“So I see. Anyway, we were wondering if he had attempted to contact you.”
“No,” Syd said flatly.
“If he does-”
“He won’t. We haven’t spoken to each other since he went to prison.”
“It’s procedure, we have to cover all family and known associates.”
“Of course,” Syd said. “If there’s nothing else...”
“We’ll be on our way.”
“Thank you.” Syd stepped back and Icerazor started the car. With the old man still standing in the drive, we had to back up until we reached the road.
“They’re hiding something,” Icerazor said.
“But probably not Sidonius Colt.” I rolled up my window and took out my phone.
“Community Fund,” Shiva’s synthetic voice said.
“Identify, Shadowdemon.”
“Voice print confirmed.”
“You’re on speakerphone. Other occupants are Xiv and Icerazor.”
“Query?”
“Public records on Sidonius Garrett.”
“Sidonius Aesirskald Garrett, born May third, nineteen ninety-five. Parents, Clive and Emerald Garrett, died January eighth, nineteen ninety-seven. Homeschooled by his legal guardian, Eugene Drummands. Moved to New Port Arthur, March Twenty-Fifteen, exact date unknown. Known living relatives, one: Sidonius Colt. Known associates, one: Eugene Drummands.”
“Wait, his other grandfather’s dead?”
“Al Garrett, died September twentieth, nineteen eighty-seven.”
“Who’s this Eugene Drummands, and what’s his connection to the family?” Icerazor asked.
“Unknown.”
“That’s not the Shiva I know and distrust,” Icerazor said.
“No digitized records exist outside of being the registered owner of a farm in Dakota, and the recent hospitalization for advanced cancer. Currently a patient in the hospice wing of Vanguard Hospital.”
“If he lives in Dakota, why is he checked into Vanguard?” I asked.
“Even if I accessed his medical records, the motivation for selecting a given hospital is not information we record. Eugene Drummands is not a powered individual.”
“I also presume he’s not a licensed hero, and Vanguard isn’t cheap,” Icerazor said.
“Do we know of a direct connection between Eugene and Sidonius Colt?” I asked.
“None on record.”
“Should we detour to Vanguard?” Icerazor asked.
“Might as well,” I said.
I let Icerazor talk to the nurse at the front desk. She and I didn’t get along too well. It was kind of my fault for being less than cordial with her in the past. Eventually, she gave us the room Eugene Drummands was in. A lot of people called the area he was in the ‘terminal wing’. It was a hospice area for people who had little hope of recovery. Eugene looked like an animate corpse. Mahogany skin sagged from features that were gaunt and skeletal. A mask pumped oxygen into a half-open mouth. Clusters of IV bags dripped medications into shunts attached to veins that would have been so oft-punctured as to resemble track marks. Jaundice-yellow eyes flicked towards us as we entered.
“Tights,” he muttered, turning his gaze back to the window. “They could have at least sent a girl.”
“Mister Drummands?” I asked.
“What do you want?” He didn’t turn his gaze back towards us.
“We would like to ask you a few questions about Sidonius Colt.”
A dry, cough-laden chuckle wracked his frame. “I hear he escaped from prison.”
“So you know who he is?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know I raised his grandson. There’s no point in pretending I don’t know of him.”
“While we’re on the subject, how exactly did you end up raising him?”
“Sally was dead, Clive and Emerald were dead, Sidonius was going to jail. Wasn’t anyone else left. Couldn’t turn him over to the state, that’d be child abuse. You said you wanted to talk about the grandfather, not little Syd.”
“Has he contacted you?”
Another painful laugh wracked Eugene’s body. “Kid, are you some sort of moron? I’m laid up in the Community Fund’s hospital. He might as well walk right back into Rockstead if he tried to get in touch with me here.”
“I see your point,” I said. “Let me rephrase the question. Who else might he reach out to?”
“You’re asking the wrong man. I worked with computers. Sidonius was a magic user. The magic community is small, ask around there.”
“Thank you for your time,” I said.
“Next time the Fund wants to ask me questions, send something pretty to look at, not some dudes.”
“Right,” I said. We stepped out of the room and I closed the door.
“I don’t think he was lying by fabrication,” Icerazor said.
“But you think he was omitting something?”
“About the past and how he ended up with Syd.”
“Will it help with the present?”
“Probably not.”
I reopened the door and leaned back into the room. “There was one other question.”
“What is it?” Eugene asked, irritated.
“What did Syd call you growing up?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just tying up loose ends.”
“I was Grandpa Eugene, even though we weren’t blood.”
“Thank you.” I closed the door again.
“What was that about?” Icerazor asked.
“The question of ‘which one’ when I mentioned we were asking Syd about his grandfather. It was bugging me.”
“Unless there’s a lead here, we should get back to our official list.”
“Somebody else is going to be asking around the magical community. So, I guess we should keep going down the list.”
We trudged down to the parking lot. Once outside, I called up the data we’d been sent. I paused as I noticed a new message. I’d only been copied in rather than being the primary recipient. “Re: Queued request - incidents of vandalism with described parameters.”
“Xiv, did you ask Shiva to do some digging for you?”
“How did you know?”
“I was copied in on the response.”
“What did he say?”
“There have been five other incidents of vandalism where there were what appeared to be toothmarks on a freestanding object of concrete and or metal. All within the general area of the Bricks. Most were lamp posts or bollards, but one fire hydrant was also damaged. In the hydrant, they found a chip from a tooth, probably an incisor, species unknown. Size, two centimeters long, one wide. Due to the low severity of the crimes, no police resources have been assigned to investigate.”
“That’s a big tooth if it leaves a three-quarter inch chip behind,” Icerazor said.
After a moment of mental math, I decided the margin of difference on the metric conversion wasn’t worth bringing up. The point wouldn’t be changed by small fractions of an inch difference.
“Species unknown? They didn’t do any DNA testing?” Xiv asked.
“Most of a tooth doesn’t contain DNA, and genetic testing is expensive. It would probably cost more to run the test than the damage from the biting.”
Xiv looked disappointed.
Part 15
The pain wasn’t as bad as it had been, a few pills suppressed it.
The board hadn’t given us any new tasks, so I ended up in the Operations Room teaching Xiv how to go about plotting the incidents of vandalism on a map of the city. They fell into a triangular area bounded on two sides by the river and First Street. It was a corner of the neighborhood know
n as the Bricks. Old, rundown, poor, mixed white and Hispanic. In some other cities, it might have been dubbed the ‘historic district’ because it was the oldest part of the city. That’s why the buildings were mostly brick, the source of its name.
“Why does it never cross First Street?” I mused aloud. “There’s nothing in the way that wouldn’t be there crossing other streets.”
Xiv’s face crunched up as he stared at the map, then a spark of inspiration crossed his expression. “What if it’s not going over the streets?” He asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What if its been moving underground?”
“Shiva, do we have maps of underground features in the city?”
“We have partial maps whose accuracy cannot be verified due to the age of the data and the lack of systematic mapping,” Shiva said.
“Overlay what we’ve got,” I said. Several new sets of colored lines appeared on the map.
“So what are these red lines under the Bricks?” Xiv asked.
“Storm sewers.”
I stared at the lines Xiv had pointed to. None of them crossed First Street. “Why are they not linked?”
“Infrastructure south of First Street was linked to Southport,” Shiva said. “After the municipal merger, there was no overhaul to link the systems.”
Xiv pointed to a series of dots along the red lines. Each one was near one of the vandalism sites. “What are these dots?”
“Maintenance access points,” Shiva said.
“If those are big enough, I’d say our culprit might just be using the storm drains,” I said.
“We have to go look,” Xiv said.
“Hold on,” I said. “We can’t just go running off to the storm drains.” Xiv’s disappointed expression pained me. “Think about it. We don’t have a clue what we’re looking for, or what we’re going to be running into.”
“You just don’t like going underground,” Xiv said.
“That’s not it at all.”
Xiv looked downcast and slinked off. A sidelong glance as he left the room sparked a paranoid thought. Was he going to just head out on his own? Part of me wanted to reject what the cynical corners of my mind were saying, but the damned analytical portion of my mind insisted we had to be sure. I headed back to my room and geared up. I connected to the base network from my wrist computer and queried the security logs. It said the last place Xiv’s code was used was to enter the residential dome. I wanted to tell the cynical portion of my mind to shut up, but it retorted that Xiv was smart enough to not try to sneak away immediately.
I hated myself for the thoughts. The suspicion was groundless. When had Xiv ever just defiantly run off? The first time I’d met him. He’d been so eager to help he’d removed his bonds and followed me. I cursed the analytical side of me. I wanted to be wrong. Heading for the door, I called out, “Xiv, I’m heading out.” He didn’t answer me, but I had no doubt he heard. I took the lift to the surface, moved into a nice quiet spot, and waited.
My mind mocked through the time it took to cross to the garage, get into the car and start driving. Just as my mental charade reached the Gruefield Highway, Xiv appeared at the top of the stairs. His eyes widened and a guilty look came over his face.
“I wanted to be wrong,” I said.
His gaze turned towards the ground. “You knew?”
“I’ve been in your place before,” I said.
“Are you mad?”
“No, just sad.”
“You didn’t tell me not to go.”
“Aside from having implied it, you know the rules. A sidekick isn’t allowed to operate solo. I don’t have to remind you of it.”
Xiv sat cross-legged on the floor. He stared in silence at the concrete for a few long moments.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“That depends on what you have to say.”
“You said we have no way of knowing what we would find. We have no way to find out without looking. It could pop out of the storm drains anywhere.”
“Except Southport,” I said.
Xiv chuckled.
“But we could also spend days just wandering around those tunnels cluelessly. You saw the tangled layout. And that was just on the map.”
“I did. And the exits used were all about the same distance along the tunnels from the middle of the south end,” Xiv said.
“That’s where you want to look, isn’t it?”
“That’s where it will be,” Xiv said.
“We don’t even know what it is,” I said.
“Don’t you want to find out?”
It was awful logic, a terribly weak reason to start crawling around in storm sewers, but I couldn’t really deny the impulse. Part of me asked why I wasn’t punishing Xiv for trying to sneak out. Another part of me remarked that he seemed more torn up at the realization that he’d disappointed me than any penalty I could reasonably mete out. I let the matter simmer in the back of my mind as I drove us into town. I parked at my hideout by the river. We’d stripped the place more or less bare after the city had declared its intent to put a bridge pylon through where the building stood, but it was still a safer spot to park than the Bricks proper.
We walked down the river’s edge, looking for a storm drain outlet. Well, I walked, Xiv flew out over the river to get a better angle on the shore. I could have told him that we had a few blocks to cross before we got to the main drain outlet. It sat somewhere around third street, according to the map, but it didn’t hurt to let him spread his wings.
The drain was inconspicuous, a concrete casement around a brickwork pipe. The rusted remains of an iron grate hung over the entrance, but it had long ago crumbled to uselessness as a barrier. The span behind was only about five feet from top to bottom, and barely wider than my shoulders at the widest. It was ancient brickwork, with crumbled mortar and loose, stained blocks.
“Lovely,” I said.
“It’s smaller than I expected,” Xiv said.
“We’re lucky it’s this big. Do you want to go first?”
He frowned, but pushed past me to climb into the tunnel. The few muted sounds he made told me how little he cared for the detritus on the floor or the scurrying creatures hiding in the crevasses of the brickwork. Fortunately, it was just a storm drain and not a sanitary sewer. Though the more I thought about it, the more I realized all of the random crap covering the floor of the tunnel had been washed in off the streets by the rain. And, we were under the Bricks.
“Xiv, you may want to stick to the ceiling in here,” I said.
“There are bugs up there.”
“And there could be needles on the ground. In the long run, it’s better to put up with a few cockroaches than risk getting jabbed in the foot with a dirty needle.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got shoes on.”
Xiv grumbled for a moment, but moved to the ceiling. The shape of his feet didn’t lend themselves to conventional footgear, and I wasn’t sure if he would still be able to cling to walls of we managed to design some unconventional footgear for him. I couldn’t see past Xiv as we proceeded further along the storm drain. I suppose if I crawled along the floor I could see under him, but the soles on a hero suit were thicker than the gloves. It wouldn’t do to fall prey to the very problem I’d warned Xiv about. So I trusted his eyesight. It was more nerve-wracking than it should have been. I knew he had superb night vision. I also knew... he was claustrophobic.
I almost stopped in my tracks. I should have noticed when he’d accused me of not wanting to go underground. And the offhand comment about the size of the pipe. In light of that, the muted sounds he was making took on a whole different meaning.
“Xiv, I think we’re going about this wrong.”
“What do you mean?” He was trying to hide it, but the fear was there at the edges of his voice, not much further than the walls brushing both his sides at once.
“Let’s back out to the river, and I’ll explain.” I didn’t really have a clue what I was going to say, I just wanted to get him out of there and needed to buy enough time to think of something. He turned around, and we backed out of the storm drain. Once out in the open, Xiv gulped an unguarded lungful of air and perched atop the concrete casement. He was noticeably more at ease than he had been.
“So...” Xiv said. He was bravely trying to avoid mentioning the distress I could almost see bleeding off from him.
“This is not the best way in,” I said. “There are those maintenance access points a lot closer to the area we want to search. We’ll make better time moving above ground than crawling through the tunnel.”
Xiv nodded enthusiastically.
“Come on, let’s get going.” I stood up and walked towards the city proper. I steered us towards the area above where we wanted to search. It wasn’t the best of neighborhoods, but I doubted the street gangs would attack us. My eye darted from manhole cover to manhole cover. Too many read ‘Sanitary Sewer’, which was entirely the wrong set of pipes. I finally spotted one set into the sidewalk next to a curbside drain inlet. There was nothing cast into the metal, but its location left no doubt it connected to the same vault as the drain. I pointed to it, and Xiv landed on the pavement. He tried several times to pick it up.
“I can’t get a good grip, and it’s really heavy.”
“Step back,” I said, taking a closer look for myself. There were a couple of holes in the cast iron plate to hook a lifting tool into, but it was otherwise flush with the sidewalk. After a moment’s contemplation, I fired my line launcher at the manhole cover. The dual grip plate connected with a thunk, and I wrapped my hands around the cables for good measure.
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 123