10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  Passing by us toward a waiting car, Greenman nods. “Good day, Brady. Agent Dare.”

  The guards step aside dutifully as the door of the storage cell rolls shut again. Greenman gets into his vehicle, and it drives off, out the opening gate.

  Kearns looks lost. “I’d be surprised if the leak was on this end,” he says, his voice muffled slightly by the wind. “Look at all this.”

  Maybe that’s why he brought me here. To shift the blame, pass the buck to our end. “You saying it’s on the Collections side?”

  “No, no.” He holds a hand up defensively. “Just that I can’t see any holes here.”

  “And you’re the expert, right?”

  He scowls, annoyed. “What does that mean?”

  This was a mistake. The guy is a yes-man, and I have no idea what his real motives are. I’d probably swear him out right now and walk away if I didn’t need him for that security footage he’s supposed to give me. Even though it’s unlikely to lead anywhere, I still need to see it to eliminate certain possibilities, so I bite back my anger, doing my best to play nice. “I’m not satisfied of anything yet,” I say, walking toward my parked ride. As he follows me, I ask, “When can I expect that data Greenman mentioned?”

  He pulls a drive out of a pocket on his jacket and holds it up for me to take. “Great,” I say, trying to sound appreciative as I snatch it and pocket it. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  He stops, one of those abrupt stops that’s obviously meant to signal me to stop along with him, but I don’t. “Wait a minute,” he calls, flustered.

  I humor him and turn around. “Yeah?”

  “I think we should work together on this.”

  “I think we can get more done separately.” That might be true, but really I just don’t want him following me around and slowing me down. I plan to do more than due diligence, and I doubt he’s interested in that.

  “You’re blowing me off,” he states evenly.

  “No.”

  “You are,” he says. “You think I’m burning your jets.”

  Maybe he’s more perceptive than I thought. “I’ll keep you in the loop,” I promise.

  “We could be looking at a major source of attrition here,” he says, serious. “This could make or break my career.”

  “You want to wade through hundreds of hours of security camera video?” I ask. “Because that’s where I’m headed.”

  I didn’t expect him to say yes, but fourteen hours later, I’m glad he did. The sun is coming up outside, but the lights in the computer room at the Collections Office have not changed since we sat down at adjacent monitors yesterday evening. My eyes are dry and sore, and my mind is numb, dulled by the monotonous loop of the packaging and shipping cycle of chalk weevil eggs. Multiple angles of nearly indistinguishable images, over and over again, the time stamps the only thing changing. If someone managed to swap one day’s footage for another, I would not be able to tell, but the computer already cross-checked the clips and found no frames with motion in them to be identical, meaning that if a swap was done, the footage cut in predates the rest of the files. Either way, it’s unlikely; the metadata showed no signs of tampering.

  Neither of us has spoken since I put a stop to his chitchat many hours ago, shutting him up so we could both concentrate. It’s awkward sitting in silence with a stranger for half a day, but not as awkward as trying to fill those hours up with small talk. I’ve tried to look at his footage periodically, worried that he’ll miss something, or worse, that he volunteered for this work with the design of covering something up. If he’s noticed my suspicion, he hasn’t said anything. His eyes are red and saggy, his hair is a limp mess, and his coat and tie sit in a crumpled heap next to his monitor, the cast-off leftovers of his performance-focused corporate image, deconstructed by a night of monotonous work. Funny how striving for success can erode the appearance of it.

  The sound of the door snapping open startles me, and I jump a bit in my chair, my back sore and stiff. I pause the video I’m checking and turn to see Myra entering the room, holding a data drive. Her eyes dart for a brief instant to Kearns, and she doesn’t bother concealing a suspicious scowl. “Hey Tar,” she says, unsure whether to say hello to Kearns or not.

  “He’s that Commerce Board auditor,” I offer. “I can’t get rid of him.”

  “Mm.” She doesn’t seem particularly satisfied by that explanation, but she hands me the drive she’s carrying anyhow. “The data you asked for.”

  I nod appreciatively. “This everything?”

  “Financial records and patient files. IA report’s still cooking.”

  “Good work. Thanks for the quick turnaround.”

  “That’s what I do.” She snaps her fingers, adding, “I noticed a large payment from the doc’s account to some lawyer. Might be worth looking into.”

  “Hmm. I will.” I glance at Kearns, who is still watching footage with a blank expression on his face, nearly motionless.

  Myra turns to exit but stops herself. “Oh,” she says, “one more thing . . . Jessi Rodgers has been released from Bray. She’s in the custody of her aunt and uncle. I sent you the address in case you want to check on her.”

  I grunt dismissively, annoyed. “Thanks.” Myra leaves, but I’m still irritated at being reminded of the little girl from the mine. She’s a sore spot, and no good will come of me involving myself in her life. Either she’ll make it or she won’t; either way, I can’t help her. Hoping that getting back to work will push the sick orphan out of my mind, I put the drive on the desk in front of the monitor, and it opens on screen. Looking through the account files, I scroll until I find a payment from the doctor—Marvin Chan was his name—to a law office.

  “Three thousand bones,” I state, thinking aloud, “to an Attorney Troy Sales. A little over five months ago.” A good amount of money.

  “Any details?” Kearns asks, his voice raspy in the first couple of syllables as he finally stirs from his trance-like state of catatonia.

  “Nothing. All it says is that the payment was made for ‘services.’ But why do you go to a lawyer?”

  He rubs his eyes, leaving them closed for a few seconds. “Legal problems.”

  “Like the problems you might have if you started an illegal business.”

  Using the date of the payment as a reference, I scroll through the patient records looking for anything interesting. Going back a little less than a month, something catches my attention.

  “You going to tell me what you’re looking at?” Kearns asks.

  “The doctor treated a SCAPE pilot just a month before he made that payment to the lawyer. Guy named Frank Soto.”

  Kearns shrugs, lazily, slowly. “He was right by the spaceport. Any interstellar crewperson with a problem the doctors on the Orbital couldn’t take care of probably would’ve gone to him.”

  He raises a good point, but I’m not ready to give up on this angle. “Maybe,” I reply, “but maybe this is how he got his hands on SCAPE property.”

  “How, exactly?”

  I stare at the auditor for a second, not ready to articulate anything, wondering if he can help me get personnel records from SCAPE. “I can’t say yet. But I want to know more about the pilot.”

  “I could request his file,” Kearns offers, taking the hint, “but I don’t know if they’d be able to give it to me.”

  Useless. I type off a message to Myra asking her to get everything available on Chan’s patients. I know it will take a while and may get bounced for probable cause issues, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I can still use the Commerce Board suit, as much as I’d love to tell him to get bricked and swallow a fistful of sand.

  “Go home, Kearns,” I tell him, standing up myself. My knees ache with stiffness. “Get some sleep and clean yourself up.”

  “What?” he asks, “Why?”

  “You’re picking me up at twenty hundred tonight. I’ll send you my address.”
/>
  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ve got an invitation to a party. I’ve got some more questions for the host.”

  Arriving at my ride on the top floor of the Collections Agency lot, blanketed in the harsh bronze light of day, I pause for a second to check the messages on my phone. Among the usual work-related memos is one from Myra with the subject line “Jessi Rodgers” and an address, some place at the southern edge of town in the shady, industry-heavy warehouse district.

  “Son of an ass, Myra.” I said it aloud, scowling. The place is not on my way home, and I had just stopped worrying about the girl, but if I go home now I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep. Those bad thoughts creep in. The ones of Jessi Rodgers in the hospital, rasping. The ones from my childhood, the image of a box with a folded letter on top sitting on the cold gray cement floor of my parents’ house, just inside the faded yellow front door . . .

  Damn you, Myra. You’ve wrecked my whole day.

  I get on my ride and head out of the lot, annoyed and tired.

  The address is a hydroponics warehouse set between old factories. The streets out here are lonely, the pavement cracked all around, the buildings built low and cheap, mostly aluminum poured with synth-foam. The block is deserted except for a single homeless man sleeping in the shadow of a rain collection overhang. The hydro farm itself, a structure of corrugated, ribbed aluminum with a mesh-covered glass roof, doubles my annoyance at Myra. I do not want to be here. The place is just like the one I worked in when I was a little girl, and those are not good memories.

  Wanting to get this visit over with, I dismount my ride, walk to the front door, and hit the ringer. A minute or so later, a woman answers the door. She looks old at first glance but is actually middle-aged, her skin weathered by a lifetime of sun exposure and marginal nutrition, her hair thin and gray and brittle. I don’t see any purple spots, but she doesn’t look healthy, either.

  “Hello,” she says, looking over my Collections blue-and-blacks with a little bit of fear, her voice soft and barely audible over the drone of machinery coming from nearby factories. “Can I help you?”

  “Good morning. My name is Taryn Dare, I’m a Collections Agent. Is there someone here who has taken custody of a minor named Jessi Rodgers?”

  The woman relaxes a bit, realizing that maybe I’m not here to toss the place. “Jessi’s my niece,” she says.

  “So you’re the legal guardian?”

  She tenses a little, like I’m accusing her of something. “I suppose I am. Hadn’t thought of it that way yet.” She offers a hand, dry and dirty with hydro fertilizer powder, and I shake it. The feel of it triggers tactile memories of my youth. “My name is Enna Rodgers,” she says. “What can I do for you?”

  “If it’s okay, I’d like to see Jessi.”

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing like that. I’m the Agent who found her.”

  If Enna Rodgers is angry at me for killing Jessi’s grandfather, she doesn’t show it. “She’s working, but come on in.”

  She steps aside, and I walk through the door into a long, spare warehouse lined with high racks of strawberry plants, their roots hooked into a lattice of hydro tubes. It’s a simple setup with reflective floors and walls bouncing the natural light flooding in from the transparent ceiling. Some farms use hydraulic adjusters to maximize sun exposure, but that’s not likely to be cost effective on a strawberry crop, and it looks like these people can’t afford that type of equipment anyhow.

  “Nice looking farm,” I offer. “You guys doing well?”

  “We’re surviving,” the woman replies, standoffish. She turns toward the long rows of green, leafy plants and shouts, “Jessi! Jessi! Come here!”

  The sound of footsteps approaches from somewhere among the crops, neither slow nor fast, and after a few seconds, the leaves part and the little girl from the mine emerges, squeezing out from between two rows. She’s in a little gray work jumpsuit splashed with water and stained in places with green and brown streaks, and she’s carrying a pollination tool. She’s out of breath, and I can hear a slight wheezing every time she inhales.

  “Someone’s here to see you,” says the aunt.

  The little girl takes half a step back when she sees me. Of course she’s afraid. I kneel down to look her in the eye, and I ask, as gently as I can, “You recognize me, don’t you, Jessi?”

  She looks away. “Yes.”

  “You know,” I tell her, “I grew up on a farm a lot like this. Worked the racks, just like you.”

  She has to pause before she speaks, her breath raspy and labored. “Why are you here?”

  “Jessi,” her aunt scolds, “be polite.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. The little girl has a good point. I can’t do her any good. Or I won’t, anyway. I’m here to make myself feel better, and I’m wasting these people’s time. “I came because I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. And I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

  She says nothing for a second or two, and I can’t tell if she’s resentful or annoyed or just bored. “Is that it?” she asks.

  “That’s it.”

  Her face expressionless, she turns away and slips back into the plants, disappearing among the close-packed leaves and ripening berries. Take away the not-yet-ripe fruit, and it could be a moment from my own childhood. I remember sliding between rows of densely-packed leaves, pulling soybeans and dropping them into a bucket for hours on end. I remember the focused look on my dad’s face as he made tweaks and repairs to the hydro equipment. He was short, his hair dark and thick, his jaw square. He was born in a place called Austria, on Earth, and he talked with an accent. My mother was taller than he was, her hair slightly lighter, her eyes blue, a beautiful woman in her day. She came from some place called California, used to tell the story of how she met my father at Cal Tech when she sold him her refrigerator. I remember the way they would smile before times got bad. They used to enjoy working that farm, for reasons I could never understand. There was something like love there. Maybe they thought it was important.

  Pulling myself back into the here and now, I stand back up feeling worse than I did before I came here. Stuff like this isn’t like me. I don’t know what I’m doing here. It didn’t turn out well, and it serves me right.

  “She don’t mean nothin’ by it,” says Enna Rodgers, apologizing for Jessi.

  “I know.” Trying not to sound judgmental, I add, “She’s in rough shape.”

  “She’ll manage.”

  “You put her to work a day after she leaves the hospital?”

  “The doctors didn’t say not to. We need the help, and getting some activity will help her, maybe.”

  “I was told she needs an operation.”

  “Might,” the woman says defensively. “The doctors told us she might need one. We have to see how she does.”

  That might be a lie, I don’t know. Either way, this woman is starting to reveal herself for what she is, and I like her less and less by the minute. “How close are you to paying for it?”

  “They’re telling us that the forced sale of her grandpa’s mine won’t even cover the hospital bills she’s already run up. We own this farm, but we’re in the red on seed and fertilizer, and the doctors said the operation would cost something around six thousand. So we’re nowhere close, but we’ll see where we are after this month’s crop goes out.”

  These people are one step up from dirt poor. They’ve got no chance of paying that bill, and Enna Rodgers is doing a junk job of convincing me that she’s even thought about trying to. As if wanting to apologize but unwilling to admit any wrongdoing, she offers, “I want you to know we don’t harbor any grudges against you, miss.”

  I know nothing about her relationship with the miner I put down, and I don’t care to. I’m not achieving anything here, and these people’s lives are dragging me down even harder than I expected, into that dark spot within me, the bad times,
the things I want so badly to put light years behind me. I’m done here. “Thanks for having me in,” I say evenly, stepping back to the door. “Good luck with the crop.”

  7

  The alarm wakes me at nineteen hundred, after a nap of insufficient length, and I wolf down some warmed up rice, then start cleaning myself up. I usually don’t wear makeup other than semi-perm lip pigments, and I can’t really tell if I’m doing it right. Fortunately, I don’t have much choice as to clothes. I only own one evening dress, which feels awkward for some unidentifiable reason, tight or something, after I pull it on. Have I gained weight? My uniform fits just as tightly as the dress, but for whatever reason, the reinforced leggings and mid-sleeve top feel more secure. Maybe it’s the thickness of the fabric.

  I’m still brushing my hair out when the phone rings. The music I’ve got playing stops, replaced by a soft tone as “Incoming call—Brady Kearns” flashes on my monitor.

  “Answer,” I order. A click tells me it’s picked up. “Mr. Kearns, I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “Okay. I’ll be in my car out—”

  “Clear call.”

  Another click tells me the connection has been cut, and my music comes back on. I straighten my hair out one last time and check my appearance in the full-length mirror on the outside of my shower chamber. I’m no supermodel, but I applaud myself silently for cleaning up decently. My dress, a knee-length, v-cut, dark gray piece overlaid with a barely visible silver plaid, hugs my frame closely, showing off my muscle tone. I’ve worn it maybe twice, so it looks new and isn’t unique enough to have gone out of style. My dark hair hangs a few centimeters below my shoulders and somehow still has a healthy shine in spite of all the hours I spend exposed to sun and alkali dust in the winds. Except for the deep, dark tan on my face, neck, and forearms, my skin could belong to a rich woman, smooth and unblemished, lacking any signs of hypocalcemia. I live cheaply, but I’m not dumb enough to cut too far back on my currency consumption. Getting hospitalized for complications from a deficiency would eat a big chunk out of my bank account, and anyway, when I can finally afford space travel, I don’t want the acceleration to break my spine or ribs.