Depth

by Rosen, Lev AC

  “Anything you can talk about?”

  “Usual wife thinks husband is cheating story.”

  “And do you think he’s cheating?”

  “I try not to think anything until I know for certain.”

  He nodded, looking steadily into her eyes. She noticed his chest inflate slightly and knew he was going to start a real conversation. But in her ear, the door slammed again and locked. Henry had left.

  “I gotta go,” Simone said before Peter could speak.

  “Oh,” he said, exhaling.

  “Case,” she said, trying to look disappointed they couldn’t talk. “It’s walking out the door.” Peter turned to the door of the hotel. It was empty. In her ear, Henry was out of the office and walking somewhere already. “Other door,” she said. He looked at her as though she were trying to get rid of him. “Really,” she said, trying to smile.

  “Well, be careful, soldier,” he said, standing. “I should get back to the station, anyway. Kluren doesn’t like us taking time off to talk to . . .” He let his sentence fade.

  “Take care,” Simone said, smiling. Peter grinned at her. She didn’t know if they should hug, but she didn’t have time to find out, so she just nodded and put a hand on his shoulder for a moment before heading for the door. She had a flash of memory to their last time in bed together, the cool roundness of his thighs and the soft pressure of his nose against her neck as he kissed her. Then, her sneaking out in the middle of the night and not returning his calls. It could never have worked, of course. She was right to end it when she did. She missed him. But then she missed a lot of people. One more wasn’t going to make much difference.

  Outside, the mist had risen up like a soft wall, and the temperature had taken its usual early-evening plummet. The sensors in Simone’s trench coat felt this, and the thin gel that lined her coat began warming up, but the initial shock of the cold scattered the little traces of inebriation that had muddled her head.

  Henry was nowhere in sight, and there were a few directions he could have gone. If he was going straight home, he would be taking the bridge that went past the cruise ship Xanadu, but if he wasn’t . . . Following her gut, she took off down the bridge towards downtown, where he had met The Blonde.

  The sun had started to set, and the fog was getting heavier. Rose and gray mixed as darkness overtook the city. The buildings grew harder to see, but you could always hear the water rushing underfoot. She walked quickly, hoping Henry would come into sight through the mist. She should have hit him with a tracker, too, but then she would have needed to actually hide the bug on his jacket and get it back later. Or hit him with two dissolving bugs. She caught sight of a yellow jacket like the one he’d been wearing last night and took off after it. She was only a few steps behind him, but in the fog, no one would notice a tail. To make sure it was him, she coughed loudly. The cough echoed in her ear. She fell back a little, now that she’d found him. He walked down small winding backway bridges, where there were few people around. Some didn’t have banisters, and the waves splashed over them onto her feet. She would be easier to notice now, so she hung back even more, speeding up occasionally to get a look at him, then falling back again.

  She couldn’t tell where he was heading. That worried her. They seemed to be moving farther and farther from central downtown, heading west and north. New York was always dangerous, but the more central areas of the city at least played at being civilized. The people who lived out in West Midtown were people who couldn’t pretend anymore: MouthFoamers who would do anything for a fix when they weren’t catatonic on a bridge; people who had given up everything but their own lives, hoping someone else would take them; people who had come to the city looking for an escape but found themselves completely trapped, clawing at anything they thought might offer some form of release. She could handle herself out here, but she didn’t think Henry could, so the ease with which he walked felt wrong. She didn’t think it was a trap—though that was always a possibility—but she sensed something off. She checked the small pistol inside her boot, making sure it was easy to reach.

  Henry stopped. She heard his footsteps fall silent on her earpiece. His breathing seemed a little heavier, too. Wherever he was, it was where he was going to stay. She looked ahead. A short building, barely a full story above water, was in front of her. She couldn’t see anywhere else he could be waiting. She quietly walked closer until she got a better read on the building. There was a large hole in the wall leading in and another hole at the other end. The building itself seemed to have been totally cleared out—just bare concrete walls and floor and fluorescent lighting making the place glow. No shadows. Nowhere to hide. A good place to meet someone you didn’t totally trust. A bad place for Simone to eavesdrop.

  She looked around for someplace higher, where she could see who came and went. She toyed with the idea of climbing to the top of the building itself, but there was no fire escape, and it would have been a noisy undertaking. She settled for a bridge a little ways away, but higher up. It faced the side of the building. She’d be able to see who came and went but not what happened inside.

  She took her camera out again, watched the fog, and listened to Henry’s heavy breathing in her ear. Someone else approached the building. All Simone could make out was a shadow, a hat, and a trench coat. She took some photos anyway, hoping she could enhance them later. Henry’s voice came in clear on her earpiece.

  “Why are you here?” he asked. Apparently, this wasn’t the person he was waiting for. There was a long pause; she couldn’t hear the other person’s voice. “Yes,” Henry said, “I did. You didn’t care about it.” Damn. Still nothing but Henry’s voice. “Not yet.” The other person must have been standing far away or talking softly—like he knew he was being observed. “No, I won’t. I need it.”

  Then, all at once, the sound of Henry yelling “what?” and a gunshot. Simone ran for the building. Too fast—she slipped on a wet plank of the bridge and went skidding towards the edge. No railings. Once she hit the water, she’d be dead. She’d be sucked under by currents or thrown into underwater debris. She grabbed for the space between the slats, and caught one, but she was already dangling over the water, her toes just touching the surface, her chin and neck just barely higher than the bridge. Splinters dug into her fingers, and she could feel blood making her skin slippery. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t falling anymore—not until her fingers slipped off—but a wrong move and the wood she clung to could snap off. She turned her head towards the building anyway. A shadow was leaving the building from the opposite exit, carrying something large. Carefully, she clawed her way back onto the bridge as quickly as she could, the rough wood gouging into her palms over and over. She pulled slowly, trying to test each moment of pressure so nothing cracked or snapped. It took far longer than she wanted, but soon she was back on the bridge. There was no time to catch her breath, to dwell on her near-death plunge, to pluck the splinters from her bloodied hands. She ran down the bridge and around another, heading for the building. The bug in her ear fizzled out into static. She reached the room, her heart pounding, and stepped slowly inside.

  In the center of the room under the bright lights was a pool of blood, slowly creeping out towards the edges of the room.

  FOUR

  * * *

  WHERE WAS THE BODY? Was there a body? Simone went out the opposite exit, careful not to step in the blood. No one in sight. She checked the water. It was dark now, and the fog was heavy, making it hard to tell, but she couldn’t see anything besides a single plastic bag, a few feet below her like a boil on the water’s skin. Gunshot, blood, no body.

  Simone saw two possibilities: Someone was injured, but everyone had escaped, or someone was dead, and his body was bobbing somewhere just out of sight. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, his old lessons drilled into her, telling her she couldn’t be certain of anything.

  She stared at the poo
l of blood as the light outside disappeared completely and the waves grew louder, angry. She could call the police, but she wasn’t sure what to tell them, and they would definitely screw up her investigation. Kluren would see to that. She could call Peter. But he was a Boy Scout, he’d call it in. Instead, she called Linnea. Voicemail.

  “Linnea, it’s Simone Pierce. Please call me back as soon as you get this. Thanks.”

  Simone crouched down in front of the blood and took out a small piece of cotton from her pocket. She dabbed it in the blood until it was nearly red all over, then took out a metal vial and stuffed the cotton inside. She locked the vial and looked down at the top. The screen there was blank for a long moment. She felt the wind pick up and shivered. The vial finally beeped and Simone read, “O positive, male.” Simone couldn’t remember Henry’s blood type, but O positive was common, and unhelpful. Making a mental note of the location, she headed out the way she’d come, winding slowly east over bridges, towards home. The wind blew her coat up around her, spraying her damp in the darkness.

  At home she changed out of her wet things and toweled off her skin. She sent out Henry’s photo to Danny and other contacts, asking them to keep an eye out. She had no other moves until Linnea called her back to say her husband was alive, or Henry’s face showed up on the recycling website. She confirmed Henry’s blood type was O positive. It didn’t tell her anything. And the photos she’d taken of the shadow approaching the building were just blurs, even enhanced with the night filter.

  Simone had seen many deaths in her years as a PI and had long ago learned to compartmentalize. The death of her client’s husband was a mystery to be solved, not a loss to be mourned. She leaned back in her chair, put her feet on the desk, and tried calling Linnea again. Voicemail. Simone left another message. She stretched her arms out behind her head. A message from Danny came in on her touchdesk. It was a video with a note attached: “Is this her on the right?”

  The video was taken off a security cam, but high quality, a clear image panning back and forth. It was the interior of Delmonico’s, all dark-green carpets, brown leather, and dim chandeliers. Caroline had taken Simone there after the first big case she’d done for her. It was out of Simone’s price range to even stop in there for a drink unless someone else was picking up the tab.

  On the right side of the image, panning in and out of view, was a woman with blonde hair to just above her shoulders sitting alone at a table. But it was just the back of her head. Simone wasn’t sure it was The Blonde, instead of a blonde. But she trusted Danny and kept her eyes on her and, sure enough, when she next panned into view, she stood and shook hands with another woman who had just walked over to the table. In profile, it was clearly The Blonde. She was shaking hands with a tall black woman in a sapphire-blue cape coat and a skirt to just below the knee. Simone couldn’t make out her face before the camera panned away, though she had a guess. When the camera panned back, her guess was confirmed: Anika Bainbridge was sitting at the table.

  She sent a thank-you back to Danny and then dialed up Anika. Straight to voicemail. Not unexpected. As a vice-president of Belleau, the second largest commercial cosmetics company in the world, she was a busy woman. Technically she oversaw foreign sales (which were most sales), but the city was considered outside the mainland, and Anika was a native New Yorker, so she’d set up her offices here. She’d once told Simone she went to the mainland only as long as she needed to. She didn’t intend to live anywhere else again. But she was always flying around—the mainland, the EU, Africa—doing whatever it was that she did. Simone wasn’t totally sure. But she had hired Simone for some corporate espionage on several occasions and paid well. Simone liked her. She was cold but sensible, and Simone liked to think that if she’d been more ambitious, she might have ended up like Anika. She wasn’t sure Anika felt the same way—they’d never clicked, gone out for drinks or anything—but Simone thought maybe that was just because she had never asked.

  Simone had never read Anika as the violent type, though. She’d always seemed to find violence distasteful; if she couldn’t achieve what she wanted through scheming alone, she’d just walk away. But maybe Simone was wrong about that.

  “Hi, Anika,” Simone said into the voicemail. “It’s Simone Pierce. I was hoping you could give me a call sometime soon. I have something I’d like to ask you. Thanks.” Keep it vague. Hopefully Anika would call back. She was the closest thing Simone had to a lead on any of this.

  There wasn’t anything to do now, unless she wanted to call the cops. And she didn’t. So she lit a cigarette and smoked it near the window, looking out at the darkness punctuated only by the sickly green of algae generators and their paler reflections, rippling as the water breathed. Then she turned to her other case: babysitting.

  Two buildings: The Broecker Building and the Hearst Tower. Simone brought up all the intel she had on her touchdesk about each of them. The Broecker Building was finished just before the water reached the streets, built with the city’s flooding in mind. An adjustable system with separated frames meant it was one of the few buildings with an elevator that never flooded or stalled, and the Glassteel and titanium carbon alloy frame had held, showing few signs of corrosion. It was a huge glass column of a thing, bulletproof and wave-proof, with a special repair team on-site daily, and it housed several of the more important businesses in the city, mostly ad agencies. They loved the city, as it was the one place left where ads could be suggestive or even lewd. There were a lot of accounting firms, too, because people still paid taxes, if they wanted to collect benefits. Companies with branches on the mainland paid because the mainland would use any excuse to shut them down, if they saw money in it.

  So the Broecker was suits and probably fairly easy to break into. Make an appointment somewhere. Duck down a stairwell instead.

  The Hearst Tower posed a larger problem. A much older building in midtown, retrofitted well enough to survive the water, it was privately owned. Sold a year before the water hit street level (and so at a low price), it had traded hands over the years and was now in the possession of Ned Sorenson, a Boro-Baptist minister and the church’s head missionary to New York. The mainland had several large branches of Christianity, but Boro-Baptism was the largest. Their ministers weren’t just religious figures, but also political ones. The current president, and the past several before him, were all Boro-Baptists. The sect had been founded by a Baptist minister who felt the rest of the conservative branches of Christianity weren’t responding to the rising waters seriously enough and started preaching against them from his pulpit in the town of Boro, North Dakota. It painted itself a religion of values and protection in this, the time of the second flood. The religion that could get people through. And people believed it, or pretended to. Simone, like most New Yorkers, thought all religions were crap, and Boro-Baptism was just the latest name for a generations-old addiction to fear and an overwhelming hope that someone else could save you. But Boro-Baptism had stalked further ahead than its antediluvian predecessors, and the chaos of the flood and the loss of life that followed had fed it like a fat toad. Pastor Sorenson was like the emissary from the mainland: ambassador, spy, maybe even fist. Whatever you wanted to call him, he was someone with lots of powerful connections. Someone you did not want to get mixed up with. Getting into his building would be much harder.

  Simone glanced at the clock. Barely eight. She told the touchdesk to call Caroline.

  “Do you want to get something to eat?” Caroline asked after a ring.

  “Sure,” Simone said.

  “I’m still at work, if you’d believe it.”

  “Well, I’m calling with a work-related question, so that’s fine by me.” Simone stared down at the grayed-out photos of The Blonde, still a small digital pile in the corner of the touchdesk.

  “When I saw it was you calling, I picked up. I could have ignored it. If I knew it was work-related, I would have.”

 
“I’ll let you pick the restaurant.”

  “Deal. Question?”

  “One of the buildings deCostas wants to get into is the Hearst Tower.”

  “Why does that sound familiar?” Simone could hear Caroline’s fingers tapping on her own desk, writing something else as she spoke.

  “Owned by one Ned Sorenson.”

  “Oh, that’s where Sorenson keeps his cult!” The sound of Caroline’s typing stopped for a moment, then restarted.

  “I don’t think it’s a cult if it’s the majority.”

  “It’s New York. He’s not the majority. We heathens are the majority.”

  “Heathens?”

  “Sorenson’s favorite word. He’s not a bad guy, aside from the religion.”

  “So, any thoughts on getting into the Tower? I was thinking we could go as curious potential converts—”

  “No. Just ask him.”

  Simone stretched her legs out and put them up on the desk. “Really?”

  “Tell him you’re deCostas’ personal assistant trying to set up an inspection to see the stairwell, see that the water is there. Drop my name, if you’d like. Don’t mention the detective thing. There isn’t going to be a dry stairwell, so Sorenson won’t mind you seeing it.”

  “That easy?”

  “He’s really an okay guy. You’ll probably get preached at a little. Tell him you’re an occasional churchgoer. He knows that’s the best they can hope for out here. Pick a church, though, he’ll ask you which one.”

  “Great. I thought this one would be hard.”

  “Not with me on your side.”

  “Just don’t tell deCostas. I don’t want him figuring out he didn’t need me for this.”

  “Fair deal. I’m putting on my jacket now. Meet me at Rosie’s in twenty?” Simone sighed. Rosie’s was a greasy diner Caroline loved and Simone tolerated. “I believe my information has earned me the right to a bloodstained meal of my choosing.”