A Spring Betrayal by Tom Callaghan Page B

for him to be taken down to the station, unless I want to share his cell.”
    I looked at him, the usual cheap mix of arrogance and uncertainty clear in his face. Bullet fodder, if not now, in the future. I pondered for a moment, then drew my Yarygin, awkwardly, with my right hand.
    “I could save us some trouble and kill him,” I suggested, sighting down the barrel in the general direction of Lubashov’s balls. Or where they would have been if Saltanat hadn’t drop-kicked them into his pelvis.
    Lubashov’s face grew smudged with gray.
    “Plenty of room for you next to your brother,” I added, “and then your dear old mama only needs one marshrutka bus ticket to visit the pair of you. Convenient, eh?”
    I moved closer to Lubashov, never letting my eyes drop until my gun loomed large in his life. Despite what he might have thought, I wasn’t going to shoot him. In fact, I’ve never killed or wounded anyone except in self-defense. Maybe that makes me less of a detective. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the innocent dead don’t rise up before me at night. They all stare with accusing eyes, wondering why I hadn’t protected them from the monsters outside, why they’d had to pay such a price in order for me to catch the bad guys. And if they could talk, they’d all ask me the same question: “Why me?”
    “If you’re going to do it, then just fucking do it,” Lubashov said, with an unexpected and rather admirable flash of spirit.
    “Not my style,” I said, stroking his cheek with the gun barrel while Saltanat kept him covered with her Makarov. “I only shoot villains, not half-assed hopefuls who don’t even know how to put a clip in a gun.”
    I gave him one of my special smiles, the one that never reaches my eyes.
    “I’m a pretty forgiving kind of guy, but, my job being what it is, I can’t help wondering if there’s another reason you want me dead, other than your brother snoozing in the cemetery. So tell, who put you up to ruining my second-best jacket?”
    “Inspector, we really don’t have time for this,” Saltanat said, impatience clear in her voice.
    I sighed, knowing she was right. I holstered my piece and unloaded the clip from Lubashov’s gun. The metal felt cold, oily, like the name plaque on a tombstone, like death itself.
    “You need to check the tension on the spring, rotate your bullets, keep everything clean, oiled and wiped. Or one day you’ll come up against someone who isn’t as considerate as me, and while you’re wrestling with a misfire, they won’t miss firing at you.”
    I looked around at the rest of the bar, at the people frozen in front of me.
    “Everyone keep their sticky little hands where I can see they’re not going to give me any trouble. Nice and calm, like taking a walk in Panfilov Park.”
    I nodded toward Saltanat, gestured toward the stairs.
    “Don’t forget our parrot; I don’t think we’ve heard all his amusing repertoire yet.”
    Saltanat took hold of Kamchybek’s arm, and we started off back to the daylight and fresh air.
    And that’s when the shooting started.

Chapter 19
    One of the first rules of policing is to make sure you’ve cleared every room, not just the one you’re in. But I must have been feeling less than first-rate because I didn’t check out what laughingly passes as the Kulturny bathroom, a piece of guttering fixed to the wall on a slant, so that urine dribbles down into a pipe leading to the sewers.
    A classic mistake. And a deadly one.
    The man who burst through the door could barely squeeze through the frame. Two meters, easily, and almost as many wide. Hair down to his shoulders, dark glasses hiding his eyes, mouth stretched wide in a scream that echoed around the room. Almost as large, and just as frightening was the Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol he gripped in one meaty paw. He collided with the wall as he raised the gun, fired off two shots. In that confined space, the noise was deafening, an express train roaring