Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) Read Free Page A

who. Maybe the government would deport him back to Sri Lanka, a callous move but the world is a callous place, and few countries more so than Bosnia. It was easy to imagine the boy returned to his homeland, spending his youth in some Dickensian orphanage, a place worse than jail.
   The taxi’s headlights uncovered a bumpy dirt-and-rocks trail that veered away from the gravel to the right. The driver slowed us to a crawl and inquired, “Go here?”
   “Excellent question,” I said. “Brief, to the point, well put. I have no fucking idea.”
   The driver stopped the taxi. “I don’t understand.”
   “Me neither.” I looked at the dirt road. Were those fresh tire tracks? They might be. I was an out-of-work computer programmer, not Aragorn the Ranger, but those tracks did look distinctly darker than the soil around them. I looked down the dirt track and in the distance I saw a tiny flicker of light.
   “Yes,” I said. “Turn here.”
   The driver advanced into the dirt road, then stopped so abruptly that the child next to me, who had thankfully fallen silent again, slid forward and nearly off the seat. There was a gate in front of us, part of a rusting metal chain-link fence that intersected the dirt trail about twenty feet up from the gravel road. The gate was locked with a thick chain and padlock.
   For a moment I felt defeated. We could go no further. I would have to take the boy back to the city and go to the police. Then the driver said something and pointed at the gate, and I noticed what should have been obvious. The vehicular gate included a pedestrian doorway, like a house door might include a catflap, and that doorway was latched but unlocked.
   “Right,” I said. “Okay. God fucking damn it.” It was either walk or turn back, and I wasn’t ready to turn back. “Okay, stop here, and wait for me. Wait for me until I come back.”
   I tried to think of a reason for the taxi driver to wait. My mind replayed a helpful scene from Eyes Wide Shut, and I withdrew my Eagle Creek travel wallet from beneath my slacks, dug out a pink 50-euro note, tore it in two and handed half to the driver. Just then I remembered all the warnings that U.S. dollars in Bosnia had to be in pristine condition for anyone, including banks, to accept them. Fortunately this stricture didn’t seem to apply to euros. My driver looked at it, nodded slowly, and said “I wait.”
   “Good,” I said. I probably wasn’t even overpaying him that much. Sarajevo was an expensive place to travel and 50 euros or 100 km – “konvertible marks”, the local currency – seemed almost right for a cab ride to and from the outermost boonies.
   I reached out and gently took the boy by the arm. He looked at me, his face soaked with tears, shuddered, and began to cry again, quietly this time.
   “Dogs and small children are supposed to naturally trust me,” I muttered. “I guess you didn’t get the memo.”
   I picked up the boy, who sobbed but didn’t resist, exited the taxi, passed through the gate, and began to trek down the dirt road towards that faint spark of light. As always while travelling, I had my keychain with me, a small Swiss Army knife connected to a mini-Maglite flashlight, and once again it came in handy. After some awkward juggling I wound up with the shaking, weeping boy in the crook of my right arm and the flashlight in my left hand.
   I thought uneasily of all the land-mine signs and warnings in every guidebook. There were still a million live land mines in this country, and we were close enough to Sarajevo that the field surrounding this dirt track probably contained its share. As long as we stayed on the road we should be all right, but if the boy decided to wriggle away and run off…I tightened my hold on him and picked up my pace, trying to walk without thinking about where I was, or what I was doing, or why. No good would come of that.
   We walked maybe half a mile. There