Black And Blue (Quentin Black Mystery #5)

by Andrijeski, JC

  Mozar frowned, exchanging looks with Hawking.

  Black made another vague gesture with his hand. “Anyway, getting out by boat in the morning would be even easier. If you miss him tonight, you’ll need to cover this whole place and search it crate by crate... the problem is, you likely won’t know which thing he’s doing, which means you might be directing your resources in the wrong way and miss him. He also might adjust his plans if he can see what you’re doing... or if your mole tells him. Like he might ditch the pick up team and swim, or hide out in a prearranged crate with a false back... etc. Searching the crates will be a time consuming nightmare, even with a big team. Most of them are full. For all you know, he set it up to be shipped out the next day on a liner or a long-haul truck. There are a lot of crazy things he could do to get past you...”

  Mozar slumped back on his seat, his frown deepening. Black caught Rodrigo staring at him in the review mirror, too, his eyes wider than they had been.

  “You see?” Black said. “Too many options. Unless you catch him in the act, I may not be able to help you bring him in.”

  Of course, he could find the guy with his sight.

  He couldn’t exactly tell Mozar or Hawking that, though.

  Mozar was back to talking to whoever he had on the line again, likely the SWAT team leader. Hawking was frowning down at the map, looking at the different areas Black had indicated in his assessment of the area.

  “You don’t think we can cover the water access?”

  “All of it?” Black said. “How many people do you have?”

  “Is there any scenario where he might go inside the building?” Hawking said.

  Black shrugged. “If you caught him in the act and pinned him near the building, he might go in to grab a hostage to get him off the island. But if he did that, you’re going to lose people. He’d only do it if he was fucking desperate.”

  Hawking nodded, his mouth tightening as he went back to looking at the map.

  “How many people work graveyard here?” Black said.

  “In the admin building? Only about ten. Maybe fifteen... at least who are scheduled that way. Port Police told us that there are a few dozen more who often work until ten or eleven at night. Day shift workers who work overtime, that is. And of course there are hundreds by the various cranes and docks and in the loading areas. We’re trying to clear the area by the admin building itself, but it’s not easy. And we can’t totally shut down work at the Port. That gets into Federal territory real quick, given that it’s an international port. Our captain didn’t want to do it without something a lot more solid.”

  Black nodded again, still thinking.

  Finally, he shook his head. “You should give Sterling a head’s up. Is he already at the building?”

  Hawking checked his watch. “Not for another ninety minutes.”

  Frowning, Black nodded again.

  He noticed his own unease and wondered about that again, too.

  He didn’t have time to dwell on it for long though.

  They were already here.

  6

  SOMETHING’S WRONG

  “YOU STAY HERE,” Hawking said, giving Black a bare glance. “Don’t get out of the car unless we call you...” He pointed towards the front dash of the car. “...or if we signal you on the radio.”

  As if to emphasize the point, as one might do with a dog they half-expected to disobey, Hawking aimed a tilted palm in Black’s direction, like a stop gesture, or maybe down, boy.

  “I mean it,” he added. “Stay in the car, Black.”

  Frowning, Black watched Hawking climb out of the back seat of the unmarked police car and slam the door behind him. He’d seen the real warning in Hawking’s eyes, and could tell he wasn’t just being petty or controlling for the sake of it.

  Still, it was hard not to be irritated.

  Mozar and Rodrigo were already exiting out the two front doors, with Rodrigo pausing only long enough to grab the shotgun hidden below the front passenger seat. When he turned, gun barrel in hand, Rodrigo gave Black a brief stare too, as if reinforcing Hawking’s words.

  Mozar didn’t look at him at all.

  Even so, Black already knew the order had originated with him.

  He must have said something to them while Black was changing into the blue uniform back at the station. Given them some bullshit line about what Black could and couldn’t do, depending on what kind of intel he gave them.

  Either way, Black got the gist.

  He was benched.

  They’d done it for Miri, which made it harder to be angry.

  More surprisingly, they’d also done it for Nick, who apparently made Mozar promise he’d keep Black out of harm’s way or he’d come down here and shoot him himself. Black had never had so many people worried about him getting hurt before. It might’ve been funny under different circumstances.

  Of course, Mozar being Mozar, he was almost certainly more concerned with covering his own ass than he was with Miri or Nick––much less Black himself. Hawking, on the other hand, seemed to be thinking primarily of Miri, which both calmed Black’s anger some and irritated him for a whole different set of reasons.

  In some ways, Mozar benching him was even close to a compliment.

  Somewhere in all of his muttering and pointing at maps, Mozar made up his mind that Black was an asset worth protecting. Black even felt him wondering if the LAPD might set up a more long-term contract with Black’s firm, specifically for help tackling the international gangs that had been moving into the city more aggressively in the past year or so.

  Either way, something Black said made Mozar decide letting him out of the car was too risky. On the off-chance the shooter targeted him, Mozar would lose his shiny new toy after barely a test drive.

  Still, Black wished he’d carried a piece with him when he went out to dinner. He hadn’t because of Miri. She definitely would have noticed, especially since she’d had her hands all fucking over him before Hawking and Mozar got there. She also would have asked him about it, and he hadn’t wanted to worry her.

  He should have done it anyway, made up some bullshit excuse. He carried one most of the time anyway; it wasn’t that much of a stretch.

  Leaning back in the vinyl seat, he exhaled in annoyance, looking out over the dotting of tall pole lamps that lit up the nearer rows of different-colored storage crates. Stamped with the name of the Konstantin shipping company in white paint, they were the same kind of crates that long-haul trucks transported all over the country. Rodrigo had driven them down one of the wider aisles between the rows, stopping them where roughly six different aisles converged. A street lamp stood in the middle, so it was probably a loading area of some kind.

  Black saw an armored van parked directly across from him, probably SWAT.

  All of it would be invisible from the admin building.

  Even so, Black felt conspicuous. Watching through the windshield, he saw Mozar, Hawking and Rodrigo walk up to a group of officers in black kevlar and helmets, all but one of them carrying assault rifles, what looked like HK416s.

  Obviously, the SWAT team... part of it, at least.

  Black counted six of them. That couldn’t be the whole team.

  Still, it was a big group to meet out in the open for this kind of gig. Not particularly subtle, especially in their quasi-military attire, even with the visual lines protected.

  The man in front, likely their leader, carried a rifle as well.

  He pointed towards a tall stack of storage crates as Black watched, drawing the eyes of the homicide detectives in unison. Black followed his pointing finger too, which aimed roughly at his two o’clock. Tracking it back to the main admin building, where Black could see lights in windowed offices across several floors in the twenty-story building, he recognized the segment as one he’d sketched out for Hawking on the tablet.

  He checked his watch. Still about an hour before Sterling would be here.

  Muttering under his breath, he wondered
if he should tell them they’d probably already been spotted by the shooter, if he was anywhere near here.

  Still, Mozar wasn’t stupid, whatever his other faults. They must have cleared this area already, or they wouldn’t be meeting here. The rest of the SWAT team was probably checking out other locations the shooter might be hiding.

  Maybe they were hoping to flush the guy out––get him to make a break for it before Sterling got here. That wasn’t an entirely stupid idea. It also might keep Sterling alive.

  Of course, it also considerably raised the chances they’d never lay eyes on the shooter at all.

  Black stretched out his sight, looking for presences in the maze of storage crates on either side of the car. He hadn’t expected to find anything relevant right away. He’d more been looking to get a handle on what the rest of the LAPD team might be up to, but he ended up stopping in just a few seconds.

  Not because he felt something––he didn’t.

  He stopped because he couldn’t feel anything. Not just in terms of the shooter. Black couldn’t feel anything at all.

  Frowning, he reached out again––when he caught motion in his periphery and turned.

  In the aisle of storage crates directly to his right, two forms in work coveralls walked in the distance. They were only about a dozen yards away, walking in the opposite direction of the car. That wasn’t what made him pause, though.

  They were walking exactly where he’d just been scanning with his light––where, just seconds earlier, he’d felt nothing at all, not so much as a seagull.

  How the hell hadn’t he felt them there, that close?

  The two men didn’t seem interested in him or the car.

  Wearing the coveralls and heavy work boots, they pushed a rolling bin down the middle of the aisle. Their strides were casual, deceptively fast, which he gauged more by the distance they covered as he watched. They looked around as they walked––also with slow, casual-seeming turns of their heads. They didn’t talk.

  They also didn’t just look side-to-side, but also up, and between the crates.

  Black frowned.

  As normal as they tried to make it look, none of that was normal.

  Could they be SWAT? Wouldn’t SWAT have cleared this area by now?

  He continued to watch as two more men in coveralls joined them, falling in behind the first two from smaller, perpendicular aisles that ran between the crates. One of the new ones carried a black duffle over his shoulder. The thing was heavy from the way the straps pulled, but the tall guy in the overalls carried it effortlessly.

  A low-level alarm rose in the back of Black’s mind––right before all four peeled off from one another, as if by mutual agreement.

  That alarm bell in his head got a fuck of a lot louder.

  He’d only seen living beings move like that if they had serious military training. Well, that and back on Old Earth. They disappeared into the stacks of crates on either side of the aisle without a whisper.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. “Miri’s going to kill me.”

  He stretched out his sight, looking for them.

  Again, he felt nothing.

  He didn’t feel the four men. He didn’t feel any other SWAT team members or dock workers roaming the stacks, either. He didn’t even feel any birds or insects, and that time he looked, if only to convince himself he wasn’t imagining things.

  Something was definitely blocking his seer’s sight. Worse, he didn’t recognize the blocking mechanism at all. He didn’t feel light shields like another seer might employ. He didn’t feel a Barrier construct, or anything screwing with his light.

  He just felt... nothing.

  Like a blank wall of nothingness stretched out over the docks.

  Those alarms were clanging now, deafening.

  Just then, someone walked right past the side of the car.

  He jumped violently, shocked when he saw how close they passed. Then he dropped down to get a better look at them. He hadn’t felt a fucking thing that time, either. Even with his light stretched out, on high alert, he hadn’t felt a whisper that they were there.

  How the hell was that possible?

  No seer he’d ever encountered could block him so well.

  The man stopped at the mouth of the next aisle over. Turning his head while he rested his palm on the nearest crate wall, he looked straight at Black in the back of that car. Eerie red eyes shone from the shadows, reflecting the light from the whiter warehouse lights.

  Black stared back at him.

  Then, impulsively, he rolled down the window.

  “Hey, brother!” he said. “You! Come here! I want to talk to you.”

  The man smiled. He did it without showing any teeth.

  Narrow-lipped, his face gaunt below those dead-looking, blood-red irises, something about that smile sent a curl of unease down Black’s back.

  It wasn’t the eyes.

  Weird-colored eyes didn’t faze him. Most seers had strangely-colored eyes from a human perspective, and Black had seen red ones before, both here and back on Old Earth.

  Anyway, seeing those eyes answered one question.

  Whoever this was, they were definitely employing seers.

  This one carried a black canvas duffle over one shoulder, as well. The fingers gripping the strap were white as bone, corpse-like. So was his face, which Black still couldn’t make out well in the shadows. He saw blood-red lips lifted in that eerie smile, a ghost-white chin, a wispy black beard and long hair that fell to his shoulders. That was it.

  “Hey!” Black’s voice came out in a growl that time. “LAPD! Come the fuck over here! Now!”

  Still smiling, the man saluted him with two fingers.

  Then he melted into the shadowed opening between the crates.

  Breathing harder, Black watched him go, disbelief still crashing through his light. Eyes like that––unless they were contacts, the guy had to be a seer. Yet, something was wrong with that, too. He didn’t look seer. He didn’t feel seer. Black reached out with his mind again, looking for the guy again. He didn’t try to be subtle that time, or disguise his light in any way.

  Again, he felt nothing.

  Not so much as a whisper of the guy met his light––the same guy who’d just been standing right fucking there, and who passed close enough by the unmarked police car that he could have shot Black at point-blank range.

  Miri would hate this. She would hate this so fucking much.

  Looking back towards the cluster of SWAT officers and detectives, he saw them still talking together in that same spot by the armored truck, about a hundred yards away. From their expressions, they were totally oblivious to what had just occurred. They obviously hadn’t heard Black call out to the guy, or noticed any of the five men Black just watched disappear into the maze of crates.

  Scowling, Black reached out his mind to read Mozar.

  Again, he hit a solid wall.

  No––not a wall. That was Old Earth terminology. This wasn’t a wall.

  It was a complete absence of living light.

  Now that he was studying it purposefully, it was nothing like when a seer deliberately blocked another seer’s sight. In those cases, something always came through. A flavor of the person blocking him––either around him, or around the target he was trying to read. He’d hit light mazes before, in the more sophisticated constructs and shields. Those didn’t block so much as misdirect and confuse. Usually those were even more difficult to get around than straight shields.

  He always felt something though... maybe nothing with relevant, concrete information attached to whatever he was trying to scan, but he felt something.

  This wasn’t like any of those things.

  Instead, he got absolutely nothing.

  A void, where people should be. Like the crowd of uniformed officers standing there was nothing more than a mirage.

  He tried a few more times, breathing harder.

  Looking down at the tablet, he considered calling Miri
, trying to get her to look at what was going on, but he didn’t want to panic her. It sure as hell would panic him if he got a similar call from her. Moreover, she was too far away to help, so he’d be panicking her for nothing.

  He considered calling Kiko, having her call the team at the hotel. They were just as far away as Miri, though, and humans would be useless against seers. Well... mostly useless. Not entirely useless, but guns wouldn’t be the problem down here, or even training, although more of both on their side would definitely help.

  Staring down at the tablet, he briefly considered calling Nick.

  All of that went through his mind in a split-second of slow-motion thought. Then it hit him––he didn’t have time for any of that.

  Whatever this was, it was happening now.

  Looking down the nearby aisles between storage crates, he couldn’t see anyone now. He still couldn’t feel anything either, but somehow, it struck him as even more silent now than it had a few moments before.

  It was like this whole area of the Port held its breath in the dark.

  Snapping the door latch, he stepped out of the car.

  Straightening to his full height, he looked around at the still-oblivious group of SWAT officers and homicide detectives, and made up his mind.

  “Mozar!” Unlike with the red-eyed seer, he shouted, figuring it didn’t matter now. “Mozar! Come here! Now! And tell your guy to get his team behind cover...”

  Hawking turned his head first. He frowned.

  “Get back in the car, Black.” He spoke loudly too. Motioning sharply towards the vehicle, he walked towards him with rapid strides. “Now. Right the fuck now. You can’t be out here...”

  “Listen to me, goddamn it! Something’s wrong!” Meeting only blank stares, Black scowled. “This isn’t what you thought it was! They have serious fucking numbers out here. I’m betting Sterling’s not even the real target...”