So, most warehouses I’d been inside were derelicts, decayed relics of a more prosperous if not necessarily cleaner time. You expected to see rusted equipment and rotting crates, broken glass and shattered light fixtures. What I found instead was…not any of that.
The walls were plain and unadorned, but the floor was polished hardwood and the space was divided up into several rooms with office cubicle dividers. There were a few men and women in smart suits and sensible shoes wandering around, carrying stacks of actual paper and datapads from cubicle to cubicle. There was the low-level hum of electronics, and inside each cubicle sat someone serious-looking doing something fiddly with a datapad or vid windows.
Standing in the middle of it all was Vera Stewart, though you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She was clad in a long trench coat, sensible pants, and had her hair tucked up inside a wide-brimmed hat that hid most of her face. Her body, which I knew to be very feminine, was hidden underneath layers of fabric that turned her into an androgynous blob. Her delicately-manicured hands were clad in bulky leather gloves. A voice distorter hung around her neck.
“Your accountants, I assume?” I said as I walked up to Ms. Stewart.
“Eddie, I let you in here because of the work we’ve done together—” I snorted in sarcastic laughter at this “—but don’t make me regret it by going off on one of your ‘hard-boiled’ monologues.” Her voice was clipped and metallic through the distorter, robotic in its cadence and tone.
“I’m here for help, actually,” I said, looking around the converted warehouse while trying to convey humility in my tone. I wasn’t sure it was working, or worth the effort. I may be self-deprecating, but I didn’t have all that much in the way of humility. “I’m working a case, but it’s not the sort that the police will be much help on. I thought your…connections might be of more use.”
“What did you have in mind, Detective?” she asked, a hint of something like triumph evident even through the vocal distorter.
I gritted my teeth. I wasn’t very good at asking for help, even from people I liked. Asking Vera Stewart for help was even worse, given that nothing ever came from her without strings attached. But there wasn’t really much of an alternative. Any other option wasn’t going to get the job done, and time was probably a factor. I sighed and pressed forward, against my better judgment. “I need to get into a pretty secure computer system. Can’t do it remotely, so I need someone who can handle themselves in the field,” I replied, hating myself for even asking.
“And if I were to loan you such a person—and I’m not saying I will—what would be in it for me?” There it was, the attached string, right on cue.
“I think you owe me a favor already,” I replied hopefully. My blood wasn’t boiling yet, but it was definitely in a pot on the stove with the heat turned on, and a slight simmer was in the works, at the very least. This was a dangerous game I was playing, and one that—if Vera didn’t feel like playing—could get me killed and my body dumped in the bay conveniently located just outside the door.
“How do you figure, Detective?” Her inflection on the last word made it sound like she meant to say “rat.”
“How about the fact that I helped you stave off a hostile takeover by Roger Kirkpatrick?” I managed through clenched teeth. “How about the fact that you’re still a free person? Or have you forgotten that I could’ve turned you in for murdering your—”
Vera leveled a glare at me that could have killed a lesser man. I could feel it even from under her hat. “You would dare bring that up, here, in my place of authority?” she snarled, the sound distorted and coming out like tearing metal through her voice modulator. Her gloved hands balled up involuntarily.
“Yeah, I would!” I shouted back, getting in her face. “If you’re gonna kill me, go ahead! It’d save me a headache of a damn case and save Raymond Calthus and his goons a hell of a lot of trouble!”
At Calthus’s name, Vera’s mood suddenly changed. Softened, really. She seemed thoughtful. “Calthus?” she asked. She gestured to the men all around the room that I hadn’t noticed before but who were suddenly there, each with a gun leveled at me. At her gesture, the gunmen stood at ease, though with body language that definitely indicated extensive violence was a possibility at a moment’s notice again, should we so choose.
“Yeah, Calthus,” I said, backing off and fishing a cigarette from my pocket. “I’m pretty sure he’s wrapped up in some deal with a fancy new weapon, and I’m trying to find some info to link him and it to a murder.” I lit my cigarette and took a long, slow drag. “Trouble is, I need a computer expert. Which brings us back to where we started, I believe.”
Vera turned away from me and opened a vid window. She tapped a few keys, then muttered something to the face that popped up on the screen. The conversation couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds, and at the end of it she pinched the vid window shut.
“I’ll help you, Eddie,” she said, turning back to me, “but there will be a price.”
I sighed, exhaling a lungful of smoke in the process. “Of course there will be. Do I even want to know what it is?”
“You’ll give me the weapon.”
I laughed. I howled. I had tears streaming from my eyes, I was doubled over, and I’m pretty sure I peed a little.
“Give…you…the weapon?” I gasped in between fits of giggling and coughing. Vigorous laughing is tough when you’ve been smoking for 20 years. “You’ve…gotta be…kidding me.” I straightened back up, wiping tears from my eyes and coughing up something that felt and looked like it’d been scraped from the bottom of a compost heap. “Tell you what,” I said, grabbing a trashcan from one of the nearby cubicles and hocking a wad of phlegm, tar, and God-knows-what-else into it. “I’ll tell you about it after it’s been recovered and turned over to the proper authorities.” I returned the trashcan, much to the chagrin and disgust of its owner.
“Eddie, this is non-negotiable,” Vera said, crossing her arms.
“Dammit, you can’t honestly think I’m going to hand over a potentially-devastating weapon to a crime boss! That’s just insane!”
“Would you rather I have it, or someone like Kirkpatrick?” she asked.
Roger Kirkpatrick was ruthless, methodical, and violent. Tremendously violent. Even though I’d planted a capsule of Compound 16 under his skin, I had no illusions about what Kirkpatrick would do if he got to me before I could push the button and set it off. And I wasn’t really sure I was up to the task, anyway. Killing, contrary to popular belief, isn’t easy, at least not at first. I’ve had to kill a couple of times in my life, and I’ve never liked it. Never got a taste for it, which was the only reason I was still sure I was on the side of the angels here. Siding with Vera Stewart may have been the lesser of two evils, but it was still evil, through and through.
Vera killed people, I knew. It was part of her business. She did it—or ordered it done, usually—with a flat, emotionless efficiency, as part of the hard and logical calculus she used to conduct business. She didn’t necessarily enjoy killing; even when I’d witnessed her pulling the trigger on her rat of a husband, there hadn’t been any joy to it. No, all I’d seen was a look of steely determination in her eyes, an intent to see a necessary job done right. I may not have liked it, but I could almost respect it.
Kirkpatrick, I was pretty sure, thrived on the thrill of killing. It was life blood to him, ambrosia. There was something missing from those beady eyes of his, something indefinable that makes a person fully human. Kirkpatrick wasn’t now, if he’d ever been. There was madness there, and sociopathy, and enough violent tendencies to choke a horse, but there wasn’t a single whit of compassion or empathy to be found. Vera might have felt bad about some of the people she’d killed over the years, but Kirkpatrick certainly didn’t.
“Honestly?” I said, sucking on my cigarette. “I would rather you all go to hell.”
“The weapon will be safer in my hands,” Vera argued. “I don’t want to use it; I just
want to prevent others from using it.”
“And have a nice little nuclear deterrent on your hands, too, right?” I said, dropping my cigarette into the same trashcan I’d desecrated earlier. Its owner scowled at me from around the edge of his cubicle wall.
Vera had the decency to not look me in the eyes, made easier by the hat she wore so low over her own. “The thought never crossed my mind,” she said flatly.
“Right,” I said sarcastically. I sighed. “I’m not going to win this fight, am I?” I concluded. I could argue with her for hours, but the fact of the matter was that she had the help I needed, and she could very easily order her goon squad to put lots of holes in me. I’d have to accept her terms for now and hope I could renegotiate from a better position later.
“No, Eddie, you’re not,” Vera said.
“Fine. I make no promises, but if I manage to recover the weapon first, I’ll give it to you,” I said, mental fingers crossed that I’d be able to “accidentally” destroy it or give it to someone who wasn’t a crime boss.
“Good,” Vera said, a note of triumph ringing through the vocal distorter. “Now, let’s see what I can do about your little problem.” She pulled up a new vid window and started scrolling through a directory. “I think I’ve got just the person. She’s a little inexperienced in the field, but she is something of a prodigy when it comes to complex security and encryption systems. I’m sure someone like you will have no problems keeping her safe if things go bad, and I know she’ll be able to handle anything Calthus’s system can throw at her.”
“Great. Tell her to meet me at my office this evening at 7:00,” I said.
“Of course. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Detective Hazzard,” Vera replied, and I could hear the smile in her voice even through the distortion.
“Sure. That’s why I feel like I need a shower now,” I muttered as I walked out of the warehouse.
VII.
I spent the rest of the morning attempting to track down information on Calthus’s new assistant, Percy Chancel, the second oily gentleman I’d met at the bank the day before. I got access to his public records through O’Mally, but didn’t find anything of interest. The man’s background was squeaky clean. He did have a lot to gain from Wallace’s death, but he didn’t seem like the sort who could do the deed himself. One interesting fact was that he was related to Mrs. Margaret Pithman, which I suppose could have just been a coincidence. I knew better than to really believe that, though. In my experience, coincidence was just the universe’s way of reminding you that everybody was guilty of something. I made a mental note to try to track him down outside of the bank and have a couple of words with him, just in case, and to pay another visit to Pithman Construction to see if Mrs. Pithman had some insight to offer.
I sat in my office for a few hours that afternoon, waiting for any of the other dead drops I’d made to pay off. I got a call from one of my usual informants around 3:30, so I grabbed my coat and hat and met her at our usual spot.
Our usual spot was a park bench in Gilbert’s Park, located in what used to be quite a posh neighborhood in Old Town. A local architectural celebrity by the name of Gilbert Parks had designed the place, all rolling grass and ancient oak trees. The park had once been a beautiful place to take a stroll; a safe, green spot in the midst of the chaos and concrete blandness of the city. Now, though, it was mostly used as a meeting place for drug deals and chance sexual encounters with individuals who might or might not leave you short a kidney.
I sat on the graffiti-splashed bench, feeding pigeons with a crust of bread I’d found in my apartment kitchen. The bread might’ve been too stale, given that it slightly concussed a bird when it accidentally hit him in the head. The bird stumbled around for a few minutes, half-spreading its wings to maintain some sort of balance. I watched, not really seeing, my mind miles away.
My informant arrived about ten minutes after I did. She was short, blonde, and blind as a bat. It was odd, in this day and age, to find someone who still had vision problems. Thanks to modern medical technology, parents knew before a baby was even born what sort of genetic baggage they were going to carry and could correct anything that was glaringly bad. Kids had their vision fixed, disabilities erased, and genetic imperfections smoothed over. Usually. Not everyone could afford the procedures, and some people felt it was morally wrong to mess with kids’ DNA. My own folks had fallen into the “too poor to do it” category, but I didn’t know about this girl. Maybe she wasn’t really blind.
Or maybe she really was. Who knows. She wore those ridiculous dark glasses and was led by a large Bassett hound named Rockford. The dog had a sign on a desperately-cheerful wooly sweater it wore that read: “I AM A SEEING EYE DOG. PLEASE DO NOT PET ME, I WILL BITE.” His handler went by the name of the Little Blind Girl.
“Hey, good to see you,” I said as the Little Blind Girl walked up. She frowned at me.
“Real fuckin’ funny, Hazzard,” she said, plopping down on the bench next to me. The Bassett hound settled into a puddle of fur at her feet and immediately went to sleep. The part of the sign about biting was, to my knowledge, a complete lie, as I had it on good authority that Rockford had never bitten a single person in his entire life. The dog was something of a softie. “You want the damn information or what?”
“Yeah, yeah, I want the info,” I replied, crossing my legs. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a manila envelope, holding it under her nose expectantly.
We sat there for a moment, birds cooing around our feet the only sound.
“Still blind, moron,” she said.
“Right, right,” I said, pressing the envelope into her hands.
“Thanks,” she said, digging into a pocket in her jacket. “Here, see if this does anything for ya.” She handed me a datachip. I dug into my own pocket and pulled out my computer, plugging the datachip into it and firing up a vid window.
“So, what am I looking at?” I asked, hitting play on the vid window. A video started up, showing the opening of an alleyway.
“It’s just something Rockford saw while we were out on fuckin’ walkies a couple’a nights ago,” she said, “and I think there might be someone on that video that you oughtta be interested in.” Something few people realized was that Rockford was quite literally a seeing-eye dog: the dog’s optical nerves were hard-wired to the vision centers of the Little Blind Girl’s brain, allowing her to see what the dog saw. Because it was all done with computers, it also meant she could record anything the dog saw, conveniently. The Little Blind Girl made a pretty good living selling information to P.I.’s like me, though sometimes the information was slightly skewed by Rockford’s doggie perception of the world around him.
This particular file was excellent, though. As I watched, a figure in a long trench coat with a hat pulled low over their face came into view. The figure was carrying a parcel, small and wrapped in a towel or something, making it impossible to identify.
“Is this the alleyway I think it is?” I asked.
“Probably,” she said, snatching the loaf of stale bread from me and lobbing a chunk of it at the birds gathered around our feet. Two were bludgeoned, knocked off their feet by the ballistic baked goods.
“What the hell does it mean, though?” I said, more to myself than her.
“The fuck do I know, genius?” she snapped, tossing the rest of the loaf of bread with uncanny accuracy at the trashcan across the path. It landed in the bin with a muffled clunk.
“It was just off 9th Street in Old Town, in case you were curious,” the Little Blind Girl said. “I tagged the file with GPS data, if you wanna check it yourself.”
I pinched the vid window shut and stood. “Thanks, doll,” I said.
“Fuck you and your ‘doll,’” she said, jumping to her feet and clicking her tongue at Rockford. The dog whoofed at me, then stood and ambled up the path with his mistress, a stream of muttered curse words trailing behind them.
└●┐└●┐└●┐
> The Little Blind Girl’s video didn’t help me all that much. I had no idea who the figure in the video was, nor what they were carrying. It was circumstantial at best, and not likely to help my case until I had a few more puzzle pieces to put together. Preferably corner pieces, because right now I had just a couple of pieces from the middle that were vague colors and shapes, and nothing particularly useful.
I swung by Pithman Construction before heading back to the office. Mr. Pithman was out working on a construction site, and his wife was apparently with him, according to the elder Mrs. Pithman, deaf secretary to the stars.
“Yes, they’re both out at the worksite on Walden Avenue. Shall I call them and let them know you’re coming?” she asked.
“No, I think I’ll surprise them,” I replied. If I tipped them to my visit, Mrs. Pithman might make herself scarce before I could ask her any questions, and that wouldn’t help me any.
I pulled into the worksite around 4:30, but found it deserted. That was odd; I didn’t think Jonathan Pithman was the sort of guy to knock off early, or let his men do so. I climbed out of my beat-up car and slammed the door shut on rusty hinges, checking my gear as I walked toward the tall chain link fence that surrounded the property. A large sign for Pithman Construction, LLC, hung from the fence, gleaming in the late-afternoon light. The lot was filled with mounds of dirt taller than me, construction equipment of various shapes and sizes, and the metal skeleton of a building rising five stories out of a concrete slab. Ladders and scaffolding around the metal frame indicated that construction workers had been hard at work on the site recently. I placed a hand against a bulldozer; the engine cowling was still warm to the touch.
The Hidden Throne (Hazzard Pay Book 2) Page 11