The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “It didn’t ring,” Houston whispered. “I think the power’s been cut. He’s gonna knock.”

  Roper stepped to the door and began to pound with the side of his fist.

  “SFPD—open up!” Roper shouted.

  He stepped away from the door and raised his gun. Carver counted to thirty while they waited. Then Houston was whispering again.

  “No one’s here,” she said.

  “Do a thermal scan,” Carver answered. “Don’t go in there until you’ve done it.”

  “Ten-four.”

  She gave the scope to Roper. For a moment, Carver could see Roper using it to scan the inside of the house, but then Houston stepped away and went halfway down the steps. She checked up the hill, and then down the street in the other direction. Then her gaze drifted along the row of houses on the other side of the street.

  “You hear something?” Carver asked.

  “Negative,” Houston answered, falling into her usual style of radio speech. “Just making sure we’re ten-twenty-six.”

  Mia glanced at him.

  “She’s making sure it’s all clear,” Carver said.

  Mia nodded, and then Houston was whispering again.

  “Roper says there’s no one in there.”

  “All right. Ten-double-zero, Houston.”

  “Ten-four,” she said.

  She came back up the steps and took the scope from Roper.

  “Kick it down,” she said.

  Roper had been laid out sick for the last week, but Carver wouldn’t know it from what he saw on the screen. Roper holstered his gun and dropped into a crouch five feet out from the front door. Then he uncoiled, as fast as a striking snake. His boot hit the door next to the jamb. There was an audible crack as the door splintered and flew open. Roper drew his gun again and rushed inside, immediately swinging to the right to cover his blind spot. Houston followed, and the screen went dark.

  It took the camera a moment to adjust to the near-black foyer. When it did, the grainy image that reappeared was composed in shades of gray and black. Carver saw a stone floor, a chandelier, a staircase. Houston was moving fast, checking each corner twice.

  “Take it easy, Houston,” Carver said. “Roper did the scan and it was clean. Get out your lights. We need to see this place.”

  “Ten-four,” she said.

  She switched on the small light that mounted to her gun, and Roper did the same. They let them rove along the walls, picking out the paintings hanging along the entryway.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Carver asked. “I can’t make it out. It’s not fire.”

  “Acid, maybe,” Houston whispered. “It smells like it, anyway. The walls are blistered. It’s like they sprayed everything with acid.”

  Her light touched a large frame at the end of the hall. Houston was about to move on, but Carver stopped her.

  “Wait, Houston,” he said. “Go back. I want to see that one.”

  She stepped up to the painting and let her camera pan across it. The colors had dissolved. The paint had run in a bubbling cascade over the lower portion of the frame and down the wall. In a few places, the acid had eaten through the canvas entirely. Carver could see all the way through to the wooden wall behind it.

  “It looks like there’s a plaque on the frame,” Carver said. “See if you can wipe that stuff off and read it. But don’t touch it with your fingers.”

  “Ten-four.”

  He watched on the screen as Houston used a pocketknife to scrape at the plaque. Then she bent close and held the light to the words. The camera pulled in and out of focus before it caught.

  Ocean Beach, with Sea Glass (IV)

  —

  Bridget Laurent

  Oil on canvas, 2017

  Mia was leaning forward and staring at the screen, her hands clenched together in her lap. Carver killed the computer’s microphone with the mute button.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s not exactly a surprise.”

  “Not after Mexico.”

  Carver reenabled the microphone. Back on Filbert Street, Houston panned across the painting once more before settling the camera back on the plaque.

  “Does it mean anything to you?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It’s ballsy, putting it by the front door,” Carver said.

  “Say again?” Houston whispered.

  “Before your time,” he answered. “You wouldn’t know it. That painting was stolen out of the Legion of Honor. Job of the century—an entire exhibition. I didn’t work it, but some of my friends did.”

  “Not much left now,” Houston said. She let the camera glide across the ruined canvas once more. “You done here?”

  Mia slid toward him, put her hand on his shoulder, and whispered in his ear.

  “We should see the basement.”

  Carver leaned back to the computer.

  “Houston?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You guys see a door to the basement?”

  She pivoted and the camera sped along the walls. Carver saw a blur of blister-cracked wood and melted artwork, and then the screen held still on a steel-trimmed door.

  “Roper,” Houston said. She kept her light pinned on the door. “They want us to check the basement. I think that’s it.”

  If Roper answered her, Carver couldn’t hear it. But he came into view and crossed the room to the door. He tried the handle, then opened the door and pulled it back.

  “I got your back,” Houston said.

  Roper went through the door and disappeared into the shadows. Then Houston went through, her gun in front of her, aimed to Roper’s right. The camera was struggling with the darkness again, but in the grainy blur, Carver could see the concrete steps leading down.

  “The smell’s really strong in here,” Houston whispered. “Acid, or something.”

  “You okay?”

  “There’s no ventilation.”

  She stopped and turned to look at the door. It was a dim rectangle of light above her.

  “Houston—you okay?”

  “No,” Houston breathed. “But I can handle it, for now.”

  Her voice sounded like it was being played through a vinyl record. On the screen, vertical bands of snow sliced through the video image. The feed had been fine until she’d started down the basement steps.

  “You read me, Houston?”

  “Barely,” she said. “You’re ten-oh-one.”

  “I’m having a hard time seeing. Is there a wall next to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Show me,” Carver said. “Get close.”

  “Like this?”

  She must have slipped on the stairs when she turned to the wall. There was a jerk and a thump, and then her hand was visible in the frame. It was trembling. She caught the wall and steadied herself against it. Then she brought the camera close. There was a steely-gray blur until the camera caught a point of focus. Now he was looking at the wall as though standing six inches from it. It was covered with some kind of wallpaper. Snowflake patterns, etched in silver ink, glittered in the light.

  “That’s radio-frequency-blocking paper,” Carver said.

  “Say—what?”

  Even with the interference, he didn’t like the way she sounded.

  “Houston, can you tell me your badge number?”

  “My what?”

  “Get Roper. I want you two out of there. The air’s not doing you any good ​—”

  “—​it burns, in my nose ​—”

  “Get Roper. Get out.”

  “—​and there’s spots, green spots ​—”

  There was a loud bang from somewhere down in the basement, but Carver couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Houston?” he said. “You catch what that was?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He watched her push off the wall. Mia put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

  “It doesn’t matter, Carver. Get h
er out.”

  On the screen, they saw Houston catch her bearings. She looked back up the stairs to the half-opened door, then at her feet. Then she was going down again. One step. Two at a time. With every step into the darkness, they lost more of the signal.

  “Houston ​—”

  She tripped and fell, and Carver heard a clatter that he knew was her gun on a hard tile floor. Houston spun her head around in the dark. A short beam of light stabbed at the floor nearby. It must have been the light on her gun barrel.

  “Houston, get Roper and get the fuck out of there.”

  The angle on the screen changed. She’d made it up to her knees. Her camera adjusted to the darkness. The screen passed through a grainy filter. He saw a spinning image of machinery. Smashed lab equipment. Broken glass. An entire wall of computer monitors that had been pried open and burned. Houston began to cough, and the camera view shuddered with her body’s spasms.

  When she turned again, Roper came into view. He was on his back, and even in the dark Carver could see the black spatter of blood around his head. There was something on the floor next to him, but Carver didn’t have time to make it out. A sledgehammer, maybe. But Houston had begun to scream, and now she was scrabbling backwards on the debris-strewn floor. Carver saw the naked beams in the basement ceiling.

  A light came on. The screen went entirely white, then eased back into washed-out color as the camera adjusted again. Houston froze, and went quiet.

  A figure in a silvery, heat-resistant spacesuit came into view. Carver assumed it was a man based on his size and his stance. But he couldn’t be sure. The suit’s faceplate was like a piece of stainless steel. Carver could see Houston reflected there. She was on her knees. Her gun was nowhere in sight, but the man in the spacesuit was armed with something that Carver didn’t recognize right away. He raised the nozzle-gun in his heavily gloved hands. A hose led from the gun to the tanks strapped to his back. Carver saw the blue flicker of the pilot flame there at the tip of the nozzle, and then he understood.

  In the faceplate, Houston raised her hands above her head.

  When the man in the suit hit the trigger, there was an instant when Carver could see the flames rushing toward her. They spread and mushroomed, yellow and white. When they swept around her, Houston never made a sound. The screaming, Carver realized, was Mia. She was squeezing his shoulder hard enough to draw blood through his jacket.

  The screen went white.

  For ten seconds, he didn’t dare touch anything. Then everything went black. A small pop-up window appeared.

  Thank you for trying OmniChat!

  Now try:

  Black Aria

  The pop-up window dissolved and a bottle of Black Aria replaced it. It hovered in a dark sky and then began its descent. Layers of moonlit clouds appeared below it. Mia reached out and slammed the laptop screen shut.

  Carver was still trying to understand what had just happened. Houston and Roper were dead. He’d sent them down to the basement, and now they were dead. Their reflexes had been dulled by the noxious air, and then a man in a flameproof suit had incinerated them. The suit was clearly insulated to protect him from heat, which must have made him invisible to Roper’s thermal scan. He must have been in there to make sure the house was clean and that whatever threat it had been hiding was gone.

  “I have to warn Jenner,” Carver said. “If there was a man in the house, there could be others in the neighborhood.”

  “Hurry.”

  He dialed and brought the phone to his ear. Jenner always answered by the end of the first ring. Especially on something like this, when the situation was fluid and they had to stay in close contact. He’d keep his phone in his hand so he’d feel it vibrate even at a dead run.

  But not this time.

  “What is it?” Mia asked. “What’s happening?”

  Carver set the phone on the table, then put it on speaker.

  “He’s not picking up.”

  They watched the phone. The seventh ring cut off mid-tone, and Carver saw the call timer begin to count. But Jenner didn’t speak.

  “You there?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  The timer counted the seconds.

  “You there?”

  “Yes . . . yes . . . I’m here,” a voice said.

  It wasn’t Jenner, and it sounded almost subhuman. The person using Jenner’s phone was speaking through a voice changer.

  “I . . . can hear you. Is this Carver? Am I speaking to Inspector Ross Carver? Is there a Miss Mia Westcott there too?”

  “Put Jenner on.”

  “I . . . can’t.”

  “You sonofabitch. Put ​—”

  Mia reached out and hung up the phone. Then she took it and smashed it against the edge of the table. Three quick blows and it was shattered.

  “Mia, for fuck’s ​—”

  “They’ll use it to pin us down, Ross.”

  “They’ve got Jenner.”

  “And you won’t get him back on the phone. They’ll just string you along. Then they won’t just have Jenner. They’ll have us, too.”

  Her face was wet with tears. He didn’t know if they were for Houston, for Jenner, or for herself. But she was right. Maybe she wasn’t telling the truth about everything, but she was right about the danger.

  “We have to get out of here,” Carver said.

  25

  HE HAD JENNER’S briefcase and a flashlight in one hand, and Mia’s arm in the other. They were running down the bell tower stairs. When they reached the bottom, she turned toward the narthex and the front door, but he pulled her in the other direction.

  “Ross ​—”

  “Not that way,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

  They went down the main aisle of the church, between the pews. He led her to the right, into a gallery off the east transept. There was a small office here. His key didn’t fit the lock, but the door was flimsy and splintered along the jamb with the first kick.

  “Ross, what are we ​—”

  He kicked the door a second time and it swung open. He didn’t bother looking for a light switch, but went in and shined his flashlight along the walls until he found the key rack. He grabbed all the keys off their hooks.

  “Church van,” he said. “This way.”

  There was a green exit sign above a wooden door at the far end of the transept. He unlocked it, and then they were in the tiny courtyard with two white vans parked side by side, facing the cast-iron portico gate. Carver hit the key fob, and the closer of the two vans flashed its lights as the doors unlocked.

  He went around the hood and climbed in. Mia was already in the passenger seat, buckling her seatbelt.

  “What about the gate?”

  “It’s fine.”

  He drove toward the gate and then stopped under the arched brick entryway. There was a keypad mounted on the wall. The church let him park in the courtyard, so he knew the code. He leaned out his window and punched in the five digits, then looked through the windshield to watch the gate as it swung open.

  “Where now?” Mia asked.

  He was trying to grab ahold of the situation. They needed to find Jenner, but that was impossible.

  “I don’t know—give me a minute, unless you can think of something.”

  “The voice on the phone, he—it—knew my name. It won’t ever be safe to go home.”

  “But it’s not really your home, is it? It was some kind of safe house.”

  She’d told him that after she got recruited, she’d been sent to San Francisco under a fake name. Running Hadley, she might have had to leave at any time. They’d go wherever their investigation took them. They didn’t have to worry about jurisdiction. He couldn’t see her buying a place, hiring a moving company.

  “It belongs to the network,” Mia said.

  “Were there others?”

  “There’s one,” she said. “I’ve never been to it, but George told me how to find it. There’s a key somewhere, hidden in a
laundromat in the Outer Sunset. I could use it in an emergency. After Hadley died, I’d been planning on going there—and then I met you.”

  “But George knew where it was,” Carver said. “So maybe Hadley did too.”

  “Maybe.”

  He heard the idea wilt in her mind as she spoke.

  “It’s not safe anymore,” Carver said. “We don’t know what happened to George, but we do know what happened to Hadley. So we should assume they’ve got whatever information she had.”

  “All right.”

  “Is there anyone else in your network? Someone we could go to?”

  She thought about it while Carver drove. They reached a stretch of road where the street lamps were missing, and he had a hard time seeing anything at all until he realized he’d never turned on his headlights.

  “There must be someone who was helping pass the messages,” Mia said. “An intermediary between me and George.”

  “But you don’t know who.”

  “No.”

  “We’ll have to think of something else.”

  “It’s no use going to Filbert Street,” Mia said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. Houston’s already dead.”

  “I know,” he said.

  It had been his idea to send Houston there. He’d thought she’d be safe, that they wouldn’t dare hurt a uniformed officer who came to the house. She’d been sent by dispatch. When she walked up and rang the bell, the full weight of the SFPD was behind her. But it turned out that none of those rules applied. And if they could take Houston and set her on fire, he was terrified to think what they might be doing to Jenner.

  “Slow down, Ross,” Mia said. “There’s police ahead.”

  “Shit.”

  He took his foot off the accelerator and let the van blend with the traffic again. If he made a single mistake, Jenner’s chances were all gone. He knew that. He also knew it was useless to think Jenner had a chance. They hadn’t put him on the phone. And wouldn’t they have put him on the phone if they’d wanted Carver to keep talking?

  “Just take it easy,” Mia said. “Stay inside the lines, under the speed limit.”

  The cops Mia had spotted were a pair of motorcycle officers from Traffic Patrol. They were parked along the curb below Grace Cathedral, and they didn’t even look up from their cell phones when Carver drove past them.