“You got a lot of guts showing up here! You’re supposed to be dead!”

Gerrin drew a deep breath and replied “Well, that hasn’t happened yet”.

“You might want to work on that, you sookun sin (son of a bitch)”, Nadia glared at him.

“You know”, Gerrin continued scornfully, “you always did jump the gun on things. There’s an explanation here”.

“And I’ll bet you spent all night thinking it up”, she sneered.

One of the security guards approached them from the door. “Doctor Koshkin, is there a problem, here?” he eyed Gerrin.

Nadia waved him off. “No, I got this. We’re good, for now”.

“You sure?”

“We’re good”, she repeated. “I’ll let you know”.

“As you wish”, the guard said doubtfully, returning to his post.

Turning back to Gerrin, Nadia hissed “What the hell are you doing here?”

Gerrin ignored the question. “Koshkin? You re-married?”

“Well, being a mass-murderer’s wife wasn’t helping my career”, Nadia snorted.

“But Koshkin? He’s a plastic politician”.

“With a better name than you have! Now, what are you doing here?”

Gerrin paused for a beat. “Right now, I’m trying to get help for a girl with a gunshot wound”.

“What, did you try to kill her, too?”

“I didn’t try to kill anybody except the guys who tried to kill me first!” Gerrin rasped quietly but hotly.

“Oh, that’s a convenient excuse!”

Aldous broke it up. “HEY!!! Can you two do this later?!? My sister’s dying, here!”

Nadia looked from Aldous to Gerrin, then turned to the couch and bent over Loomie. “How did this happen?”

Gerrin answered “We were brokering for a cargo run and some former employees showed up with an attitude”.

“Oh, so you’ve gone from mass murderer to petty smuggler, is that it?”

“You think you can wait ‘till you get the whole story before damning me? Right now you got a job to do, so how about doing it?”

Nadia glared at him for a second, then turned toward Loomie, examined her, then called