Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The thought both thrilled and horrified me.

  I ended up dozing on and off, curled up on the sofa, instead. I woke up a few times during the night, once from a dream of a large black cat sleeping on my chest, and then again when a truck rumbling by set off a series of car alarms down on the street, and then finally overslept, waking up only when the sound of kids on the street outside wormed their way into my consciousness.

  Oh, fuck. I wasn’t late—yet. But there was no time for my usual putter-around-the-apartment wake-up routine. A fast shower got me clean, and a rummage in my closet resulted in an easy-to-manage outfit of long black skirt, leggings, and black cotton sweater over my lace-up stompy boots. I managed to make it out the door by ten after seven, feeling like crap, but still on time. Thank god we didn’t have a particular dress code.

  Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of purpose; everyone’s got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn’t mean it’s an unfriendly place—just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I’m a social creature but there are times and places you just don’t want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.

  This morning, though, my usual comfort level was replaced by something a lot less…comfortable. Walking to the station, and standing on the platform waiting for my train, I was acutely aware of everyone around me, not in the usual “get your elbow/cell phone/coffee away from me” sense but judging distances, evaluating body language, watching anyone who got too close…specifically anyone male.

  Huh. It wasn’t that I didn’t do this sort of thing all the time. You have to, wherever you are. It’s just basic common sense and security, and when you’re being trained to observe and detect, that goes into overdrive. But normally it was background processing, something I did without being really aware, unless a warning signal pinged my forebrain. Today…it was all front-and-center consciousness, and very much focused on gender. The difference was like between healthy skin and abraded flesh. Every whisper of touch, every possible glance from a stranger, made me shudder in almost physical discomfort.

  It wasn’t worse than the cold numbness of yesterday, but it sure as hell wasn’t better, either. What the fuck was going on?

  I managed to clamp down on it long enough to get on the arriving train without screaming or snarling at anyone. Once on, I slipped and slid my way into an empty seat at the far end of the car, between a young Asian woman in a suit, eyes closed as though she were sleeping, and a large, middle-aged black woman with a bundle of knitting in her hands. She radiated a don’t-mess-with-me-this-morning attitude that was soothing.

  I exhaled, forcing myself to calm down. The car was full but not packed, and there was actually enough room that people weren’t in each other’s personal space, which always made for a more relaxed atmosphere. I had a book in my kit, but it didn’t feel like a reading morning. I looked down, and only then noticed that in my rush I’d put on mismatched socks. Great. My fashion style was a little on the fashion-risk side sometimes, but that was going to be tough to carry off as intentional. I pushed the brown one down into the ankle of my boots and closed my eyes instead, trying to get into work mindset.

  Usually it wasn’t a problem. While I’m not a morning person, the hum of the subway’s electrical power and the jolting of the train typically eased me into the day, while the promise of a puzzle—either a training session exercise or, as now, an actual job—to chew on got my brain to agree to function.

  But this case… Damn it, I was the one who stayed cool. But my brain wasn’t cooperating, even after a night’s sleep and a recharging hit, so I couldn’t blame it entirely on exhaustion.

  It couldn’t be the job itself: we had all the answers already. All we had to do was organize and present the evidence. But I needed to be in a nicely grounded state of mind to do that kind of sorting and organizing, and it wasn’t happening, even after spending time with J. The sleeplessness, the raw nerves, and the lack of ability to dress myself decently were all warning signs that I was off-kilter, still. The unease, the cold numbness, the discomfort within my own skin…not good.

  When I forced myself to look at the emotional side, rather than the facts, it was—duh—obvious. The girl, what had happened to her. It was tough for me to see what happened to her as a puzzle to be solved, a question to be answered, and nothing more.

  I tried to focus again on the hum of current in the third rail, letting it trickle into me like bittersweet honey. That helped, but the tinny crap music pumping out way too loud through the ear-buds of the guy standing in front of me was seriously annoying, and I almost wished that I had a cup of coffee just so I could accidentally-on-purpose slosh some over his expensive sneakers. When the sound suddenly spluttered and died—I suspected that another Talent in the car had taken offense and sporked him—it cheered me significantly.

  Small revenge is large comfort, some days.

  Between that and the hum of current, by the time the train dumped me out at my stop, my mood was better and my nerves under control. I tromped up the stairs, enjoying the ringing noise my boots made in the stairwell because some days I really am seven, pushed open the office door, and headed directly for the coffeemaker, shedding my coat as I went.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “’Morning.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and leaned over to see what Nifty was doing with the bits of paper he had laid out on the coffee table. It was a casual move, nothing I hadn’t done dozens of times in the past six months, but this time I hung back just an inch or two more distant than I normally did, not resting my hand on his shoulder for balance. It took me a minute to realize it, and another one to realize why.

  Damn it, this was Nifty. He was a good guy. He was on our side.

  He was a guy.

  I guess my nerves weren’t quite as under control as I thought.

  Whatever calm I’d gotten went sizzle like water on a griddle, my core shifting from its usual cool loops of neon to something more jagged and hot. Bad. Very bad normally, and even worse here, in the office. Be calm, Bonnie, I told myself. Be still and controlled, that’s what you do, remember? You’re the one who has the most excellent control.

  Knowing why I was reacting this way, and that logic wasn’t going to work, not right now, didn’t help. All I could do was deal with it, and try not to let it get in the way of the work. With that in mind, I consciously leaned forward to get a better look at what he was doing, even as I smoothed the jagged spikes back down into cool loops through sheer force of will. I would not let nerves show. Would not.

  “I really wish I had a camera right now.”

  I twitched, and looked up at Pietr, who had been his usual silent self until now, meaning I hadn’t even realized that he was in the room. He had an amused look in his gray eyes, so I looked down to see what the hell he was talking about, and started to laugh. Me, my white-blond hair, pale skin, and black outfit, and Nifty’s dark skin and white sweater—yeah, I could see where we’d make an irresistible target.

  The tension broke, a little, and I could function again, control slipping back into place naturally.

  “You try bringing a camera in here,” Nifty said, mock-scowling, “I give it a week, tops, before it goes snap, fizzle, pop.” Warding could only do so much; the moment current was free of either core or spell, it looked for an electrical stream to hook up with, the more powerful the better. That was why we’d trashed the original expensive coffeemaker for a simpler, if still wicked, brewmaster, and why there was only one phone and one computer, and both were down in Stosser’s office, where nobody did any workings by order of the Big Dogs.

  “So what’re you doing?” I asked Nifty, leaning in a little more easily now.

  “Girl had a bunch of scraps in her pocket, got ’em in this morning, courtesy of one of Venec’s contacts. Looks like they were napkins or something, but there’s writing on them.”

  I took a closer look. They were smudged and incomplete, but I recognized them. “Oh. She was collecting nu
mbers.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Phone numbers.” I looked at him in astonishment. “Dear god, Nift, for a jock you sure are innocent….”

  He stared down at the bits of paper, trying to see what I saw. “That’s a lot of numbers for a virgin to be collecting.”

  I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It’s not about calling them, it’s about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don’t ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”

  “Looks like.”

  Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.

  Pietr put down the file he’d been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”

  Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”

  “Different paper. Look at the textures.”

  “We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.

  “We should,” Pietr said.

  “Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil’s advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that’s why they attacked her? Doesn’t matter, to our job. We’re not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy’s dead, the other’s in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin’s skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”

  “Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

  I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn’t know what was up with ghost-boy, either.

  “It’s not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there’s something under the surface, and it’s going to bite us if we’re not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn’t going to rag on him for it.

  “You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he’d been holding out on us. Precog wasn’t a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn’t quite qualify.

  “No. I don’t think so. I just…” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”

  That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”

  Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It’s more like an itch somewhere I can’t reach.”

  “There’s probably something you’re seeing, but haven’t identified. Did you…” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”

  He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”

  “So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn’t strike me enough to consciously remember?”

  Good point. I had no answer.

  “Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”

  I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.

  Pietr was considering the question. “I don’t know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it’s making me feel…urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”

  Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn’t normally find in the average twentysomething male.

  “Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick’s was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn’t. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl’s not going to press charges.”

  “What?”

  Pietr’s yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn’t even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I’d said to J last night, it’s hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that without mentioning the ki-rin, Talent, the Cosa Nostradamus or anything else that would get you locked in the psych ward for evaluation? The very best scenario involved a Cosa-sympathetic cop and judge, where she’d still have to relive every minute of the attack; worst case brought up the possibility that they’d think she had killed the guy and nail her for manslaughter, provoked or not. And it’s not like they could punish the guy who died, or bring back her relationship with the ki-rin….

  Nifty didn’t look surprised, either. I bet he’d seen a lot of that kind of scared-silent, all the years he spent playing high school and college football. The bitterness in my own brain surprised me again. I knew, with the rational portion, that I was being unfair, tarring Nifty just ’cause he’d been a jock. But the rational part wasn’t leading in this dance.

  Nick was nodding sagely. “Stosser told Venec, who just told me. I think she thought the ki-rin was going to pretend it didn’t happen, or something. She went totally hysterical in the emergency room.”

  “Nicky, you’re an insensitive asshole,” I said. Nick must have realized how his words sounded, because he blushed. “I didn’t…”

  “The ki-rin is refusing to acknowledge her now, isn’t it?” Pietr asked

  The bitterness in my brain escaped into my voice. “You expected anything different? That’s how ki-rin are—it’s like asking a dryad not to put down roots, or a griffon not to fly. It’s what they are—she had to know that before she agreed to the terms, and evidence is that she’d adhered to her part of it all the way up to that night. Being a ki-rin’s companion isn’t something you pull out of a Cracker Jack box. There’s no greater honor, by fatae standards, a human can aspire to, and one asshole with more brawn than humanity took that away from her, for his own jollies. You think you’d be calm and rational right now, if it was you in that emergency room?”

  That pretty much put a damper on the entire conversation, and Nick took his coffee and his mug out with enough speed that I almost felt sorry for snapping at him. Almost.

  “So if we can’t do anything for her, and the guy who did the attacking is dead…are we still on the job?” Nifty wondered, giving up on his napkin-puzzle. “I mean, what does it matter? Christ, I’m sorry for the girl, but I can’t see our client paying for our time if the girl is going to sweep it under the rug her ownself. It’s over and done with, nothing to see here, move along, thanks for your time. Right?”

  He probably wasn’t wrong, and I’d wondered the same thing myself. Except… “J says—” it wasn’t really a secret in the office that my mentor had Connections into all the best gossip lines, or that I tapped into them as needed “—that there’s been a bunch of fatae-related incidents in town already. Folk are tetchy, rumbly—like the crowd we saw at the scene.” I saw the guys process that, then nod. “He thinks the Eastern Counc
il thought that if they did some proactive digging into this, or had us do it…”

  “They’d be off the hook for whatever happened after,” Pietr finished for me. “Nice.”

  “Council.” The disgust in that single word dripped from Nifty’s mouth and splashed into a thick puddle. “So that’s who we were working for—again?”

  Other than Stosser, I was the only Council-side member of the pack, and even my connection was only through J. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for the Council, either the actual seated members who made the rules or the general members who followed those rules. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for anyone who followed rules, period, which made for interesting group interactions—and probably why Stosser and Venec kept us on such a loose rein most of the time, when we weren’t in training.

  “You didn’t guess that?” Pietr sounded surprised. “Most of our work’s going to come through Council contacts, at the very least, not lonejacks. Lonejacks settle their own scores. They’re not going to suddenly step back and let us determine who’s at fault—not until we have a lot more street cred, anyway.”

  I had a feeling Pietr’s family was Gypsy—they tended to be more clannish than the independent lonejacks, but just as regulation-scorning, hence the nickname—but he had a strong pragmatic streak that put even Venec to shame.

  “Council leads may be callous bastards,” he went on, “but they’re the callous bastards with a checkbook. And their checks clear faster than most. Get used to it.”

  Nifty looked like he wanted to argue the point, but couldn’t.

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway,” I reminded them. “Until we’re told otherwise, we’re still on the job.”

  “Here…” Pietr held out the file he’d been reading, offering it to me. “The dossier Ben put together, plus what we were able to add in the follow-up.”