Audacious (15 page)

“What about yours?”

“Ten-for-ten at twenty-five feet. But I have never had to actually shoot a man.”

“Lucky you,” Kris said, dryly.

“I believe so. Now, the cause for our peripatetic journey is some good news for you. And, as is the custom around you, some bad news.”

“And as is my custom, I’ll take the good news first.”

“Higher-ups have decided that we should grant you a temporary license to carry arms and a special protective contingent. That particular stunt yesterday of mixing your team with those guarding Mrs. Tordon was quite brilliant. With some of your Marines guarding her, she already having a permit, and then switching off guarding you, it might well result in a plea that they had a weapon on her detail and got switched so suddenly to your detail that they didn’t have time to return their arms to the armory. A brilliant sleight of hand. But then, General Trouble is also your great-grandfather.”

Kris considered relieving the inspector of his illusion, but thought better of it. Once in a while a good deed should get the kind of reward it deserved. The Marines had taken it upon themselves to stand up a guard for their general’s woman with not a second’s thought. If it now got them the freedom to shoot back when shot at in the cause of protecting his great-grandbrat, well. Good for them.

Kris felt good for all of three seconds, then remembered the lead-in to this little chat. “And the bad news is…?”

“Since this is a temporary permit, any security used that is not already under license by the Personal Security Administration of Garden City, such as your Marines, will have to use only nonlethal protection devices.”

Kris considered that for a long moment. Then said, “I am going to produce my weapon, since it is now, I assume, legal.”

“It is legal. I will not feel any obligation to confiscate it. Assuming it shoots nonlethal darts.”

“There is that issue,” Kris said, bringing out her Browning automatic. “This little puppy was given to me by, well, never mind. It chambers a 4-mm dart, either from the right magazine, which loads Colt-Pfizer’s highest-quality sleepy darts. Or, at the flick of a switch, armor-piercing rounds from the left magazine. I assume if I and my Marines promise to always keep the selector on the right side, you won’t be all that concerned if the left magazine is not empty?”

“It could complicate an investigation,” the inspector said, but he didn’t contradict her.

“You are aware that with enough of a propellant charge a sleepy dart will smash flesh, bone, and skulls?”

“Oh, it can? I hadn’t heard” didn’t reach the usual level of conviction that Kris had come to expect in the most two-faced of diplomatic exchanges.

And Kris suddenly felt very tired of playing guessing games and “Thimble, thimble, who’s got the thimble,” where the thimble probably wasn’t anywhere within a day’s drive.

“Inspector, you and I both know that my exit from Hotel Landfall a few days back was not by the normal route. And I left a rather high body count on the pavement between there and the embassy. Yet none of that made it into the papers; none of the bodies showed up at the morgue. You want to tell me where they went? More important, if my Marines need to put a similar number, or more, of such optimists down hard, will their bodies do a similar disappearing act or be used as evidence against me and my Marines in a court of what passes for law on Eden?”

“Why don’t you ask your maid?”

That answer from deep in left field knocked Kris off her stride. “What does Abby have to do with this?”

“Yesterday afternoon, she visited the hood where most of those shooters were hired. She met with the gang bosses, at least one of them. She spent quite a bit of time with several members of the gang and even gave one of them a computer and bought supper for him and his girlfriend.”

Kris felt like she’d launched herself for a skiff drop from orbit… but forgot the skiff.

N
ELLY, DID YOU TRACK
A
BBY’S WHEREABOUTS YESTERDAY?

N
O,
K
RIS, SHE THROTTLED HER SQUAWKER.
S
HE SENT A MESSAGE TO HERSELF WITH A CC COPY TO YOU FOR OPENING LATER LAST NIGHT, BUT SHE ERASED BOTH WHEN SHE GOT IN.
I
DID NOT OPEN IT AND HAVE NOTHING AVAILABLE TO LOOK AT NOW.

N
ELLY,
I
’M VERY UNIMPRESSED WITH YOUR WORK PERFORMANCE.

I
KNOW,
K
RIS.
B
UT YOU ALWAYS KNEW THAT
A
BBY WAS BUYING THE TOP-OF-THE-LINE ENCRYPTION SYSTEMS.
A
ND SHE CHANGES IT TOO OFTEN FOR ME TO CRACK IT.

W
E NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS LATER.
“Inspector, can you share with me where my most
loyal
maid went yesterday? Royal courtesy or what have you?”

“I shouldn’t,” he responded, but he was clearly enjoying being ahead of Kris on something. A map of Garden City suddenly reflected off the sedan’s front window. A line appeared in red, with various other colored lines intersecting it. Sometimes they merely crossed. Other times, they went quite aways together.

K
RIS, THE MESSAGE WAS SENT FROM THERE
. And a green X appeared along with the red and black line late in the day. It was on Kris’s vision, not something the inspector could see.

“Well, Inspector, it appears that you know something I don’t know— ah, didn’t know. I will need to look into this.”

He grinned proudly.

“Oh, and could you tell me why you’re the one letting me know about my new permit? Shouldn’t Lieutenant Martinez have delivered it?” That put a dent in his grin.

“Your case has been elevated. I’ll be handling all your issues for the time being.”

And thus keeps me from talking to someone who can’t vote and might give me an interesting perspective on your planet.

Kris gave the inspector the empty-headed socialite grin she occasionally got away with. Clearly, she had a lot on her plate at the moment. And the inspector had played his distraction game very well.

Kris made a mental note. There had to be something in the fine print that would leave her with a question or two. A question that she really didn’t need to bother a full-fledged inspector about.

But first, matters close to home. Why was Abby talking to the people who had done their best to kill Kris?

20

Nelly
,
TELL
J
ACK,
A
BBY, AND
P
ENNY
I
WANT THEM IN MY QUARTERS NOW
! Kris thought as she marched into the embassy. T
ELL THEM FIVE MINUTES AGO WOULD BE EVEN BETTER.
O
H, AND TELL
P
ENNY SHE CAN BRING HER THUMB SCREWS.

Y
OU ARE JOKING,
K
RIS?

J
UST TELL EACH OF THEM WHAT
I
TOLD YOU TO TELL THEM.

Y
ES,
Y
OUR
H
IGHNESS, MA’AM, BOSS.

Kris found Abby already in her quarters.

“You got a command performance, baby duck,” she said, removing Kris’s cover and running a testing hand through her hair. “Ambassador says there’s this charity art show that you just must make an appearance at. Oh, and he suggests that you spend some of that Longknife money buying some of this art… for goodwill sake.”

Kris stepped away from her maid. Was this for real, or was Abby just doing another one of her Oh-we’re-so-busy-no-time-to-talk song and dances?

The arrival of Jack and Penny interrupted that dance. To Kris’s disappointment, the professional interrogator was not juggling thumb screws or pushing a rack.

And people said Kris had problems following orders!

Abby raised an eyebrow at the intrusions, then did her best disappearing act, backing herself up against a wall and leaving the floor to the others.

“Not this time,” Kris said, and used Abby’s own movement to corner her. “What were you doing yesterday?” Kris demanded.

“You gave me the afternoon off. I was on personal business. Even a poor maid needs a bit of time to herself,” Abby said as self-righteous as any who spoke for the downtrodden masses.

Kris shook her head. “Not good enough. What were you doing yesterday meeting with the very gangs that provided the shooters that I was running from three days ago? Why did you have supper with two of those gang members?”

Now Kris found Jack at her right elbow, Penny at her left. They said nothing, getting their briefing, as it were, from Kris’s own questions. But what they heard caused narrowing eyes to go hard as they locked on Abby.

“I thought everyone had a right to some privacy. Isn’t there any time a poor working woman can call her own. And why were you spying on me?” Abby shot back. It hadn’t taken the maid very long to find grounds for a counterattack.

She was good.

“I was not spying on you, though the next time you throttle the GPS squawker on your computer you better have a good reason. No, Inspector Johnson seems to have all of us under surveillance. Don’t spit on the sidewalk, any of you, or you’ll end up with a rap sheet. But let’s get back to the questions I’m asking. Why were you meeting with gang leaders?”

Abby pulled herself to her full height, and if possible, her back got even more rigid. She sniffed. “I was
not
meeting with them. I failed to avoid them while getting the hell out of Dodge. They demanded to know why they shouldn’t take out on me some of Your Highness’s bad karma with them. My argument was brilliant, and they bowed to my logic.”

“How many did you kill?” Jack demanded.

“None. I said they bowed to my logic.”

“Am I the only one having a hard time swallowing this?” Penny said.

Once again, Abby was doing a great job of misdirecting her interrogators. Kris held up three fingers. “Okay, let’s say you answered one. Why buy a couple of gangers supper?”

“Because Bronc needed the time to put together the computer I’d bought him. The cops did mention that I bought one of them a set, or rather the parts to build a set.”

This was getting weird. Kris still had two fingers up. She would not let Abby confuse her… or deflect this line of questioning.

“You bought two ganger’s supper?”

“No, I bought pizza for my niece, who I assure you is not part of any gang. And I bought a computer for her boyfriend, also not part of any gang, for helping me do what I went there to do,” Abby said very slowly. “He also liked the pizza. I hear most teenage boys do.”

“So why were you in that part of town? With your squawker off!” Kris demanded.

“I. Was. Looking. For. My. Mother.”

“Your mother” came in three separate gasps.

“Yes, my mother. Everybody has one, don’t you know, Kris.” Abby gave Kris one of her dry scowls. “Didn’t your mother give you the basic talk about the birds and bees? Princesses have mothers. Maids have mothers. Princess’s usually have fathers. For a maid it is optional. Makes it easier. If you’re born a bastard you don’t have to work so hard to earn the title… as some around here do.”

“She did say she was from Eden,” Penny pointed out.

“And I didn’t want to come back here, may I remind you.”

“So you went looking for your mom… on the worst side of this town,” Kris said.

“When you’re born and raised on that side of town, where else you gonna look?”

“So you found your niece,” Jack said.

“With a whole lot of help from her boyfriend. I’d promised him a computer. You wouldn’t believe what he was doing with just an old magazine reader.”

“With a whole lot of help…” Penny said. Kris gave her a glance. Maybe they had taught her something in interrogator’s school.

“With a whole lot of help,” Abby said slowly, “we talked Cara into taking me home to meet the family.”

“Why’s that?” Penny asked.

“Why do you think? Princess here was born and raised in Nuu House. Fancy place. The first couple of houses I lived in got bulldozed for urban renewal. Nothing growing there but a few weeds, but trust me, it’s an improvement.”

Abby paused, swallowed hard. “When I was twelve, I didn’t take a lot of friends home, either.” Then again she stiffened. “And I killed my squawker ’cause I wasn’t all that interested in any of you knowing where I was… what I was looking for.”

“I’m sorry, Abby,” Kris said, wondering if she just bought another ticket for a ride. “Did you see your mother again?”

“Yeah, and my sister. And Cara. A good kid. She deserves better.”

That got three nods.

“Well, if you need time off to visit…” Kris started.

Abby cut her off. “If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be going back there anytime soon.”

Again three people nodded, knowing that whatever feelings were going through Abby, they had no idea what they were.

“But I will be going back a whole lot sooner than I want.”

“Why?” Kris asked.

“Because I bought Bronc a whole lot more computer than I’d planned on. He’ll need it if he’s going to stay alive with a Longknife on this planet.”

“Huh?” This conversation was going round and round. Was there a center to it?

“Kris, my mom knows I’m working for you. My momma’s gotten herself uptown. Says you might be surprised to find her being squired around on some fancy man’s elbow at a party or two.”

“That’s, ah, nice,” Kris said, but tried to leave half a question mark hanging.

“Not nice… at all. There’s no reason for her to know I’m working for you. Your name was in all the papers. I wasn’t even in the background of any of your pictures.”

Kris took a step back, no longer pinning Abby to the wall. The others beside her were backpeddling, too.

“Maybe she saw your name in some landing report?” Penny offered.

“For a planet like Eden, where everything’s a secret, the chances of that are poor. And when you consider I am now Abby Nightingale, a name my mother never knew me by, it gets harder and harder to match her knowing I was back— and working for you— to just coincidence.”

Kris nodded slowly. Yes, this was a whole new development. An entirely different can of worms.