Jade Sky (9 page)

"Well," she said. "This is a nice surprise."

He recognized the question in her cautious statement. "Yeah. We finished up in Mexico faster than we thought." She didn't reply, so he added, "I have to fly to D.C. tomorrow morning for a meeting, but I'll be home in the afternoon. Not sure what the schedule is from there." He felt no need to tell her that the 'meeting' consisted of Conor Flynn's autopsy.

"If you want to come to Momma's on Sunday, she could use a hand with that gutter after service."

He kissed her nose. "Can't promise, but I'll see what I can do."

She squeezed him, then lay cradled under his arm, the tension draining from her. As her breaths turned to soft snores, he stared at the ceiling and fought off dreams of Conor, laughing at him as he tore his skull in half.

The whispers startled him from sleep, and he opened his eyes to an empty ceiling. He reached over to an empty pillow.

Monica screamed.

He rolled off the bed and raced to the bathroom, leaping over Ted as the Basset sat up in the hall. Monica stared into the toilet with tear-filled eyes, the water pink. Her hand, slick with blood, grabbed her abdomen. She winced and hunched over. "Nonononono . . . ."

He swept her pajama bottoms from the floor, grabbed a roll of toilet paper out of the cupboard, and cradled her in his arms. "It'll be okay." He carried her outside, set her in the truck, jammed the stick into reverse, and gunned the gas. He buried the speedometer, with only an occasional sniffle from Monica or growl from a passing car to break the drone of the engine. They were halfway to the hospital before he realized he wore only his boxers and that he'd left his phone and wallet on the nightstand.

There were two people in the Emergency Room when he carried Monica through the automatic doors: a black triage nurse and a bleach-blonde secretary, both of whom sprang to their feet. He stepped to the nurse. "I think my wife is having a mis—"

"Don't you say it," Monica snapped. "Don't you fucking say it."

"—a problem with her baby."

The nurse nodded to her right. "Room one." As she followed them in, Matt heard over the PA, "Doctor Savard to the ED. Doctor Savard to the ED."

He set Monica on the bed, and the nurse shooed him out of the room, after drawing the curtain to block his view. Monica's blood streaked his forearm. Numb, he went into the bathroom and scrubbed it off, watching until the last pink streak swirled down the drain, then took a seat in the waiting room. A long hour went by, worse than the wait before a firefight. After another forty-five minutes, he stood as a middle-aged woman in a white coat came out. Gray streaked her blonde hair, which she'd pulled up in a bun held with chopsticks.

"Mister Rowley?" She offered her hand. He shook it. Her smooth hands had not a trace of callous, and her fingernails were painted a green so faint it almost looked natural. Her green eyes locked onto his, though she had to crane her neck to do so. He sighed in relief the moment before she spoke, her voice a pleasant Mississippi drawl. "Everything's okay. The baby's fine, your wife's fine."

"What happened?"

She sat down, and motioned to the empty chair beside her. He fell into it.

"Well," she said. "Your wife had what's called a subchorionic hematoma. The symptoms are a bit like a miscarriage—vaginal bleeding, mild cramping—and it some cases it can lead to an increased risk." His heart caught in his throat. "This hematoma was small, and carries little elevated risk."

"Little," he said.

She nodded. "Yes. Really no more than a normal pregnancy. We're going to keep her for observation overnight and recommend limited bed rest for the next week. No heavy lifting, no exercise, but she can move around the house a bit."

"Can I see her?"

Her smile softened. "You can, but we had to sedate her, bless her heart. She'll sleep some hours now."

"You're sure she's fine? And the baby?"

"I'm sure. A bit shook up is all."

"I have to catch a flight at eight. Do you know when she'll wake up?"

She patted his wrist. "Oh, well after that. Why don't you go on in, give her a kiss, and get on home? We'll call you when she wakes up. She's in good hands here."

He exhaled, and only then realized he'd been holding his breath.

*   *   *

The morgue smelled of polished steel and bleach. Conor Flynn's body lay on the cold metal slab, his head an unrecognizable flap of skin and cartilage. The coroner, an obese man with a bad comb-over, took pictures of the red-brown tattoos that covered the body, a stark contrast to Conor's pale skin. They looked amateur, almost primitive. Matt didn't recognize a single word. Given the look on his face, Jeff didn't either.

An Asian man who looked no older than thirteen cut tiny samples from several of the tattoos and carried them to a lab station against the wall. Matt couldn't place the meandering tune the technician hummed, but the cheery melody struck him as out of place. Matt wished he'd stop.

"Do you think he did those himself?" Matt asked.

Jeff grunted. "What makes you think that?"

Matt rolled the corpse on its side to expose Conor's back, ignoring the coroner's disapproving cluck. "Look. The letters on his back are much sloppier than the letters on his front. If a tattoo artist did them, they'd be more consistent. Cleaner."

The coroner grunted. "Why would a man tattoo himself with gibberish?"

Matt shrugged. "Why would a man let someone else tattoo him with gibberish? It doesn't make sense either way."

"True," Jeff said. "But we're shopping these pictures around the local parlors and police stations just in case. I think maybe you're right, but that's no reason not to check other options."

"Well," the coroner said, "preliminary analysis says there's nothing overly strange, nothing physically abnormal beyond standard ICAP Augmentations. Cranial abnormalities are of course impossible to assess, though we might get some brain chemistry from some of the larger pieces, drugs or whatnot. Bath salts, maybe."

"Nah," Matt said. "Drugs pass through my system so fast there's no point, and Conor's regenerates were even more effective than mine. He'd have to take bath salts every minute to sustain a high, and it wouldn't do any long-term damage."

"Well, we'll check anyway." Without preamble the doctor picked up a rotary saw and cut through Conor's sternum—it took twice as long as with a regular man, and the scent of burning bone reminded Matt of the dentist's office. The chest spreader split Conor's rib cage to expose glistening internal organs. Matt's biology education stopped at his freshman year in college, but everything looked normal to him.

Jeff pulled him aside. "Maybe it was PCP or something, something his regenerates didn't respond to. We've never seen brain abnormalities in a bonk anyway, and this behavior wasn't exactly textbook." He handed Matt a manila folder labeled "Flynn, Conor."

Opening it, Matt leafed through Conor's psychological profiles over the previous five years. There were no significant changes from one to the next, except for a spate of mild depression three years earlier when his eighteen-year-old dog passed away.

"I told you," Jeff said. "He was as sane as you or me this time last week."

The humming technician looked up from his lab station. "Mister Hannes?" They turned to him. "These tattoos are blood."

Jeff raised an eyebrow. "How do you know?"

"Chromatography indicated that it was possible, so I ran a Takayama test. Pyridine forms pink crystals when it reacts with hemoglobin." He gestured toward the microscope, and Jeff took a look.

His eyes buried in the lenses, Jeff asked, "Is it human?"

The man shrugged. "That takes a lot longer to figure out. The lab should have results in a week or two."

While Matt looked, Jeff spoke to the tech. "Well, tell them to step on it. And if it's human, I want DNA."

As promised, pink crystals impregnated the whitish background of the microscope slide.

"Will do," the tech replied.

A pleasant female voice broke over the PA. "Mr. Hannes, I have linguistics on line three."

"That was fast," Matt said, stepping away from the microscope.

Jeff picked up the phone, identified himself, and jotted notes in a small notepad. Matt spent a few minutes avoiding the autopsy table, while the coroner harvested and weighed organs, speaking for the benefit of the microphone. Jeff hung up the phone. "Well, that's fucked up."

"Gibberish?" Matt said.

Jeff shook his head. "On the contrary, there are sixty-seven unique tattoos, and every single one says a variation on the same thing: 'Be ready. The master is coming.' The most interesting one is on his left ribs. Cindy called it, 'Uruk proto-cuneiform.' It's early Bronze Age, like six thousand years ago."

Matt flipped to Conor's résumé in the front of the file. "Conor knew, what, nine languages?"

Jeff shrugged. "But not Uruk proto-cuneiform. He was a polyglot, not a linguist. He never studied any dead languages."

"That we know of."

Jeff shrugged. "That we know of."

Matt tapped the coroner on the shoulder. "Hey, we know how old these tattoos are?"

The man’s jowls shook as he nodded. "Regenerates make it impossible to tell based on healing rate or anything of the sort, but knowing that he used blood for ink allows us to narrow it down quite a bit." He leaned in for a closer look, hemmed and hawed for a minute, then stood to his full height. "Based on the limited photobleaching and strong pigmentation, let's call the oldest ones no more than two years or so, but no newer than a year."

Jeff asked, "When's the most recent?"

He chuckled. "It's not that accurate. As far as I know it could have been this morning."

"Can you tell the time between them?"

He shrugged. "I can't. But I'd be confident testifying that they spread out over at least a year."

Matt handed the folder of psychological profiles back to Jeff. "So much for these."

Jeff set the folder on the table and threw up his hands. "You can't just ignore the evidence. This incident shouldn't have happened."

"Right, he didn't bonk," Matt said. "It wasn't like that at all. It wasn't mindless rage." He laughed, a soulless, lost bark. "It wasn't even rage. He acted like he wanted more cream in his coffee or had decided to clean the garage. Only he decided to slaughter eighteen people instead." Matt ran his hands through his hair. "And 'The master is coming'? I can't be the only person thinking this is related to our winged friend back in New Mexico."

Jeff shrugged. "That was 'The Servant,' buddy. Maybe they work in the same office."

"Not funny."

Jeff turned to look at Conor's headless, now empty torso. "No. No, it's not."

*   *   *

By the time Matt flew back to Tennessee and drove to the hospital, Monica had woken up and taken a cab home, against medical advice. They handed him an envelope containing her cross and wedding ring, which they'd removed during her examination, and gave him more than his share of admonishing looks.

"She promised that she'd take it easy," the doctor told him.

He lead-footed it home, then pulled in the driveway at a crawl. He eased the door shut after he got out. He tiptoed to the deck so as to not disturb her rest.

He crept up the steps, skipping the third, and swore under his breath when the screen door creaked. The latch on the door to the deck clicked as he stepped inside.
Oh, good
, he thought.
She's not asleep.
He stepped around the corner to the kitchen, just as she backed out of the pantry. "Baby, you really shouldn't have—"

She turned to him with guilty eyes, always a terrible liar even before she'd said anything.
I was just getting some lunch
—

"I was just getting some lunch—"

He stepped forward and interrupted her with a kiss, ashy and unpleasant. Nudging her to the side, he opened the pantry and scanned the shelves. She burst into tears as he picked up the can of Folgers and tore off the lid. Upending the grounds into the sink, he picked out the half-full pack of Marlboros and crushed them in his fist. He closed his eyes without turning around.

She sobbed. "I'm sorry, baby, I just—" She yelped as his fist shattered the countertop.

Blood dripped from his knuckles onto the broken stone. He flexed as the skin healed over the exposed bone, then took a better look at the counter. The marble slab had broken into four large chunks, the drawer underneath cracked in two.
Better it than her.

His temper in check, he took a deep breath and turned around. "You were saying?"

She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. He held her, patting her hair as she cried. One minute. Two. Five. When she'd cried herself out, he scooped her off her feet and carried her to the couch. By the time he sat, she'd already fallen asleep.

He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. With
Sharktopus vs. Mansquito
the most compelling option, he pulled up the previous week's Titan's game on DVR. Ted made it onto the couch on his third try, and lay down half on Monica, his head on Matt's thigh. His tail thumped the cushion as Matt scratched his head, and he snored his way through the fourth play. Monica woke up in the third quarter, curled around Ted to use him as a body pillow, and they watched the rest of the game in silence. When it ended—28-17 over the Texans—he turned off the TV.

"The whole time?" he asked.

She shook her head without lifting it. "No. Just this past week. Only one a day. Sometimes two. Never more than that."

He sighed. "Just cigarettes?"

Her head jiggled by way of reply, but he couldn't make out a "yes" or a "no."

"Weed?" He didn't want to say it. "Meth?"

"Just cigs. I ain't done anything in three years, you know that."

"Drink?"

Ted gave a happy whine as she squeezed him, and licked her arm. "I'm still on that wagon. There's nothing in the house, and Momma makes sure there's nothing there, neither." Matt sighed again, this time in relief. They sat in silence for a while. He knew she wanted something else, or she'd have gotten up to do something. He didn't know what it could be, so he waited.