Dead Man's Hand (6 page)

I hated to think of how these things had
been found out and knew there wasn’t any point in asking. I also
wondered why vials of this stuff weren’t on every drug store shelf
and first aid kit in the city, but knew the answer lay once more in
the secrets of the re-animators. If this was publicly available and
open to analysis, it might open doors to the rest of their trade
and put them out of business.

“
Thanks,” I said with a
nod, then snapped the lid shut and turned to go.

Five

It was easy enough to find the spot where
Drea’s van had stopped sending signals. The driver had taken his
undead passengers from the heart of the city’s industrial zone and
almost to its edge when things had gone wrong. A few more blocks
and he’d have been in a more suburban area. If the zombies were
loose, one or two might have made it that far already, but I
doubted that was the case. If that had happened, there would have
been reports by now. Helicopters with searchlights would have been
crisscrossing the skyline, and the roads would have been blocked by
squad cars and growling German Shepherds barely held back on
leashes.

As it was, the street was quiet. Nothing
crisscrossed the skyline but wires strung between poles, and the
only growls I heard came from a pair of cats squaring off over
territory in a nearby alley. I parked and got out of my car,
walking along the dotted white line that ran up the center of the
street. According to Drea’s data, her van’s GPS had cut out in the
middle of this block, which made a car accident seem unusual.
Either her driver had been incompetent when it came to strapping in
his cargo or the Grommets had gotten to him and he’d had a meet-up
somewhere along this street, at which point the GPS could have been
disabled, the driver paid off, and the vanload of zombies taken
wherever the Grommets wanted.

Several yards from where I started, I caught
a glint on the pavement and stooped to get a closer look. A few
dozen fragments of orange or yellow plastic were scattered around
my feet. I picked up one of the bigger pieces, about the size of my
thumbnail, and held it up to one of the streetlights. It looked
like the kind of reflective plastic they use for turn signals on
cars. A closer look at the pavement revealed some pretty fresh skid
marks close by. It wasn’t proof that something had happened to the
van, but I had to re-evaluate my accident theory.

I stood up and looked around, turning a full
circle and then back again. Then a smile broke out on my face, and
I crossed to the other side of the street. A little red car was
parked there. It had a small dent in its front fender and the turn
signal’s plastic lens was gone. When I got closer to it, I saw a
scrape of white paint in the middle of the dented fender. And next
to the dent, the car’s emblem read “Getabout.”

“
Well, how about that,” I
said to the car, patting its bruised fender.

After shining a light into the windows for
any signs of life and coming up with nothing, I headed back to my
car with my phone out and Pixel’s number already on the screen.

She answered on the third ring. “Ace! Have
you got it worked out?”

“
Not yet,” I
said.

“
This thing isn’t getting
any fresher.”

“
I’m sure. Look, this is
complicated, getting more so by the minute.”

“
Is it going to work
out?”

“
It’s conceivable. I need
your help, though.”

A moment’s hesitation, then, “How?”

“
Do you have Pete’s number,
or can you get it?”

“
I’ve got it. Why? You want
to call him?”

“
No. And don’t you call
him. I don’t want him knowing I’m interested in what he’s doing.
But can you use some of your toys to track him, tell me where he is
right now?”

“
I should be able to. But I
don’t—”

“
You don’t need to
understand. Like I said, it’s complicated. The less you know at
this point, probably the better. Just tell me where he is right
now, okay?”

“
Okay.” She sounded
chastised, which wasn’t what I’d intended, but if it got her to
stop asking questions that weren’t going to help either of us, so
much the better.

I waited on the line while she worked, could
hear the clicking of her keyboard. Then there was a rustling sound
as she picked up her phone again.

“
838 South Harbor,” she
said.

“
You know it?”

“
No. But…satellite shows
it’s a in a row of buildings just north of downtown. Doesn’t look
like a nightlife area, more industrial.”

“
All right.
Thanks.”

“
You going
there?”

“
I might.”

“
You don’t trust
me.”

“
I don’t trust anybody
right now, Pixel. Don’t take it personally.”

“
Whatever you
say.”

“
Good.” I was in my car by
now but hadn’t started it yet. “Hey, one more thing. Did you tell
Pete your plan about the hand, why you wanted it?”

She hesitated. All the answer I needed. “I
didn’t tell him everything, not about what I’d do once I got it
re-animated. Was that bad?”

“
Not necessarily,” I lied.
“I gotta go. I’ll call if I get anywhere with this.”

I clicked off before she had a chance to try
to change my mind. Soon, the Getabout was far behind me and I was
letting my Nav guide me to 838 South Harbor. Neat Pete may have
filled in the blanks on Pixel’s plan or he may have gotten help
thinking it through. Regardless of how it had gone, though, I knew
for certain that he’d spilled at least some of the details to one
of Clancy’s boys; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been snooping
around Drea’s and asking questions about re-animating hands. It was
possible Pete had a partner, somebody maybe a little smarter, a
little savvier than him, and the two of them had cooked up a plan
to get the second hand away from Drea. And it was also possible
that Pete was being shadowed, that Pete’s interest in the first
hand had awoken Clancy’s suspicions. If that was the case, I might
not be the only one on Pete’s trail. Not for the first time in my
career, I wished I owned a gun.

Not ten minutes later, I was cruising past
the address Pixel had given me. A chain link fence ran around the
perimeter, its gate padlocked shut. The building was dark, but
since no windows faced the street that didn’t tell me much. The
place had big roll-up doors at its front, the kind it would be easy
to pull cars in and out of. Maybe it had started out as a body
shop. And then evolved into a chop shop as times got tougher and
the neighborhood followed suit. Running through what I knew about
this area, my guess was that the place had now transformed into a
drug lab, probably the one Neat Pete had been sentenced to after
his dalliance with Clancy’s dancer.

I parked across the street and rolled down
my window, just staring at the building and listening for signs of
life. Either Pete was in there, or his phone was in there, or Pixel
had steered me wrong. I just sat there, letting maybe fifteen
minutes tick past, trying to work all the angles. None emerged as
more likely than another, and the building wasn’t giving up any
clues as to what was going on past those roll-up doors. So with a
sigh, I rolled up and got out, but not before digging my pick set
out of the car’s storage compartment and grabbing Drea’s antidote
kit from the passenger seat.

The kit barely fit into my
back pocket, but even so I reached around twice as I crossed the
street just to make sure there was no chance of it falling out.
When I got to the gate, I looked around for a few seconds, taking
extra time to peer into the dark around the side of the building
before me just to make sure I wasn’t being watched. Two bats
fluttered around a streetlamp half a block down, maybe real bats
and maybe not. They made me stop and think.
My people
, I told myself, and I
almost turned around to go back to my car, thinking of a dozen
better ways I could spend my night. Then I snapped the cover on the
little leather lock pick set and went to work anyway.

I’d learned a long time ago that working
defense on a case sometimes meant skirting the law. The other side
had an awful lot of resources, and sometimes those included rules
and regulations designed to keep me from information that I needed.
So I looked at the strategic computer hack, the occasional breaking
and entering, the well placed bribe all as just a way to level the
playing field. I could just as easily have looked at them as ways
to get myself disbarred, but that was beside the point.

The lock popped after a few seconds. I slid
it out of the hasp, lifted the latch, and pulled the gate open
slowly, my teeth gritted against the possibility of squeaky hinges
echoing through the night. All stayed quiet, and I stepped through
once the opening was just big enough, then pulled the gate closed
and latched it, leaving the open lock hanging on one of the links
so I could get out quickly if I needed to.

Holding my phone low, I turned on its light
and walked around the side of the building. The space was wide
enough to drive a car through, and if it had been daylight I might
have been able to pick out tire tracks in the dust, but for now I
was content to assume Pete or someone working with him had driven
Drea’s van through here and that I’d find it around the back of the
warehouse.

When I rounded the corner, my hunch proved
itself correct, and I just stood there looking at the van. It had
been backed into a smaller doorway, this one just big enough for a
single vehicle to pass through. Its roll-up door was all the way
up. Only the front half of the van stuck out of the building. From
inside, white light shone out around the sides of the van, faintly
illuminating parts of the area between the building and the back
fence.

Nervous that the van’s former cargo might
have gotten the better of Neat Pete, I stood still for a few
seconds, shining my light around the property at the back of the
building to be sure nothing was lumbering around in the shadows. It
didn’t take long to satisfy myself that I was the only
person—living or dead—behind the building, and I let myself breathe
again. In my sweep of the property, I saw two other cars and a
black van parked against the fence and thought about walking over
to feel their hoods to see if they were also recent arrivals.
Drea’s white van, though, struck me as the more important object of
investigation, so I crept up to it, looking and listening for
anything amiss.

The passenger door was unlocked, but I
didn’t open it—just went to the front of the van to peer through
the windshield. I could see nothing, no one living or dead or
anywhere in between. Heavy metal mesh formed a barrier between the
cab and cargo area in the van, the kind that would have been strong
enough to keep the driver safe in case the zombies broke their
restraints in the middle of being transported. Peering through the
glass, all I could see for sure was that the van’s two back doors
hung wide open, as though it had expelled its contents into the
building.

I squinted and then rubbed my hand against
the window, hoping in vain to be able to see for certain what was
inside the drug lab, but the mesh was too thick for me to be able
to make out anything but what looked like large tanks or vats with
a maze of multi-colored pipes running from place to place. My guess
about the place being a drug lab seemed to have been right, and now
I hazarded a new one.

Given my area of professional expertise, the
drug trade wasn’t something I knew much about. My clients tended to
get themselves into trouble over other things. But that doesn’t
mean I wasn’t up on the latest trends. The drug lords, the Grommet
brothers predominant among them, had started manufacturing a new
product a few years back, and it had caught on among the normals in
the city. The trick of this one wasn’t that it was an upper or a
downer or a psychedelic or a euphoric but rather that it was all of
those in one, a drug that would cycle from one effect to another to
another, randomly and with equal intensity. It had a long chemical
name, but the kids called it “roller” as in roller coaster, and
using it was either “rolling” or “coasting.” The drug could be
eaten, snorted, smoked or shot up. Total versatility, depending on
individual taste.

I told myself that I was looking into a
roller lab, one that was now home to half a dozen zombies along
with Neat Pete and maybe others. With a reassuring check of my back
pocket to make sure I still had Drea’s antidote with me, I tried to
decide if I should venture in or hang it up and tell Pixel it
wasn’t worth the risk.

And at the moment that choice ran its way
through my thoughts, I decided to bolt. And not because of zombies.
I don’t know if it was a shift in the breeze or some change in
pressure inside the building, but I smelled something now, or maybe
only just realized that I’d been smelling it already, just figured
out the significance of the scent wafting out of the building:
brown rice and bananas.

Pixel was a roller. It didn’t mean she as an
addict, or even that Pete was her connection. But what were the
chances that the hacker with a little habit and the dapper killer
with access to her drug of choice should just happen to hook up?
Maybe the satyr attack had never happened. And maybe it had. It
didn’t matter. Sure, Pixel had the dead man’s hand, but the story
of how she’d gotten it suddenly looked shaky. And while I didn’t
think there was any way she could have engineered my presence here
just from our conversation the night before, I knew for sure that
the steel mesh in the van wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t see all
the way through. When you threw zombies into the mix, there was no
way I was about to move another inch toward that doorway.