Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
“You tied my h-hair together?” Struggling to sit, Davila winced then dropped back onto the squeaky cot with rusted springs on which he lay. The cot’s springs complained in creaky squeals. There had been no mattress, so John had first draped Parviz’s sleeping bag over the bare springs and then stuffed Davila into a second bag to keep him as warm as he could. “Just... ouch .” Wincing, Davila sucked in a breath. “Just give me a c-couple seconds.”
“You having a hard time catching your breath?” John pulled his stethoscope out of a pocket. “Let me take a listen again.”
“N-no.” Davila warded him off with his good arm. “Side hurts, that’s all.”
“Bone pain, probably.” I hope. Huddled in his sleeping bag, he watched Davila, silently timing the intervals between the other man’s breaths, a task made easier by the deep chill of the shipping container in which they sheltered. Every exhalation plumed in small, gray-white clouds. Davila was moving air relatively well but also splinting on his left side, holding himself as still and stiff as he could. Common after a rib injury, but John would have to keep an eye on that. “Bullet might have cracked that rib.”
“Uh-huh,” Davila grunted, the sound rising on a smoking breath. “Next time you’re going to make like Clayton Kershaw…give me a little warning. Anyway.” Davila made a keep-it-rolling gesture with his right forefinger. “Go on. I bashed my head and tore my scalp open and…?”
“Like I said, I closed that up. Could’ve used glue but that would mean shaving your head around that area. Given the shape of the wound, that would’ve been hard. This way, there’s nothing to take out. You just can’t go digging around when you wash your hair…which you also can’t do for two weeks.”
“S.O.P. in the field. Remind me to thank Helen for bugging me to let my hair grow out. What about my arm?” Davila studied the thick bandage around his left biceps. “Bullet’s gone, right? You dug it out while I was unconscious?” When he nodded, Davila said, “So what aren’t you t-telling me? Why the look on your face?”
“What do you mean? How am I looking?”
“Grim.”
Because things are grim, my friend. Aloud, he said, “Me? Pshaw. This is just my concerned face. I’ll have you know that patients find my bedside manner very reassuring.” He paused then said, “Of course, they’re also in the OR and unconscious.”
“The more you joke, the worse I know it is.” Davila’s chin took on a hard jut. “Tell me.”
Davila, we are screwed in so many different ways, I can’t count them all. Instead, he said, “Okay, listen, you’re really lucky. I’m not talking about just being alive, but that your arm still works. Yeah, your side hurts, but that’s from where the bullet ricocheted off the rib before burrowing into your arm. The good news is that your pulse in that hand is strong, the bone’s not broken, and you can move your fingers.”
“Meaning the bullet missed the”—Davila sucked in air then winced on the exhale— “artery.”
“And didn’t damage the nerves.”
“But?”
“But...a couple things.”
“Tell me.”
“The bullet.”
“What about it?”
“Well, there wasn’t an exit wound. Hitting the rib slowed it down. Lucky thing it wasn’t in pieces, and I felt it just under the skin, so I was able to make an incision while you were in la-la land and pop it out. In fact,” he said, pulling a wadded gauze from a pocket, “I saved it for your brag shelf. Most patients get gallstones. A bullet’s definitely a step up.”
“Hunh.” Davila studied the dull, brassy, inch-long spear of a bullet. The point was slightly flattened on one side. “Reminds me of a Hog’s Tooth. You know, those 50-cal rounds they give out in Marine sniper school?” When John nodded, Davila said, “Dinged up from smacking into my rib?”
“Yup. You are luckier than hell that it didn’t punch through into your chest and wasn’t in pieces.” Or snugged up against an artery and acting as a plug. He’d been in operating rooms when a surgeon had simply plucked out a bullet without first checking and been rewarded with jets of the red stuff. “Then I irrigated the wound. Cleaned it out best I could.”
“With what?”
“Bottled water in a syringe and then…” He inclined his head toward an empty vodka bottle “100-proof. Figured it was a step up from beer.”
“B-beer?” Davila shook his head. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t know if I even want the details of that story. And I didn’t wake up?”
“I sure thought you might. Mostly, you moaned.”
“So, if I’m hearing you right, the bullet’s gone, and I woke up and, my skull’s only bashed instead of bashed in . So, why do you still look so worried?”
“Because a bullet’s dirtier than hell.”
“So? They leave in shrapnel.”
“True, but not because they want to. Some guys who get fragged, they leave the shrapnel in because it’s better than hunting for it all. Do more damage than it’s worth. But those guys also get IV antibiotics. I don’t have anything like that. I can give you a broad-spectrum antibiotic by mouth, but that’s no guarantee.”
“Still sounds more like a lot of mights than will-be s.” Davila waved his good hand to take in the shipping container’s interior. “How’d you get me up here?”
“Slowly.” The way had been slick and treacherous, the bare rock of the path frosted over with ice. He’d been lucky that whoever managed this place had tacked a guide rope, as thick around as a man’s wrist, to the mountain with a series of sturdy eyebolts. In the best of times, the trip up and down the path, which curved around the mountain’s flank, should’ve taken no more than two or three minutes. With Davila’s dead weight on his back and the ice, the trip had taken the better part of a half hour.
“Even with crampons, I’d never have made it without the rope,” he said. “I left you in the van with the engine running so you’d have heat, grabbed the boy, and hoofed it on up to check things out.”
Davila waved his good hand at the ceiling. “How many of these things?”
“Six.”
“That’s a lot of containers.” Davila’s forehead furrowed. “How’d anyone get them up there?”
He shrugged. “Might have been the Russians. The containers are stamped on the outside with numbers and something in Cyrillic underneath. Maybe the Russians figured this was a nice place to hang out, their own private Club Med, and then, when they left, some enterprising guy took them over. There are two containers on this side joined to make one nearly continuous space.” He turned the enormous flashlight to a door on the right. “That leads to an office. It’s not much, just a desk, couple of chairs, a couch. Found a bunch of keys in the desk.” Along with assorted desk trash: paper clips, pencils, pens, notepads. Chewing gum. Half-finished packets of cigarettes. There were also several disposable lighters, still with fuel, which he’d pocketed. “Filing cabinets, too. I’ll bet one of the keys on the ring I found will open them.”
“Look inside the cabinets?” When John shook his head, Davila said, “Might be a good idea. I once knew a colonel kept a couple weapons in his. You never know.”
“I’ll check.” He didn’t mention that he’d been a little busy trying to make sure Davila wouldn’t die. “My guess is this container is used by staff.” Aiming the flashlight across the room, he said, “A couple of lockers, see? One holds towels, some clothes. Sandals. The second was stuffed with five sleeping bags, one on top of the other, and mats.”
“For staff to sleep over?”
He nodded. “I bet the manager grabs the cot. But despite what Parviz said, I don’t think we need to worry about people coming here, at least for a while.”
“Why?”
“Well, first off, it’s the next day…” He flicked a look at his watch. “Five in the morning, to be exact, an d still snowing and really cold. Second, there were no old, iced-over tracks leading up or down from here. I know because I checked. Ducked out a few minutes after I got you settled.” After he’d put a zip-tie around the boy’s ankles and essentially cocooned the kid into a sleeping bag to keep him warm. The fact that the kid had that knife nagged. He just couldn’t take a chance the kid was only biding his time. Although, logically, where could the kid go from here? “For another thing, the place was padlocked. There’s no sign that anyone’s been here lately, and there’s a lot of dust.” He ran a finger along the floor near the cot and then played the light off twinkling motes. He thought again of that movie he’d watched with Roni, the one with the penguin in a snow-globe. For an absurd moment, he wondered if Roni was keeping tabs on him from wherever dead people went when they died.
“How’d you get inside?”
“Pry bar from Parviz’s van.”
“That van is the gift that keeps on giving. But we can’t stay here long.” Davila shivered. “F-freeze.”
“There’s a generator around back. There’s a socket for a light on the ceiling and a corner socket down here. They must have light bulbs somewhere and probably some portable heaters. That would suggest fuel squirreled away somewhere.”
“Unless they used it all.”
“Possible. But there are four more shipping containers up here. The main pool’s essentially a circle, and the containers are arranged like the principal ordinates on a compass. So, the two we’re in at south, one each at east and west—probably changing areas—and two shipping containers at north, on the far side of the springs. Decided to wait until you woke up before I went out to take a look.”
“Even if you find fuel, that generator will make a racket.”
He spread his hands. “Open to suggestion, man. We need to stay warm, and there’s nothing here I can use for a fire. Even if there were, we’d have to ventilate this place. Now that you’re pretty awake, I think I should go check those other containers and see what the weather’s doing. You going to be okay?”
“Sure, but…” Wincing, Davila inclined his head toward the sleeping boy. “Leave me a…” He cleared his throat. “A weapon that works. Pr-probably overkill, but…you know.”
“Yeah.” There was something about Davila that bothered him. The way Davila was splinting his left side, holding himself so still… Not right . Might be nothing but bone pain. And I can’t sit with him forever; I have to see if I can find fuel, food, something to tide us over until... Well, until what? They didn’t have their sat phones and were miles from where they were supposed to rendezvous. The only thing working in their favor was that there wasn’t likely to be so much snow in what amounted to a mountainous desert that he couldn’t get the van out.
“I don’t think the boy’s going to come gunning for you.” He explained about the zip-ties around Matvey’s wrists and ankles. “I couldn’t tend to you and keep an eye on him.”
“True.” Davila took a small pull from a water bottle then made a face as his throat worked in a swallow. “B-but there’s always a first time for everything. Lucky thing I’m right-handed, too.”
“Yeah.” Shucking his sleeping bag, he slipped a Glock from a pocket and handed that to Davila. “Lucky.”