”
     
“Yes, you did, my friend. And here are three of them less than twenty-four hours after you asked me, all of them ready to start work. Give me until tomorrow night, the day after at the latest, I'll get you a fourth, I promise.”
     
I considered, or pretended to, looking back at the women. The one in the corner had shifted her head slightly to watch me and, when she caught me looking, turned it back again. She was the smallest of them, and perhaps the eldest, black hair and an olive complexion, and I caught sight of the swelling at her lip before she hid her face. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and she couldn't conceal the hatred in them.
     
“What happened to her?” I asked.
     
“You know how they are,” Arzu said. “Sometimes they need it explained to them.”
     
I nodded, because I didn't trust myself to speak.
     
“Let's go.” Arzu put a hand on my shoulder. “We can talk business someplace more comfortable.”
     
He guided me out of the room and into the next, where two partners or acquaintances or brothers or who the hell knew were sitting around a small table, eating their dinner. Each one of them had a pistol resting next to his plate of mezes. The one nearest us got to his feet and locked the door we'd just exited. Arzu said something in Turkish, without breaking stride, and the response followed us out of the apartment and into theearly evening. Arzu took the lead, down the