by M. G. Herron
“No!” I shouted, diving into the sea of alien bodies as I grabbed for him. “Vinny. Vinny!” Remembering his full offworlder name, I shouted, “Vinkalathis!”
There was a surprised gasp that I distinctly recognized as Vinny’s. Then a scream. I caught a glimpse of leather, ten-fingered hands, a wing, a sandal, trampled plastic cups. Alien bodies, slimy and rough, thin and fat, closed like a gate in front of me. I heaved and shoved at the knot of offworlders.
When I broke through the crowd at last, I found Vinny prone on the floor, eyes colored a bright orange and swimming with specks of light.
6
Air evacuated itself from my lungs. I saw Vinny’s bright orange eyes and, for a moment, lost my equilibrium. My whole body broke out in a sheen of cold, terrified sweat as the boardwalk wobbled.
Despite being unconscious, Vinny wasn’t just shivering now, as Monica had been when I found her; he was shaking violently. When I realized I wasn’t going to topple over, I laid a palm on his chest, then pulled it back, gasping when my hand instantly went numb, as if coming into contact with an object vibrating at a high and unnatural frequency.
I touched his forehead, but could only hold my hand there for a few seconds before I had to pull away again and shake the feeling back into my fingers. The pain of the vibration was too much. How was that possible? Vinny was burning up, his heart pounding and pulse racing, but apart from the uncontrollable vibration, he was unresponsive. I waved my hand over his glowing eyes. Little specks swam in the irises. No acknowledgement. I put my ear next to his mouth. He was breathing shallowly, quickly, like he was running a race.
I wiped sweat from my brow. Why was I so hot? For a moment, I feared I had been drugged, too. Then I became aware of everyone gathered around us both. My heart lurched through my chest, but that was fear, not caused by a substance. The multicolored horde of offworlders pressed in closer, gawking down at Vinny, and exhaling their hot breath on my bare neck.
“Spacechaser,” someone whispered.
“How much did he take?”
They were right. Vinny seemed to be experiencing the same euphoric effects of heavy Ora use that I’d seen in the addict, Monica, on the ratty couch in her house. I didn’t have much experience with the drug, but it was impossible not to see the similarities.
Vinny’s case was evidently worse because another level of symptoms had been added: the high frequency vibration of his body.
I stood, shoving a Torlik back with two hands against his chest. “All right, move along! Nothing to see here! Get gone, you tourists!”
My words and bearing began to have the intended effect. Slowly, offworlders began to shift and move away. Rashiki’s barking voice came from behind me, and that seemed to motivate them to move faster.
When a space around us had cleared, I spotted a shifty gray figure lying against the wall near the door to the massage parlor. He had two wings and the left one was bent at an obtuse angle. The Daacro tried to push himself up onto all fours. Flexing his injured wing, he hissed in pain.
When he noticed me, he flapped the wings, instinctively taking flight and instantly regretting it. His broken wing couldn’t hold him aloft and he fell back to the wooden slats of the boardwalk. Reaching out, I wrapped the fingers of one hand around his scrawny neck and hauled him over next to Vinny.
“Are you responsible for this, you sneaky little bastard?” I demanded.
The Daacro wasn’t very big. I knelt down and squeezed his neck, forcing him within inches of Vinny’s unconscious face so that I could watch his reaction. He struggled and averted his eyes.
True to the mythical comparisons with gargoyles, the Daacro’s skin was bumpy and sharp. It felt like I was grabbing granite. However, I could fit my hand all the way around his stick-sized neck. It definitely didn’t seem like I was hurting him enough, because he lifted his chin and bared his teeth at me.
I reached back with my free hand and crunched his broken wing.
“Argh!” he cried. “Stop!”
I lifted my eyebrows and looked pointedly at Vinny. “Talk, bird brain, or I’ll do it again.”
“You have no authority over me, bounty hunter.”
I squeezed his wing again. He squirmed against the pain and cried out. Though his rough skin felt like it was tearing my palm open, I squeezed harder. “I asked you a question! What did you do to Vinny?”
“Nothing,” the Daacro said through gritted teeth. “It wasn’t me.”
At that moment, the crowd parted and Rashiki came into view, his pod hovering off the ground like a floating throne. I stared at the massive Torlik, intimidating up close, and even more so from my vantage point, gazing at him from my knees. He must have outweighed me by four hundred pounds. More if you counted the pod.
“What is meaning of this?” Rashiki demanded. “Why are you assaulting offworlders in my establishment?”
When he saw Vinny, his nostrils widened as he inhaled deeply, but he didn’t move to help or open his mouth to call for assistance.
That pissed me off even more.
“You think I did this to Vinny? He’s my friend. Why don’t you tell me why you’re letting others assault offworlders in your racetrack!”
“I didn’t touch the Pangozil,” the Daacro choked out. I released my hold slightly, allowing him to suck in a desperate breath.
“I was referring to you wringing the neck of this Daacro,” Rashiki said.
I looked at the pitiful, pain-wracked creature. I didn’t release him. “He attacked Vinny. I can’t just let him walk away.”
“I did no such thing,” the Daacro insisted again.
Rashiki pushed his pod closer until the metallic edge came within inches of my face. He looked from the Daacro to me, and then lowered his voice so that only the three of us could hear. “We just met, human, but understand me this: I am extremely attentive to my customers during every race. Especially ones that spend money.” He twitched his jowls in Vinny’s direction. “Vinny was showing symptoms since you two sat down. Oh, yes. You didn’t see it, did you? The enraptured look on his face. The elevated heart rate, the nervous tics. I knew he had gambling problem, but not even I knew about his drug habits.”
“He doesn’t have drug habits!” I said.
“Then how do you explain this?”
I rocked back on my heels.
Was Rashiki right? Vinny had already proven capable of keeping one huge secret from me. Could he really be hiding another whopper like this?
My memory skipped back to earlier that night when I’d first asked him about the strange drug. A distant, absorbed look had come over his face. He’d been thinking. About what? Did he know more than he was letting on?
The Daacro squirmed in my hands.
“Did you drug Vinny?” I demanded.
The Daacro shook his head.
“Prove it.”
“I was sent here to monitor you, bounty hunter,” the Daacro hissed. “The Gatekeeper could care less about what happens to this leech.”
With a snap of my arm, I slammed the Daacro’s head into the floor, and then brought him back up again. His eyes unfocused, looking in two different directions. I had to work to keep him upright while he regained his balance.
“Oops,” I said.
“Enough!” Rashiki snapped. He made a gesture, and six large Torliks stepped from the crowd, making a tight perimeter of orange-tinted cyclopes around us.
“Let Samael go,” Rashiki said.
I sighed, but I was outnumbered and it sounded like Rashiki knew this runt, so I did as I was told and loosened my grip. Samael the Daacro didn’t run away, which was smart of him because I would have broken his other wing if he had tried.
“Gatekeeper, eh?” Rashiki said.
I shrugged.
Rashiki crossed his arms and shook his head at me. “Just what I need, more trouble. As if I haven’t got enough to deal with.” The rotund Torlik snapped his fingers and two of the offworlder medics in white scrubs who had been do
wn on the track earlier stepped from the crowd with a hovering stretcher in the same style as Rashiki’s pod, but thinner and long enough for a body to lay on.
“I want assurances,” I said.
“For what?”
“His safety.”
“I gain no advantage by harming a valued customer. He needs to be treated, and we have medication on site that will lessen symptoms.” Rashiki looked pointedly around at the crowd, which, though they stood back had not really dispersed. What was happening here was far too interesting.
“When will he wake up?”
Rashiki shook his head slowly.
“How long?” I growled, turning to glare at the medics. “Tell me how long he’ll be unconscious.”
“Hard to say,” one responded.
“A day, maybe two,” said the other. “If he’s lucky.”
As the medics carefully tipped Vinny onto the floating stretcher and lifted it back into the air, I stepped over to him and straightened his shirt, then looked into his half-lidded, bright orange eyes one more time, shaking my head. I patted his pockets, finding his cell phone, wallet, and betting chips. No drugs or paraphernalia—not that I had expected to find any.
As for his phone…
My friend Detective Gonzalez would disapprove mightily of what I was considering doing. I knew that for a fact. But it would buy me some time. I picked it up and checked for signal, expecting it to be out of service. To my surprise, the phone had full range.
“Cellular relays,” Rashiki explained as he pulled from the hookah and exhaled a cherry-scented plume. The fat Torlik watched me like a hawk with his singular, ponderous dark eyeball.
I took a deep breath and called the restaurant. I waited through the Moretti’s Pizza voicemail—which was Vinny at his best, by the way. I could hear the smile in his voice through the jolly, scripted response. When the recording began with a beep, I said, “Hey, uh, assistant chef—sorry I don’t know your name—this is Anderson Gunn, a friend of Vinny’s. I think he ate some bad sushi at the bar tonight. He’s, uh, not feeling so well. He said he’s not sure he’s going to make it into work tomorrow, and since he’s puking his guts out right now, he asked me to call. Watch the shop for him, wouldja? Vinny is counting on you.”
After hanging up and putting the phone back into Vinny’s pocket—along with one of my business cards, so he knew to call me when he woke—I ran back over the evening in my mind, beating myself up for not paying more attention to Vinny’s behavior or symptoms. It seemed I was doing that a lot lately, ignoring the people around me because I was too focused on my own problems. Regardless, our arrival at the racetrack had been pretty uneventful. We explored the boardwalk, spoke to nine or ten different groups of offworlders. Any of them could have drugged him with a surreptitious needle or a patch that absorbed the substance through the skin. But wouldn’t I have seen it happen? Then we met Rashiki. Everything had been running smoothly, up until…
My expression must have changed because Rashiki cocked his head and said, “What did you remember?”
I shook my head. “Even if Vinny was using this drug voluntarily, why would he take enough to knock himself out, in a public place like this? Someone must have drugged him, or altered his dose. If bird brain over here didn’t do it—”
“Don’t call me that,” Samael said in his gravelly voice.
“—then it was that big, drunk Lodian. Right after we talked to you, Rashiki, Vinny made a few bets and then bumped into the dude, got into a fistfight. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. You know how some drunks can be. Combative and always looking for a reason to get belligerent.”
“What did this Lodian look like?” Rashiki asked.
“Bulging gut, leather vest, extremely inebriated.”
Rashiki made an unhappy noise somewhere deep in his throat. “Ken Lard.”
“Ken Lard?” I snorted. “What kind of alien name is that?”
Rashiki shrugged. “Many offworlders come here to start new lives. It’s easier to take new name at the same time, a name that you Earthers won’t scrutinize.”
“That… that actually makes sense. Okay, so where can we find this Ken Lard?”
Rashiki consulted a panel on his pod while the Daacro nursed his tender wing and watched me with his creepy vulture eyes.
“He left,” Rashiki said. “Twenty minutes ago.”
I frowned. “Then he must have drugged Vinny when they were fighting. He was only out of my sight for a minute, tops. I don’t know the mechanism, but it must have happened then.”
That was plausible, but it was also thin. No one else here had seen the scuffle between the three of us.
“Check your security cameras,” I suggested to Rashiki. “If not that, then others surely saw me trading blows with this Ken Lard.”
Rashiki explored his teeth with his tongue, his face twisted as if he had unexpectedly discovered a bitter flavor. Then, he pointed to one of the Torlik guards. “Pull up the feeds. I want to see this fight. Gunn, what did Vinny do with his betting chips?”
“They’re in his pocket.”
“Give them here.”
I did as he asked, handing the chips over to Rashiki. He punched a sequence of buttons in his pod, pulling up an array of names and numbers separated into three distinct groupings on a thin monitor. The bets were complicated, with numbers, lines, and symbols connecting names with times and placements that made no sense to me.
They clearly made sense to Rashiki, though. His face screwed up in anger and he banged a hand against the side of his pod.
“He shorted Slim’dar,” Rashiki hissed.
I had forgotten all about the Jel’ka who had collapsed on the racetrack. If Rashiki thought this was related… well, I could see why he would be upset about that. But Vinny didn’t know anything about that. Did he?
Rashiki didn’t make any accusations, but I could see the emotion dancing across his expressive face. He suspected foul play. Rashiki met my eyes. “System says bets have already been cashed out.”
“How is that possible? We didn’t even make it over there.”
We all whipped our heads to stare at the bank of bookies on the spiral boardwalk below us, across the track. They were still dealing with a mob of angry bettors, but the crowd was less agitated now that the bookies were processing people. Rashiki’s Torlik guards stood nearby.
“Someone did,” Rashiki said.
“How much did he stand to win?” I asked.
“The odds were fifty to one if you bet against Slim’dar Killperch,” Rashiki said.
I whistled. “Sounds like motive to me.”
Samael, his injured wing now being attended to by one of Rashiki’s medics, whipped his head in our direction, bat-like ears perking up with interest. The other medic waited nearby, one hand on Vinny’s stretcher as he kept an eye on the Pangozil’s vitals.
“Bounty hunter,” Rashiki said. “Come with me.”
I nodded, but before I turned away, Samael grabbed my pant leg.
“What?” I said, turning on him in anger.
“The Ora.” His thin, stony lips lifted into a small smile. “This must be related to the Gatekeeper’s request. Shall I tell him you’ve had a change of heart?”
I yanked my sleeve out of the grip of his tiny-boned claw. “I’m not doing this for him,” I snarled. “I’m doing it for Vinny.”
Even though that was true, the Daacro had hit the mark, giving voice to the weight of dread that had settled into my gut. No freaking way were these two overdoses unrelated. My bounty hunter’s instinct told me that if I pulled the threads, and didn’t get myself killed in the process, they would both lead back to the same source.
Right now, though, I had more questions than answers. I took one last look at the smug Daacro’s face before I turned from Samael and followed Rashiki back down toward the track. The medics, pushing Vinny’s stretcher between us, followed.
7
Rashiki led our small convoy past the bleache
rs, down into the dirt track—now disconcertingly flat and clear of flames and other implements of torture—then down again into the belly of the beast. The retractable ramp in the center drew open on pneumatic hinges like a monster’s maw.
We entered a small room with an adjustable barricade that I presumed must be a staging area for the races, and then into what I would have mistaken for a prison if it weren’t for the colorful feathered raptors snapping their teeth inside long runs to my left. Apparently, they’d all been corralled back into their cages after Slim’dar collapsed. Countless Jel’ka paced up and down, preening, restless, rattling steel bars with their teeth and claws. Three large carcasses of a fatty creature whose skeletal structure reminded me nauseatingly of a horse were being torn to shreds in the corner. I didn’t know anything about the creatures of Jel, but I knew enough about animal nature in general to tell they were agitated their race had been cut short. The extra meat was an attempt to sate their appetite for blood.
Along the opposite wall, metal shelves full of training equipment were stacked to the ceiling—wheels and whips and weights, ropes and saddlebags, thick tractor tires, and more.
At the far end of the room were two sliding doors. Closed.
Rashiki seemed to spare no expense for this operation. That gave me hope that we might find a useful clue on the security footage.
The wide open space in the middle of the stables held forty or fifty aliens, all golden-skinned, one-eyed Torliks. They milled around, trainers and medics and other helping hands, and the air was hushed and thick with tension. Except for the medics, most of the workers wore what you’d expect of stablehands—dust-stained jeans, boots, overalls. Real country getups, designed for rough work. That seemed to explain the red pole barn up top and finally pulled the whole aesthetic together for me. The largest cluster of Torliks crowded around a metal table in the center of the room.
“Yarnow, give me update,” Rashiki demanded breathlessly as he bobbed down the ramp.