State of Decay (24 page)

There. The smoke from one of the cars parted suddenly as it drifted across the street. It was subtle, but I saw it. For just a second, there was the outline of an arm and a leg in the smoke; then it flickered and moved away.

He was there. He was right there. Whoever it was really did have an LW suit. I hadn’t seen one of those since my tour.

“Is he out there?” one of the guards asked. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to spook the shooter.

Switching filters, I managed to at least get a fix on him. It was definitely a male, carrying a rifle of some kind. I couldn’t make out any features, just an enhanced silhouette, but I could see him. He stood in the middle of the street, between two cars, looking toward the steps, which were still covered in the man’s blood. The shooter lingered, like he was debating whether or not to press the attack.

He opted not to. He took two steps back, then turned.

I moved out from behind the door, took aim, and fired three times. I hit him twice for sure, but it didn’t stop him. He crouched down and darted down a side street.

“Sir?” one of the guards said.

“Let him go.”

We could get a team together with the right hardware to track him, but not before he was long gone. For now I had gotten at least a recording of him, proof that he existed. Faye wasn’t seeing things; someone or something had been under an LW field at the truck fire as well.

Stepping over the slick of blood on the stairs, I followed the trail back inside. The medics had arrived and were treating the man, but he was hemorrhaging badly. I knelt over him, and his although he looked very weak, his eyes found mine immediately and fixed on me. He spoke, struggling to get the words out.

“His name is Luis Valle. . . .”

“Luis Valle.”

“Luis . . . they’re looking for him. Help him . . .” he whispered, groping with one hand.

“I will,” I said. “They told me you asked for me by name. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Why me?”

“You were there. . . .”

His face tightened and his eyes went wide; then everything relaxed. His eyes began to swim out of focus.

“Where?” I asked.

“Heinlein . . . Samuel never left. . . .”

“You left that message for me?”

He nodded.

“Samuel Fawkes?”

“Yes,” he whispered. He could barely speak. “He found me out. . . . I had to run. . . .”

“Samuel Fawkes is dead. Isn’t he?”

“I suspected . . . he was in the system. Luis found something . . . for me. He’s in danger. . . .”

“What does that mean? What did he find?”

His eyes met mine one last time, tears brimming.

“Help Luis. . . .”

He flatlined. The medic closest to me gave me a look.

“That’s it.”

I stood up. The knees of my pants were wet with blood. I called back to security.

No doubt. Bob MacReady, the representative from Heinlein who met with me, had mentioned his name, in passing anyway. He had worked at one time for Samuel Fawkes, up until the time of Samuel’s death. The two had worked on Zhang’s Syndrome.

He worked at Heinlein Industries
, I said.

Heinlein Industries, and the name Zhang in particular, had a way of cropping up during the course of all this.

Rebecca Valle’s name was right after that of Mae Zhu, who had been murdered in her car the night before. None of the others on the list were reachable, and none had responded to repeated messages. That last name could not be a coincidence.

Got it
, the security agent said.
Rebecca Valle is the second wife of Luis Valle’s father, Miguel, and get this—Rebecca, the husband, and their daughter were all found dead in their home earlier today.

The medics hoisted the body onto a gurney, leaving behind nothing but a mess on the tiled floor. Whatever else he was, Cross wasn’t the kind of man who dealt with men like Tai. It sounded as though he found something at Heinlein, something that made him enlist the help of his computer-savvy nephew. Rebecca Valle’s name on that list of targets tied them together, though, somehow. Did she prompt Cross to get involved in whatever he had gotten involved in?

“Hold on,” I said, stopping the medics before they wheeled the body away. I found a cell phone in his pocket. Sure enough, Luis Valle was on his list of contacts. I punched the number in and the phone started to ring.

Someone was looking for that boy. By now, he most likely knew he was in trouble and was on the run.

He’s not answering his phone
, I said, snapping it shut.
Coordinate with local police and find that kid. Offer a reward—whatever it takes. I think we don’t have much time.

The coroner zipped Cross into a bag. I wasn’t sure why, but he took a bullet in the back because he wanted me to know that Samuel never left, whatever that meant.

The kid, Luis Valle, might be the only one left who knew what.

When Wachalowski first left the envelope full of evidence with me, I was so excited that I didn’t think that much about what exactly he expected me to do with it, or how I was going to be able to give him any information he didn’t already know. It had been a while since he left, and although I had been looking at some of the stuff he gave me, I was mostly just a lot drunker.

Gray light peeked in from behind the shade, but the bedroom was lit by a couple of the scented candles Karen had left behind. Usually I didn’t use them, because candles and me didn’t mix, but the overhead was out. The light flickered over the walls where I had tacked up about half the stuff from the envelope so far.

Mostly it was a bunch of documents, but I wasn’t about to read through all that. Mixed in were copies of ID cards, what looked like schematics of some kind, and some other things I didn’t recognize. There were also ten printouts of waveforms like the kind I doodled on the card I’d left for him that night. They were all labeled RHS, along with a number code in the lower right-hand corner. Those squiggles meant a lot to him, but I didn’t even remember drawing the one on the card and I had no idea what I was supposed to be able to tell from them.

I’d been staring at them tacked up on the wall and letting my mind drift, but like I said, I was pretty much only getting drunker. I held the empty shot glass against my lower lip, smelling the fumes and waiting for inspiration to come.

Someone knocked on the front door, snapping me out of it. I sighed into the glass, fogging it up. Considering that up until a few days ago I hadn’t had any visitors for years, now it seemed like I never stopped getting them.

Putting down the glass and the bottle, I crawled off the bed and made my way to the door, thinking it was probably Karen and that maybe she wanted her clothes back. Nico had said he had someplace he had to go, so it probably wasn’t him. At least I hoped not, because I didn’t have anything to tell him.

Usually I used the peephole, but this time I didn’t. I should have, because it wasn’t Karen and it wasn’t Nico; it was my asshole next-door neighbor.

“God, what do you want?” I asked. He stood there watching me in that weird way he had.

“You get a lot of visitors lately,” he said.

He was too much. I’d had it with him. How did I end up with this spaz living next to me? The old woman had never done anything but smile at me in the hall every once in a while, which was almost never, because she came out of her apartment even less than I did. What was wrong with this guy? Was this just his weird way of trying to make conversation, or was he some kind of nut job?

Either way, I didn’t care anymore. Without bothering to answer, I focused on him until the color drained away from everything and the lights swelled.

The colors that drifted above him came into view, and so did that strange, thin white halo I noticed before. In fact, since I was concentrating harder this time, it was much brighter. It was brighter than anything else, and got even more intense until it threatened to wash out everything.

Right then, I started to feel funny, and instead of his curiosity or whatever it was disappearing, it was my anger and frustration that just melted away. This total relaxation kind of came over me that was even better than drinking.

The lights dimmed back to normal around me and his colors faded until they were gone, along with the odd halo. He was looking directly into my eyes and smiling faintly.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Your new friend is a federal investigator,” he said, still smiling.

“Yeah.”

“What did he want?”

“I’m helping him on a case he’s working on.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little proud of that fact. “He left me some stuff, some evidence to look at.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I would like very much to see that.”

“You want to see?”

“If it’s appropriate,” he said, still staring into my eyes.

“Well, he said none of it was classified. . . .”

I opened the door wide enough for him to enter, pushing over a stack of notebooks as I did. His face changed for a second, showing what might have been disgust or contempt, but it was gone as fast as it came. Stepping back to let him through, I gestured to my bedroom door.

“Through here,” I said. “Follow me.”

He came inside, one of his shoes knocking into something that skittered across the floor before he closed the door behind him. His footsteps sounded behind me as I headed back into my room, where the contents of the envelope were tacked up.

As I looked over the array of things hanging on the walls, I felt him also looking behind me.

“Your friend works with revivors,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s something about the case he’s working on.”

He moved closer to the printouts with the heart squiggles on them and studied them. His eyes moved across the walls, looking at the other documents, IDs, and whatnot before they landed on the evidence envelope sitting open on my bed.

“May I?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He picked up the envelope and looked inside before shaking out what was left out onto my bed. Among the other papers were a stack of photographs that he spread out over the mattress.

One was a dark-skinned Asian man with a long face and long black hair. He was creepy- looking, and I knew right away I’d never seen him before. Another one looked like a video still of a girl revivor. She was standing completely naked in what looked like a public bathroom, with those electric eyes staring out from behind strands of straight black hair. I recognized that one; I’d seen her on the news in one of the clips the data miner had picked out when I was filtering on Wachalowski’s name.

He pushed the photographs around for a moment so that he could see them all. He didn’t show any particular interest in the naked ones, but he did linger on one in particular.

“Do you know who that is?” I asked. The picture looked like a still taken from somebody’s point of view as they were standing inside an office or something. Sitting on a desk was a polished stone clock with what looked like a diamond above the twelve. A little Asian woman with a big head was sitting behind the desk. She had an overbite and weird lips, and her eyes reminded me of a fish’s, for some reason.

“Do you?” he asked back.

“No.”

He looked at the picture a little longer, then looked back at me.

“How is it that you are helping your friend, the federal investigator, on his case?”

“I have special talents,” I said.

“But why you?”

“I’m the only one that can do what I do.”

He nodded like he wasn’t even listening. He didn’t ask me to clarify what I had just said.

“I see,” he said, stepping back from the photographs. He took one more look along the walls at the other things tacked there, then moved to the bedroom doorway.

“Thank you for showing me this,” he said. “It was very interesting. Good luck helping your friend. I hope you are successful.”

“Thanks.”

“If there’s one thing this world does not need, it’s more revivors.”

On that note, he moved back to the front door and opened it, giving my apartment one last look before that expression of contempt came back for a second.

“You should tend to this,” he said. “Human beings shouldn’t live in filth like you do.”

All at once, the sort of lighthearted feeling left me and I remembered why I couldn’t stand that guy. My face got hot all the way to my earlobes.

“I should have known better,” I said. “I knew you were a jerk.”

He shrugged as he turned to leave.

“Get out!” I snapped at his back, then slammed the door behind him.

I was so angry. Who did he think he was, asking to come in and then insulting me to my face?