Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (5 page)

The sudden stillness was creepy, after that. Slowly, I straightened up and looked at the chair. The barber and his customer were gone. Then I looked at Remy and smiled. Remy stared back, expressionless, and slid his gun back into his hip holster, wiping his hands on his muddy coat.

I sighed. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s find that fat fuck.”

Morales was sitting on a recovered chair in the midst of his ruined tent, belly spilling out over his knees. He was smoking what looked and smelled like a real cigar, pre-war. He watched us approach, with squinted eyes, affecting calm, but the sheen of sweat on his brow and the way he fidgeted told me otherwise. He was terrified, and for good reason: He probably had more muscle on tap, but they weren’t here yet, and if I chose to slit his throat in front of Potosí, no one was going to stop me.

“I am glad to see you triumphant, Mr. Cates,” he said with fake cheer. “Those crazy Spooks should be
opposed
.”

That sounded sincere enough. I stopped in front of the fat bastard while Remy circled around behind him. Morales cocked his head to track him for a second, then smiled at me and spread his hands.

“I was not lying, Mr. Cates,” he said. “I do not have the funds I owe you.”

I nodded, pursing my lips, and when I reared back and kicked him over in the chair, he didn’t seem surprised. Feeling tired, I just walked over to where he was and put my gun on him, cocking the hammer just in case all he needed was some extra encouragement.

He put his hands up, the sheen of calm cheer gone.
“Espera!”
he shouted. “Wait! I have a counteroffer. I have five thousand yen in notes in my pocket. It is all I have, liquid.”

I waited without moving. “And?”

He licked his lips and fucking
smiled.
“I have information you have been seeking. I can tell you where the man named Wallace Belling is. Where he is right now.”

I stood there for a moment, a cold shock settling into my bones. My mouth watered and I had to blink rapidly to clear my vision. It had been
years
. I’d last seen Belling in Amsterdam, when he delivered me to Cainnic Orel—known then as Michaleen Garda—after buying me out of the army. I’d last been in Belling’s
presence
weeks later, in Hong Kong. I’d been dreaming of killing them both for years.

I nodded, stepping back and clicking the hammer back down. “Deal.”

YOU JUST HAD TO LET HIM DANCE

I reached out and pulled Remy back. He resisted for a moment and then let me shove him down into his chair. I leaned against the bar and let my coat hang open, showing off the Roon in its leather holster. The big, hairy guy who was sweating in the unheated bar looked at it and then back at me.

“I apologize for my friend,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

The bar only sold something mysteriously sweet and disturbingly red. I didn’t know what they made it from, and didn’t want to know. Our first night in Potosí I’d made the mistake of having a third.

The big guy was probably seven feet tall. Old, older than me, but still a lot of muscle. His beard was gray and black and long, tied off every few inches with bits of leather. He settled back into his stool. “All right,” he said in an accent I couldn’t place. “Tell your friend he should not pick fights.”

I nodded at the bartender and pointed at the big guy. “He wasn’t picking a fight,” I said. “He likes to shoot people.”

I let that hang in the air while the bartender, a skinny girl of about ten with dull, wild black hair frizzing out around her head, poured red liquor into the big guy’s cup. I studied her as she worked; it had been a long time, I realized, since I’d seen a child. She looked incredibly small and new, suddenly. When she came over I handed her five hundred yen. All the bills were new and crisp.

“I need transportation, long distance,” I said, holding on to the bill when she grabbed it. “You point the right person at me and there’s another five hundred.”

She bit her lip and nodded, eyes wide and locked on the money. Paper was still strange to me, and fucking inefficient, but it felt good to be able to bribe people again. Five hundred yen would buy her something to eat. A thousand yen might keep her alive for a week, if she lived careful. It was a good enough tip to get her enthusiasm up. I let go of the bill and she made it disappear impressively. I eyed her for a moment as she ran, barefoot on the cracked, frozen cement floor, to the rear of the bar. She probably worked the streets as a Pick when she wasn’t slopping drinks in here, and she probably did well doing it.

I sat down across from Remy, who was finishing off his second cup of solvent, looking yellow and bloated, his eyes squinty. Remy was the worst drunk I’d ever known. He drank fast, like he was punishing himself, and got surly, picking fights and being nasty. He’d killed four or five poor assholes in stupid bar fights, and I’d learned that that was the whole point. That’s what he wanted to do—have a reason to shoot someone. I’d had to knock him cold a couple of times just to stop a fucked-up situation from crossing over into batshit insane, but he never complained. He woke up, vomited once or twice, and seemed good to go. I looked down at my own cup, untouched. In the cup, the booze looked black, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I missed gin, but no one made gin anywhere. I missed N-tabs, too. Every time someone set a joint of memy, who wdown in front of me, I wanted to puke right onto my plate.

“Try not to piss everyone off,” I said. “We’ve got a window before Morales gathers his troops. We don’t need the rest of the town against us, too.”

Remy saluted me and waved his cup in the air without turning around. I sighed.

The bar was mostly empty, just a half dozen people aside from us, four cripples who sat nursing cups on the darkened edges of the room, Remy’s new friend, and a cardsharp who sat alone, shuffling an ancient deck of holographic cards that still shone bright and cheery in the dim light. There was no sound in the place aside from the wind howling through the thin walls, and not much light from the smoky oil lamps. I wondered, briefly, how come no one tried to lift anything from behind the bar with the girl gone, and then wondered why they didn’t try with the girl
there
, since she looked about as dangerous as a cloud. Then I got bored and put my attention into trying to drink the stuff in my cup. I opted to breathe through my mouth and just swallow it fast. It was thick and oily on the tongue, and when I’d choked it down the burn wasn’t the pleasant one alcohol usually gave me, but something acidic and sinister.

I thought about Mexico. We’d passed through it on our way to Potosí, months ago, coming south down from Alaska and the ruin of California, which was still just a field of rubble that glowed at night. Mexico was better off; it had been largely controlled by criminal gangs before the civil war, and since the war had been under the thumb of two dozen old army units and their commanding officers, a hundred well-armed and desperate men and women who still had augments in their heads that could be controlled by their CO and his blackjack. Mexico wasn’t
civilized
, but you could get things done in Mexico, and the gangs and old military units were big enough that yen was useful to them. It wouldn’t be hard to run an operation in Mexico, if I could dig up the resources.

Tiny steps told me the bartender had returned, and bigger steps in tow told me my yen had bought someone’s attention. I didn’t turn around; Remy was still sober enough to glance over my shoulder and then shrug, letting me know it wasn’t a threat.

The girl who sat down across from me was beautiful: tan, smooth skin, long, glossy black hair, an oval face with a long nose and a full mouth with nice teeth. Her eyes were a dark green and looked back at me steadily. She was wearing canvas overalls that had been patched a hundred times over a thick, gray shirt that looked warm and scratchy. Her hands were nicked by a million tiny cuts and heavily calloused, but they were folded in front of her calmly. If she was afraid of drunk men with guns, she didn’t show it.

“Adela tells me you need to go somewhere,” she said flatly. “Where?”

I stared at her for a few heartbeats, smiling, giving her the old attitude. It was like clicking into a groove, well-worn and familiar:
Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, is not amused.
“Mexico City,” I said finally.
City
was a grand term for what was left up there, but names stuck.

She pursed her lips, nodding, calculating distances and risk. She glanced at Remy, who had acquired his third cup and seemed content to stare into it, then back me. “Two of you?”

I nodded. “Probably.” I couldn’t think of any reason we’d acquire anyone else, but you never knew.

She nodded again, and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms behind her and pushing her tits at me. That was probably a good negotiating trick, usually, and my smile became more natural. The girl had some brains. “My cousin has a vehicle. Four-wheel. The deal is: You provide a type V6 battery with working solar collector, plus ten thousand yen, and he will drive you there. We all provide our own food along the way.”

“We?” I asked. I wondered if that was a grift, if we were supposed to stare at her tits and get all hot and bothered at the thought of her sleeping three feet away from us out in the wilderness and forget to haggle on the price. Or if she was fishing to see if we’d make her an offer to keep us company along the way. That thought made me sad, suddenly, and I made a face, waving my hand. “A working battery and a collector is gonna cost me fifty thousand yen, easy, from one of those assholes out there. That’s sixty to get up there. That’s fucking robbery.”

She sat forward again, so suddenly I was startled into widening my smile. “Do you have a vehicle?” She waved a finger in front of her. “No, you do not. You do not like the price, you can go find someone to maybe carry you north.”

Remy suddenly lashed out an arm and took hold of her hair, yanking her head back as he set his cup on the table carefully. She squeaked in shock, but then whipped her hands up and clawed at his face, kicking the table as she twisted in the chair. If her nails hadn’t been bitten down to the tips, she might have made the kid regret such a sloppy move. As it was, he had her neck bent down over the back of the chair and she had no leverage with which to extricate herself.

“Be polite,” he advised.

I looked at Remy and shook my head. “No fucking need for that, dammit,” I said evenly, controlling myself. He glanced at me and shrugged, releasing her and scooping up his drink casually.

She sprang from the chair, her face dark, and stood coughing. No one else in the place had so much as shifted their weight. I waited to see what she’d do: curse us out, walk away, make threats. Instead, she swallowed, pushed her hair from her face, and then slowly resumed her seat, settling herself carefully. When she looked back at me she was composed.

“Your friend should be careful with people he may be sleeping near later,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “People get stabbed in their sleep.”

Remy raised his eyebrows and I thought it was the closest to a smile I’d ever seen on him. “I don’t sleep,” he said.

I leaned forward, clenching my teeth. Fucking Remy. It was like hauling a retarded bear around with you—sometimes he got a burr up his ass and you just had to let him dance. But I didn’t like it, and I saw this as a teaching moment. “I apologize for fuckhead over there,” I said pointedly, clasping my hands in front of me to keep them from doing damage. Fucking
Remy.
“We have a deal.” I held out my hand slowly, unclenching it with effort. I wanted to kick Remy’s chair out from under him and give him a few to the ribs, but would be a better time and place for that.

She stared at my hand for a moment, then nodded and reached forward to shake. “I am Adora. I will take you to Cristo and you can see the vehicle and discuss a deposit.”

She tried to take her hand back but I held it tight. “He’s a fuckhead,” I said, jerking my head at Remy. “But he’s
my
fuckhead. I just apologized for him, but that’s all you get. If he gets stabbed, I will kill you.”

She went pale for a second, swallowed again, and then firmed up, getting her face back under control. “I accept the apology,” she said slowly. “Shall we go?”

She stood up, but waited for us to follow suit before walking for the exit. I smiled. I liked anyone who could look into Remy’s eyes and still threaten him.

Then I looked at Remy and gave him a hard smack to the back of his head. He accepted it silently, wincing and scuttling out of reach, but saying nothing.

“This way.”

We followed her through some heroic mud, the kind of dark brown stuff that made walking so much trouble you just wanted to lie down in it and be sucked into the earth. Adora was pretending to be unconcerned as she turned her back on us, but she had a blade tucked up her right sleeve. I figured some of the men she’d done business with weren’t as polite as me, so I gave her a few feet of space and glanced back at Remy, who was lagging, sweat streaming down his face as he carried the battery and collector.

“Don’t fucking drop it,” I said cheerfully. “I just hocked everything we fucking own for that thing.”

He grunted, long hair hanging in his face. Remy had wanted to just take it by force—what the hell, we were leaving Potosí anyway—and we could have; the old man running the cart had two fat guys sitting on barrels drinking moonshine for security. Remy and I would have been halfway to Mexico before those two managed to get on their feet. But the old man was just skin and bones, dried up and hanging on, and he’d wanted a fair price. Fair was fair.

We were heading toward a bleached wooden shed, a sagging collection of slats that looked ready to collapse if we made too much noise on the approach. Adora worked a rusty metal chain and padlock and threw open the warped doors, revealing a shadowy garage in which was parked a military four-wheel vehicle. I’d ridden in something like it a few times; if you didn’t mind your kidneys in your throat and a few lumps on your head, it would get you where you wanted to go.