Emma Bull (7 page)
Authors: Finder
A B B YY.c
was s
tranger still. The front room was three-walled now, no division between it and the one we'd
brought down
on us. The air was opaque with dust. In the hall, another piece of ceiling had f
allen, and a
bearing wall, and the rotten roof. The sky hung heavy and starless above us.
The air was hot and weighted down to motionless with the threat of rain. We went carefully but quickly down the stairs, always listening for more building preparing to give way. I thought Rico was listening for something else, too, and remembered all her careful entrances into rooms. Of course—she was still waiting for the ambush.
It didn't happen. We made it to her car in perfect safety.
Rico let her guard down at last; she stood by the car with her arms folded over the roll bar, her head resting on them. I sat on the curb.
"You'll never get your nice suit clean," I said. "And all for nothing, too."
"Shut up," said Rico, with murderous clarity, "and get in the car."
"Why?"
"Because I thought you'd want a ride home. Was I wrong?"
I slid in the passenger side door, and she started the engine. "It's on Sentiment Street—"
"I know where it is."
"Of course." Resentment nipped at me. "You would."
After a few blocks, I asked, "Are we square? Can I stay home now?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're out of leads, aren't you? What do you need me for?"
She shook her head. For the first time since the roof had fallen, I looked directly at her. There was blood mixed with the plaster dust on her face, from a cut near her eye. She seemed not to notice. The Night Peepers were gone, possibly lost, and I saw the intensity of her gaze, the way it seemed to reach past the street and the city and into some place I couldn't see or imagine. "Did I say I was out of leads?"
"Aren't you?"
"I'll get Linn to take a crew and go over the building in daylight." She smiled suddenly, a harsh expression. Her hand went into her jacket, came out again. "And I have this."
In her fingers, a thick white sheet of paper, now rather crumpled: the note from the table.
"I'll come by for you tomorrow. Around noon," Rico said, just as if I'd responded.
"Stop here."
A B B YY.c
She did. "Something
wrong?"
"I think… I think I'd like to walk the rest of the way."
She looked at me for long seconds, but didn't speak. She understood that much, at least. I got out and shut the door firmly behind me. "Tomorrow," I said, and walked away. I heard the engine pick up behind me, and the crunch of gravel under the tires.
Tick-Tick's motorcycle was parked in front of my building. Tick-Tick was sitting on it. When I was close enough for her to tell that the sorry object walking toward her was me, she vaulted off the bike and ran toward me. I let her do it.
"Mab and sprites and imps of Hell," the Ticker burst out. "What in all their names did that copper bitch lead you into?" She'd grabbed my shoulders; now she let them go, as if afraid she'd break me.
"It was a mistake."
"I think that goes without saying."
I tried running my hands through my hair, but I hit a sore place and stopped. "It'll probably happen again."
"Why should it?" she asked ominously.
"Because she's not done."
"Might I suggest that you
are
?"
I shook my head.
"Why not?"
I thought about it, about the things the Ticker didn't know. About a car, and an act of violence. "Because it would be a bad idea."
She looked down the street; not at anything, just not at me. "I tried to follow you from Chrystoble Street," she said after a moment, with less heat. "I got too late a start. I'm sorry. All I could do was come here and wait."
I looked up into her moonlit face, at the deep dismay there, and touched her arm. "I'm all right. I just need a shower."
Her fine-carved mouth worked; then she said, "Do you need to get out of town, too?"
"If I did that, I'd never be able to come back."
She understood. She knew that, in all the wide world, one could run out of places to run to.
"Go on home," I told her. "I'll stop by tomorrow."
A B B YY.c
I went
straight upstairs, picked up a towel and a bar of soap, and went down again to the backyard.
There's a solar shower the
re, an old black plastic fifty-gallon drum full of water with a hose and a shower head at the end of it. It loses heat slowly, even well after dark.
I rocked the drum—plenty of water, nearly full, in fact. Maybe my fellow squatters had left town
because of the heat. I pulled the shower curtain closed, peeled off my filthy clothes, and flung them out on the grass. Then I opened the spigot. Warm water. I scrubbed down; then I just stood, letting the water pour over me and away, as if rinsing off more than soap. I had an angry-looking gash down one arm, pulled muscles in my neck and shoulder, a darkening bruise on one hip, a painful lump on the back of my head, and another on my shin.
But I was alive. That was nice. I hadn't realized that before: that events could have turned out such that I wouldn't be there, and they hadn't done that. I could almost feel the other path, the one where I'd died.
Suddenly, standing naked under running water was the most wonderful experience I'd ever had. So I did it for a long time.
When I was finished I tied the towel around me and pumped water to fill the drum again. Then I carried my clothes upstairs to my squat, dropped them on the floor, and crawled under the covers. I must have fallen asleep almost immediately.
I sat up. No, that's not what I did. That's not even close to what I did. Like some machine part, like a bolt being shot from one position to another, like a single-pole switch toggled from off to on, like a tractor-trailer jacknifing on the ice, I found myself vertical in the dark, sweat already cold, stomach and heart like trapped birds flapping, flapping, and a sound, not really a scream, escaping the back of my throat.
They do it in movies. Gunshot on the soundtrack, and a fast cut to an actor, sitting up in bed. It's real. I did it.
"Easy," said someone next to me in the dark. "Easy. You were dreaming. Tell me about it." There was a hand on my shoulder. I snapped my head around and stared at the silhouette barely visible between me and the darkened window.
Lightning flashed behind, and a match flared in front of her. Sunny Rico. She sat in one of my kitchen chairs near the bed. Light sketched the outline of the fingers on the hand that sheltered the match; light rolled over her impassive face and lowered eyes and made her look like a statue in a Mexican church. A Madonna with a brush cut. She lit a candle on the nightstand as thunder cleared its throat outside.
Terror is a long-lasting, mind-numbing drug. I sat amid the ransacked bedclothes unable to identify them, or to make sense of anything, dragging air in and out through my constricted throat. Then half-thoughts fell over each other: what was
she
doing here, or if she was here, where was I? Memory began to settle out—Rico, her car, the building, Charlie, the dream I'd just—
"How'd you get in here?" I gasped.
"Tell me about the dream, before you forget it."
"Not likely—"
"Tell."
A B B YY.c
I slumped f
orward and leaned on my knees. "Don't be a ghoul," I said, muffled against the sheet.
"You can charge me for the time.
Please
?"
I turned away, back to the rucked bedclothes, settled my chin on my knees and let my eyes unfocus. I spoke fragments aloud as I remembered them, and as I spoke, the pieces shifted into a reasonable order.
The hot blue sky, and low walls of crenellated brick. Tar bubbling up, sticking to shoe soles; the smell of sweat, mine/his. The belfry empty; someone to meet there, but it was empty. Looking around, out over the rooftops, the street, way down, no fear. Sound behind. A thing—not clear, something awful, leaping at my face—screaming, arms up, a step back and the wall comes up hard below my knees and
what's coming is more terrible than the thing I saw on the roof…
I stopped a little before the nightmare had, and my fingers dug into the mattress for security's sake. A decent silence had been in place for a few seconds before I said, "He was set up."
"Yeah. I'd thought so, but now we're sure. And there was no one else on the roof, so we can quit looking for a hitter. Here." She held one of my glasses out to me, and I smelled whiskey. Since I didn't think I had any whiskey, she must have brought it with her. I drank it off and shuddered at the silken burn of it.
"So how did you get in?" I asked, as soon as I had my breath back.
"You left the door unlocked. It's a bad idea."
"I leave it unlocked all the time. Usually there aren't any cops in the neighborhood."
"Very funny."
"Did you just drop by to see if I was having a nightmare?"
Rico said, "Actually, yes. When I got home, I found Linn waiting for me. He'd been thinking about what happened when you laid hands on Charlie's body. According to him, the theory is that elves can make stuff like that work because they've… God, what did he say?…
integrated
their conscious,
subconscious, and unconscious minds better than we have. He said if you couldn't remember what
happened when you touched the corpse, you'd probably passed the whole trauma straight into your
unconscious, and there was a good chance you'd get a nice little package delivered in your dreams tonight." stared at her. "Tell your partner to quit the cop business and take up psychotherapy. So you came to hold my hand?"
"I came because he said that, depending on the quality of Charlie's last moments, there was a good chance you could take major damage from it."
"Oh."
"And to find out if Charlie took anything with him to the Happy Hunting Ground that will help me find his goddamn boss." Her words were so measured and fierce that I had to look at her. Still a statue, but not a Madonna. Her face was hard and still, with only the eyes alive.
"Ah. Not to hold my hand, but to pick my brain. Well, do you know anything more now than you used to?"
