Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  “Thank you. It’s not mine,” Mendelsohn said as the limo bumped up into the hotel’s drive.

  “What are we doing here?” Friday asked, peering out the tinted window into the night. “Did Grendel attack the hotel? Was it because he took Badda-book, Badda-boom as a literal suggestion? Because I’ve thought that before, in my more impressionable and less brainy days.”

  “So...five minutes ago?” I asked, popping the door as soon as we got to a stop. “Come on, lunkhead.”

  “On it,” Friday said, almost charging over me to get out of the car. I barely made it out of his way before he exploded out into the night, the reduction in size he’d undergone to fit into the limo reversed in an instant. Friday’s shoulders were now as broad as a city bus, and his eyes raked the night and the hotel facade, as though expecting Grendel to leap out of the bushes out front. “Where is he? Why are we hesitating?”

  “Because we’re done for the night,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “He hit Inquest hours ago and faded back into whatever chum pit he came out of. You know, while you were busy posing for ‘Dorkage Monthly.’”

  Friday bristled. “I’m an influencer, okay? I was influencing.”

  “I saw about five seconds of your display and was influenced to commit ritual seppuku,” I said, turning from him to head into the hotel. “Is that what you were aiming for?”

  “Exposure is exposure,” Friday said, reducing just a little to follow me through the sliding doors. His shoulders bumped on either side and he paused, shrinking a little more so he could fit through them. “So what are we doing here?”

  “Bunking in for the night,” I said.

  Friday bristled again. “Ew. I’m not sleeping with you. I know I’m sexy and all, but we’re related and that’s called ‘Inquest.’”

  I barely avoided hammering my face into my hand at deathly speed. “It’s called incest, you jackwagon. ‘Inquest’ is where I just told you Grendel hit.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, completely unabashed. Which was a shame, because he could use some serious a-bash-ing to set his head right. Though I doubt that it would work, I was willing to give it the old non-college try. “Sometimes I reinvent definitions for words to make them make more sense.”

  “Sometimes you grow your muscles so much blood flow doesn’t reach your brain and you forget words.” Reaching into my jacket, I flipped through my wallet for the company credit card. Friday was working for the Bureau now, that meant he was not only subject to my (annoyed) supervision, but that he was entitled to a hotel room on their dime. “I need a room for this clown behind me,” I said to the front desk clerk, a chipper woman with a name tag that read Dominique.

  “Sure thing, Slay Queen,” she chirped, tapping away at her computer. Someone had done a line of ground coffee beans. Her eyes flittered beneath thick glasses.

  Great. She knew who I was. Hopefully she wouldn’t stalk me in the middle of the night.

  I paid, grunted through Dominique’s singsongy, “Have a great night!” and headed up the elevator with Friday, ignoring him pointedly all the while.

  He followed me down the hall to just outside his room, which was next to mine, and I opened the door for him, then held it, gesturing with my arm that he should go in. I realized that we must have left Mendelsohn behind without so much as a goodbye, which bothered me. It shouldn’t; I was the Slay Queen, after all, but somehow manners were still important to me when someone as kind as Mendelsohn came across my path. A strange dichotomy of my being, but there it was. I was nice to people who were nice to me, and fatal to those who crossed me or innocent human life.

  “You first,” Friday said, slapping a ham hand on the door just above my head. I rolled my eyes and stepped inside, Friday shrinking slightly and following, his muscles deflating just as surely as if he’d let the air out of them like balloons.

  “Okay, fine, me first,” I said, once he’d closed the door. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Friday stood there for a long moment. “Oh, man. I left my laptop computer on the moped.” He tapped his chin for a second. “Good thing I uploaded my tracks to the cloud. Whew.”

  “This is the thing that’s important to you right now?” I folded my arms to keep from throwing them around like a nutball, and tried to keep my voice from rising precipitously. It still crept up a few octaves, though. “You broke into that gym—”

  “The door was totally open when I got there.”

  “You’re working for the FBI right now, Friday,” I said. “You can’t do this kind of thing.”

  “I disagree,” Friday said. “This is the perfect time to do this kind of thing. I have the power of the law behind me.” Now he matched me, folding his arms in front of him. “When do I get my badge? And my first paycheck? Because I’m not going to lie, I’m a little behind, and putting together the capital for my first album has been a pretty uphill proposition—”

  “Well, I’m sure the massive success of ‘Dropping Deuces’ will put you back to flush again,” I said, with barely concealed disgust.

  “Heh,” Friday guffawed. “‘Flush.’”

  “Not what I meant.” I sighed. “But I guess I walked into that one. Friday, if you’re a representative of the law, you can’t be lawless.”

  “What’s the point of power if you can’t use it?” Friday asked, and he sounded genuinely baffled.

  “Uh, restraint, responsibility,” I said, “just off the top of my head.”

  “That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really get you a hundred thousand followers on Instaphoto.” He pulled out his phone and took a look. “My Socialite numbers are up nicely, too, which is good, because it’s the social network of the future.”

  “And here I am, still ignoring the hell out of Twitter and Facebook,” I muttered. “Friday—”

  “Sienna,” Friday cut me right off. “It’s cool. I got this. I will make the FBI look totally kittens. Trust me.”

  “Let me put this in Californian: Dude, you wrecked that gym,” I said. “That is not totally kittens, nor puppies, nor anything awesome. It’s totally not awesome. It is the opposite of awesome. It’s...it’s ‘Kardashians’ is what it is—”

  “I like that,” Friday said. “Stealing it.” He started tapping into his phone, his fingers shrunk absurdly small in contrast to the rest of him. “‘My...toilet selfie earlier was...totally kittens...but the smell was totally’...no, ‘totally’ is wrong for this...‘absolutely Kardashians.’ Hashtag and send.” He finished and clicked off his phone with great satisfaction. “Now that was kittens, right there. Synergy. Between you and me. Cross-pollination of excellence.”

  “I get the feeling you’re not getting the point I’m trying to make here,” I said, holding my head. My hair had escaped my ponytail in large measure, and pushing it back over my ear was becoming a full-time job given how much I was facepalming with Friday around.

  “I get it.” He waved me off. “Tomorrow’s another day and all that, and we’ll find this absolutely Kardashians Grendel that’s running around and we’ll take a toilet selfie with him right before we flush.” He smacked his hands together so thunderously it probably woke half the hotel. “Badda-book, badda-boom.”

  I cringed, squinted—and not just from the hand slap heard round the Valley, either. “I need you to understand something, Friday. This is my job. I am supervising you—”

  “I’m your uncle; I should really be supervising you. I mean, I changed your diapers when you were a kid—”

  “We didn’t meet until a few years ago!” I exploded.

  Friday seemed to think about this. “You sure you weren’t still in diapers then?”

  “I was twenty-something,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “You weren’t experiencing, like, incontinence issues or something?”

  “No.” Now my teeth were grinding together.

  “Huh,” Friday said. “Whose ass was I wiping?”

  “At minimum, I hope at least your own.”

/>   “Oh, yeah, that might be it,” Friday said. “Sometimes I’m so huge I have to bend over and look at it in the mirror just to make sure I get it clean—”

  “How do you get that confused with my—never mind,” I sighed. I really didn’t want him to connect the dots for me on that one. Haters on the internet would have had a field day with this conversation. “Can you just...not be a jackass tomorrow?”

  Friday took my verbal jab in stride, though he was slow to respond. “Yeah, I can probably do that,” he finally said.

  “Great,” I said, heading for the door. “Keep the deuce dropping for after you’re done working this case, okay?”

  “I got you.” Friday nodded. “I’m just a little too cool for the FBI. It’s understandable. Their funk level is low, mine is off the charts. The squares can’t handle my totally kittens behavior. We’ll moderate. For now.”

  “I appreciate that, I think...?” I opened the door, listening down the hall for anyone up and moving after Friday’s attempt to rattle the whole building. “Just...chill out. Tomorrow we’ll—”

  “Hunt the Grendel,” Friday said. He pounded his fist into his other hand, and the window behind him shattered from the force of the smack, which rattled my teeth in my head. He looked back in surprise. “Did somebody just shoot at me?”

  “No,” I said, and shut the door. “Just...go to sleep.” Now people were starting to open their doors, looking out at me sleepy-eyed, some of them a little crabby.

  “What the hell was that, Slay Queen?” some middle-aged guy said as I went past.

  “Your mom’s bedpost,” I said. “What can I say? She really makes them rattle.” I slammed my own door just a touch quieter than what Friday had just done. This was going so well.

  37.

  Veronika

  “This is a good crowd,” Berniece said, looking them over like a general on an inspection tour.

  Veronika did a little subtle glancing of her own. She had to agree, it was a good crew. A little light on what she’d consider ethics, but...not a bad group, power-wise.

  “You don’t need no crowd, baby,” Kristina Bonner said. She was a tall lady, compulsive shopper—which meant she was always looking for the dollars. She’d grown a little bit of an afro since last they’d worked together, too. “You just need me, and a direction to point my pretty ass, and your problems are all going to be solved in minutes.”

  “I love that can-do attitude,” Berniece said. “Hollister, don’t you just love her attitude?” She glanced over her shoulder to where Hollister McKay was sitting at a work bench, twiddling with something or another. Berniece looked back, right into Pam’s eyes. “He loves your attitude, too.”

  “I don’t really give a fig about attitude,” Phinneus Chalke said, his old 1873 Winchester slung over his shoulder, ammo belts crisscrossing on his chest, his actual belt filled with cartridges for his Colt Peacemaker. “I care about money and getting the job done.” He looked sidelong at Pam. “And this little Janey-come-lately ain’t gonna stand a chance against my experience.”

  “That’s a good point,” Berniece said. “We don’t want to lose sight of the conventional wisdoms, because sometimes they have their place.”

  “And sometimes they’re ripe for ripping the whole foundation down.” This came from Tyler Bowen. He looked twenty-something, like a rager with his hair long and flopped over half his head, the other side completely shaved. Veronika wasn’t sure what that was called. A partial mohawk, maybe? It lay over his left eye, and stopped just short of his crooked, wicked smile.

  When Berniece had asked for morally flexible, Tyler was the first one that came to mind but the last she’d called. Mostly because he was about as stable as nitroglycerin.

  “So you’re probably wondering why I called this meeting,” Berniece said, doing a little pacing in front of the crew, hands behind her back.

  “Mostly Baby is wondering about her money,” Kristina said. “Baby gets paid, everyone is happy. Mostly I am, but that lets everyone else live and thus be happy.”

  “She’s Baby,” Veronika prompted, seeing Berniece’s somewhat confused look.

  “Money’s a good thing to be focused on,” Berniece said. “So let me lay this out for you—I have a problem, and if you help me solve it—boom, money to you. My problem is this: some yellow-skinned meta has torn through my headquarters. Killed some of my people. Stolen something from me—us.” She gestured to Hollister. “Silicon Valley is a very tight ecosystem. There are sharks and minnows, and I can’t be seen to be a minnow.”

  Veronika frowned. What the hell was she talking about?

  “Minnows get eaten, you see,” Berniece said. “By vulture capitalists—excuse me, venture capitalists.” Here she grinned to show, no, that wasn’t a misspeak. “I don’t like to be on the dinner menu. I’m the top of the food chain here. Have been since we displaced the losers who used to sit at the top of the mountain.” She flashed anger for a second. “We’re not taking a step back, and we’re not taking any shit from meta-come-lately who crashes down our door looking to steal proprietary secrets. There’s a message I’m looking to send—this behavior is unacceptable. And I want it sent in the strongest terms.”

  “How strong terms are we looking at here?” Phinneus asked, running his fingers over his rifle’s furniture.

  Berniece just stared at him for a moment, then looked pointedly at his gun, then smiled sweetly. “The stronger the terms my message is expressed in, the more you’ll get paid. I want this message being heard loud and clear, ringing through the Valley.”

  “I love the smell of chaos in the morning,” Tyler said, sucking in air between grinning teeth. “This thing you want dead—”

  “I didn’t say ‘dead,’” Berniece cut him right off. “Nor would I say it, because that’s an ugly, troublesome word that my lawyers would rather eat live goldfish than let me say. But I think you might be aiming in the right direction there.” She smiled again. “Okay?”

  “Got it,” Phinneus said, nodding as he turned away. “Where do you want this message sent?”

  “Wherever this thing shows up next,” Berniece said, and here her voice turned cold. “You can hang here, with us. Collect some money for bodyguarding, if you’d like, until it pops its ugly head up again. The Valley’s a tight space, and it seems like it mostly wants to work around in the tech sector, so...” She shrugged. “It’s more likely to show up here than San Francisco. Hang here, it appears—well.”

  Tyler hummed a few bars of Pop Goes the Weasel.

  Berniece pointed right at him, grinning widely. “I think you’ve got the right of it. Now...who wants some Kombucha?”

  Veronika looked over at Chase, who was standing as close to Hollister as she could without triggering a fit from him. Even through that scowl she wore like a layer of base makeup these days, the question on her face was as plain as could be to Veronika, mostly because she was having a very similar thought.

  What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?

  38.

  Sienna

  “Sorry if I made you wait,” I said, taking a seat across from Aaron Mendelsohn down in the hotel restaurant the next morning. I’d been up for a few hours but had been hesitant to get moving, mostly because my pillows were calling on me to make up for all the sleep I’d lost last night. Alas, that hadn’t panned out, but I hadn’t given up on the dream until just a few minutes before my phone buzzed with a text message from him inviting me to breakfast.

  “Not at all.” Mendelsohn half rose to his feet before I slid into the black leather booth across from him. “I expected it might take you some time to get ready after you got my message.”

  “Yeah, well, I do have some minimum standards these days,” I said, “though the temptation to play my current role like Sandra Bullock’s character in Miss Congeniality has been pretty appealing on the days when I pull out my makeup kit and fondly recall when I didn’t deal with this bullshit at all.”

  Mendelsohn chuckled. �
�My wife says a very similar thing vis-a-vis the societal standards of beauty.” I glanced at his ring finger, which was bare. He noticed and held it up. “I don’t care for jewelry,” he said. “And I don’t have much of a problem with random women hitting on me these days, so...” He grinned.

  “What does your wife do?” I asked. “If she works.”

  “She does,” he said. “She’s an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So you’re one of those power couples I keep reading about who are dominating the top tiers of economic success these days.” I looked sidelong out into the lobby of the hotel. It was pretty busy out there, a whole heap of people lingering around at the edges of the place, staring at smartphones, and not dressed at all like business travelers. I brushed it off; that was probably a common occurrence around Silicon Valley, where the billionaires dressed in black turtlenecks and wore cargo shorts and sandals.

  “I can’t argue with that, nor would I particularly want to, given it hinges on my personal income,” Mendelsohn said, blushing a little. “Pardon me for steering the conversation in a slightly more pleasant—for me—direction.” He leaned on his elbows against the table, pausing as the waiter came by to ask us about drinks. Coffee for me, tea for Mendelsohn, waters for us both. The server left a menu with each of us and disappeared. Mendelsohn, undeterred, fired away as soon as he was out of earshot: “How do we narrow this investigation down in order to solve it? In your experience?”

  “You don’t ask the easy ones, do you?” I settled back, giving the menu a very cursory glance as I worked out how to answer his question. “I mean, the best way is to figure out why Grendel is committing the crimes he is. We find the why, we’ll get the what and the who, because these questions are all tied together. So far, we’ve got no what, no who, only the bare bones of how, so the why has been pretty elusive.”