the small rectangular shape vibrating inside. After sneaking out the cell phone that I hadn’t known was there, I flipped it on and glanced at the three-word message on the screen.
men’s room now
I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “I gotta hit the bathroom before we go.”
Nolan gave me a distrustful glance. “It’s cold and dark out there, kid. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Don’t worry.” On the way past the bar, I brushed past Swierczynski, who’d been sitting there with a thick mug of coffee, to the heavy wooden door marked HERREN. In the background I heard Nolan’s voice continuing to warn me not to be stupid.
I swung the door open. The men’s room was freezing cold, and right away I saw why. The window was wide open and Gobi was standing in front of me with a thick slab of wood in her hands. For a second all I could do was stare at her in shock.
“You are late.”
“Gobi, how-”
She pushed past me and jammed the wooden beam against the door, wedging it into the tiles and blocking it shut from the inside.
“Crawl through window.”
“What happened to the-”
“No talking.” She boosted me through the open window and out into the darkness, where I fell straight down into a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and bags of trash. A cat squalled and took off running. Gobi, having crawled through and dropped down after me, took my hand and yanked me up onto my feet. As we ran around to the front of the restaurant, I heard voices from inside, Nolan and the bartender and good old Swierczy, shouting, coughing, hammering on the door. There was an ice machine pushed in front of the main entrance, blocking it shut, and thick smoke oozing from the slight gap, but the door wasn’t opening any farther than that.
I looked up at the roof.
“You blocked the chimney?”
“Watch out.” She pointed at the unconscious body of the driver sprawled on the ground next to the Peugeot, then opened the driver’s-side door. “You can still drive stick, yes?”
I got in and started the engine.
38. “Needle Hits E” — Sugar
“We have to talk,” I said.
She pointed out the intersection up ahead, where a rectangular yellow sign read MULHOUSE, FR-50 KM. “Turn left here.”
“How did you escape from Paula?”
“Is not far from here. Roads are clear.” She checked her watch.
“How did you find me?” I looked down at the phone that she’d dropped in my pocket. “Does this thing have a GPS tracking beacon on it or something?”
She closed her eyes and sat back as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Are you even going to answer me?”
She didn’t move. The Peugeot’s tires hugged the road, its high-performance engine barely making a sound above the low, steady whir of precision engineering. My hands tightened on the wheel and I checked to make sure we were both wearing our seat belts. Coming around the next bend, I swung to the side of the road and slammed the brakes hard enough to make her sit up straight and stare at me. Her face was taut and strained, and the glare in her eyes could have smelted pig iron.
“That asshole back at the restaurant told me everything,” I said. “I know about…” Even then, as upset as I was, I couldn’t make myself say the words
Gobi just kept glaring at me. Her silence was a void, like no other silence in the world. It seemed to collapse inward, sucking all other sound into it, like the aural equivalent of a black hole. For a long moment we just sat there, facing each other like the last two people in Switzerland.
“Is nothing,” she murmured.
“Bullshit.”
“Is epilepsy.”
“Who tells you these things? Kaya?” She snapped a glance back in the direction that we’d come. “They lie.”
“Gobi, I saw the images of your brain.”
“And of course medical pictures cannot ever be altered. Images doctored. Different names put on.”
“If they’re lying, then why were you working for them?”
She stared at the window, and I felt my heart race harder, like a gallon jug glugging out its contents into the hole at the bottom of my chest. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I’d been hoping for another explanation, any explanation, hoping for anything besides what Nolan alleged to be true. Partly because I’d already decided that Gobi was the only way that I was going to save my family, but also because Gobi was Gobi. She was twenty-four years old. She belonged in the world-if not my world, than at least some version of it, somewhere.
“Look,” I said. “I know that guy Nolan promised you the operation if you took care of Armitage and Monash and Paula. He told me all about it.”
“Is not for you to worry.”
“Oh, okay, I’ll just stop. I’ll just switch off my worrier.” I reached for her hand, and she jerked away as if I’d given her a shock. “You know what, if you can’t stand me so much, why the hell did you even bother coming back for me?”
“You would not survive five minutes on your own.”
I felt a quick sting of anger. “Yeah, well, meet me in a year from now and we’ll see who’s doing better.”
She stiffened, drawing in a sharp breath, then exhaled with a little shudder and looked at me. The shadows across her face made it hard to see her expression, but her eyes gleamed around the rims in the light of the dashboard.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “That was harsh. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”
“You are doctor, Perry, yes? Go to medical school?”
“No.”
“But you are genius, yes? Smart American boy, you can see everything, you know what is right for everybody else?”
“Gobi-”
“You want to worry about someone, worry about yourself, falling in love with some rich girl who would sleep with your father to get what she wanted.”
“Don’t even go there.”
She spat out something, a curse in Lithuanian that didn’t require any translation. “Just drive.”
I took my hands off the wheel. “Forget it.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to help you,” I snapped. “Don’t you get that? I’m the only one that you can actually trust.”
Gobi glared at me. For a second I couldn’t tell if she was going to take a swing at me or shove me out of the car. Then her chin trembled and her whole expression quivered and she started to laugh.
I stared at her. “Now what?”
“I forgot how funny you are when you get mad.” She wrinkled up her forehead, lowering her voice, transforming it into an annoyingly accurate imitation of mine.
“Okay, first of all, I don’t sound like that-”
