The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (10 page)

Although the front of the building wasn’t much different from its neighbors, the back of the property was secured on three sides by a high greenbrick wall topped with broken bottles—not at all the sort of thing you’d expect of a legitimate fungus dealer. Score one for Grossman’s story.

As I inspected the wall, I got one of those feelings that a P.I. learns to respect—an itching at the back of my neck, like I was being watched. I whipped my head around as quick as I could, but saw nothing behind me.

But was that a splash I heard? Someone vanishing around a corner?

I crouched low and stayed still for a while, but nothing jumped me.

Returning to the street, I approached the shop’s front door just like an upstanding citizen. The door croaked a greeting as I approached—a habit of the local architecture I’ve always found disquieting—and as it opened itself, I was immediately met by the proprietor, Mr. Ugulma himself. He was just as plump and ugly as his photograph had promised, and his wide, shining eyes oozed suspicion.

“Can I help you?” he gurgled curtly. He spoke English with a German accent, which did not endear him to me. It wasn’t the froggies’ fault that the whole continent of Thugugruk had been German territory before the war, I told myself, but that accent still made me twitch.

“I’m looking for . . . something in the fungus line,” I temporized as I inspected the merchandise. The place looked not unlike a soggy version of an Earth lumberyard, though all of the planks and beams were actually slices of giant mushroom and it smelled of loam rather than cut wood. But I wasn’t really paying any attention to the goods on display—I was looking behind and between the stacks for signs of Ugulma’s other business.

“Fungi we’ve got,” he replied, gesturing to indicate the whole shop. But his froggy eyes didn’t budge from mine. It was as though he expected me to walk off with a whole bundle of toadstool two-by-fours the minute his back was turned.

“I’d like some . . . some, ah, fancy trim work,” I said, naming something I didn’t see that he might plausibly carry. “You know, detail molding. Like you might find in a nice house.”

“Nothing in stock. But we’ve got a catalog. Special order.”

“Can I see it?”

He gave me a long, hard look, then muttered, “Yeah, sure,” and ducked behind the counter. I heard the office door croak, which was interesting. I took advantage of his absence to peek a little more nosily into and behind his stock, but when the door croaked again, warning me of his return, I had learned nothing new.

Nor did I learn anything from perusing the catalog, other than the difference between an architrave and a dentil crown. I excused myself as quickly as I plausibly could. Ugulma seemed happy to see the back of me.

The door croaked at me again as I left. “Same to you, pal,” I sneered to it under my breath.

I looked around, all casual like, before I hailed a cab back to my hotel. But though I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched.

Even though the sun barely peeps through Venus’s perpetual clouds, for some reason the natives are strongly diurnal. So when I returned to Ugulma’s shop after dark, creeping through the moonless, starless blackness between the widely-spaced wormlights, I could be pretty sure I wouldn’t encounter anyone. But I still brought my gat, plus a few other things.

The alley behind the shop was completely black, so I risked a quick flash of my cigarette lighter to make sure I was where I wanted to be before proceeding.

Was that movement? In the murk beyond the lighter’s reach?

I doused the flame immediately and crouched stock-still—holding my breath, gun in hand, ready for any attack. But the Venusian night stayed silent as ever, and after several long minutes I decided that what I thought I’d seen had been just a trick of the lighter’s flickering flame.

My hotel was pretty cheap—cheaper than my expense report to Grossman would indicate, anyway—but in this case that worked in my favor because the rough woolen blanket they’d provided worked just fine to cover the broken glass at the top of the wall. Even if it got torn, I figured no one would ever notice. Who uses a blanket on Venus, anyway?

I scampered up and over the rough greenbrick just as quick as if it were a wall on the Marines’ obstacle course, then dropped to the ground on the other side without a sound.

From my jacket pocket I pulled a little gizmo like a perfume atomizer and squirted it at the door as I approached. The door relaxed, making no sound as I pushed it open a crack and squeezed inside. One of the many useful tricks I’d picked up during my sojourn as the only mostly-honest cop in Cooksport. The office door got the same treatment.

The croak I’d heard from that door on my earlier visit had been a significant clue. Living doors provided security as well as a polite greeting, and they weren’t cheap, so the froggies generally only had them as outside doors. For Ugulma to install one of them as his interior office door indicated that there was something more than usually valuable inside.

The office had no windows, so I used my lighter to take a good look around. It had the usual sort of things you’d expect to find in a fungus dealer’s office—papers, ashtray, spore casings—plus a large and very sophisticated safe.

Bingo.

The safe’s nameplate read “Schlosserei Döttling GmbH” in that almost illegible black-letter type the Krauts are so fond of. It was a name I knew—quality German engineering, nearly impossible to crack. And, given the cost of shipping from Earth, far more expensive than any mere fungus dealer could possibly justify.

But even a perfect safe is worthless if the owner doesn’t lock it, and you’d be surprised how often that happens. I reached for the handle to check it . . .

Suddenly I heard the gurgle of a Venusian squelch pistol being cocked. “Hands up, Mr. Drayton,” came a familiar German-accented voice, “and turn around slowly.”

I did as I’d been ordered, the flickering lighter still in my hand. Ugulma was standing inside the open door that I myself had silenced. Damn it. “Shouldn’t good little froggies be in bed by now?” I said.

“I was told you’d try to steal my notes,” he replied, leveling the squelcher right at my family jewels. His grin showed that he knew just how much this was going to hurt.

“What’s that behind you?” I cried, and threw the lighter in his face.

It might be the oldest trick in the book, but in this case I really
had
seen something moving behind him.

The lighter smacked him right between his bulging eyes. It went out with a hiss, followed immediately by the liquid cough of the squelcher’s discharge. But I had ducked to the side as soon as I tossed the lighter and the shot only caught my sleeve.

I rolled under the desk, drew my gun, then crept out into the pitch blackness as silently as I could. Making for the door, hoping to slip past Ugulma in the dark.

But although froggies don’t have ears, they still have excellent hearing. Just before I got to the door, I felt a warm, wet pressure behind my ear—the squelcher’s business end.

“Goodbye, Mr. Drayton.” The squelcher gurgled . . .

Suddenly a brilliant, blinding flash of light stabbed me in the eyes. Ugulma shrieked in pain, throwing the hand that held the squelcher across his eyes.

My gun was still in my hand. I aimed at Ugulma’s afterimage and fired.

The muzzle flash showed Ugulma’s startled face . . . and a second figure in the office, a skinny froggie with a fedora and a big camera like a reporter’s. What the hell?

Darkness returned with a thud, the sound of Ugulma’s body hitting the floor. I leapt at where I thought the froggie with the fedora might be.

Somewhat to my surprise, I connected.

We rolled over and over on the office floor, both grunting as we struggled, banging into furniture, wastebaskets, icky fungus things, and Ugulma’s heavy, slimy body. Then there came a crunch of breaking glass and a gasp of froggy pain.

That gave me the opening I needed. I shifted my grip, got my thumbs under his throat-sac, and squeezed. Hard.

He fought back, but Earth’s gravity is higher than Venus’s and I work out at the boxing gym every week. Pretty soon he stopped fighting, his movements growing weaker and then stopping altogether.

I kept up the pressure long enough to be sure he wasn’t playing possum, but not long enough to kill him.

By the time he came to, I’d handcuffed him to the safe, tickled the wormlights awake, and retrieved my gun. His pockets held a nasty little two-shot squelcher, some spare flashbulbs, and no identification. And though he was bleeding from a cut on his face where he’d rolled over and broken his own camera’s flash unit, most of the green blood on him, and on me, was Ugulma’s. The fungus dealer was dead, shot through the throat.

Whoever the froggie with the fedora was, he was tough and ruthless and good at his job; despite my advantages in strength and weight, I’d only beaten him by luck. So I sat in the chair a good ten feet from him, with my fully-loaded pistol trained on him and Ugulma’s squelcher ready in my other hand. Fedora’s own squelcher was in my pocket—I didn’t trust it.

In any Earth city the size of Cooksport, the sound of gunshots would have brought the police by now. But I’d been a Cooksport cop for almost five years and I knew we wouldn’t be disturbed until morning.

He groaned and sat up . . . or tried to, until the handcuffs holding him to the safe’s thick steel foot stopped him. Then he looked around, spotted me, and immediately rose to a crouch, ready to spring if he got an opportunity.

“Settle back down or I shoot,” I said conversationally.

He settled: butt on the floor, facing me, with his hands behind him. Which showed that he understood English and that he wasn’t dumb.

“Who are you?”

“My name is not important.” His English was good for a froggie, with no regional accent I could detect.

“Who sent you?”

Silence.

“Why were you following me?”

Silence.

I stood up, took one step closer to him, and drew back the hammer on my revolver. I find that the click it makes is extremely persuasive. “Who sent you, and why were you following me?”

I’ll give him credit. He held his silence right up until I put the barrel between his froggy eyes and started to squeeze the trigger.

“I don’t know who hired me!” he spat. “The money came through a blind drop.”

I stepped back, still keeping the gun on him. “What was the job?”

“To get pictures of your death.”

That explained why the camera had flashed just as Ugulma was about to pull the trigger, and strongly hinted at the employer. “You were a bit premature.”

“I didn’t know it would be so
bright
.” If froggies had teeth, he would have been gritting them.

But something didn’t quite fit. “How did you know Ugulma would show up and try to kill me?”

He smiled, and it was an ugly thing. “I told him to.”

Ugulma had said something along those lines . . . “You told him I’d try to steal something of his. What was it?”

He didn’t say anything, but his eyes flickered fractionally in the direction of the safe.

“So the
ulka
’s in the safe,” I probed.

At that he blinked. “
Ulka?
Not even Ugulma’s stupid enough to sell
ulka
here. This is Gurundi territory.”

Curiouser and curiouser. “So what’s in the safe that’s so important Ugulma would risk killing a human over it?” Humans and froggies in Cooksport had separate-but-equal judicial systems. For a froggie to kill a human was a maximum crime under froggie law—he’d have to be truly desperate to even consider such a thing.

“Notes.”

“What kind of notes?”

“I wasn’t told.” His throat-sac pulsed, then slowly deflated—a froggy shrug. He really didn’t know.

“Whatever those notes are,” I mused, “your employer knew that if Ugulma thought I was trying to steal them, he’d kill me. So he told you to warn Ugulma I was coming to do exactly that, and then follow me to photograph the hit.”

“Pretty smart for a human.”

I felt like I had all the pieces, but the puzzle still wasn’t fitting together. “You’re pretty good yourself. So if whoever-it-was wanted pictures of me dead . . . why didn’t he just have you kill me?”

Again the ugly grin. “Look behind you.”

It might be the oldest trick in the book, and I’d just used it myself, but even so I nearly fell for it. I started to look . . . then immediately caught myself and turned back.

Somehow he’d managed to work one hand out of the cuffs while they were behind his back. He was leaping right at me, fearless, the handcuffs swinging toward my face and the other hand reaching for my gun.

But even though my head had started to turn, the gun hadn’t. I pulled the trigger right before he slammed into me.

He was still trying to claw my eyes out when he died.

So there I was with two dead froggies, a ruined suit, and a safe full of secrets. I straightened the place up a bit while I thought about what to do next.

Even though the cops wouldn’t come by until business hours, whoever had hired Fedora Guy—and I had a very good idea who that might have been—was extremely interested in the contents of Ugulma’s safe and certainly had resources of his own. I suspected he’d find out what had happened and try for the safe himself right away. And if he did, and if I could catch him in the act, that would be a very interesting conversation.

I squeezed myself between two file cabinets and waited in the dark.

I didn’t have long to wait. It was less than an hour later when the door croaked—apparently it had recovered from the mickey I’d slipped it—and a little guy in a trench coat and slouch hat entered, carrying a pocket wormlight.

The light illuminated what he was looking at, not him, so I couldn’t see his face. But he was much shorter than the gross man I’d expected. I took a firmer grip on my pistol and waited to see what he’d do.

He looked around the place a bit, obviously unnerved by the blood and the two bodies, but as soon as he saw the safe he went right to it. He knelt down in front of it, pulled a folded paper from his pocket, and dialed in the combination.