Roland heard her siren's call in his mind, faint and seductive. All he had to do was give up. Give in. Stop being Roland and go back to being Breach.
The bitch is making it easy, too, his thoughts were maudlin, she just killed off the last real hero in town.
Roland did not know what to do. He reached inside and gently removed the dead man from the passenger seat. The body rose, feather-light, nearly weightless in the hulking arms of the half-ton war machine. Roland had a bizarre thought in that moment.
This man should be heavier. He was bigger than this.
He lay the body down on the sidewalk at the exact moment that the sun dipped its first toe into the purpling gloom of the dawn, and the street was suddenly awash in reds and yellows. It was a perfect Dockside sunrise, painted with impressionist’s brush strokes that for a single infinitesimal instant scrubbed the world clean of last night’s horrors. Walter seemed alive in that moment. The red glare of the rising sun gave some of the color back to his cheeks and for a tantalizing instant Roland hoped that the man might wake up and return some of the balance to this doomed town. Large black fingers began to straighten the man’s limbs and adjust his shirt, as if a young man with a head full of fear and rage could make everything right again by correcting the disheveled appearance of a corpse.
Roland did not cry. He wasn’t sad after all. But he was lost, and suddenly very lonely. Not knowing what else to do he began to adjust and arrange Walter’s clothes into military perfection. Buttons were aligned, and his jig-line was corrected. Roland fixed the man’s collar and straightened his pants into neat creases. But when he began to align the seams of Walter’s coat to the seams of his pants, something fell from the inside pocket. It was small and black, and Roland did not recognize it right away. He picked it up, happy for the distraction, and examined it more closely.
It took far too long for the obtuse cyborg to figure it out, but when he did, the potential impact of what he was holding staggered him.
He was holding a storage cell. Walter’s storage cell. The man who routinely sacrificed DataPads in liquor-fueled pyres for the sake of secrecy had thought that the information in this cell was worth keeping. Roland did not understand what that meant, but he knew it was important. He looked around stupidly, as if any moment black-clad spies would materialize to steal the treasure from his hand. There were none. Just the yellowing morning light casting long pale shadows down an empty street. Roland tucked the device into his pocket and finished arranging Walter’s body.
There was a clatter as a door opened across the street, and Mr. Granovich stepped out from his home to walk the half a block to his office. He spotted Roland and the body and his eyes grew wide. He jogged across the street to examine the pair and shook his head sadly.
“Who has killed Detective Bixby?” he asked.
“I do not know,” Roland’s voice was just above a whisper.
“You are going to find out, yes?” Granovich was looking at the pallid face of the dead cop.
“I am going to try, yes sir.”
“Will you kill this person, when you find him?”
“Probably.”
Granovich nodded his agreement, “You should. This was last good cop in Dockside.” The landlord stopped and looked up at Roland, “Maybe not last good man, at least.”
“I am not a good man, Mr. Granovich.” Roland wasn’t sure if he was a man at all anymore, and he did not want the burden of being a good man on his shoulders just yet.
“Maybe yes. Maybe no. I am not God to make such determinations,” he chuckled, “But maybe Dockside isn’t place for good men. Maybe what Dockside needs is a very bad man who wants to be good.”
“I’ve come to the right place then, Yuri,” Roland forgot to call him ‘sir’ or ‘Mr. Granovich.’
Yuri clapped him on the arm, “Welcome to neighborhood, Roland.”
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Also by Andrew Vaillencourt
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Escalante Page 8