Page 138 of Nothing More

Pushkin stood at the open rear doors of the van, rattling around in a collection of plastic bins. He was dressed, as he’d been the last time Toly saw him, in a pair of workman’s coveralls, smeared with grime in various shades, though he’d never done a day’s honest work so far as Toly knew. Frizzy gray hair curled out from beneath his beanie, and even from behind, his ragged, snuffly breathing was audible.

For a moment, Toly wondered if it had been Pushkin in Raven’s apartment that day, when Miles found footage of the pretend maintenance man covering cameras, but he dismissed the idea as soon as it occurred. The intruder had been taller, leaner, fitter than Pushkin, who would have shown up as a shuffling, ungraceful toad in the video they’d watched. Not him, then.

Misha caught Toly’s eye at the last second, and nodded.

Toly wasn’t prepared for the surge of electricity, that old click and fire of his nervous system, like wolves of the same pack communicating with a look.You go that way, I’ll go this way. Startling how easily they slid back into it, as though time and betrayal and whole continents had never separated them.

Misha grabbed Pushkin’s left shoulder, and when he gasped, and tried to whirl around, Toly kicked him in the back of the right knee and sent him sprawling forward into the back of his van. Misha pounced, gripped his lapels and got him flat on his back. Toly had his knife at his throat before he could make the first splutter of protest.

“Wait, wait, wait!” His hands – gnarled, dirty, fingers crooked from badly healed breaks – fluttered up at them like twisted, wing-clipped birds. “I don’t – please – please don’t!”

“Please don’t what?” Misha asked in Russian, voice pleasant, hands twisting so his knuckles ground into Pushkin’s collarbones and left him hissing in pain.

Pushkin’s eyes widened at the sound of his home language, and then further, as he looked between them. It wasn’t Misha, but Toly that he seemed to recognize – who seemed tofrightenhim.

“Traitor!” he yelped. “Traitor, traitor, traitor!”

Great. Did every fucking Russian in this city know what he’d done?

Misha lifted him a half-inch, and slammed him back down; his head banged off a plastic bin with a clatter, and his teeth clicked together. “Shut up.” He swapped back to English, low and sinister, the words pushed out in a whisper that managed to both punch at Pushkin, but stay close within the confines of the van. “Do you know who I am?”

Aleksy Pushkin was not a smart man – but he wasn’t a stupid one, either. What he lacked in cleverness, he’d made up for with caution and observation. His gaze tracked over Misha’s face, and then his red, chapped face went slack when recognition hit. “Pakhan,” he murmured. And then, in Russian, “Usurper.”

Misha gave him another shake, this one harder. A bin slid out of the stack and clattered toward the front of the van.

Toly filed the word away, an absent thought like an autumn leaf caught drifting on the breeze.Usurper. Saved it for later.

“Who are you delivering to in this building?” Misha demanded. “What is he buying?”

Pushkin breathed fast and harsh through an open mouth. Wet his lips with a tongue that looked like a fat slug and left Toly suddenly revolted. A wave ofwhy am I here, I shouldn’t be doing this– but then Misha ground his knuckles again, and Pushkin’s face creased with pain, and he was in an alley in Moscow, watching blood dot the snow, listening to Misha say, “The trick is to hurt them, but not so badly they can’t think straight and give you a good answer.”

Everything he knew about street work, about staying alive, and completing hits, and getting the information he needed had come from the man he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with, and not from a Lean Dog. The Dogs had made use of his skills, but they hadn’t been the ones to instill them; hadn’t doled them out like grandfather’s wisdom and nurtured them like living things.

All the jostling had dug the edge of Toly’s knife into Pushkin’s throat, and blood pearled along a single red line that bisected his throat. It beaded, and slipped, and rolled down his neck, and his pupils shrank to tiny dots as he felt it.

“Please,” he said, voice a rough whisper. “I’ll cooperate. I don’t want any trouble.”

The joints in Misha’s hands cracked as he flexed them, tightened his grip, and for a second, Toly thought he meant to slam the man down again. A show of aggression he’d never seen before in his old mentor. Misha was violent by necessity, but he’d never had a temper, and he never pushed farther than he needed to in any given situation.

But then he flattened his palms on Pushkin’s chest and was calm again. “Who are you delivering to here?”

Pushkin shivered. “I don’t have a name – I swear! Just a voice. He called the number, and he knew the word. He gave me an address, and I deliver, that’s all.”

“You know more than that,” Toly said.

When Pushkin’s gaze slid to him, it was with a curled lip, and an unspoken accusation.Traitor.

“Don’t look at him,” Misha commanded. “Look at me. And he’s right: you know more. You can’t deliver without a name, or a drop box, or something. Show us.”

Pushkin hesitated, breathing fast like a trapped animal, but finally saw the wisdom in nodding. “Okay. Okay, yes. I’ll show you.”

With one last warning look, Misha released him and he scrambled around to search through his bins. After a bit of digging, he came out with a white envelope about the size of a brick. It was sealed with adhesive, and the front labeled with numbers, rather than a name: 1208.

“What’s in it?” Misha asked.

Pushkin had donned leather gloves to handle it, and gave it a shake; sound of pills rattling inside. “Morphine. Hospital grade.”

“American?” Toly asked.