by M. G. Herron
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Could blow up in my face, though.”
“Not much choice in a time crunch. You kind of want it to blow up, if you can manage the fallout. People reveal their true selves under pressure. After that, if you still can’t tell who’s guilty, it should at least help narrow your list. Follow that up with individual interviews.”
“Hmm…” Where could I get the fourteen Pangozil in the same room? At the Jel’ka track was the obvious answer, but how exactly? My odds were long. None of them had any reason to listen to me, not if my reputation had made its way to other offworlder ears the way it had to Lard’s. And getting them all back in the room together would be next to impossible. I popped the pizza crust into my mouth—a crunchy yet airy dough, topped with bits of caramelized cheese—and tipped the dirty paper plate into the nearest trash can.
“Thanks for lunch,” Gonzalez said. “I…”
Her lips parted. She hesitated.
“What is it?”
“Never mind.”
A perfect stranger could look at Gonzalez and tell that she burned with curiosity. I knew her well enough to know that this innate curiosity was coming up hard against her commitment to her duty as a police officer—and her desire not to get involved with my affairs again, lest I get her into more trouble.
It was, apparently, enough to make her hold her tongue.
If I ever needed to ask her for help or call her away from her job again, I had better make damn sure it was serious. Because if it wasn’t, or it did anything else to threaten Detective Gonzalez’s career, I knew it would take more than a pizza to get her to forgive me.
“Try to keep yourself busy,” I said.
“Oh, there’s plenty of paperwork to do,” she replied. “Doesn’t mean I’m not bored out of my skull. What I’d give to be working a real case.”
“If you need anything, you know how to reach me.”
“Oh, I know. You owe me a Big Favor—capital BF. I won’t forget it.”
I smiled. It didn't balance the scales, but at least things were moving in the right direction. If only all of my relationships were so easy to repair. “Good luck.”
Instead of responding with the ritual “Have fun. Don’t die.” Gonzalez said, “See ya,” and turned away.
That was disappointing, but all the same, I left the police station without looking back, satisfied that I’d at least made some progress. Gonzalez was one of my oldest friends, and while we hadn’t been as close in recent years as we once were, I hated to burn that bridge. I might yet need a friend I could trust who was on the right side of the law.
Overhead, the Daacro continued to circle lazily. Now that I had a moment to think about it, I could tell that he intended for me to see him up there.
He wanted something.
“All right, Samael. Let’s talk.”
11
Vinny lived a couple miles north of downtown, near a split in the road shaped like a triangle. I headed in that direction, trusting my airborne shadow would follow. When I spotted an empty field tucked away behind a strip mall, I pulled off the road.
Sure enough, a minute after I got out of the truck, the Daacro reappeared in the sky, still circling overhead. I always find it difficult to estimate vertical distance, but he wasn’t that far up, maybe a couple hundred yards at best. More or less at the edge of my range.
I didn’t need to hit him. Just get close enough to shake him up.
Now for the fun part. Grabbing rubber bullets out of the lockbox, I quickly loaded them into a Ruger .22, and shot the rifle into the sky while crouching down behind my truck.
After half a dozen rounds, Samael tucked his wings and dove, doubling in size with every breath until the gigantic bat-like alien dive-bombed my head.
“Darkness between the stars, Earther!” Samael screeched. “Why are you shooting at me?”
I barked a laugh and dodged his attacks easily. He lost his enthusiasm for harassing me in just a minute or two. The Daacro spread his wings, squawked angrily, and landed in a huff in the dirt.
“You’re following me,” I said, “and it’s getting on my nerves. Cut it out.”
He ignored me. The Daacro pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Haven’t I already endured enough damage on your behalf?”
Now I could see the reason for his lack of stamina. A black butterfly splint had been wrapped around his arms and the base of his wings. Rather than looking tough, like a wounded vet, it had the effect of making it seem like Samael was a monkey with costume wings strapped to his back. I couldn’t help but snort another chuckle at the image.
“What are you laughing about now?” Samael demanded, his face twisted into a sour snarl.
“Nothing, nothing.”
He glared at my gun.
“Relax. They’re just rubber bullets.”
“You can still injure me with just rubber bullets, you juvenile. Or worse, cause me to plummet to my death!”
“Darn. Now I’m mad I missed.”
Samael grumbled under his breath. He rubbed at his head, then shook all over like a wet dog. It was wonderfully strange to watch his rough, stone-like skin ripple with his gyrations, then harden up again like a shell. His large, pointed ears swiveled toward me.
“It's not my fault you hurt your wing,” I pointed out. “You followed me to the Jel’ka track.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Speaking of which, you never gave me a straight answer. How exactly did you get hurt last night?”
Samael took a deep breath. “When the crowds rushed the betting booths, I lost sight of you and got caught up in it. I am rather small of stature compared to most offworlders. I was attempting to climb out of the fray to get a better vantage point when something snagged my wing and I got pulled into the same mayhem as your Pangozil friend. Gamblers in a crowd are no better than those savage Jel’ka. Someone stepped on my wing. Or several someones.”
The creature blinked his big bat-eyes and his ears swiveled in the direction of minute noises I couldn't hear. Did Samael just get unlucky, or was he lying to me? I couldn’t be sure, and right now I had better things to do with my time.
“Whatever,” I said. “Point is, quit following me around, all right?”
Instead of answering me, Samael said, “Now that you’re looking into our problem, the Gatekeeper asked me to pass some information on to you.”
I bristled at this. Taking information from the Gatekeeper was tantamount to working for him, and the last thing I wanted was for him to think I changed my mind and agreed to take the job. Even if busting a drug dealer was, on the surface, a just and righteous cause, it wasn’t my cause.
“I already told you, I'm doing this for Vinny.”
Samael shrugged. “What difference does it make? You're doing the work.”
I didn't like the sound of that. But on the other hand, if there was a chance that Samael’s information would help me find Vinny’s attacker and bring him to justice, shouldn’t I hear the Daacro out?
There was also a third point to consider—that I was being used as a pawn. Whatever Samael was about to tell me was designed to manipulate me into acting as the Gatekeeper wanted me to. Isn’t that why he bought up my debts—so he could push me across the board toward some nefarious offworlder endgame? He’d tricked me once. I didn’t think for a second that he would hesitate to do so again.
Samael watched me carefully, holding his silence while I struggled with the decision.
“Unless it’s relevant to helping me find who attacked Vinny,” I finally said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
"Of course it's relevant! Why must you be so difficult all of the time?" The Daacro shook and turned away, flexing his wing while he grumbled under his breath. Was he… scared? This was the first time I’d sensed fear in one of the Gatekeeper’s minions. Samael sighed heavily. “Just listen. As you know, we believe that an offworlder is selling Ora in the city. We have not been able to root out the source of the supply, but we do know that the human
drug dealer who sold the junk to Monica goes by the name of Spider. The Gatekeeper wants you to figure out where Spider is getting hold of the Ora. All you have to do is trace that thread back to the source without casting suspicion upon the Gatekeeper's operations.”
"And how, exactly, does that help me find out who attacked Vinny?"
"From there, you should be able to discern who would have access to enough of the drug at the right time to put the Pangozil into that kind of coma."
"That's thin," I said aloud. In my head, however, I thought that although it was a long thread to follow, as leads go, it wasn't terrible. If I didn't find any more clues at Vinny's house, I could look into this next. With a little pressure, I could probably get this Spider character to talk.
"How do I know you didn't drug Vinny just to get me to cooperate?"
"If the Gatekeeper wanted to coerce you into cooperating," Samael said, "We would not be having this conversation. Believe me."
There was no malice in his voice. Just a pained tiredness painted over cold hard facts.
“Fine. I’ll look into it. But you’ve got to stop following me around. It’s cramping my style.”
Samael backed away, hopping up onto the bed of my truck, then onto the roof of the cab.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Watch the paint!”
With his injured wing, I guess he needed a little boost to be sure he could get off the ground.
Ignoring me, he said, “I will keep my distance. But it is not me you should be worried about.”
With a two step running start, the Daacro flapped up and into the sky. After a few seconds, whether by the glare of the sun or the activation of a reflective photon cloaking field, the offworlder was lost to me.
I let a few minutes pass for the Daacro to get some distance, then climbed back into my F-150 and made my way to Vinny’s house. I reached into the back-of-seat compartment for a water. My fingertips rubbed against empty food wrappers and receipts, but no plastic bottles. I groaned. It felt like I’d been awake for days. Apart from one slice of pizza, I hadn’t eaten much, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d hydrated.
I finally arrived at Vinny’s neighborhood. His townhouse was tucked away in the back of the quiet neighborhood. All the blinds were drawn. The door was solid and wooden, with small decorative windows at the top. Leaving the engine running, I got out and strode quickly to the front door. Peering into the windows, my eyes scanned a dark living room. The linoleum floor and a shining metal stove were visible through a door to the left, at the back of the house. In the kitchen, another door led to the backyard.
That door hung open on its hinges.
I ran to the truck and pulled around back. Each block was split by an alley, so that cars could enter through the alley and park under metal awnings in the back of each house.
As I turned into the alley, my heart thundered in my chest and I swallowed against the dryness in my throat. I drove past a row of telephone poles, finally picking out Vinny’s house among the identical empty car ports.
Sure enough, the back door to his unit was ajar.
I slid off the front seat, letting the door barely close behind me, and removed the lock from the lockbox on the back of my truck with a few practiced motions of my free hand, then reached inside and took out a magazine of live rounds. After putting the rubber bullets back, I slid the new mag home with a soft click.
My feet stepped softly through the grass as I approached, moving softly. Blood pounded in my temples and cheeks. Was that movement in the shadows of the kitchen I could see through the half-open door? It could be that I was spooked, that I was imagining the movement—anything to justify the chill that stood my hair on end.
With a nudge of my toe, the back door swung the rest of the way open. The latching mechanism had been busted, the wood of the doorframe splintered and cracked. With both hands holding my gun straight out in front of me, I swept the kitchen. A doorknob and wood chips littered the floor, but I found no one in the kitchen.
Shoulder against the door jam, I stepped into the living room and cleared it. No one there either.
I subsequently checked two bedrooms and a bathroom. All empty. Vinny’s place was a little messy, but no more than you’d expect from someone who spent every waking hour at his restaurant. Apart from the busted back door, there was no evidence of a burglary. Nothing missing that I could see. A flatscreen TV sat securely on its stand. His jewelry box was full of the heavy chains and gaudy gold rings he liked to wear.
Who broke in here? How did they know he wasn't home?
And what in the world did Vinny have that they wanted?
I returned to the kitchen. Further inspection confirmed that a powerful blow had ripped the door from its frame. The doorknob, the deadbolt, and a chain, all removed in one or two solid kicks.
I wasn't even sure I could have done that with my door-kicking boots on a full night’s rest. Upon closer inspection, it almost looked as though the strike had happened in three places. The indent was circular and clean-edged, as if it had been made by a large, powerful hammer. No one's foot did that. It was made by a tool—metal, if I wasn't mistaken.
The doorknob on the floor must have been thrown clean inside when it was struck.
A fluttering sound startled me. Had that blasted Daacro followed me again? My mind latched onto an insult to hurl at him. At the same time, I jumped up, lifted my gun and stepped clear of the doorframe.
“Thought I said…” The words died on my lips. The Daacro fell from a low rooftop, limp as a rag doll, and sprawled, unconscious—or dead—atop a box hedge.
A cloaked figure jumped down behind it, leap frogging the spot where the Daacro had fallen. The newcomer landed midway across the yard, coming down with knees bent and two fists bracing himself against the ground. As this person stood, bits of grass and soil dribbled from the sleeves of the cloak.
This was either the same assailant I’d seen on the security footage or they shopped at the same hooded robe store. For the briefest moment, I saw a Pangozil’s face under the hood—it was what my mind wanted to see. Eyesight combined with human desire is such a powerful force that, for the briefest of moments, I was given what I wanted.
“There a ComicCon in town?” I asked, hoping to offset the dour mood with some ill-placed humor.
Then the features of this new offworlder coalesced, and I realized that the cloak was just a message—
I know you’re looking for me, it seemed to say. I can find you, but you can’t find me.
In actuality, the face hidden in the cowl was not a whiskered Pangozil snout, but a plate of twisted metal. The form hidden beneath the cloak was hunched and misshapen. Deformed hands and feet, if you could call them that, stuck out from the openings of the sleeves and the bottom of the garment. But they weren’t the fleshy extremities of an organic being; they were an engineered amalgamation of metal joints and ball bearings and gears and metal piping.
When the newcomer cast an arm wide, the cloak rippled away from the figure’s shoulders, revealing a mechanical Frankenstein monster. The freak lunged forward. Half creature, half junk heap, all twisted metal and oil-stained rust, it folded toward me, whirling and twisting as it toppled end over end, mechanical joints making hard clacking sounds against the paved driveway, joints and springs giving off pressurized, asthmatic wheezes.
When it was halfway across the yard, I raised my pistol and fired three rounds. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the monster’s metallic hide.
As it grew near to me and every instinct in my body screamed for me to jump for the bushes, the metallic monstrosity spread. A trio of metallic quadrupeds split off from the larger creature, reshaping themselves as they went with snapping, magnetic precision.
Three creatures with bodies like engine blocks and pistons for legs landed on the ground and formed an arrow pointed in my direction.
Then they charged.
I held my ground and peeled off three shots at the nearest robot, ri
pping chunks of metal out of the top of its body and sending sparks into the air as each bullet struck.
The other two peeled off and curved around me to either side. I made the mistake of trying to shoot at the robot that moved to my left. My aim trailed just shy of its body, and my next two shots embedded themselves in the grass or in the cedar posts of the neighbor’s wooden fence.
Meanwhile, the central robot had gained speed. It bounced mindlessly off my legs, its uneven metal hide flaying my skin and sending shards of pain into my shins.
I’d been hit like that before, but never by a sharpened cannonball with powerful pistons for legs. I staggered back as the metal creature rolled off and around me, barely managing to keep my feet. I swung my gun around.
Five more shots. Five more sprays of metal shavings.
Then my gun clicked on empty.
When it reached the busted back door of Vinny’s house, the robot that bumped me spun a hundred and eighty degrees. Its low center of gravity and agile lower extremities made the motion look effortless. When it kicked back, flinging dirt, to make a minor correction in its balance, I knew exactly how that door had been broken.
These robots hadn’t wanted anything inside Vinny’s house. They probably hadn’t even entered the residence. That’s why nothing had been disturbed.
They came solely to set a trap for me.
I gritted my teeth as I felt the blood begin to drip down my torn shins, and the shock gave way to throbbing pain. The robots now surrounded me in the nearly enclosed space of Vinny’s backyard. The wooden privacy fence of the two adjacent townhouses boxed me in.
And I was out of ammunition.
In unison, like a bizarre android dance number, the three mechanical beasts pawed the ground with a single front foot, and charged again.
This time, I waited until the last second to jump. One of the robots leapt with me, catching my feet while my legs were in the air and tipping me sideways. Thus suspended, I became a prime target for another robot to loop around and plow into my ribcage with its heavy body moving like—well, moving like an engine block through the air at thirty miles an hour.