by Dan Stout
The heart of Old Town ran on a combination of historic tours and prestige rents paid by lawyers and advertising agencies who wanted to see something old when they looked out their office windows. To my left was St. Ogden’s, the oldest guidepost in the city, now more tourist attraction than place of worship. Catercorner to it were the ornate gates that marked Titanshade Public Cemetery #1, the first and only in-ground cemetery in the city. After oil was discovered on the ice plains, the city founders quickly realized that real estate and thermal vents were far too precious to be given over to the dead. Instead, the practice of sky burials or cremation became mandated. For citizens of Titanshade the ultimate worldly destination of the physical body was either funeral flames or the fierce beaks of the condors that lived on the north side of the Mount.
Along this street the city’s oldest dead kept watch over the red-and-white embossed compass above the city’s oldest place of prayer. And in turn the faithful averted their eyes from the cemetery gates as they walked to service. Life on one hand, death on the other. As if there was a difference.
I turned left, and walked through the doors of St. Ogden’s.
Once inside, I mixed with the small crowd of early evening tourists. Simon had given me no details beyond telling me to meet him there, and I scanned the place, looking for his familiar profile. The guidepost was large, with rows of backless trail benches flanking a central aisle that led to the celebratory stand. From there the presiding guide could deliver speeches or lead meditations during service. Private meditation alcoves were set into the side walls, separated by racks of devotional candles and engravings of saints from which the faithful could draw inspiration. The smell of incense and burning candles was heavy in the air, undercut by the heady blend of sedatives and herbs that drifted out of the occupied chambers, as slumbering adherents hoped to be touched by dream sight and granted a glimpse of a world other than this.
I had vivid memories of my parents dragging me to a guidepost, where I’d hear how the Path teaches of many worlds and many walkers. Dream sight is a way to peek into those worlds and draw inspiration. Artists and inventors claimed uncountable creations that had resulted from meditation-induced visions. Of course, the Path also teaches that of all the worlds, this one is special. The guides call Eyjan a spiritual fulcrum, that the paths of other worlds hinge on the ability of the eight Families to live in harmony. I had my doubts; funny how you never hear anyone talk about living in the world that doesn’t matter.
In any case, if survival was any indication of authenticity, then the Path had it in spades. The world had once been rich with religions but all had been absorbed by the Path, their multitude of deities and devils transformed into the pantheon of saints, leading us astray or righting our route as we walked our road in this life.
As for me, I kept circling the crowd at the front of St. Ogden’s, looking for Simon among the shadows and alcoves. At my back, a guide in full frock and staff regalia rattled off a prepared speech to the tourists. The crowd oohed and ahhed, cameras clicking as they moved from stop to stop. Overhead, stained glass windows stretched to the ceiling, each with its own lesson or historical snapshot. The one closest to me depicted a pair of shaggy, bison-sized Barekusu teaching a group of other Families. Above and behind them stretched the sideways figure eight of the ba, representing the eternal, winding nature of the Path.
Simon was nowhere to be found, so I slipped away from the tour group and walked through the rows of nearly empty trail benches to the far end of the guidepost. I passed a pair of old women sitting side by side, hands clasped as they meditated together. A few rows away a burly man rocked back and forth, hands obscuring his face. He wore a thick flannel coat, frayed at the cuffs and collar. He’d surely trekked in from the tattered fringes of the city where the warmth of the geo-vents was sparse.
As I drew closer to the celebratory, I looked mountwise. The Mount’s silhouette was hidden from view, cloaked in the dark of evening. But I knew where it was. Jenny was up there. After the last efforts of the doctors failed, after the funeral and the tears, after Talena and I said good-bye, Jenny’s body had made the trip up the Mount. It was her last wish, so the sky shepherds could help her be reborn and walk the Path in a new form. Some days I missed her so bad it was like a physical tug in my bones, pulling me toward her like iron shavings drawn toward a magnet.
A hiss caught my ear, and I turned toward the meditation chambers at the rear of the guidepost. There I found my favorite Gillmyn waiting for me, huddled in a shadowed alcove near a rack of devotional candles and scanning the crowd of tourists for, I guessed, any unwelcome company.
Simon looked me up and down as I approached.
“What happened to you?”
“I beat someone up,” I said. When he was silent I added, “No need to ask if I’m okay. I’m sure it looks worse than it—”
“Were you followed?” He wore a black stocking cap and a tight knit sweater, the sleeves pushed up to display his forearm tattoos.
“No.”
He said it again, more insistently. “Were you followed?”
“Dammit, no. Now what’re you so desperate to tell me?”
We were on the far edge of the seating, and he hunkered down onto a trail bench. I sat beside him, matching his posture, both of us keeping a low profile. The background noise of the tour group provided enough cover for us to speak in hushed tones.
“You asked me about pimps.” He peeked over his shoulder as he spoke. “Blackmailed johns and janes.”
I straightened up, at least as much as my aching body would allow. “That’s right.”
“I’ve heard talk,” he said, still peering behind us.
I made a spinning motion with my hand. Get on with it.
“First time was the other day,” he said. “Some hard cases I never seen before showed up and ran their mouths about problems with candies. They said anyone with a sweet tooth was getting shook down by candies with wires. That the pimps tried to deal with it and couldn’t manage, so a client set them straight.”
Giving up on looking over his shoulder, Simon slipped back into the shadows of the alcove. He hiked up his blue jeans and squatted down, a move that put his back to the alcove wall and gave him a better view of the crowd. “I tried to get a hold of you, but you never responded.”
“I was a little busy with people trying to kill me.” I slid over, to the end of the trail bench, giving him some cover from prying eyes. He was spooked bad.
“Whatever.” He adjusted his stocking cap. “So I figured you weren’t interested.”
“Simon. They were trying to kill me. They put a friend in the hospital.”
The shadows around him danced to the flickering flames of the devotional candles. “So I never got a hold of you. We never talked.”
“I know,” I said. “I was there when we didn’t talk.”
“So today, when a completely different set of hard cases come in and spill the same story, it spooked me.”
“Different guys?”
“With the exact same story.”
“And when you say exact . . .”
“Like someone had written it out for ’em.”
I grew very still. “Someone knows to plant a story with you.”
“Worse. They tried a second time. Which means they knew the story hadn’t gotten back to you.”
Hells below. The only people who would’ve known that were—
“Your buddies in the Bunker are feeding info to someone who’s trying to get a story in the system. Maybe that new guy you brought over. I don’t know who. But you understand that I’m screwed, right?” His gills flared, with anger or fear or both.
I tried to process what he was telling me. Someone in the Bunker was leaking, but to whom? And the leak had to be from someone with access to critical information about the case, and about me. It meant I couldn’t report what I’d
just found in that laboratory, and it meant that my CI was . . . I looked at the big Gillmyn beside me.
“Simon, I’ll make this good.” It felt false even as I said it. Once a CI was exposed, he or she was living on borrowed time.
“Oh, yeah. You’ll make it great,” he said. “I’m heading out of town. Don’t contact me again.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He huffed and glanced warily over the trail benches.
“I mean it,” I said. “You could’ve just split town. Why did you tell me?”
He looked at me like I’d sprouted another head. “Because of all the low-lives in this town,” he said, “you’re the one asshole that wouldn’t sell me out.”
We sat for a moment in the quiet of the guidepost. The tour had ended, and the only sound was the gentle weeping of the burly man, overcome by grief or joy. As if there were a difference.
Simon’s eyes still swept back and forth, watching the crowd and the entrance. I tried not to calculate odds on him getting out of town alive. Whoever had ears in the Bunker wanted him to feed me those fake stories, which meant they wanted him alive. But if word about Simon had leaked to the Harlqs or CaCuris or any of a dozen other crews, he wouldn’t see sunrise. And with my own people compromised, I couldn’t even offer him protection. Not that he’d have accepted it anyway.
“You got enough cash to get out of town?” I said.
He nodded and wiped his hands across his jeans. I jerked a thumb at the exposed tattoos on his forearms.
“You ought to cover those up,” I said. “If someone’s looking for you, they’re distinctive marks.”
Simon smiled. “Are you kidding? I’m big, green, and gorgeous. No one needs tattoos to recognize me.” He stood up. “Good luck, Carter. Try not to let the bastards kill you.”
He headed toward the guidepost’s entrance, zigzagging a path past chattering tourists and engravings of long-dead saints. As he disappeared from view, I saw him roll down his sleeves.
29
I STAYED AT A MOTEL that night, my talk with Simon leaving me too troubled to trust that my home was safe, and too exhausted to defend myself if it wasn’t. I visited a drugstore and spent most of the evening sitting on the edge of an uncomfortable mattress patching myself up from my encounter with Heidelbrecht’s guard. I left the motel’s washcloth stained red, but I was glad to find that the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. Torn lips and brows were as ugly as the swelling along my jaw, but the only injury that’d stick with me was the broken finger.
The rest of the night I spent lying in bed, surrounded by freshly emptied take-out boxes and bathed in the silent flicker of the muted television. All the while I worked with pencil and paper, trying to make sense of the mess I’d found myself in. It took me hours before I found sleep, but when I did I slept hard, and no dreams disturbed my rest.
In the morning I returned to the Bunker, turning heads with my bruised and bandaged face. As I passed each colleague, I wondered if they were the one who’d sold out Simon.
Myris was headed somewhere with a box full of files, but skidded to a halt when she saw me.
“Side roads!” She set the box down. It was probably packed full of research for Angus’s investigation into the candies. I wondered if my name was in there somewhere. “What happened to you?”
“Long story,” I said.
“Does it have a sequel?”
I wondered if she knew how much her career would benefit by her move to Angus’s group. I wondered if she was the person leaking information. But I said none of that. Instead I shrugged, smiled, and kept walking till I got to my desk. It was covered with the usual office debris. I sat down and surveyed the stack. Memos about this or that bit of procedure, files I’d meant to get around to reading. As I stared, a drip of blood fell from my mouth to the blotter below me. My lip had torn open again. I wiped the drip away with a stray memo about dress code policies, then dug in my coat pocket for a fresh bandage. I opened a desk drawer and with a single sweep of my arm sent all the files and folders tumbling inside.
There’s nothing like the feeling of getting things done.
I dropped a single folder on my now-clean work area. I flipped it open and revealed the map of connections I’d been working on overnight. It showed Garson Haberdine, Jermaine Bell, Harlan, names I’d learned since I’d been pulled out of Mickey the Finn’s, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Gellica, Paulus, Lowell, and Cordray. The envoys were there, as were the Squibs: Lanathel and Yarvis. Flanagan was on there as well. He wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t guilty. Not completely. Or at least he wasn’t the only guilty one. Next to Flanagan were the names of my fellow officers, at least one of whom was feeding info to another player.
I’d drawn lines in pencil representing the relationships between all of them. An intricate web encompassing the many players on both sides of the law and the hundred tenuous connections that tied them together. Somehow the answers to everything were hidden in that map.
Ajax arrived a little after I did, settling into the desk next to mine. He was on my web too, of course, but as a relative newcomer to Titanshade, he had almost no connections with anyone else that I’d been able to verify. That made him one of the least risky people to trust. But I couldn’t tell him about my meeting with Flanagan. Not yet.
Jax eyed my battered face, but kept any comments about it to himself. Reaching to his shoulder he untied the sling and flexed his arm, still bulky from the bandaging under his suit coat. “I hate this thing,” he said, and bunched the linen fabric of his sling in one hand before tossing it in his wastebasket. “If anyone asks, it broke.”
I grunted my complicity. For him, it was probably a significant act of rebellion. Maybe I was setting a bad example.
“Well,” he said, “you’re here in an advisory role. You have any advice?”
I squeezed the splint that held my finger straight, biting my lip with the twinge of pain it brought. I wanted to trust him. But I couldn’t say anything. Not there, in the middle of the Bullpen, anyway.
A muted rattling broke the silence. I looked at Jax, who shrugged. It sounded again, and I pulled open the drawer where I’d shoveled my desktop. The rattling got louder. I reached in and fished out my pager. I didn’t recognize the number, and dropped it back on the blotter.
“What about Guyer?” I said.
“She can’t do anything else.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Either,” he said. “Both. The Squibs took Haberdine’s remains.”
“For what?”
“To send back to his family. You’ve heard that some people care when their family members die, right?”
I flipped through my sketch of relationships. “I’ve heard. Is she sure she can’t do anything?”
“She’s around here somewhere, ask her yourself.”
The phone on my desk rang. I answered it and found myself talking to Talena.
“Why didn’t you answer my page?”
I thumbed the page to look at the call-back number. “Didn’t recognize it. I had other priorities.”
“People are trying to poison me,” she said. “Make me a priority until I’m out of the hospital. And why does your voice sound funny? Are you eating right now?”
I dabbed a tissue to my mouth. It came away crimson. “I bit my cheek,” I said. “And no one was poisoning you. They were going for me.”
“Fine.” Her voice rasped, a reminder of the plastic tube the docs had used to pump her stomach. “Either they were aiming for you and they’re incompetent, or they were targeting me, and they’re skillful. Two different lists. Let’s go over them both.”
She read me her list. I listened to the whole thing. It was the least I could do. The poor kid had almost gotten killed for the mortal sin of knowing me too well.
When she got to the end I recited a
couple of the names back to her—former johns or janes who she’d forced to give up their taste for candies—just to show I was paying attention. I told her I needed to go.
“I’m not going to stop,” she said. “My work, I mean.”
“I know. Don’t ever stop doing the right thing.” There was more emotion in my voice than I’d intended, and the line was silent for a moment.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll take care of things on this end, and I’ll swing by and see you soon.” I broke the connection and rested my aching head in my hands. There was a rustle of paper and Ajax shoved a report to the side.
“Carter,” he said. I raised my head and found him giving me a crinkle-eyed look. “You want me to go talk to Talena? I’ve got a follow-up at the hospital today anyway.” He displayed his bandaged arm. “Unless you think she’d get nervous about having another cop around.”
“Nah, she’d love it,” I said. “She thinks you’re cute.”
He froze. “Yeah?”
Uh-oh.
“No. Not really. I only said that to get you to— In fact, don’t worry about it . . .”
“Like I said, I’ve gotta go anyway.” He stood up. “Try not to bleed on anything while I’m gone.”
* * *
Over the next few hours I worked the phones, spinning the rotary dial until my index finger was numb. I leaned on every government connection I had, trying to get some traction on the connection between Paulus, Harlan, and the mysterious Dr. Heidelbrecht. No one had anything beyond the normal political backbiting, and no one had heard of Heidelbrecht. As I hit brick wall after brick wall, my patience got lower and lower. I hung up after yet another futile call and pressed on the bridge of my nose, trying in vain to hold a headache at bay.