Free Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) by Jon Evans Page A

America. Is good. Is most good. Is smart? Is good?”
   “Is good,” I assured her. I wanted to cry. “Is smart.”
   “Good,” Saskia said. “You good man, Paul. You good man.”
   We looked at each other. It was clear that the conversation was over.
   “Do you go to…” She couldn’t think of the word, and mimed using her hands as a pillow.
   “Sleep,” I said.
   “Sleep. Yes. Do you go to sleep now?”
   “Yes,” I said. “Except I need to use the bathroom first.”
   She looked at me, confused, and I pointed to the toilet.
   “Oh, yes,” she said, and smiled, amused and slightly embarrassed. I hadn’t seen her smile before. It was a smile that seemed to belong to an entirely different woman, confident and beautiful and insouciant, rather than the frightened, huddled, desperate person who had conducted the rest of this conversation. She got up and padded silently past me. On impulse I reached out and took her shoulder. I was going to hug her, but she pulled away, fast, her smile fading to fright.
   “Sorry,” I said, kicking myself for being an idiot, for not realizing that she associated any male touch with terror and pain. “Sorry. I just… sorry.”
   “Oh,” she said. “Okay. Sorry. Is no good. Sorry.”
   “Good night,” I whispered, although it was now day.
   “Good night.”

* * *

   I woke the second time to a pounding headache and an angry girlfriend.
   “Sure hope you had a good time yesterday,” Talena said, when I made the mistake of opening my eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, reading my Lonely Planet guide. “Hope you had a wonderful time with all your new friends. Why don’t you ask them to take you hunting later on? Maybe they can explain the fine points of how you set land mines so that they’ll kill small children.”
   “Nguh,” I protested. It was hard to talk. I cleared my throat. “Land mines…what?”
   “But that’s all old news. What they’re really expert at nowadays is beating their wives. Ask them all about it. I’m sure they can teach you all the details. Where you hit them so that they piss blood for a week but it isn’t visible in public. How you hit them on the soles of the feet so they can’t walk if you don’t want them to leave the house. You know what? I just realized. I bet actually they learned all this from torturing people during the war, and now that the war’s over, they’re just keeping in practice with their wives. That’s how Saskia got that black eye. Dragan’s just practicing for the next war.”
   “Black eye?”
   “There’s a reason she dragged all her hair over one side of her face and put makeup on like she was about to go on TV.” She paused and in a slightly less angry tone said, “I didn’t notice it either at first. He stopped hitting her in the face a couple of weeks ago, because we were coming to visit. He told her that if she told either of us he would cut her tongue out. You hear that? Cut her tongue out. And it’s not some empty hyperbolic threat, he actually means he would take a steak knife and hold her mouth open and saw her fucking tongue off. That’s your new buddy Dragan for you. She was crying all day yesterday. It took her all day to start talking about it. He wouldn’t give a shit whether we knew or not, not Dragan, except he wants to make a good impression because he’s hoping you’ll give him money.”
   “Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned.”
   “He did? He talked to you? In English?”
   “His friend. Josip. Speaks English.”
   “Josip. Right. The Professor. Well, Saskia says Dragan doesn’t, so we can speak freely as long as Josip isn’t around. But if you so much as hint that we know about him beating her…” She tried to come up with some kind of consequence equal to the enormity of that action, and failed. “Don’t. Just, don’t. Please, Paul, for God’s sake, wake the fuck up. This is