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

were no sounds but the child’s soft sobs and my Doc Martens against the dirt ruts and tire tracks. The weeds on either side of the road had not been touched for years. The spark of light grew and resolved into a single bare fluorescent bar, the only illumination outside a big concrete-and-metal building, some three hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, surrounded by a flat gravel field. Once upon a time it had been some kind of factory, but it looked long-deserted, almost all the doors and windows were boarded up. The light glowed above a set of concrete stairs that led up a few feet to a loading dock. The door next to the light was an eight-foot-square sheet of horizontally corrugated metal that slid up and down. There were two vehicles parked near the light. A gleaming new Land Rover, the vehicle of choice for Bosnia’s warlords, criminals, thugs, and venal officials, and a familiar empty white Mitsubishi pickup.
   I stood before the steel door for a long moment. The boy had given up on crying and buried his face in my shoulder instead. I could feel his quick panting breaths and his warm damp face and his jackhammer heartbeat. He felt very heavy now but I didn’t want to put him down. It wasn’t just fear of him running away. Some kind of paternal instinct had arisen during our walk down that dark dirt road. I felt jealously protective of him and afraid for us both. I didn’t know exactly what lay behind that steel door, but I was pretty confident that the answer included violent armed criminals. Maybe my refugee-smuggling theory was wrong. Maybe for some reason the family had been brought here to be executed and the child was lucky to have been left behind.
   I considered my options. The smart thing to do was obvious. Turn around, go back, take the taxi back to the city, confer with Talena, and turn the kid over to the police in the morning. Hell, the Bosnian police were so corrupt they probably knew these smugglers by their first name, they could deliver the boy to them during their first donut break.
   But I wanted to return this child to his family. I knew that his family was just behind that door. I did not really think they had been brought here to their deaths. And, yes, it was kind of insane that I was standing here at all, but now that I had come this far it was too late to chicken out and turn around.
   That last was really the deciding factor. A stupid motivation, granted, but enough. I banged on the door with my left fist, using my Swiss Army knife to generate a pleasingly loud metal-on-metal sound. The boy started to cry again.
   Loud but muffled voices behind the door expressed surprise in the guttural warlike sounds of Serbo-Croatian. I heard the tromp of heavy boots, followed by a few questions aimed in my direction. I banged on the door again. There was a moment of silence. Then the grating rattle of metal on metal as the door rose up, revealing three men and one woman, all of them carrying guns, all of them aiming at me. I had planned to say “Avon calling” or something equally amusing, but staring down four gun barrels really saps one’s desire to be flip and entertaining. I barely forced an unconvincing smile.
   The woman, a tall slender black-clad redhead who would have been intimidating even unarmed, unleashed a jackhammer sequence of harsh syllables which I was sure translated to something like “Who the fucking fuck are you?”
   “Sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, trying to make my voice as soothing as a hypnotist. “Does anyone here speak English?”
   They stared at me, dumbfounded. The guns stayed aimed at my head and body as if magnetically attracted.  It took a lot of effort to keep the smile on my face. It had been a long time since I had faced a situation anything like this. My slivovitz courage had evaporated in the face of all those guns, and my whole body trembled with adrenaline and fear.
   I looked past the guns, hoping to find a willing