MORNING SERIAL
HE then bent down to Lou and spoke to her in a hushed tone in a language I couldn’t place. He looked over to me, as did Lou, and he stroked his chin some more and nodded.
Stelly leaned across to the captain’s side and said, “You going to trust her, cap? You going to listen to her? She not from here. She not one of us, cap.”
The captain ignored him, and reached behind Lou and cut the binding at her wrists.
“This is a mistake,” I said. “She is here to kill these girls.”
Dina and Darya waited, clinging to each other.
Lou stood. “I’m here to take them home,” she said to me with a stern, angry glare.
The five militia by this point were bystanders, relaxed, leaning: a Francis Benthemsketch-in-waiting. But when the captain took his revolver from its holster and turned to Stelly, the woman who had been his point of contact stepped forward urgently.
“No,” she said. “He is a Golden Orphan.” That Turkish phrase again.
Stelly grinned and seemed to tense and stretch so his legs pulled out and the veins in his neck pushed from under his woody skin.
“I know who he is,” the captain said, and he fired a single shot through Stelly’s eye. “And I am not a superstitious Greek.”
Dina and Darya convulsed at the scene and I went to them and turned them away.
“And him?” the captain said, and I turned to see he was asking Lou what was to be done with me. The five militia were now on edge. The Turks had violated something with the execution of Stelly.
Lou took a moment before saying, “He really doesn’t have a clue about anything.”
“He can identify you.” “But he won’t,” Lou said. The captain holstered his pistol and they both turned away from me as if to discuss more important business.
“I do know one thing,” I said. They turned back to me.
“I know that nobody needed to die here today. I know that given the choice you chose to do wrong.”
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW