Five minutes later we were in my truck, bouncing over the caltrops that hadn’t done a damn thing to protect my home.
*
“I don’t know why they took him,” Irene said in a low, pissed voice. I had explained to her that the object stolen by the Eks was my employee, who currently happened to be encased in cryonite. I’d kept waiting for her to admit that she knew all this already. But she stayed stubbornly mum.
“These have to have been the same guys who robbed you last night,” I said. “You said you knew what they were looking for.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you do know.”
“I guess I do now,” she snapped.
Exasperated, I lightly banged the steering wheel. “Can you at least admit that you know Risk? Not just to say hello to.”
“All right, yes, I know him. We were friendly. But when a guy vanishes, it’s not smart to let on that you know him, is it?”
“How did you know he’d vanished? I didn’t say anything about that when I was at your place.”
She clammed up again.
My phone rang.
I snatched it up.
Dolph.
“Yeah?”
His voice was thick with excitement, barely above a whisper. “Get here as fast as you can.”
“Guess what?” I started to tell him about the Eks. He cut me off.
“Never mind what happened to your fancy condo. Parsec is the bad guy. I decided to follow him, OK? He spent the night at Dr. Zeb’s.” Dr. Zeb is a Shifter doctor who runs a private hospital. It wasn’t surprising Parsec would have gone to him to get patched up, rather than have to explain his unusual injuries to a mainstream sawbones. “Discharged himself this afternoon and called his ride. I tailed him. Guess where he is now?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“At home.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “Dolph, that is not an unusual place for him to be.”
“Maybe not. But wait’ll you hear who else is here. His whole bad-news crew. I’ve been watching them arrive in ones and twos all afternoon. Those grizzly twins, the Kodiaks, just showed up. He’s getting ready to roll deep on someone,” Dolph said. “And it might be us.”
*
I had just been robbed by armed Eks. Compared to that, I couldn’t find it in my gut to be scared of a bunch of bears.
On the other hand, I had no idea where the Eks were, and I did know where Parsec was. And Irene had gone slightly pale when I gave her Dolph’s news. Although she still wasn’t admitting anything, the thought must have occurred to her—as it had to me—that maybe Parsec was getting his ursine crew together to roll on her.
I told Dolph we were on our way.
Parsec lived in one of the exclusive gated communities out on Cape Agreste. These are lovely places. Their only disadvantage—if you’re limited to ground transport—is that you have to take the spaceport road to get there.
Space Highway is the single most congested stretch of asphalt on Ponce de Leon. Today was no exception. We sat in a long narrow tide of vehicles that now and again surged a few inches forwards. I opened the windows and regretted it when the hot afternoon air rolled in, richly tinged with the smells of rotten fish and raw sewage. The seaward side of the highway is barnacled with slums. Wooden jetties and stilt-houses crowded the shoreline. Gillies swam around, tending their mom ‘n’ pop fish farms. “Makes you never want to eat shrimp again, huh?” I said to Irene, breaking the increasingly pregnant silence.
“I never eat shrimp, anyway,” she said coldly.
“Fish?” I had seen her tucking into sashimi at Wally’s last night. I was curious to find out what animal form she espoused. I still leaned towards leopard seal or dolphin.
I should have known by now she wouldn’t gratify my curiosity. “We’re not made of money,” was all she said.
Lightly, I said, “I’m not in the flying-car tax bracket. As you will have noticed.”
“Yeah, but look at where you live. I can only dream of living somewhere like that.”
“I’m not sure I’m gonna be living there much longer,” I said. I had been replaying the Ek invasion in my mind and wondering if I would ever feel safe leaving Lucy at home in Majesta Gardens again. “I’ll never get the smell out of the carpets.”
“We might have to move, too,” she said. “The landlord is threatening to kick us out. Like it’s our fault.”
“Wow, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. Silence descended on the truck once more, soggy and fraught. It got so uncomfortable that I put on my music—necro rock, the music of my misspent youth—and pretended not to notice Irene’s grimace of distaste.
We finally reached the turnoff for Ville Verde. Leaving the traffic behind, we climbed a steep, winding road through thick forest. The only vehicles we passed were self-driving delivery vans.
The residents up here don’t drive, they fly.
That, obviously, did not apply to Parsec’s bad-news bears. Half a dozen rustbuckets disfigured the Ville Verde visitor parking lot. I saw Dolph’s bike in a remote corner next to a dumpster. I hopped out of my truck and told it to impersonate a catering vehicle or something until I needed it. This was one of the times I was glad I had eschewed a fancy corporate logo.
Hidden from the security checkpoint by my slowly reversing truck, Irene and I jogged to Dolph’s bike.
Dolph wasn’t there. But a hole in the fence was.
I smelled fresh sap from the vines he had severed along with the chicken-wire.
We squeezed through the jungly vegetation outside Ville Verde. My heart sank as I realized how far Dolph had gone in his pursuit of Parsec.
He hates climbing trees.
Yet there he was, thirty feet up in a murder oak, beckoning to us.
Irene and I climbed the tree to join him. Irene climbed so nimbly that I revised my guess about her having a marine form. Or maybe, like Dolph and me, she had more than one.
Dolph moved out along his branch to make room for us. “Looky looky,” he whispered.
Twitching aside the leaves, I found myself gazing into Parsec’s back garden.
In between here and there was a weed-choked trench. A fence marched on this side of it, half hidden by the foliage. Another fence bounded the far side of the trench, curving outward at the top. Between the fences, the air shimmered slightly. There was a force field on top of the inner fence. I saw a dinoroach fall out of the air like a pebble, and noticed drifts of dead bugs, and even some dead birds, among the weeds at the bottom of the trench. The electronics in the outer fence were zapping the critters … and would probably zap any larger invader, too.
It didn’t seem fair. Out here, we were getting bug-bitten, prickled by the murder oak’s twigs, and covered with sap from the vines that were trying to murder it. In there, Parsec and his bear buddies lounged in deck chairs on a lawn as smooth as velvet, drinking martinis. A couple of the bears were mock-fighting in his swimming pool. His house cast an evening shadow across the lawn. It was three graceful brick storeys, with French windows and just the right amount of ivy climbing up the walls. Parsec himself sat with the Kodiak twins in human form, showing them something on a laptop.
His black hair had been shaved off, and bandages wrapped his head. I suddenly felt ashamed. Because I had caused his injuries? Because I was spying on him? I don’t know. It was a powerful feeling, but it soon passed.
Dolph whispered, “They’ll get good and drunk, then they’ll roll out. They’ll have to go by road. Too many people for his flying car. We could wait until they leave, and tail ‘em. Or …” He made his hand into a gun and jerked it up lightly to simulate recoil. “We could take ‘em out right now.”
I stared at him to see if he was serious. He winked. I was not entirely reassured.
“You wouldn’t get them all,” Irene said dispassionately. “But I might.”
“You might?” Dolph echoed.
Kneeling on the branch, Irene visua
lly raked the garden, as if her eyes were targeting lasers. “There isn’t much wind,” she said. “I’ve only got a .38, but I think Mike still has the pocket Gauss he took off the Eks. Yeah? With that, it would be doable.”
“Heard you were a shooter,” Dolph said. I elbowed him. That information came from Parsec, not her.
She shrugged. “I served with the Ghost Gators on Tech Duinn. I haven’t totally lost my touch.”
The Ghost Gators, a.k.a. the 129th Sharpshooters, had been easily the best sniper outfit on our side. Dolph raised his eyebrows, clearly feeling a new respect for Irene. When he opened his mouth I knew he was about to tell her about his own service, and probably mine as well.
She forestalled him. “But I’m not gonna try it. Because I have a better plan.”
Before we could ask what it was, she dropped off the branch to the one below. Quiet rustlings told of her unseen descent to the ground.
Dolph and I exchanged a look of panic and followed her. We were bigger and not as agile. We only caught up with her at all because she stopped by the hole in the fence to pick the twigs and leaves out of her hair. She smoothed down her nice pants and blouse, although the sap stains were never going to come out.
“Irene,” I said, “what’s the idea? You’re not gonna just walk in there?”
She gave me an odd look: half apologetic, half teasing. “Yes, I am. I’ll be fine. He’s not exactly going to knock me on the head and bury me in his garden. And if he is dumb enough to try it …” She took out her phone and touched the screen.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I accepted the call and stared dumbly at the screen.
“I’ll get you video if I can,” Irene said. “If not, I’ll just keep the line open. Should you hear Parsec threatening my life, I’ll be counting on you big tough men to rush in to the rescue.” She suddenly rose on tiptoe, pulled my shoulder down and whispered in my ear, “I know what you did.”
She knew what I’d done. But which part? I’d done a bunch of things in the last thirty hours, and most of them, in retrospect, appeared mindblowingly stupid. I was still trying to formulate a response as she walked up to the security checkpoint.
“Crap,” Dolph said, grabbing my phone. “She’s gonna drop us in it.”
I grabbed the phone back. “Dolph, her daughter’s at my place.” As a parent myself, I knew Irene would not do anything that placed Mia in danger. Dolph didn’t have that gut instinct, but he subsided, cursing.
“The security guys have seen us,” he said a second later. “Back through the fence.”
“No!” I hung onto him as one of the beefy guards started our way. Fleeing into the woods would be just about our worst option right now. How stupid could he get?
No stupider than me: ”Hey, there,” I called out, all smiles as I yanked Dolph towards the guard. “Is this Ville Verde?”
“It is.” He had his hand on his gun.
“Great! I’ve been trying to find this place all afternoon. It’s well-hidden. I like that. See, I’m interested in buying in this area, but I’m looking for something genuinely exclusive. Restricted access. Neighbors that are my kind of folks. Know what I mean?”
Taking Dolph as a guide to how I looked right now, the security guard would have been forgiven for thinking ‘my kind of folks’ were homeless guys who slept in trees. But he must have had orders to be nice to prospective buyers.
And that is how Dolph and I ended up in the Ville Verde realty office, which happened to be kitty-corner to Parsec’s house on a cute little street called Hibiscus Court. We were due a piece of luck, no matter how trivial.
The realtor on duty was petite and buxom. Dolph took on the arduous task of boring her with our long list of requirements. I played the skittish one, wandering around and examining the VR model houses set up in the front of the office, while pretending to talk on my phone.
I was actually listening to this:
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Irene said. “It was stolen. When I got back home last night, these Eks—”
“Heard about that. They rolled your place, huh?”
I imagined the scene. Irene had gained access to Parsec’s house. It wouldn’t have been difficult. From his perspective, the salmon was jumping into his jaws. I could hear the other bears in the background, so I figured he must have taken her through to the garden. I pictured them ripping her clothes off with their nasty little ursine eyes, and gritted my teeth.
“That was plain dumb keeping it at your crib,” Parsec said. Strangely, he didn’t sound all that upset. The next minute I learnt why. “See this?”
“What is it?” Irene said. “It looks like a map of Mag-Ingat.” She was narrating what she saw for my benefit. “What’s that red dot?”
Parsec let out a rich pleased-with-himself chuckle. “Package tracking.”
“Package … Oh.”
I froze with my hand inside a holographic doll-sized living-room where I had been rearranging the furniture for kicks.
“Risk has a tracking tag?” Irene said.
That piece of metal sticking out of his jeans pocket. It was a tracking tag?
“Honey,” said Parsec, “you married dumb, so I understand that you have low expectations. But Buzz Parsec isn’t dumb.”
God, I wanted to kill him so bad.
“Yes, the nanonic defroster has an integrated tracking beacon. Why did I request that feature? Because I foresaw that something like this might happen.”
There it was. Confirmation—and because I was recording, evidence—that Parsec and Irene had worked together to ice my weapons officer. I should have been elated that the mystery was solved, or at least partly solved. I just felt cold.
“Uh uh,” Irene said. “I don’t care how smart you are, you did not foresee that freaking Holoventures would come after us.”
“You got me,” Parsec said easily. “My prediction was that you’d try to cut me out of the deal and sell it yourself.”
Now I was confused again. Sell it? Were they talking about Risk, as if he were an inanimate package? More to the point—sorry, ole fox—what possible monetary value could a cryonite-encased 62-year-old Shifter have to anyone, let alone Holoventures, whoever he, she, or they were?
“I’m not stupid, either, Buzz,” Irene said. “I wouldn’t try to cheat you. All I want is my fair share.”
“Your fair share,” growled a different voice. I guessed it was one of the Kodiak twins. “All you done is screw up.”
“Cool it, Kody,” Parsec said easily. “In fact, get the lady a drink.”
“I have to get back to my kids,” Irene said.
“They’ll survive without you.”
Irene hissed between her teeth at the not-so-veiled threat. “What’s taking so long?”
“This tracking dot. See? It’s just sitting there.”
“Quetatl Hospital,” Irene read.
“Yup. You must’ve put the hurt on those Eks.”
“I did. Winged a couple of them good.”
She was leaving me out of it. Letting Parsec think Risk had been stolen from her place last night, instead of from mine today. I felt a shameful, selfish rush of gratitude and admiration.
“Now see, I just don’t think that’s true,” Parsec said in the same easy, conversational tone. “If you and hubs winged ‘em last night, why’d they wait until today to go to hospital?”
Irene was silent. Her lies were catching up with her. I could almost feel her heart racing in panic over the phone.
“And why did this tracking beacon spend the night at this location here? Majesta Gardens.”
My own heart started to race.
“That’s one of those crummy mid-rent communities,” Parsec mused. “Their security looks good on paper, but in reality it ain’t shit. Now here we have defensive laser installations on the perimeter, and a communal anti-spaceship plasma toroid gun. But I guess Majesta Gardens is a step up from Shiftertown. In fact, I know someone who lives there. Small-time freighter ca
ptain, Michael Starrunner.”
Small-time?!
“You ever met him?”
“No,” Irene said. “I think Risk mentioned him a couple of times.”
“Yeah, he might have, seeing as he was his boss!” On the last words, Parsec’s voice deepened to a growl. I heard loud crackling and rustling noises and a cry from Irene. I stiffened, ready to fly across the street, guns blazing.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Parsec said. “I get a little carried away when I think someone might be trying to rip me off!”
More loud rustling. I took a step towards the door.
“All right,” Irene said, her voice high and breathless. “Put that gun away! I’ll tell you the truth. Someone is trying to rip you off. It’s Starrunner.”
And she spilled everything. She told him that I’d removed Risk from his apartment on 90th. That she had cleverly come up with an excuse to go to my place, but before she could re-steal Risk, the Eks had. And that I had called Parsec a mangy fleabag.
The only thing she didn’t mention was that I was in Ville Verde right now.
My pulse felt thick in my head.
She was talking at gunpoint. She wouldn’t have given me away otherwise.
Regardless, the fact remained that Parsec now knew all about my attempts to free Risk. He still didn’t know that I was the jaguar who’d attacked him outside Wally’s, but that was only because Irene didn’t know about that, either.
Parsec called me a string of filthy names, impugning my parentage, my service, the condition of my ship, and my crew, with special attention to Dolph, whom he called a grass-eating psycho. He speculated that my preferred diet was also grass, and my animal form must be a rabbit, because all I was good at was running and hiding in holes.
I thought of one silver lining: he didn’t know I was across the street from his house right now, hiding in the local realty office.
“When I catch up with him,” he finished, “he’s gonna wish he was never born. No hole’s deep enough for him to hide from Buzz Parsec.”
“Well, he won’t be going back to his crib anytime soon,” Irene said. “The Eks destroyed it.” She giggled girlishly. “God, that was funny.”
The Cryonite Caper Page 6