The construction was sagging heavily in the middle, the timbers exposed without maintenance to the harsh Californian sun for decades. With nobody coming in or out for endless years, the interior would likely be littered with animal scat and other debris from nesting birds.
‘Is this the building that Reed claimed the shot came from?’
‘Sure,’ Samson nodded, ‘if you believe him.’
‘Did forensics search it for prints of any kind, DNA evidence, that sort of thing?’
‘They gave it a once over,’ Samson agreed somewhat sarcastically, as though Nathan was insulting his department by even asking such a question, ‘but they found nothing to support Reed’s story of a third shooter.’
Nathan moved to stand where Samson had indicated that Ricard had fallen, and then looked at the warehouse. Two large windows stared back at him like soulless square black eyes, cold compared to the warmth and sunshine outside, the glazing smeared with dirt. He turned to Foxx.
‘Kaylin, do me a favor and get on your back,’ he said with a sneaky smile.
Foxx peered at him. ‘Do what now?’
‘I need you to be the victim for a moment.’
Samson sighed and strolled to the indicated spot. ‘I think I know what he has in mind, and I know how to be a gentleman even in this day and age.’
Wearily, Samson sat down in the dust and lay down on his back with his hands clasped across his stomach. ‘Good enough for ya?’
‘Great,’ Nathan said. ‘Now, Kaylin, you stand about where we think Reed was at the time of the shooting.’
Foxx moved into position and stood over Samson as Nathan hurried across to the abandoned warehouse and found an entrance from which hung the tattered remains of a door on shattered hinges.
He stepped through into the darkness within, the air cool but heavy with dust and pollen trapped inside the building. The smell of rotten timbers and mold clung to his skin as he crept through the darkness until he reached the grubby windows and saw Foxx and Samson outside in the sunlight. Careful to stay well back from the windows, he shifted left and right until he figured he was in the right spot.
Nathan drew his pistol, checked that the safety catch was in place, and then aimed out of one of the filthy windows, sighting over Foxx’s right shoulder at where Ricard would have been standing. It took him only a moment to position himself accordingly and then he called out to them.
‘Okay, you can get up now!’
Nathan holstered his pistol and pulled out a flashlight as he illuminated the ground before him. A dense carpet of leaves and soil covered the ground, and he carefully began sifting through it as he sought any sign of anybody who might have stood here when Ricard was shot dead months before. Foxx and Samson joined him in the warehouse’s shadowy interior.
‘What are you doing?’ Foxx asked.
‘Police work.’
‘The warehouse was scanned at the time of the shooting,’ Samson said. ‘We’re wasting our time here.’
Nathan ignored him as he sifted through the debris and then slowed as something scraped against the floor. He shone the flashlight down and saw a dark patch on the dull gray flooring, saw more of it scattered among the dead leaves.
‘What’s that?’ Foxx asked as she crouched alongside him and he smelled a waft of perfume on her skin, scented like the wildflowers outside.
‘Ash,’ Nathan replied, ‘probably from scorched debris. My guess is that when the shooter fired their weapon a small amount of plasma fell here and scorched the debris at their feet. They wouldn’t have known about that because they would already have fled to avoid being seen by anybody outside.’
Nathan stood and turned to Samson. ‘How come this wasn’t in the forensic report?’
Samson shrugged. ‘No disrespect, but nobody was looking for it because nobody was taking Reed’s claim seriously. Besides, it could just have easily been caused by somethin’ other than plasma fire. Ash is ash, right?’
Nathan didn’t reply as he moved to the window and pulled the latch before he tried to open it. The window moved freely up and down in his grasp. He crossed to the other one and popped the latch, but this window would not budge until he heaved his shoulder against it and it finally slid open with a grating sound, the mechanism rotting and stuck with the filth of ages.
Nathan stood back from the window and looked expectantly at Foxx.
‘Okay, you’ve got my attention,’ she said.
‘Are you serious?’ Samson asked them. ‘What here says anything about Reed being innocent?’
‘The window,’ Foxx replied with what sounded to Nathan like a little bit of pride as he walked away from them. ‘One window is jammed with age but the other moves freely, as though it’s been used recently. It’s the same one that I’m guessing Nathan sighted through when we were outside.’
Nathan turned and moved across the warehouse until he found another door, this one closed. He slipped on a latex glove and opened the handle carefully, pushing the door until it opened out onto a path that led to their left. Nathan ignored the path, and instead peered directly down the hillside before him, strewn with rocks and rubble from which sprouted foliage and hardy bushes basking in the sunlight.
‘You think the shooter came out here and ran?’ Foxx said as she joined him.
‘Straight down that hillside,’ Nathan said. ‘With the chaos over there, by the time anybody at the scene of the shooting might have thought to check out Reed’s story, the shooter would have been well out of sight and likely long gone.’ He turned to Samson. ‘Is there a road down there?’
‘A what now?’
‘Can vehicles traverse the hillside further down?’
‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘there’s an arterial route for hover cars maybe a quarter mile away from here that heads out toward North Island and the marinas.’
‘Would your police department have any kind of record of traffic movements from the time of the shooting?’
Samson appeared to think for a moment. ‘Records are normally kept for six months if they’re needed in a case, but the law only requires three months of storage before data is wiped. But there are not a lot of cameras in this area.’
Nathan nodded. ‘If I’m right then this was meticulously planned, right down to ensuring a means of escape that would not be monitored. The shooter opens one window in preparation, takes the shot, closes the window and walks right out of here and down that hillside. I’m guessing that we can’t place a vehicle at this spot at the time of the murder?’
‘If you’re right,’ Foxx replied, ‘then they would have used a vehicle that had been tampered with, any tracking devices removed or switched off. There were no recorded vehicles here at the time of the shooting.’
Nathan rubbed his jaw with one hand for a moment.
‘Scheff,’ he said as he fished in his pocket and pulled out an image of the criminal Asil had mentioned back at the precinct. ‘We need to figure out if this guy could have been planet–side when the shooting occurred.’
Foxx nodded and turned for the warehouse door.
‘Let’s get back to New Washington and bring him in,’ she suggested.
Nathan was about to join her when Foxx’s communicator buzzed. She switched it on and an image of Vasquez appeared.
‘Yo’,’ he greeted her with his customary disregard for professional etiquette, ‘I got a trace on the MM–15 pistol’s base–code. Turns out the weapon was registered to CSS Titan before it was slated for destruction when the 17’s came into service.’
‘That’ll make tracking them easy,’ Nathan said. ‘We’ve got history with Titan’s captain, Marshall.’
He saw Foxx think for a moment, and then she made a decision.
‘Get ready to travel,’ she told Vasquez. ‘I’m going to fly to New York and request access to Titan’s armory. My guess is that whoever got that MM–15 into circulation down here, did it from up there.’
‘Somebody on the inside?’ Vasquez echoed. ‘But why would anybody aboard a
fleet ship be messin’ around selling arms down planet–side. The armory’s are as tight as can be.’
‘We’ll figure that out when we get there,’ Foxx replied.
She shut the communications channel off and turned to Nathan.
‘Get back to New Washington and help Vasquez and Allen track this Scheff down. I’ll meet you there once I’ve finished up in New York.’
***
X
Tethys Gaol
The cell block was thick with loathing, the air heavy with the live current of impending violence. Xavier could sense it, could feel it probing for him as he sat in silence on his bunk in his cell and listened to the sounds of the other convicts talking.
Whispers flittered back and forth, chasing like demons through the shadows. Xavier could not quite hear what they were saying but he could detect individual words among the conversations that stabbed in his direction: shiv, cut, stomp, slice. The words slashed through his conscience like warring blades in the night as he wondered how long it would be before they came for him. He spent much of his time willing the attack on his life to arrive, the endless waiting far more corrosive than the threat of death itself, but when the attempt finally arrived he found himself wishing that he could sit in silence in his cell for just a little while longer.
The stomping of boots across the gantries jerked Xavier out of his lonely vigil, and he heard the other inmates clattering steel cups against the bars of their cells in anticipation. Xavier climbed off his bunk and walked to the barred doors to see four sticks making their way across the second tier toward his cell, batons in their hands and grim expressions etched into their features. Determined. Uncompromising.
Xavier allowed himself the hope that they were not coming for him, that they had some other business on the block, but the four heavily armed guards stopped outside his cell and stared in at him with bleak expressions.
‘Turn your back, show us your wrists.’
Xavier complied and backed up to the cell doors. Manacles were fitted, snapped painfully tight around his wrists and then the cell door rattled open and Xavier was pulled out of his cell and turned onto the gantry.
A chorus of whoops and yells sallied back and forth as inmates cheered. Xavier glimpsed some of them exchanging wagers on his chances of survival as he was prodded along by the guards’ batons, although at this time the baton charges were switched off as he had not yet done anything to provoke the guards. Xavier considered begging for his life, telling the guards that he was innocent, that he did not deserve this, that he had done nothing wrong and that most of the cons on the block wanted him dead only after a long and agonizing period of suffering, but he knew that they would not have listened to him. The sticks considered Xavier as guilty as the cons did, and probably relished the opportunity to see him pay for the murder of Officer Anthony Ricard, a loyal prison service employee so brutally betrayed and gunned down by one of his own.
Then, as now, the perfect storm had been created.
The guards led him around the gantry, not down onto the lower tier. Xavier knew that this was a break in protocol, that he was not being moved to one of the lower cells as most newcomers would be when it was time to join the rest of the population. He was prodded and cajoled past a row of cells belonging to lifers and saw in one of them two big, blocky, bearded faces glaring out at him. Thick knuckles grabbed the bars of their cells as the two lifers watched him pass by, their murderous gazes following him as he was led to the cell at the far end. There the tier ended in a thirty foot drop to the chow hall: no escape.
The cell door rattled open, and Xavier was turned and pushed inside, and as he stumbled forward so his belly turned cold with true dread and he wondered in despair at the way he had been betrayed by what seemed like the entire universe.
The cell smelled of crude aftershave, itself better than the stench of urine and sweat that permeated most of the block. Three men were squashed into the one man cell, two of them sitting patiently on the lower bunks and watching as Xavier’s manacles were released. The third man leaned on the wall at the back of the cell with his muscular arms folded across a barrel chest, squat and brutal like a gigantic white toad, his jagged hair sparkling with lights like a psychopath’s Christmas tree. Zak Volt watched as Xavier was given a last shove into the cell, and then the door rattled shut behind him and the guards left him alone in the cell with the three most brutal inmates in the entire gaol.
The raucous outside died down as the other inmates fell into silence, waiting and listening for whatever was about to occur inside the “The Shock’s” cell. Xavier surveyed his meagre surroundings and bleak outlook, and decided to say and do nothing.
Zak Volt regarded him for a long moment before he spoke in a surprisingly soft voice, the voice of a man devoid of the need to project the violence and rage contained within.
‘You’re already a dead man on this block, y’know that, right?’
Xavier was about to reply but he found that he was unable to speak, his throat parched and thick with the same loathing that he had felt in his own cell. He settled for a casual shrug, as though an unofficial death warrant was no big deal to him.
Volt pushed off the wall and moved to face Xavier, a good two inches shorter than he but invested with such an aura of psychotic fury that Xavier felt as though he had shrunk to half his normal size as Volt’s emotionless gray eyes peered into his own.
‘The act doesn’t fool me,’ he whispered. ‘You’re scared.’
Xavier raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m surrounded by a couple hundred men who want me dead,’ he replied, his voice working all of a sudden. ‘You think I wanna dance a jig?’
Volt stared at Xavier for a long moment and then he laughed, a bellowing laugh directly into Xavier’s face, and in an instant Xavier understood why this man was so utterly feared on the block. Unpredictability. Nobody of sane mind had any idea what Volt would do next, and thus he embodied the unknown, of which all men were afraid.
‘I like you,’ Volt said, his laughter fading away, ‘which is why you’re gonna live today. But you remember this, Reed: I control this block, and your life is in my hands ‘cause I got big plans for you. You don’t do what I say, you die.’
Xavier was about to ask what he meant when he sensed the cell block behind him suddenly plunged into semi–darkness. A claxon sounded, flashing red lights illuminated the darkness like beacons of writhing flame in a Hadean dungeon and the cell door suddenly rattled open again.
Xavier turned and saw the other inmates howling with delight and fighting for a view of Volt’s cell as the guards in the watch stations suddenly abandoned their posts.
‘Fire drill,’ Volt shouted above the noise, his eyes shining with malice. ‘The sticks don’t care about us if fire breaks out, so they make for the emergency exits. They practice it once a week. Sometimes, in the confusion, one or two cell doors malfunction and open up.’
Xavier heard running boots rushing down the gantry outside, and then Volt and the other two inmates strolled past him and vacated the cell. Two huge figures appeared near the cell doors, their beards glistening in the light as Volt said something to them, and then he vanished with his two henchmen and Xavier saw the two bearded lifers move to stand in front of the cell door, blocking the flashing red lights with their huge bodies.
Xavier had not been prepared for the kind of influence that Volt had over the block, perhaps over the prison itself. He was able to bribe guards to arrange events just like this, could control what happened to Xavier on a daily basis, and the warden likely knew everything about it and was idly standing by.
Xavier acted on impulse, knowing that if he let either of the men in they would overpower him in an instant. He bounded forward at the first of the bearded men and twisted on his heel as he thrust his right boot out sideways into the con’s guts. The lifer folded over the blow as a rush of foul breath was expelled in a gust across Xavier’s face. The lifer dropped to his knees as his companion fought
his way past and reached out for Xavier.
Xavier dropped low, beneath the big man’s reach as he launched himself forward over the fallen lifer and drove his fist directly into the second man’s groin. The lifer gagged in shock and pain and he stumbled into the side of a bunk and clasped his genitals in both hands as his face folded in on itself in pain.
Xavier scrambled past both men and then turned, lifted his boot and smashed it down on the kneeling lifer’s head. The blow sent the man reeling sideways across the cell as Xavier turned to the second man and made to repeat the attack, but the first man’s own boot plowed into the side of Xavier’s knee with a lance of pain and he staggered sideways as the leg gave way beneath him.
Both lifers scrambled to their feet, their bodies robust enough from a lifetime of violence to absorb Xavier’s blows as they turned on him. One grabbed his shoulder and then hurled his bodyweight on top of him, crushing Xavier into the floor as the other yanked the cell door shut and slammed one boot down on Xavier’s chest.
Both men looked down at him with savage smiles, their faces shining in the pulsing red light with a maniacal, volatile fusion of rage and delight. One of them lifted a fist that seemed as big as Xavier’s head, and then the blows began to fall and his conscience retreated into some deep, dark place where the pain would no longer bother him.
***
XI
Brooklyn Spaceport,
New York City
The Global Express shuttle descended smoothly from hypersonic cruise back into Earth’s lower atmosphere, the slender craft’s variable–form wings gradually altering shape from razor thin to gracefully tapered as Foxx looked out of her window.
The first time she had been lucky enough to travel planet–side had been when her parents had bought a holiday at a resort near San Diego on the coast of California, a rare opportunity and one for which her parents had saved long and hard. Although only a child Foxx could remember the warmth of the sunshine, the sight of an open ocean, the life that had seemed to be everywhere, even buzzing on the open air. The planet had seemed so wild and vigorous and alive that the memories had remained with her ever since, seared into her conscience along with the melancholy yearning for her family who, like Nathan’s, were gone forever. Her second visit with Nathan Ironside to Denver, Colorado had ended with her being attacked by drones and had nearly cost her life. Nathan, charismatic individual that he was, had a lot to answer for.
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