Chapter 4

The Laundromat

Lena's POV

For four days, Adrian Volkov kept every single term.

The driver turned out to be a gray-haired man named Pavel, who drove a gray Camry, listened to opera at a volume just barely audible and said exactly four words to me each morning..

"Good morning, Miss Harper." He never came inside the hospital. He never parked within sight of my building. Once, when I walked out of the staff garage in the pouring rain, he was standing beside my car with an umbrella and he stepped back the moment I took it, as if the umbrella had been the whole job.

Dmitri moved out of the ICU into a step-down room under a different name. He asked me every shift whether the door was locked and every shift I checked it in front of him. His fever was gone. His color was coming back. In the evenings, Viktor came and sat in a plastic chair outside his room with a crossword puzzle, solving it in pen and swearing softly at the clues.

It was almost easy to forget what I'd signed up for.

Then, on Friday, Maya dropped into the chair across from me in the cafeteria with two paper cups and a look that I recognized from every time she had ever caught a doctor lying.

"Okay," she said. "Don't freak out."

"That's the opposite of how you start a sentence if you don't want me to freak out."

"There's a guy." She slid a cup toward me. "I saw him Wednesday outside the coffee cart on Wells, reading a newspaper. Same page. For twenty minutes. Today he was across from the hospital entrance, reading 'the same page.' Tall, green jacket, face like a locked door. And he is not your Camry man, because I made friends with your Camry man on Tuesday. He gave me a butterscotch."

I set down my cup very carefully. "Green jacket."

"Lena." Her voice dropped. "What's going on?"

"Nothing I can't handle." I took out my phone. "Give me one minute."

Out in the stairwell, I dialed the number on the blank white card. The line picked up before the first ring finished.

"Lena."

"There's a second man on me," I said. "Green jacket. I was told one."

The silence on the other end lasted two full seconds. I had a feeling that two seconds was a very long time for him.

"Where are you tonight?" he asked.

"The laundromat on Clark and Belmont. Eleven o'clock. Come alone." I hung up before he could answer.

***

The all-night laundromat smelled of hot lint and cheap detergent and glowed fluorescent white against the dark street. I had a basket of scrubs, three towels and a king-size fitted sheet that I had already lost a war with twice. Pavel's Camry was parked a full block away. I was learning to take that kind of courtesy seriously.

Adrian came in at five to eleven. No coat tonight, just a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed to his forearms and I could see the pale scars across the backs of his hands. He sat in an orange plastic chair across from me, between a vending machine and a dryer that thumped like a heartbeat and looked, absurdly, like a lion in a waiting room.

"Say it," I said.

"Viktor put a man on you Wednesday. On my order. I didn't tell you." He didn't look away and he didn't dress it up. "You said one man and I said one man. It was a lie."

I had spent the whole walk over rehearsing what I'd say to a man who lied. I hadn't prepared for one who admitted it in the first thirty seconds.

"Why?"

"Because Pavel watches the garage. Nobody watches the street. And because..." He stopped and for a moment I watched him decide whether to say the true thing. "Because I am not used to asking. Asking feels like losing and I have spent fifteen years not losing."

"That isn't an answer. That's an excuse with a nicer voice."

"Yes." He nodded once. "I'm sorry."

I stared at him. The dryer thumped. Somewhere in the back, a coin dropped into a machine with a bright, small ring.

"You're allowed to say that?"

"I'm told it takes practice."

I folded a pillowcase, corner to corner, because I needed something to do with my hands. "He goes away tonight."

"He's already gone. I called him before I walked in."

"And I want something."

"Name it."

"The envelope." I looked up. "You've seen it, I haven't and I've signed my name to it. I'm in this whether I like it or not. I want to know what I'm protecting."

This time the silence was heavier. A man could not tell a civilian this and expect to stay safe. I knew it and I watched him know it.

"Money," Adrian said at last. His voice was low, controlled and absolutely level. "Eight months of transfers out of Volkov accounts, through shell companies, into a network of arms dealers in Ohio and Texas. It's skimming. My family's name is on every page. Someone moved that money without my knowledge and then someone else decided a man carrying the proof should die before I saw it."

"Dmitri."

"Dmitri said 'he.' 'I did what he told me.'" Adrian's jaw tightened. "So it's someone who gives orders inside my house and I don't know who."

I thought of Dmitri in his bed, asking about the locked door every single shift.

"Then he's scared of the right thing," I said slowly. "He isn't afraid of the men who shot him. He's afraid of someone who might walk in through your front door. I can't treat that with morphine, but I can treat it with routine. Same nurse. Same time. Same locked door. If he trusts me, he'll talk. If he doesn't sleep, he won't."

Adrian studied me. "You just made yourself part of my investigation."

"I made myself part of my patient's recovery," I said. "You can call it whatever helps."

Something that was almost a laugh left him, soft and surprised. He looked down at the fitted sheet draped across the table, a wrinkled, shapeless thing and one eyebrow lifted.

"May I?"

"You're asking."

"I'm practicing."

I handed him two corners. He took them with a care that made my throat tight and I showed him how to tuck one corner inside the other, then the next, until the edges lined up. His hands were steady and warm. Our knuckles brushed and neither of us moved away.

His eyes fell to my left wrist, to the thin white scar that curled along the bone.

"I was seven," I said. "I put my arm through a kitchen window chasing a neighbor's cat."

"Did you catch it?"

"Obviously."

He turned his own hand over, showing a ragged pale line that ran from his thumb to his wrist. "Broken bottle. I was fifteen. My father said it was a lesson."

"What was the lesson?"

"I never found out." He folded the last corner. The sheet lay flat between us, neat and square, the best-folded sheet in Chicago. "I think he was wrong about most things."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. I let go of the cloth. He let go a second later.

"Next time," I said, "you ask."

"Next time I'll ask."

When he was gone, I sat in the orange chair and watched my dryer spin an empty load, because I'd forgotten to put anything in it. I stayed another twenty minutes watching it, which is how I knew I was in real trouble…