“Right. I don’t think so.” He found a silver bowl and a linen cloth where she’d placed them on the counter, and winced at putting them to such rough usage. Who kept silver bowls in an RV, anyway? Apparently the woman who was currently oozing blood all over a velvet-covered sofa without a qualm.
He placed the bowl and his first aid kit on the coffee table and got to work, perched next to Baba on the edge of the couch. The scrape along her jaw looked raw and sore, and he had to fight the temptation to kiss it and make it better, settling for a little antibiotic ointment instead. He tried to be as gentle as possible, but the knee and elbow were both full of gravel that had to be cleaned out before he could bandage them. Baba’s face was white and set; she looked like some classical European statue of a goddess. If the goddess was covered with bruises and had black tar and grit ground into her skin.
“It’s a good thing you wear leathers,” Liam said as he picked out a couple of deeply embedded bits of stone with a pair of tweezers that looked tiny in his big hands. “This could have been a lot worse.” He blotted away a fresh upwelling of blood and winced. “Not that it isn’t bad enough. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you.”
Baba shrugged, although he noticed she took a long pull on her beer before saying, “My adoptive mother had a saying about such things.” She rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian that sounded like a coffee grinder running in reverse. “It means, roughly, pain is mostly mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
A chuckle escaped. “My old football coach had pretty much the same saying, only he usually made you do fifty push-ups after he said it.”
They both laughed, and Liam could feel a little of the accumulated tension slip away from his shoulders. After patting the knee dry, he dabbed some antibiotic ointment on it and started carefully wrapping a sterile dressing around the joint. Now that the worst part of the job was over, he tried not to look longingly at the beer dangling loosely from Baba’s long-fingered hand.
A blunt head nudged his leg and he looked down in amazement to see Chudo-Yudo sitting at his feet, a beer bottle lightly clenched between alarmingly large white teeth.
“Wow,” he said, taking it carefully from his unusual waiter and prying the top off with his Swiss Army knife. “That’s a very helpful dog.”
Baba just rolled her eyes. “Nice,” she said to the huge white animal. “You’re two for two. Let’s not push our luck, eh?”
As usual, Liam felt like he was missing half the conversation—the half that made sense, at that. So he changed the subject back to the issue that had brought him out here in the first place.
“I hate to bully my patients,” he said, tucking in the ends of the bandage and pushing his hair out of his eyes before starting to wrap her elbow. “But would you like to tell me why you thought it was a good idea to hassle Maya Freeman?”
Baba’s usual bland expression clouded over with the hint of a frown.
“I was hoping to catch her off guard and get her to admit to something,” she confessed. “Not much of a plan, I know. But I thought at least if I said something, she’d know that someone was on to her, and no more children would disappear.”
Liam said through gritted teeth as he packed up the rest of the first aid supplies, “You do realize that if Maya is involved, you have just warned her that you know she is involved, and that will make her much less likely to lead us to the children that have already gone missing.” He didn’t bother to point out that if Maya were really the culprit, Baba might have even put herself in danger; she’d already had a rough enough evening.
Baba sighed and swung her legs up onto the coffee table, her furry footrest having moved off to nap in front of the refrigerator, as if he was afraid that someone would steal something precious out of it while he slept. A slight snore rattled the cupboards.
“I said it wasn’t much of a plan, didn’t I?” She let her head droop back onto the crimson velvet cushion behind her, ebony lashes fluttering down to cover those remarkable eyes. “It is remotely possible that I may have acted a tad hastily. It’s only that I keep thinking about those children . . .”
Liam swallowed back all the retorts that had been about to zip out of his mouth like angry bees. “Yeah. I get that.” He shook his head, forgetting that Baba’s eyes were still closed and she couldn’t see him. Then he had to push that damned hair out of the way again. Any day now, he was going to find time to get it cut. Like when he was applying for another job because he’d been fired from this one.
“You know, you could have waited,” he said, trying not to let his frustration at her lack of faith in him show. After all, they’d just met; how was she to know that he took every lead seriously? Even hers. “I did actually check Ms. Freeman out more thoroughly, and everything looks perfect. No history of trouble with the law, excellent references from her last job—not so much as a parking ticket.”