The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  The Hotel Bruce sat only a few blocks from where Byron was killed and Angel didn’t feel particularly safe, even if police HQ was just down the street—after all, so was the meeting hall for the Knights.

  In two hours of questioning, Angel got a better feeling for White than she really wanted to. By his own definition, he was a good cop. Angel was willing to admit that. To her, though, a good cop wasn’t a very admirable creature.

  At least now the feline hit squad was leaving a path wide enough for just about everyone to follow. It was strange, but Angel was annoyed by the fact that they were acting so bonehead. When a bunch of moreys started acting violent and stupid like that, it helped to feed a lot of nasty pink preconceptions.

  Somehow, Angel knew that someone in the police department was going to leak to the vids the fact that the suspects in Byron’s death and ones responsible for the mess at her place were a bunch of moreys. She had a vivid picture of what that kind of news would do to Collor and the Knights.

  She stayed up most of the night, thinking. She lay on a sagging mattress that was saturated with the smells of a dozen previous tenants. She listened to her cop babysitter in the next room and occasionally watched the skyline out the window through a haze of orange neon.

  White was pragmatic, inclined to believe that Byron’s death was the result of some petty conflict. Angel didn’t do much to enlighten him. She couldn’t see any way to mention VanDyne without explaining her run-in with Anaka. She was sure that any mention of his ex-partner would just piss him off. She certainly didn’t tell him about Mr. K, and she did her best deadpan act when she claimed not to know what the moreys were looking for.

  She didn’t trust White.

  As she stonewalled, she wished to God she knew what was on those ramcards. Then she might have some inkling of who all the players actually were. She had the feline hit squad tearing up everything that got in its way. There were the original buyers that she’d labeled the guys from Denver who may or may not have been the guys who slunk around covering their scent with pine disinfectant. There was VanDyne—actually two VanDynes; the original VanDyne that produced hot data that Byron was hired to transport, and the VanDyne that was owned and operated by the CIA. There was the pale Fedboy with the reddish eyes that she’d run into at Frisco General and seen hovering in a van outside her apartment. Then there were the Knights, who were supposed to meet with Byron when he was killed—

  Angel’s head hurt. No wonder Anaka was a little nuts.

  She closed her eyes against the neon glare and listened to the comm in the next room. More politics. That’s all the net seemed to carry now, riots and politics. Senator Sylvia Harper was going to visit the battle scene in LA, and the commentators were speculating whether she was going to come north to San Francisco. Must be a local broadcast. Local vid-jockeys seemed to have a visceral need to include the home burg in a national story no matter how farfetched the connection.

  The news went on, and Angel felt unaccountably angry when the lengthening brief on local violence didn’t include Lei. Like she didn’t really count . . .

  Angel pulled her arms in, clutching herself and trying not to shake.

  Chapter 18

  Angel spent Thursday on the comm to DeGarmo trying to figure out her legal status. She found out that, if she wanted to she could have her lawyer get her out from under the cop’s thumb. Her problem was that she didn’t know where else she could go. After all, it seemed like going home, or to Byron’s condo, would be like strapping a target to the back of her head.

  As if there wasn’t one there now.

  She also asked DeGarmo if he knew anything about the Knights’ new high-class defense lawyer. DeGarmo said he’d look into it. He also told her that he now had Byron’s ashes and wanted to know what to do with them.

  She almost told him what to do with them, but she restrained herself. She told DeGarmo to hang on to them. She’d think about it.

  She also called St. Luke’s. Lei was still under, but she was probably going to pull through.

  The juxtaposing of those two calls completed her disassociation with the world. She’d been cut adrift. Her life had become so much storm-tossed flotsam.

  The disintegration of her personal life found a mirror in the social turbulence enveloping San Francisco. When she wasn’t making calls, her resident cop—a Hispanic named Quintara—remained glued to the screen watching the news.

  To her, the news wasn’t news. It told her nothing new. The county was still clogged by a judicial logjam two days after the mass arrests on Tuesday. A pink mob had attacked a Bensheim Reproduction Clinic down in Bayview. The home of a conservative pink councilman was torched in Pacific Heights. A bunch of nonviolent moreys led a sit-down strike on the Golden Gate. Another bunch of pinks rampaged through Chinatown again.

  When they went national and cut to artillery fire in the Bronx, it didn’t help promote a tranquil mood.

  Angel watched the cop, rather than the screen. The cop had the look of some small animal locked in the glare of oncoming headlights.

  The young detective wasn’t much for conversation. Angel had tried talking to him a few times. All she usually received in return was a grunted monosyllable. She’d given up on conversation about two hours after she woke up. Quintara was as preoccupied as she was, and he smelled nervous to high heaven.

  Probably didn’t like being shut up in a hotel with a rabbit.

  Or, more likely, he didn’t like the thought that the city around him threatened to go ballistic. An ugly prospect for a cop.

  When she got bored watching Quintara, she turned her chair toward the window. She watched the scene through the blinds, the cop watched the scene off the comm, and the hours passed in uncomfortable silence.

  She rested her chin on the windowsill and thought. The moreaus that jumped her and threw Lei out the window, two felines and two canines. She’d gotten fairly good looks at them, as well as scent a few times, but she couldn’t place either species. The only thing she really felt for certain was that they were the shits that offed Byron, and they were all strut, swagger, and intimidation—but no fucking brains.

  Someone’s hired thugs, they had to be. Someone who wanted the data Byron carried. Who? Could be anyone. All Angel could figure was that it had to be someone who hadn’t been playing this game for very long.

  The hit squad slashed Byron, scared Ellis into falsifying the autopsy and reaching Byron’s corpse, then trashed Byron’s condo looking for the data. Only after Angel had become an involuntary media star did they go after her for the data. First her apartment—mauling anything that got in their way—that, finally, they had gone after Angel herself.

  She looked out at the darkening neon jungle of Eddy Street and wondered why she didn’t feel better. This was all about who killed Byron, right? The creeps who did it were up on SFPD shit list now. White was after their asses, too. The hit squad was so unusual—and blatant—that they should turn up pretty fast. Once that happens, the bastards get put away, finito, the end, hand the fat lady her script.

  Like hell.

  Not that seeing all four of those creeps strung up by fishhooks and having electric shocks applied to their genitals wouldn’t lighten her day a little—but it certainly wouldn’t solve anything. Also, she was beginning to suspect it wouldn’t lead to any answers either. The four moreaus were small-time.

  All the evidence pointed to the fact that the circles Byron ran in were far from small-time. If he was carting data for VanDyne, at the very least he was carting sensitive data for a high-tech megacorp that was into defense contracting. At the most—

  She shuddered a little when she thought about the speculation that had been running through her mind in the back of Anaka’s van. If any of that was true, the Fed had a very good reason for taking over VanDyne.

  Whatever the source, Tetsami, Mr. K, seemed to think the data Byron carried was
big-time by an order of magnitude. Considering the shit kicked up by those ramcards, Angel was inclined to agree.

  A lighting-flash broke her train of thought, the thunder rattling the window pane a centimeter short of her nose. She blinked a few times and looked at the street below. Something was missing—

  She spread the slats of the blinds and called, “Quintara.”

  “Hmm,” came a voice barely audible over the gunshots on the comm.

  “Shouldn’t there be a patrol car out front?”

  “Huh?” Angel heard Quintara get up and walk next to her. A hand reached over her head and pushed the blinds to the side. “Jesus, what do they think they’re doing?”

  Quintara walked back to his seat. On the end table next to it, his radio was sitting on top of a pizza box. He started talking to some bewildered dispatcher and Angel went back to looking out the window.

  Eddy Street’s neon was flickering through sheets of gray rain now. A flash of lightning hit close by. The neon world blinked out of existence for a second.

  She tried to pick out the Knights’ headquarters, but it wasn’t in her line of sight. A tangle of chrome-cubic modular postquake structures blocked her view.

  Quintara stopped talking on the radio. “The squad outside had to respond to a call. Fighting broke out on Nob Hill.” He shook his head and repeated, “Nob Hill,” as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “Shouldn’t they have called you?”

  “Dispatch said they did—some computer glitch. They’re sending a replacement.”

  Angel felt the first drumroll in the paranoia parade.

  “Don’t worry. We got two cops in the lobby, and two across the hall. The squad’s just a precaution.”

  The first thing they always say is, “Don’t worry.” The building’s on fire, but don’t worry. The fault is about to open up under us, but don’t worry. We’re tracking an incoming nuke, but don’t worry.

  “Check the others, would you?”

  Quintara shrugged, hit a few keys on his radio. “Hey out there, this is Quint, can I have a head count?”

  “Yara and Lacy here—”

  “Myers.”

  “Johnson.”

  “Anything else?” asked the second voice, Myers.

  “Yeah, they called the squad out front, so we’re it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Quintara put the radio down. “Feel better?”

  “Yeah,” Angel lied. She walked away from the window. It now felt a little too exposed. She looked at the comm in time to see a lovely tracking shot of a rocket taking out a National Guard helicopter in Los Angeles. The commentary kept a straight level tone as they slow-moed the shot and zoomed at the helicopter. “Would you kill the damn news?”

  Quintara stared at her.

  Angel stepped over and grabbed the remote from the chair where he left it. “I know the world’s going for shit. I don’t need the reminder.” Angel crushed the power button with her hand and tossed the remote at the screen. The cheap plastic casing on the remote cracked in half.

  Angel pushed past Quintara into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. She could feel the pressure building, and suddenly the dam just broke open.

  She threw herself facedown on the mattress and screamed Spanish obscenities into the dirty pillow. For at least ten minutes she vented everything she had pent up inside her, all the anger, all the pain, all the frustration.

  When she calmed down enough to think straight, she lifted her head, panting. Her throat was raw, the pillow was soggy with her saliva, and from the ache in her thighs she’d been kicking the air as hard as she could.

  Angel, she thought to herself, you’ve lost it.

  For a while there, she’d gone to la-la land.

  She backed herself to the headboard and drew the pillow into her lap.

  “Calm down,” she told herself in a hoarse whisper. “Lei’s going to make it and the cops are going to snag the bad guys.”

  Right.

  She shook her head. The cops might get the moreaus that were after her. But what about the other people that were after that data? What about the guys from Denver? The folks who thoroughly went through all of her ramcards and went so far to cover their scent? Those were the people who scared her because she didn’t know anything about them. All she knew about them was the fact that they could get into her apartment as easily as White could and that they may have searched Doctor Ellis’ office prior to White.

  The Denver people may even have lifted whatever it was that White had been looking for.

  And then there were the Knights of Humanity.

  She couldn’t avoid the fact that the Knights were involved. Earl had told the cops about a meeting that Byron was supposed to have with his two pink sidekicks. Why was she so uncomfortable with that thought?

  It wasn’t that she refused to believe that Byron’d deal with them. At this point she could picture Byron with any convenient evil that would explain something. She was long past giving Byron the benefit of any doubts.

  It wasn’t even the fact that she didn’t believe the Knights would deal with a morey. Byron’s career was that of a go-between between person A and person B. If the deal is important enough, the nature of the go-between doesn’t really matter.

  No, what bugged her about the Knights was The Rabbit Hole.

  She just couldn’t believe the coincidence involved. No way. Three punks go into a morey joint at random to harass the furballs and just happen to land on something this big. She couldn’t see those three running across Byron by accident—

  Unless it wasn’t an accident.

  Unless they were after Byron in the first place.

  “Chuck the bunny, Earl,” one of them said. It wasn’t what they were there for. It wasn’t me. It was Byron!

  The red neon outside the bedroom window flickered.

  Angel let go of the pillow, letting it slide to the ground.

  Wind was whipping outside and sheets of rain were rippling sideways across the window. The neon flickered again and Angel slid to her feet. In the next room, Quintara was shouting into the radio.

  Quintara threw the bedroom door open. “Come on, we’re joining Yara and Lacy—”

  “What?”

  He reached over and grabbed her shoulder. “No time.”

  As he said it, the neon sign for the Hotel Bruce flickered for the last time, and the power for the building died.

  Quintara pushed her toward the door to the room. The emergency lights began coming on, then flickered out again.

  “Tell me the storm’s fucking with the storage batteries,” said Angel.

  Quintara started struggling with the lock, trying to open the door. “Damn, these things are supposed to unlock in a blackout.”

  The emergency lights continued to flicker on and off, preventing Angel’s eyes from adjusting to the dark.

  “You hear a fire alarm?” Angel asked. “You think the hotel wants to be looted in just any blackout?”

  “Great. Still can’t open the—”

  “Allow me.”

  Quintara stepped aside from the lock. Angel planted her left foot in the carpet and let fly with a back-kick just to the left of the electronic lock. The fact that the door opened in to the room didn’t prevent the frame from splintering and most of the lock’s structure from breaking through the cheap veneer of the door. The door itself moved out for about six centimeters and emitted a solid crunch. Angel removed her foot and the door slowly swung inward, shedding electronics around the edge.

  Quintara drew his thirty-eight and the two of them stepped out into the hall. The hall was filled with the sound of people pounding on the inside of their doors and lit by the irregular strobe of the emergency lights. The normal collection of pink winos seemed to be absent. “What the hell’s going on, Quintara?”

/>   “I can’t raise anybody.”

  They stopped in front of a door across the hall. “Yara, Lacy—” Quintara yelled at the door.

  “Can’t get the bastard open,” came a muffled voice from inside the room.

  “Get away from the door.” Quintara told them, and nodded toward Angel.

  She planted her foot in the door and this time the whole thing flew in as if it was jerked on a cable. The lock was ripped out of the door entirely, and flew to the center of the room. The other detectives were back in the room, a black pink woman and an Asian man who looked nothing like Anaka.

  “Myers and Johnson?” asked the black woman. From the voice she was Lacy.

  “Can’t raise them, can’t raise dispatch, can’t raise anybody—”

  “Radio ECM,” said the Asian, Yara, “We were locked in. Myers and Johnson should have been here—”

  Angel didn’t know whether to be pissed at the cops, scared witless, or just become resigned to the fact that her world was turning to shit.

  The emergency lights finally died for good, leaving the only light the streetlight glare from out the windows.

  “Damn,” said Quintara, “so much for security. We got to get her out of here.” He nodded in Angel’s direction.

  “Fine,” said Yara, who had leaned up with his back to the doorframe, gun out, turning his head back and forth to cover the hallway. “Where?”

  “I’ll check the fire escape—” Lacy ran through the hotel room and into the bedroom. Quintara followed, pulling Angel in his wake.

  Angel didn’t like the smell of the cop’s fear. She also didn’t like the sound of combat boots in the distance. Lots of boots.

  Quintara pulled her into the bedroom. The window was already open, letting in the electric air from the storm outside. This window opened on a narrow alley between the Hotel Bruce and one of the modular ice-tray buildings. The smell of garbage drifted in with the smell of lightning and rain.