I’ll tell you but don’t hurt her!! Kirtan had written (the crushed throat matter).
“No, no, kuritsa. I won’t hurt a hair on her head. I just need to have a talk with Vimal. I won’t hurt him either. That’s a peeing promise.”
Rostov had had to read the response twice, to make it out—the kid’s hand was shaking so. The message was: Will die before I tell you if you hurt her.
Which made no sense.
“Hair on head. Really.”
Peeing promise. Rostov had just made that phrase up but he liked it. He’d use it again.
He’d bent down and slid the knife along the kid’s fingernail.
In three minutes, poof. Vimal’s girlfriend was Adeela Badour. And she lived in East Elmhurst, Queens, a mile or so from Vimal’s family.
A check of Google revealed that a Mohammad Badour lived at the address. And, yes, he had two daughters, Adeela and Taalia, twenty-two and ten. Though, sadly, no online pictures of the little creatures. Some parents were so protective.
“Anyone else?” Rostov had asked. “That Vimal is close to?”
Kirtan had shaken his head vigorously. His last gesture. Rostov had slit his throat then. It was a favor, he reasoned. The kid would have lived with guilt his whole life, for having given up Vimal and his friend.
After he died—which took some messy time—Rostov had cut his pinkie finger off and placed it, still holding the travesty of a ring, into Kirtan’s slack-jawed mouth. The Promisor didn’t have to limit himself to making statements only about diamonds on the fingers of slutty fiancées.
Adeela Badour…
He’d be at her house soon.
At a traffic light, he took a napkin from his pocket and coughed into it for a moment. Fucker, he thought angrily. A problem all his life. Cigarettes, of course. He’d stop smoking someday. The condition would go away.
He wondered if this Adeela was sexy. He generally preferred pale-complexioned women. But since he’d been thinking of the little Persian kur, Kitten and Scheherazade, he was of a mind to spend some time with a darker girl, an Arab girl. Hell, didn’t matter if she was sexy. He was hungry. He needed a woman. Now.
Oh, and the Promisor would keep his peeing promise to Kirtan. What was going to happen to her wouldn’t damage a single hair on her head.
Chapter 45
It’d be an adventure.”
“Adventure,” Adeela Badour replied to Vimal, clearly troubled by his choice of words. “What is this? A quest? The Hobbit.”
They were in her backyard. The Badours had a nice house, brick with red wooden trim, in East Elmhurst, Queens, about a mile from Vimal’s family. This neighborhood embraced LaGuardia airport and on days when the wind wasn’t kind, residents would have to endure the scream of jets skimming over houses to land on Runway 4. Today the air was, more or less, quiet.
The Badours’ home was bigger than the Lahoris’; Adeela’s father had a good job with a big tech company, her mother—like his—was a nurse. The place featured a yard with a well-tended garden, both rare here.
As far as Vimal was concerned, though, one of the better features was a detached garage, behind the house, which opened onto an alley, shared by all the homes here.
Better, because it was in the musty structure that Vimal and Adeela had first kissed—daringly in the backseat of her mother’s Subaru—after the adults had gone to sleep, of course—and where they had explored, touching and tasting, growing warm, teasing open buttons and finally a zipper or two.
At the moment, though, the mood was different. The only agenda item was escape.
He directed her into the garage, just to be out of sight, though he wasn’t concerned the ski-masked man had found his way here—that would be impossible. But he didn’t want neighbors to see him and call his father.
She leaned against her car, an old dark-green Mazda (fond memories there too, though the backseats were comically small). There was no room inside the garage for a second vehicle. Much of the rest of the space was occupied with a shabby workbench and limp storage cartons, inscribed with faded labels describing contents. Mothers dishes. Clothes for goodwill. Textbooks/diapers.
He said, “I’m not making, you know, light of it or anything. I mean, it’d be a change for you.”
“California?” she asked. “Why California?”
“Have you ever been?”
Adeela fired a thoughtful look, tilting her head. “In a land long ago, far away, there was a magical place out to the west, beyond the far reaches of humankind.”
Vimal sighed. Now she was being sardonic. “I’m just—”
“Disney, Legoland, San Francisco, Yosemite. I skied in July at Mammoth.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound like you were…what’s that word?”
“Young, provincial, naive?”
He sighed, but only slightly. Then recovered. “So? Did you like it?”
“Vim! Of course. That has nothing to do with anything. How can you just pick up and go—and expect me—”
“Not expect.”
“—to go with you?”
“UCLA has a fine arts program with a sculpting track. And a great medical school. I checked.” Then he took her hand.
“This isn’t the time to be thinking about that.” Her brown eyes narrowed. “You’re a witness to a murder. Do you get it, that this is not a normal time? Is that registering with you? You’re joking about adventures. This is serious!”
“I’m not saying we jump on the train today. I’ll go and then I’ll find a place and—”
“Train to California?” Her beautiful sculpted brows furrowed. “Oh, because you can’t fly because you’re on a watchlist. People don’t take trains across the country, Vim. Does that tell you anything?”
He fell silent. “Would you consider it?”
“Vim, just tell him you don’t want to cut anymore.”
He released her hand, stepped away and walked to the small window in the side wall of the garage, grimy and half obscured by a persistent weed. He laughed softly at her comment, which appeared to be a non sequitur, but was in fact the whole point of his fight.
His father, the person the police couldn’t protect him from.
The person he was fleeing as ardently as he was the killer.
Vimal loved Adeela Badour. He’d fallen for her the first time he’d seen her. It was in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village—one of the old-time ones, way-way-way pre-Starbucks. She’d been poring over a detailed diagram of the heart in an anatomy book and whispering the names of veins and arteries and muscles—or whatever medical students need to know about the pump, which was presumably everything.
He’d sat down and opened his Michelangelo book.
The ice-breaking conversation was, of course, anatomy. Flesh and blood, in one case. Marble, in the other.
They’d begun dating not long after that and had been in a monogamous relationship since then. From early on the subject of marriage surfaced regularly in his thoughts. On some days, he viewed marrying her as a goal that could be achieved by practical planning, like with most couples. Other days, more frequent, their saying “I do” was about as feasible as using their arms to fly.
The problem was that Romeo and Juliet thing.