Black Man (46 page)

“So?”

“So he was too close to the detail. It wasn’t just the age, it was the other stuff. He was talking about men in uniforms, debriefing in a steel trailerfab. Osprey’s handlers all wore suits. And we never had any trailers, the whole place was purpose-built and permanent.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’s read about it. Seen footage.”

“That’s not how it sounded, Sevgi. It sounded personal. As if he’d been involved.” He sighed. “I know.

Thirteen paranoia, right?”

She hesitated. “It’s pretty thin.”

“Yeah.” He looked away from her. Seemed to make an effort: she saw his mouth clamp. He met her eyes again. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that. Thought I had that shit locked down.”

“’sokay. Just don’t do it again. Ever.”

He took the blunt from her, very gently. It was down to the stub and smoldering unequally from where she’d stabbed his hand with it. He coaxed a little more from it, drew deep.

“So what’s going to happen now?” he asked, voice tight with holding down the smoke.

She grimaced. “Aftermath, like I said. We’re going to be chasing the detail for months, but they’ll start to fold the case priority away. Someone somewhere’s going to figure out how to knock off some major unlicensed Marstech again, and we’ll get switched to that. File Merrin for a rainy day.”

“Yeah. What I thought.”

“Look, let it go, Carl.” Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand, the same hand she’d scorched.

“Just let go and walk away. You’re home free. We’ll look at the
familia
thing, who knows, maybe we’ll get somewhere with it.”

“You go down there without me, all you’ll get is killed.” But he was smiling as he said it. “You saw what happened last time.”

She flickered the smile back at him. “Well, maybe we’ll be a bit less full-frontal in our approach.”

He grunted. Held up the dying blunt, querying. She shook her head, and he just held it there between them for a moment or two. Then he shrugged, took one last toke, and pitched it out through the cradle forks, down the long slope to the water.

“You chase that aftermath,” he said.

“We will.”

But out beyond the vault of starboard loading, the waves were starting to pale, black to gunmetal, as the early light of a whole new day crept in.

Back at the hotel, he opaqued the windows against the unwelcome dawn. Jet lag and fight ache stalked him through the darkened suite to the bed. He shed his clothes on the floor and stood staring down at them. s(t)igma, the back of the inmate jacket reminded him in cheery orange. Sevgi Ertekin stood in his thoughts and waved—she’d walked him up to the helipad on
Bulgakov’s Cat
and seen him off. Was still standing there with one arm raised as the
Cat
dropped away below and behind the autocopter, visible detail blurring out.

He grimaced, tried to shake the memory off.

He ripped the bed open irritably, crawled in, and tugged a sheet across his shoulder.

Sleep came and buried him.

The phone.

He rolled awake in the still-darkened room, convinced he’d only just closed his eyes. Steady blue glow digits at the bedside disputed the impression: 17:09. He’d slept through the day. He held up his wrist, peering stupidly at the watch he’d forgotten to take off, as if a hotel clock could somehow be wrong. The wrist ached from the fumbled blow he’d hit Merrin with. He turned it a little, flexing. Might even be—Phone. Answer the fucking—

He groped for it, dragged the audio receiver up to his ear.

“Yeah, what?”

“Marsalis?” A voice he should know but, sleep-scrambled, didn’t. “Is that you?”

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Ah, so it is you.” The name came just ahead of his own belated recognition of the measured tones.

“Gianfranco di Palma here. Brussels office.”

Carl sat up in bed, frowning.

“What do you want?”

“I have just been speaking to an agent Nicholson in New York.” Di Palma’s perfect, barely accented UN

English floated urbanely down the line. “I understand that COLIN have no further use for your services, and that they have arranged that all charges against you in the Republic will be dropped forthwith. It seems you will be returning to Europe very shortly.”

“Yeah? News to me.”

“Well, I don’t think we need to wait around on formalities. I’ll have an UNGLA shuttle dispatched to SFO tonight. If you would care to be at the suborbital terminal around midnight—”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“I am sorry?”

South Florida State swirled up into his mind, like dirty water backing up from a blocked drain. A sudden decision gripped him, cheery as the lettering on his S(t)igma jacket.

“I said you can fuck off, di Palma. Write it down. Fuck. Right. Off. You let me sit in a Jesusland jail for four months and I’d still be there for all the fucking efforts you made to get me out. And you still owe me expenses from fucking
January
.” And just like that, out of nowhere he was furious, trembling with the sudden rage. “So don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to jump into line just because you finally got your dick out of your own arse. I am not done here. I am very far from done here, and I’ll come home when I’m fucking good and ready.”

There was a stiff pause at the other end of the line.

“You understand, I assume,” said di Palma silkily, “that you are not authorized to operate without UNGLA jurisdiction. Of course, your time is your own to dispose of, but we cannot agree to you having any further professional contact with COLIN or the Rim States Security Corps. In the interests of—”

“What’s the matter with you, di Palma. Don’t you have a pen there? I told you to fuck off. Want me to spell it?”

“I strongly advise you not to take this attitude.”

“Yeah? Well, I strongly advise you to go and get a caustic soda enema. Let’s see which of us takes direction best, shall we.”

He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.

So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?

It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.

They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.

The phone sat in his hand.

Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a raise when you get back.

The phone.

Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favors, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.

Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.

Oh, how very alpha-male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.

He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realized suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.

Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.

There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.

You don’t know that.

He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.

You
don’t know
he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy-eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it
.

He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.

Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.

He grimaced. Dialed from memory.

Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late-afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open-access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled-out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holosigns that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.

It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of
Bulgakov’s Cat
.

The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah, Ertekin.”

“Alcatraz Control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?”

“Patched?” She frowned. “Patched from where?”

“New York, apparently. A Detective Williamson?”

She grappled with memory—saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amid uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.

“Yeah, I’ll take it.”

Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. “Ms. Ertekin?”

“Speaking.” A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.

“Is this a bad time?”

“No worse than any other. What can I do for you, Detective?”

“It’s more what I can do for you, Ms. Ertekin. We have some information you might like.” He hesitated for a moment. “I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.”

She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn, and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now—they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorized to listen electronically who knew where.

“That’s very kind of Larry.” She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amid menswear, hopped half to a halt, and dodged around them. “And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?”

“What I’ve got, Ms. Ertekin, is your third shooter for Alvaro Ortiz.”

She nearly stopped again, in clear space. “Is he alive?”

“Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.” Williamson chuckled.

“You believe that luck?”

“Not a local boy then?”

“No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“We’re sweating him pretty hard,” Williamson said casually. “Got one of the Homicide psych teams on it.

Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.”

Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly nonstreet syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. “Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?”

“Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a backup man.”

“What about the others?”

“Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray-and-run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumor and implied Yaroshanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano.

Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well. He’s a known associate of Atkins.”

“Okay.” Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. “Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?”

“Marsalis? The thirteen guy?” Pause while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. “No.

Nothing here outside of
we would have brought the whole thing off, too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offense
.”

“No offense?”

“Yeah.” Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. “One of the psych team’s the same color as me.

This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.”

Sevgi grunted. “Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?”

“Yeah, he was pissed about that, too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves.

Seems he always went by this coffeehouse he liked on West Ninety-seventh, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston
sicario
standby, apparently. Good for city-center hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic.

Anyway, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads uptown suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to Hundred eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.”

“Very pro.” She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming around a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.

“Right,” Williamson agreed. “Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.”

“No.”

“Yeah.” The New York detective hesitated again. “So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang on to this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that news flash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.”

The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of coordinated effort from RimSec and the
Cat

’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide—it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.

“Well, listen, Detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favor someday.”

“No need. Like I said, saw the news flash. Lot of talk about agency cooperation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to
be
some, too.”

“I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.”

“Will do. Hope it helps.”

The New York patch clicked out, taking Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.