State of Decay (12 page)

“Why did you really call me down here?” I asked, and immediately kicked myself.

“Sorry?”

“It can’t just be the card,” I said, my mouth moving on its own. “You don’t even know who I am. . . . Did it say anything else?”

As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t. He raised his eyebrows a little.

“You wrote it,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

Booze or no booze, my face got hot again and I knew it was obvious. My mind went blank and I couldn’t think of anything to say. The longer I went without saying anything, the worse it got, and I started feeling panicky. All of a sudden, I thought I was actually going to start crying.

“It was the doodle,” he said. I looked back up at him and he was looking at me, but not like some of the others did. He wasn’t looking at me like I was a piece of dirt, or like he was sorry for me or embarrassed for me; he was just smiling a little. His blue eyes were on me as I nodded, but I still wasn’t sure what he meant.

He slid the card across the table with the back facing up, and tapped the corner where I had scribbled some kind of little pattern.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“A doodle?”

“Well, if it is, it’s a doodle of the waveform that’s generated when a revivor’s systems reanimate and come online. It’s called a revivor heart signature. Does that sound familiar?”

I shook my head.

“What’s really interesting,” he continued, “is that your doodle is even more than that. Every signature is unique, and your doodle matches, for all intents and purposes, the signature I pulled off a revivor found at the Palm Harbor docks yesterday.”

He was looking at me more intensely now, orange flickering in the pupils surrounded by that cold blue. The booze had finally started working its magic and was hitting me all at once, making it harder to concentrate. My anxiety was melting away, and I started to relax.

“Can you explain that?” he asked.

I couldn’t explain it, because I had no idea what he was talking about. He was kind of cute in person, I decided. He was nice, too. He didn’t treat me like a lot of the others.

His phone rang. He reached into his suit jacket and checked it, but didn’t answer. It looked like maybe he was reading a text. When he put the phone away, I could tell something was bothering him.

“Who was that?” I asked. He raised his eyebrows.

“An old friend. She wants to meet for lunch.”

“Are you going to?”

“Look, Ms. Ott—”

“I can help you,” I said.

“How?” he asked. His attitude was different, and I thought I was losing him. I remembered the resume I held in my lap. It shook a little as I put it on the table and slid it across to him, just like he had done with the card.

He took the paper and looked at it. He read it for a couple seconds; then his face started to change.

“I’m serious,” I told him.

“You know,” he said, folding the paper and putting it on the table in front of him, “I can see that you are.”

I had blown it. All at once, the anxiety was back and I sat up straight. Damn it, I knew the resume was a mistake; I shouldn’t have given it to him.

“Wait,” I said.

In a few seconds, he was going to send me home. I didn’t know what else to do.

The room got brighter as I stared at him, until it was so bright that the only colors I could see were the ones that hung above his head. They were complicated, but shifting toward red. I pushed them back, soothing them until I saw his face relax.

“You need to give me a chance,” I said. “If you could know one thing right now that you don’t, what would it be?”

He paused for a couple seconds, considering.

“Did she love me?” he asked.

“Something to do with your case,” I said.

“We have a suspect in custody. I need him to talk.”

“Good,” I said. That was perfect, actually. That was something I should be able to do. “I can make him do that. Don’t think about it. Just trust your instincts and take me to him. When we get there, do what I say and I’ll prove it to you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

I let go of the patterns above him and let them resume their flow as the brightness subsided and they faded from view. The room returned to normal, leaving us sitting there facing each other. Agent Nico was looking at me now differently from before, but it was hard to say exactly what he was thinking. The seconds ticked by, but I didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything.

“Follow me,” he said finally.

“Really?”

“Really.”

It had worked. He stood up and waited for me to come around the table; then he walked down the hall and I followed him to a door with a little glass window that was blocked from the other side. He opened the door, and I could see there was a man inside.

“Is that him?” I asked, trying to get a peek through the doorway. Nico seemed to be deliberately standing in front of me, trying to block my view.

“Yes,” he said, “Ms. Ott—”

“I’m listening,” I said. I caught a look at the man through the doorway; he was big like Nico, and dressed in an orange prison uniform. He was sitting in a wheelchair, and from the look of him, he’d been in some kind of accident. He was staring at the floor, and all around his eyes his face was swollen and bruised black and blue. He had cuts on his cheeks and a square piece of gauze was tented over his nose with a strip of adhesive tape. His lips were split, with a couple of stitches in the top one.

“No, you’re not,” Nico said, and stopped talking. I looked up to see him looking down at me, waiting.

“Not what?”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “Pay attention.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Stay on the other side of the table from him,” he said. “He’s in bad shape and he’s restrained, but he’s had extensive body modification, so he’s tougher than he looks. He’s on painkillers that will keep him calm and also keep his motor skills fuzzy, but play it safe.”

“I will.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Do you need anything?”

“Just let me talk,” I said, “and don’t say anything.”

He pushed the door open and went inside. He reached up over the door and did something, then motioned for me to follow. As we approached the guy in the wheelchair, he was looking at his leg. I couldn’t see it before behind the table, but one leg was held out straight in a metal brace. The pant leg was rolled up, and I could see two metal rings around his shin, one under the knee and one above the ankle. Metal pins were stuck into his skin and the whole middle portion was wrapped in gauze. His foot was swollen and black, the toes sticking out like fat little sausages.

I focused on him and saw a violet light prickling above his head, red spikes jumping out. Even with the painkillers, he was in pain, but he was also experiencing some turmoil. He didn’t know what to do.

“Hey,” Nico said to him. “You’ve got a visitor.”

The man looked over at me like he hadn’t noticed me before.

“No shit,” the man said. He was hoarse and his nose was plugged up. His front teeth were missing so his t’s came out like d’s.

“Answer her questions.”

Nico turned to me. I was on.

“Are you okay?” I asked. It was the first thing I could think to say, seeing him like that.

“I hope you’re not my conjugal visit.”

He smiled slightly and winced. His remaining teeth were bloody. I thought about the bandages on Nico’s knuckles. Had he done this? I wasn’t expecting the man to look like that. One part of me was saying that he must have done something to deserve what he got, but another part of me wasn’t so sure.

“I’m helping Agent Wachalowski,” I said weakly.

“You’re wasting your time.”

I was going to have to try it soon, before he got too riled up. I was hugely aware of Nico’s eyes on me.

“Relax,” I told him.

“Screw you, you ugly little bitch!” he yelled; then, before I could react, he leaned forward and spit at me. I saw a red glob shoot out of the gap in his front teeth and felt something wet land on my face, above my eye and down across the bridge of my nose to my cheek. I felt a big surge of anger from Nico, who stood up so fast he knocked his chair back. I held up one hand, easing him back.

“Calm down,” I said. “Both of you, calm down.”

The man in the wheelchair had been glaring at me with a kind of satisfaction, but now his face relaxed as I eased back the light around him, shifting the violets and reds to orange, then blue. Nico put his chair back and sat back down.

“Sleep,” I said. The man’s eyelids fluttered.

His eyes didn’t close but they looked unfocused, staring into nothing. The pain was gone from his face.

I glanced over at Nico, who looked surprised. He handed me a paper towel.

“Is this for real?” he asked.

“Shh.”

I took the paper towel and wiped my face, then folded it in half, covering the smeared blood. I looked back to the man.

“Can you hear me?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Nico had pulled a pad of paper out of his jacket and was scribbling on it. He put it down on the table between us, facing me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Alek Katebi.”

Nico pushed the pad toward me and tapped it with his pen.

“Who are you working for?” I asked.

“I don’t know who he is.”

“You don’t even know who you are working for?”

“That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Nico turned the pad to me again.

“What was the revivor for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All I did was pick them up when they came in, and drop them off. The buyer had a deal with some local trafficker to piggyback the units through his regular routes. I don’t know who the trafficker is. The trafficker doesn’t know who I am, or who I work for. I doubt he ever even saw the units himself.”

“Where did you drop them off once you had them?” I asked. “The revivors, I mean.”

He paused, and the far-off look left his face. His sudden change worried me. Was he coming out of it? He turned and looked at Nico.

“He knows who you are,” he said.

Nico didn’t respond, and the man smiled, showing the gap in his teeth.

“He doesn’t care that you know. You can’t stop it now.”

“Can’t stop what?”

“Maybe before this is over,” the man said, “we’ll let them eat the rest of you.”

Another surge of emotion came from Nico, but he clamped down on it, leaning across the table to face the man.

“Were you there to pick up the revivor? Or were you there to destroy it?”

“If—” the man said, but that’s all that came out. He jerked in his wheelchair so violently that I jumped in surprise. His eyes bugged out, and I heard a muted popping sound as the mellow blue light around his head expanded into an orb and burst like a soap bubble. A spurt of blood shot out of one of his ears and spattered across the table, leaving red dots on Nico’s pad; then the man’s body went limp in the wheelchair.

“Shit!” I said.“Holy shit! What the hell was that?”

Nico didn’t answer; he was already up and checking the guy. He put his fingers to the man’s neck.

Shit. The light above him was gone. Blood was dripping steadily from his ear.

Nico took a step back; then, after a few seconds, he made a call on his cell phone.

“Get a medic up here,” he said. “Interrogation room 5-C. I’ve got a suspect down; he’s dead.”

“It . . . wasn’t my fault,” I said. Nico hung up his phone, still looking at the body.

“I didn’t do it,” I repeated, standing up. My legs buckled a bit, and I was having trouble catching my breath. Blood was spreading all down the guy’s neck, seeping into his shirt. Nico looked over at me.

“I need to get you out of here.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

“I know, but you’re not supposed to be in here.”

“But I—”

“Now.”

He turned me around gently and put his palm on my back, guiding me out of the room. I caught one last look at the body in the wheelchair as he closed the door behind us.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

He took me back to the conference room and handed my coat to me.

“Go back through the lobby,” he said. “You were never in that room, understand?”

“I blew it, didn’t I?” I asked.

“Just the opposite,” he said. “I’ll be contacting you again. Soon, I hope. For now, though, it will be better if no one here knows about your involvement, understand?”

I couldn’t believe it. I think maybe my mind was blown a little, and I couldn’t interpret it all. Was it me? Had I somehow killed that man?

“Understand?”

“Yes.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and a shiver went up my spine.

“Go back out the way you came,” he said. “I’ll contact you again soon.”

Before I could say anything else, he left, heading back to the room with the dead man. I noticed there was some blood on my shirt, so I zipped up my parka to cover it up. As I headed back toward the elevators, I passed a group of people moving quickly in the other direction, but they didn’t pay me any attention. On the trip back down the elevator I kept waiting for an alarm to go off or something, but nothing happened.

I pushed open one of the front doors and went back out into the cold, leaving Nico and the dead man behind me.

As soon as I got close to his place, I knew I shouldn’t be there. It was way the hell on the other side of town—that was the first thing. The twerp was way off his turf, hitting that bar and ending up in the tank with the rest of us. No wonder his friends were crying their eyes out; the dumb shits were probably scared stiff.