Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka

one was empty. Assuming each condo had a companion berth, and assuming the odd-numbered ones went with the apartments on the second floor, Illya Tyagachev was missing his car.
    “Where is he now?” Alena asked from the backseat.
    “Working, he drives a cab,” Dan said. “Graveyard shift. I didn’t want Vadim following him all night long, he might’ve made that. I told him to get rest, instead, so he’s back at the hotel.”
    Alena hissed softly with displeasure.
    “When does he get off work?” I asked.
    “Another hour—he drives midnight to eight,” Dan said, quickly, as if trying to assure us that his lack of surveillance didn’t translate to a lack of information. “Heads home, crashes, gets up again around four in the afternoon, heads out again.”
    “To his other job,” I said.
    Dan had turned us away from the condos, had us on a main thoroughfare heading south, back towards the heart of the city. He shot me a glance, vaguely suspicious.
    “You know about the other job?”
    “He didn’t pay for that place on a hack’s salary,” I said. “And if he did what he did to us for money, I’m sure it was spent long ago. There’s another job, got to be. That’s probably how you found him.”
    “There is another job,” Dan confirmed. “He sells meth.”
             
    “Russians,” Dan told us. “Add in the others: Ukrainians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, all the rest. Over sixty thousand of them are here. That’s why Illya came here. He didn’t want to leave the U.S. of A., but he couldn’t leave his people, either. He probably went to Seattle first, maybe San Francisco, we haven’t been able to track all his movements yet. But he ended up here, maybe six, seven months ago.”
    Dan leaned his chair, threatening to topple backwards on the people eating their McDonald’s burgers at the table behind him. We were in the food court of an indoor shopping mall. The court was on the third level, open in the middle with a view down to the ice rink below, where maybe two dozen boys and girls were wobbling about on skates. Music drifted up at us, distorted, the Vangelis theme from
Chariots of Fire.
Between that, the cavernous acoustics, and the ambient noise of shoppers and diners, there was little chance of being overheard.
    “Anyway, he finds where the Russians are, you know how it is. Meets the people he needs to meet, gets himself a gig running meth from the labs outside of town to the sellers here in the town. Lot of meth here. They have a lot of the wide open spaces here in Oregon; you need that if you cook meth. Stuff stinks like shit in sunshine.”
    I nodded. When he said “Oregon,” he said it “ore-ee-gone.”
    “You know the people he’s working with?” I asked. “That how you found him?”
    “One of them I know from the old days. He heard from a friend who heard from a friend who heard from a friend that I was looking for this guy, that it was personal for me. Illya, he changed his name, he calls himself Maks Dugachev now.”
    “And you’re
certain
it’s him?” I asked again.
    Dan sat forward, bringing his chair down with a slam, getting angry. “I told you, I checked for myself, I made visual confirmation. This is personal for me.”
    “And the people, your friend’s friend’s friend, you trust this guy?”
    “I told you, I trust him.”
    “How do you know him?”
    “It doesn’t matter! I know him, he won’t fuck with me, he understands the personal, okay?”
    “It matters to me,” I insisted. “It matters if he tips ‘Maks’ that we’re on to him.”
    Dan shot me a look, then spoke to Alena in Russian, asking why the hell he should put up with my bullshit. She’d been sitting with her chair turned away from us, chin on the railing, gazing down at the skaters. Without looking back, she told him that he had to put up with my bullshit because my bullshit was her bullshit, and if he didn’t like hearing it from me, he could hear it from her instead, and