by Allen Steele
Chris hadn’t been back since the Revolution, so he was only vaguely aware that Defiance had become a large and prosperous agricultural community. The tree houses had vanished, replaced by wood-frame houses along tidy streets, with enormous greenhouses and livestock sheds on the outskirts of town allowing the locals to continue their livelihoods during the long winter months. When the sledge went west again, its hold would be packed with crates of corn, potatoes, sugar beets, tomatoes, and waterfruit, its refrigerator compartment stocked with beef, lamb, and chicken. The town proclaimed itself to be “the Breadbasket of the Provinces,” and the fact that it had once been the sanctuary of the Alabama colonists was a source of civic pride as well.
Chris and I disembarked from the sledge at the depot and, carrying our packs over our shoulders, went in search of a place to stay. We had plenty of choices; Defiance had a lot of visitors, many of them businessmen like those we were pretending to be, so accommodations ranged from a large and fairly luxurious hotel in the town center to third-rate boardinghouses that catered mainly to migrant workers. We settled for a small inn located on a side street: not so fancy that our arrival would draw attention, but neither so seedy that we’d stand out. The innkeeper booked us into two rooms with a connecting door and a shared bathroom; we stayed just long enough to put away our bags before going out again to get a decent bite to eat and, not incidentally, begin our search for David Laird.
Or rather, for Peter Desilitz. Laird had disappeared the moment he’d left New Brighton, but when Chris searched government census records for Peter Desilitz, it came up as belonging to someone who, up until at least three years ago, had an address in Defiance. That surprised me; Desilitz had been Laird’s alias when he was busted at the New Brighton spaceport, so I would have assumed that he’d have adopted a different pseudonym. When I mentioned this to Chris, though, he’d only grinned and shook his head.
“One of the things you learn when you’re a proctor,” he said, “is that there’s no such thing as a ‘criminal genius.’ People who make a career out of breaking the law are usually too dumb to make an honest living…and dumb people tend to do the same dumb things over and over again.”
“But still, using the same alias when you’re trying to go underground…”
He shrugged. “He probably had a whole set of phony IDs under that name which would’ve been good enough to establish his bona fides while renting an apartment or getting a job. Not everyone makes background checks, y’know. He probably figured that, so long as he didn’t do anything that would give a proctor a reason to search the provincial database, he could get away with it. In any case, the guy we’re looking for isn’t Laird, but Desilitz.”
It made sense, or at least it does if you’ve got a lawman’s mind-set. Once again, I realized that I’d made the right decision by letting Chris join me. Having a former chief proctor as a partner in a manhunt has its advantages. Nonetheless, as we stepped out onto the snow-packed streets of Defiance, I wondered how long it would take for us to track down Laird.
Indeed, I’d begun to have second thoughts about the whole thing. Early that morning, while we were waiting in Carlos’s Pizza for the sledge to arrive, I’d checked in with Jon Parson. He’d told me that the Mercator had just lifted off from New Brighton and was on its way to Rho Coronae Borealis; I guessed that the expedition had probably gone through the starbridge by then, and my people would soon be meeting with the High Council. I had nothing but confidence in Jorge Montero, and yet, at the same time, I kept wondering whether I should have led the expedition myself instead of taking a leave of absence from the Corps in order to look for someone I might never find.
Although we were hungry, Chris and I decided to postpone dinner until we’d found the place where Peter Desilitz was last known to have stayed. A rickshaw cab took us to a run-down tenement building near the outskirts of town. It looked like the sort of flats that itinerants would rent, but the foyer mailbox didn’t have a card for either Desilitz or Laird. Chris rang the bell for the manager’s apartment; when her voice came over the intercom, Chris claimed that he was an old friend of Peter’s who happened to be passing through town, and asked if he was still around. A minute later, a door down the hall opened and the manager herself came to speak with us. The old crone was suspicious at first, but Chris turned on the charm, and she eventually told us that Desilitz had moved out about three years earlier. In fact, he’d left overnight, leaving behind his furniture and apparently taking only a couple of bags; he’d also stiffed her for a month’s rent, which the landlady had collected by selling his belongings.
“So he’s not in town anymore?” Chris feigned regret. “That’s too bad. I was looking forward to having a drink with him.”
“Not so far as I know.” The landlady rubbed the tip of her blue-veined nose; it looked like she probably spent a sizable portion of her tenants’ rent on bearshine. “Looked high and low for him, but even the boys at the bar don’t know where he’s gone.” A crooked grin. “Or if they do, they ain’t telling me.”
“Yeah, could be.” Chris shrugged. “Well, maybe if I talked to them, they might know something. Which bar did he usually hang out at?”
Her eyes narrowed as she pulled at an earlobe beneath her frizzled grey hair. “Y’know, it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite remember…”
“Maybe we can help out a little.” Chris gave me a knowing wink. “Seeing how we’re old friends of his, the least we can do is pay the rent he stuck you for.”
He’d already warned me that we might have to grease a few palms. I reached into my trouser pocket, pulled out my money clip. The manager’s eyes glittered when she saw the cash. “Well, that’s awful nice of you. I think it was…oh, three hundred, if I remember correctly.”
I doubted that she did—in Liberty, C300 would be the monthly rent for an entire house—but she’d already figured out that we probably weren’t who we were claiming to be, so there was no point in arguing with her. I peeled off a few bills, and her memory improved the moment they were in her callused hand. “Ah, yeah, now it’s coming back to me…the Alabama Tavern, over on Pleasant.”
“I know the place. About four or five blocks from here, right?” She nodded, and pointed in its general direction. “Thanks. Anyone there you think we should talk to? Maybe someone who’d know Peter?”
An indifferent shrug. “Just about any of the regulars, I reckon. He was there almost every night, after he got off work at the stockyards.” Her gaze searched us. “That’s what he was doing, y’know. Working in the barns, shoveling manure and the like…but I guess you already know that, don’t you?”
“Sure. Just been a while since we’ve last seen him.” Chris smiled. “Thanks again for your help. And, hey, if we catch up with him…anything you want us to tell him?”
“Not really.” She was already counting the money in her hand. “Just that if he shows up around here again, he’d better find another place to stay. Ain’t gonna be here.”
Night was falling by the time we made our way to the Alabama Tavern. I hadn’t been lying when I said that I knew the place. Back when I was a wilderness guide, it had been a bar I’d frequented when I’d found myself in Defiance. Provided, of course, that I was down on my luck and looking for a cheap watering hole; it wasn’t the sort of nightspot where I’d take a client. And in the years that had passed since then, the tavern didn’t look like it had changed very much.
We paused on the sidewalk across the street, gazing at yellowish light gleaming through its frost-rimmed windows. “This can be a rough place,” I said quietly. “Sure you don’t want me to handle this on my own?”
Chris looked at me askance. “You think I’ve never been in a bar before?”
“No, but…” I stopped, not knowing how to say what was on my mind. Chris Levin was a tough old boid, but nonetheless he was in his eighties by Gregorian reckoning. I wasn’t anticipating any trouble, but in a dive like this, it paid to expect the unexpected.
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br /> “Never mind me.” He opened his parka halfway. “If things get hairy, I’ve always got backup.”
A Union Guard fléchette pistol was tucked into a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit, an antique that he’d kept in prime condition ever since he picked it up during the Revolution. I was carrying a Corps airpulse pistol, but Chris disdained nonlethal weapons: bad guys didn’t take you seriously, he said, unless you were packing a gun that they knew could put an end to their lives. We weren’t trigger-happy, but neither were we under the illusion that all our problems could be solved by sweet talk and a roll of cash.
We walked across the street, pushed open the heavy blackwood door. The Alabama Tavern was the same badly lit, smoke-filled beer joint that I remembered, with tough-looking men and women seated at tables or throwing darts near the fireplace. It was still early evening, so the room was only half-full. A few people looked up as we came in, but otherwise we didn’t attract much attention. Which was what we wanted; nevertheless, I kept my hat on. There was always a chance that someone might recognize one of us, and the last thing we needed was to have word circulate through the bar that a Corps of Exploration senior officer and Liberty’s former chief proctor had dropped in for a drink.
There were two vacant stools near the end of the bar. We took them, and Chris ordered a couple of pints of ale. The bartender seemed to do a double take; he might have vaguely remembered my face, but if he’d matched it with a name, he didn’t say so. I sipped my beer while I glanced over the menu. Pretty much your usual tavern fare—sandwiches, stew, chili—but at least we’d get a bite to eat. If we were lucky, the cook might have bothered to wash his hands.
Chris and I ate in silence, pretending to ignore the regulars while letting them get used to the presence of a couple of strangers. More people began showing up, and it wasn’t long before we had company. We made small talk with the locals, not giving our names but letting them know that we were sales reps from the Thompson Wood Company who’d come to town in hopes of landing new customers. After a little while, Chris got up from his stool and sauntered over to the dartboard; I remained at the bar, nursing my beer while commiserating with a couple of farmers about the hard winter we were having that year.
It wasn’t all idle chatter, though. As I went from one conversation to another, now and then I’d mention Peter Desilitz, ever so casually saying that he was an old friend and wondering if anyone had seen him lately. As his former landlady had told us, he was well-known in the Alabama Tavern; whether he was well liked, though, was another matter entirely. It appeared that he was someone whom several people had known, yet almost no one had known well; he’d drifted into town a few years earlier, stayed for a while, then abruptly moved on again, leaving behind a string of unpaid debts. More than a few people scowled when I mentioned his name, and one guy went so far as to hit me up for the five colonials Pete had sponged from him the day before he disappeared.
This was all very interesting, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to finding out where he’d gone. At one point, Chris walked past, giving me a quick tap on the shoulder as he headed for the men’s room. We met there a couple of minutes later and, after quickly making sure that the stalls were vacant, quietly discussed what we’d learned. Which amounted to almost nothing, except that our quarry had split town almost as suddenly as he’d appeared, without even bothering to quit the job he’d been holding down at the stockyard.
“That’s significant,” Chris said. He was standing at the urinal, his back turned to me. “People don’t vanish overnight unless they’ve got a good reason.”
“Sounds to me like someone was after him for money.” I glanced at the door. “From what I’ve been told, he was carrying enough IOUs to buy drinks for everyone out there.”
“Maybe.” He zipped his fly, turned toward the sink. “Or maybe someone learned who he really was, and he figured that it was time to leave before the truth got around.” He gave me a stern look. “If that’s the case, we’d better be careful.”
“How come? If there’s someone here who knows this…”
“Then they’re keeping it to themselves…which means they could be as dangerous as he is.” Chris finished rinsing his hands in the sink; he eyed a filthy towel hanging from the rack beside it and decided instead to wipe his hands on his trouser legs. “Just be careful, all right?”
Returning to the barroom, I bought another ale, then wandered over to the dartboard. A few minutes later I managed to pick up a game, and it was then that I got lucky.
“Yeah, I know Pete.” The young guy with unwashed blond hair who’d consented to throw a few turns with me wore the mud-caked field jacket of someone who spent his days in the stables. “We worked together at Olson’s…that’s the stockyard a little ways from here. Why?”
“Oh, nothing.” I took aim at the board, did my best to sink a dart into the bull’s-eye. “Just that I haven’t seen him in a long time, but from what I’ve heard, he left town in a big hurry.”
“Yeah, well…” The kid shrugged, picked up the pint of ale he’d brought with him from the bar. “Think he had a reason to get outta here. And if you know him half as well as you say you do, you’d know what that is.”
I tried not to look at him too sharply. This didn’t sound like the usual gripe about an unpaid debt or a mooched drink. “I said I knew him. I didn’t mean we were best friends, though. Why, is there something about him I should know?”
My companion didn’t reply at once, but instead took a sip from his drink. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a couple of men standing near the fireplace. They were leaning against the mantel, apparently doing nothing more than observing our game; somehow, though, I had the feeling that their interest in us was more than casual.
“Maybe.” The kid waited until I threw the last dart in my hand, then walked over to the target. He paused as if to study the arrangement I’d left on the board; I moved closer to join him. “Depends what you wanna know,” he went on, dropping his voice to a near whisper. “You a proctor or something?”
I shook my head. “No…just someone who wants to find out where he went.”
He slowly plucked the darts from the board, taking his time. “I can help you there,” he muttered, “but it’ll cost you.”
“I can do that.”
A faint smile. “Kinda what I thought.” He juggled the darts from hand to hand, careful not to let the spears jab his fingers. “Finish the game, then we’ll go. Not safe to talk here.”
We left the tavern a few minutes later, by ourselves. That wasn’t the way I wanted to make our exit, but when I’d looked around the crowded room, Chris was nowhere to be seen. The kid was nervous enough already that I didn’t want to leave his side to go searching for Chris; the young man was our best shot at finding out what had happened to Laird, and I was afraid that, if he became aware I wasn’t working alone, he’d disappear.
So we departed the Alabama Tavern without my letting Chris know where I’d gone. As we trudged down the snow-covered sidewalk, I glanced over my shoulder to see if we were being followed. Bear had begun to rise over the mountains, casting a cold blue radiance that made everything stand out; there were few streetlights in this part of town, with plenty of shadows in between, but the bearlight was bright enough to reveal anyone who might have left the tavern after we did. No one else was in sight, which made me feel a little better. All the same, though, I remembered Chris’s warning; when the kid’s back was turned to me, I quickly shifted my gun from my shoulder holster to the right pocket of my parka. No sense in taking chances…or at least no more than I was taking already.
The kid’s name was Jake Turner, he told me as we walked to the stockyard, and he’d lived in Defiance all his life, born and bred in Midland to parents who’d come to Coyote during the last great immigration wave. I figured that he was about Inez’s age, give or take a few months. When he was old enough to bring money into the house, he’d dropped out of school to go to work in the stockyards, whe
re he’d done the sort of menial tasks a not-so-bright kid would do: feeding the animals, pitching hay, mucking out the stables, and so on. It was there that he’d met Peter Desilitz, who’d been hired to do much the same thing.
Jake didn’t tell me more than that, though, until we reached the stockyards. We walked a short distance down an unlighted side street until we reached a row of long concrete sheds beside a fenced-in paddock. The sign hanging above the front gate read OLSON BROS. LIVESTOCK; the gate was locked, but Jake fished a key from his jacket pocket and used it to let us in. He led me past the first two sheds, then opened the side door of the third one in the row. The interior was dark and warm; I could smell hay, manure, and the strong aroma of animal fur.
Jake didn’t turn on the ceiling lights, but instead found a lantern hanging from a post near the door. He switched it on, and within the circle cast by its wan glow I saw wooden stalls arranged in three long rows beneath the open rafters of a mountain-briar ceiling. Within the stalls were sheep: curly white Cotswolds, black and tan Suffolks, black-fleeced Romneys. They bleated when the lantern came on, and a few rose from their straw beds to approach the chest-high sides of their stalls, thinking perhaps it was time to be fed. Jake stroked the heads of the nearest ones, shushing them with a few soft words, then turned to me.
“Say you got money?” he asked, his voice low.
“Uh-huh.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out my clip. “Fifty do you?”
He snorted. “C’mon, man…you can do better than that.” He placed the lantern on a workbench beneath the windows, and I couldn’t help but notice the pair of large and very sharp-looking shearing scissors that lay upon it. Jake probably didn’t intend for them to be menacing, but nonetheless I was intimidated enough to be thankful for having moved my gun to a pocket where I could easily reach it.
“All right,” I replied. “A hundred.” Jake hesitated, perhaps wondering if he could bargain for more, then slowly nodded. A hundred colonials was probably more than he made in four weeks. I pulled five C20 bills from the clip, handed them to him. “Let’s have it, then. What do you know about Desilitz?”