The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [146]
With the goons outside, Ritter couldn’t walk through the front door without being recorded by at least five or six departments. But, providing he’d gotten rid of his own locator, nothing prevented him from sneaking through the back door—barring the local parish priest. With a sigh, Genia keyed her neighbor’s address on her pager, pressed the button to send, and moved over to her study, rehearsing the tall story she was about to deliver to Father Damien over the phone.
After switching off the lights, Genia padded barefoot into her backyard, skirting the pool and sitting at a bench under the large grapefruit trees she kept threatening to chop down. She hated grapefruit, and, as revenge, the trees exhibited an obscene fertility.
After a while she spotted movement by the plum tree’s branches, which sat almost on top of the fence. Ritter was trying the easy approach. Then she saw him swinging from a branch, followed by the sounds of a loud curse, the sickening rip of tearing cloth, and a thud. She stood and walked over to the fence, choking with ill-contained laughter.
“Boy, you make a lousy thief.”
Ritter also made a lousy patient. Between gasps, hisses, and countless sharp intakes of breath, Genia thoroughly cleaned the literally hundreds of tiny cuts on his face and scalp, most of them little more than pimple size. After swabbing the nicks with peroxide, she applied dabs of a spray-on dressing, then stood back to examine her handiwork. He looked like someone with a bad dose of chicken pox.
“Have you eaten?” Ritter stood from the kitchen stool where he’d endured her maintenance work, removed his jacket, made a face at the ripped pocket, and hung it from a wall hook next to the kitchen towels.
She was about to explain about her queasiness, then realized she was miraculously hungry and shook her head.
“I’ll make supper,” he said, and moved to the fridge. Genia climbed onto his vacated stool, tightened her robe, and settled in for the performance. He rummaged through the freezer to unearth a tray of leathery-looking chicken legs and a few odd vegetable lumps. Over the next hour, with pasta, eggs, sour cream, and other bits and pieces he’d scrounged from the kitchen, Ritter produced a huge bowl of luscious fettuccini. And throughout the culinary exhibition, he related his version of the sniper attack, his exit from Mason Tower, and the drive to her house, without omitting the providential coaching by his anonymous caller. She wasn’t overly surprised. Whoever was listening to her exchanges with Palmer was doing an excellent job as guardian angel. Except by now she had narrowed her list of possible candidates to one: Nikola Masek. War was indeed a strange scenario, and mercenaries fickle in their allegiances.
After supper, they moved into the living room, dimly lit by whatever spilled over from the kitchen, with a coffee tray, snifters, and a bottle of cognac that had once belonged to Genia’s father.
“That was my bit. Now, care to tell me what’s going on?” Ritter asked.
Genia sipped her cognac and shelved devious thoughts. Her stomach hadn’t begrudged the five-star treatment. She had eaten more at one sitting than in the previous week. “The DHS has been keeping illegal prisoners in the tanks.”
“We’ve already been through this. I take it ‘illegal’ means people who weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. You mean innocent people?”
“People who have not been sentenced by the courts.”
“That means nothing. Innocent?”
She stalled.
He waited.
“People sent into cold storage by the Russian Mafiya.” There, she’d said it.
“How many?”
“Many.”
Ritter swirled his liqueur, sniffed it, and swirled some more. He was a cool customer, but his reaction had been too tame.
“You knew?”
“Since the unveiling of the first sugar cube there have been rumors of illegal inmates, but I would have never guessed