by Jay Allan
“So you say.”
“So history says.” I bulged my lower lip with my tongue. “You know, when the police look at suspects, they look for something called a ‘motive.’“
“To discourage competition. Or steal our business plan. Or gather the intel to make a buyout.” Baxter steepled his fingers over his nose. “It was them. You’ll see.”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of what? The people who see through their lies? Yes. And I make no apologies for it.”
That afternoon, Deng fed us updates on ruled-out suspects while we finalized the purchase of Felix’s automotive factory and ironed out the details of retooling it to vacunautical work. Convinced there was a personal angle to Baxter’s enmity toward HemiCo, I pried him for details, but I would have had more luck pumping a cow about its plans for college. Baxter gazed through me when we spoke, a scowl forgotten on his face. I knew the look. Lost in memory.
At the office two days later, as I packed it in for the day, he grabbed me by the sleeve. “Deng’s got something. Let’s go.”
“It better be to a bar.”
I lucked out. We met Deng at Asgard, a dim, elegant, but unpretentious downtown pub that brewed its own line of beers. I ordered a pitcher of pilsner with a faux-Greek name. Baxter knuckled down to business before the long-haired bartender had it filled.
“Hop Cooper and Bart Silva,” Deng mumbled over the rim of his stout. “Regular contract work from Brock, Inc. Demographics consultancy. Are the youth excited about french fries.”
Baxter glanced down the bar. “And?”
“Brock’s in bed with HemiCo.”
“Proof?”
“Nothing courtroom.” Deng produced a stack of paper. Hard copies were always a good way to convince the client they were getting their money’s worth. Knowing Baxter would see whatever he wanted to see in them, I focused on the pleasant bitterness of my beer.
Baxter looked up from his reading. “Where are they?”
“Right now?” Deng flipped open his omni, squinted at it. “Drinking up their wages in Capitol Hill.”
“Get Gutierrez,” Baxter said. “It is time to be sociable.”
We rolled out in a rented mini, a four-seat electric monster almost as big as the Mustang I’d climbed inside at Felix’s factory. Baxter threaded us through traffic like a cranked-out shuttle while Deng exchanged terse updates with his spotter. Capitol Hill was a schizophrenic neighborhood of ancient dive bars, rock clubs, and secondhand stores mixed with steel-ribbed office buildings that stood over the stubby old apartments like pinstriped pant legs. An hour after sunset, we cruised past sidewalks and storefronts swarming with equal amounts of natty-suited professionals and ad-tatted samtowners.
Gutierrez and Deng’s spotter were parked in a dive across the street from the sports bar housing the two thugs. Inside, Baxter delved into strategy. Feeling extraneous, I ordered a double whiskey. Deng’s spotter, a blunt-featured blond woman in an unraveling sweater that matched the Hill’s vibe, left to post up inside the sports bar. Crowded into the booth of the bustling pub, I felt awfully exposed: I had concluded my existence as Robert Dunbar in the two weeks before Baxter caught up to me in Greece, but I hadn’t had time for any surgical face rearrangement, and there was the chance, however slight, of being recognized by one of my friends from back East or a former student from my medieval studies class.
But I supposed I’d been known for keeping odd company there, too. If any gin-flushed graduate caught me drinking with a wrong-eyed white businessman, a plump Asian in sweatpants, and a tanned ex-kickboxer who looked like the model for Rodin’s Adam, it would at best confirm what they already suspected, i.e. I was never going to make tenure.
“Stun guns, maybe they got.” Deng thumbed his nose. “Pistols, no way. State gun laws are tighter than Hemingway.”
Gutierrez laughed. Baxter showed the same immunity to humor he’d donned since the break-in.
“So,” he said. “There is nothing to stop us from beating them in the street until they tell me everything I want to know.”
Gutierrez raised a finger. “Except a hundred witnesses and the street cameras.”
“And the stun guns,” I said.
“We don’t know they have stun guns,” Baxter glared. “Abducting people,” he started, then lowered his voice to a reasonable pitch, “carries certain risks. I hired you to minimize them.”
Deng shrugged. “This here’s a little spur of the moment.”
“Then figure it out!”
Exasperated, I followed the hall at the back of the bar to a large, too-bright bathroom the bar shared with the restaurants to either side. I had a thing about public urinals and it took me two tries before I found a stall that didn’t look like it had been recently abused by a dysenteric Vandal. Even so, considering its state, I would have worried about coming down with the plague if I hadn’t already caught it twice. I washed my hands repeatedly and returned to the argument about how to confront the two alleged HemiCoers.
“How about we just invite them over?” Deng said, eyes locked on his omni.
Baxter showed his teeth. “Tragically, that’s your best suggestion so far.”
“Not a suggestion. Lucy says they’re coming inside.”
Everyone but Deng turned their head toward the front door. Baxter had shoved their pictures in our faces on the drive to Capitol Hill, and I recognized Cooper, a hefty white, and Silva, a skinny brown man, strolling in like a partnership from a cop drama. They elbowed their way to the bar and reeled the bartender over with the flash of a card.
“How long you want with them?” I said to Baxter. “Just a minute? Or would you prefer a romantic weekend?”
“Not likely to know much,” Deng said.
“I just want the name of the man they’re working for.” Baxter narrowed his eyes. “And to hurt them.”
I pointed over my shoulder. “Bathroom’s big. With an escape route.”
“How do you get two grown men to go to the bathroom together?” Baxter said.
“They gay?”
Gutierrez shifted the hillocks of his shoulders my way. “All gay men leap at the chance for anonymous bathroom sex?”
I silenced myself with a drink of whiskey. Well, give me a break. Even when you know better, old prejudices pop up now and then. Most of the time I thought I did pretty well for myself, considering I’d spent many of my most formative years in an age when child abuse was all the rage.
“Bluff,” Deng said. “Tell them you’re from HemiCo and they need to meet you in the bathroom in two minutes. No one doubts a lie if it’s crazy enough.” We all stared at him. He shook his shaggy head, stole my drink, and tossed it back. “Guess I just volunteered.”
Baxter nodded. “Mr. Gutierrez will go in beforehand and pretend his bowel is obstructed. Rob and I follow them in, and then Mr. Gutierrez, whose bowel is in fact perfectly functional, jumps out of his stall and kicks them in the head.”
“Call me Pete,” Gutierrez said.
To my brain, it sounded stupid. To my instincts, it sounded good, and my feeling of being extraneous evaporated, replaced by the predatory excitement of an ambush. Lifetimes ago, I had soldiered for Babylon and Athens, for Milan and Amsterdam. Since then the closest I’d come to the unthinking oblivion of battle was when I’d discovered wing chun kung fu in a Chinese monastery near the end of the nineteenth century. I threw myself into it, a fast-striking system whose ideal operating range was too close for the eye to react to, forcing us to fight by touch.
I had been docile for a couple lifetimes now, letting my skills rust—I tended to operate in phases, returning to old favorites I’d dropped cold years or even centuries earlier—and at times I missed the clarity of physical combat sweetly.
We gave them time to have another drink, then Pete excused himself. Five minutes after that, Deng walked up to the bar, planted his elbows, and made a pseudo-subtle examination of Cooper and Silva. Silva met his eyes. Deng stood,
yawned, and muttered something. A few sips and a brief conversation later, Cooper shoved off and headed toward the back, Silva a step behind him.
I crunched an ice cube between my molars. “You ready?”
“For decades,” Baxter said.
We rose and followed. The talk and laughter and clank of bottles faded to a far-off place. As we reached the bathroom, the door had just stopped swinging. Baxter shoved it open.
“This is a private restroom.” Silva crossed his arms in front of the sinks, Cooper beside him. Whether through luck, or Pete clearing it out, the bathroom was otherwise empty.
Baxter smiled. It was not a healthy expression. “I’m sorry?”
“Turn the fuck around,” Cooper said.
“I swore, a long time ago, to never obey one of you ever again. So instead of turning the fuck around, I will now hurt you violently, ask some questions, and repeat as necessary.”
If I’d been in their spot, I would have laughed. But maybe they saw something in his face, that mineral coldness in his eyes. Both reached for their pockets. Four stalls down, a door banged open and Pete rushed out with the face-splitting grin that had made him famous ten years ago in the ring. Silva backpedaled and drew a smooth black object like an electric razor. It popped and Pete went stiff as a wooden dummy, sliding on his squeaking shoes until friction caught up with him. He bellyflopped with a fleshy thump.
Baxter charged past me. From ten feet away, Cooper discharged his stunner. Baxter ran on without missing a step. Cooper’s eyes bulged like a cartoon. Baxter crashed into him like an enraged ram. I closed on Silva. He held his stunner straight out from his shoulder and pulled the trigger. I stepped to his left, turning my hips to stay square to his body. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and drove my right into his floating rib. It was a quick shot, and I had lost the snap of my wrist that might, in my better years, have cracked his rib, but he gasped anyway. I rolled his arm elbow-up and crashed my forearm down into his upturned joint. The stunner clattered to the tile.
Baxter and Cooper separated and a series of body blows echoed through the bathroom. Silva dropped to one knee to relieve the pressure on his hyperextended arm, which I still controlled. I launched a point blank front kick, using our mutual descent to hammer my foot into his turned hip. His elbow jolted and his wrist yanked free from my sweaty grip.
“You get back here.”
Silva scooted back on his butt, disabled elbow held to his chest. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I charged forward, right leg leading, hips and shoulders square to him to keep all my limbs in play. He drove his heel at my lead knee. I lowered my weight for the incoming blow and took it on my lower thigh instead, an aching shot to the muscle. I slipped on the water-slick tile, scraping the sink as I went down.
He swung to his feet. “See what you get!”
I grimaced and stood. He came at me with the worst punch in the history of punches, a from-the-heels right haymaker so huge you could see it from space. I bent at the knees and shifted my heels, left hand flicking out of my half-assed guard, smacking the blade of my palm into his forearm. The redirected motion of his punch brought his face straight at me. I dropped my right elbow and just about jumped out of my shoes attempting to replace his chin with my fist.
A wet pink blob sailed from between Silva’s clacking teeth. I stepped to the side. He timbered like an axed tree. The tip of his tongue hit the tile with a soft plop.
Pete started to twitch on the floor. To my right, Baxter and Cooper were wrapped up in standard fistfight devolvement, i.e. they grappled like lovers royally pissed off about how hard it was proving to fuck through their clothes. Cooper slipped a punch into Baxter’s gut and they fell apart. Cooper’s hand dropped to his shirt. A finger-length knife flashed in the harsh overhead lights.
“Cheater!” Baxter said.
Cooper swatted at Baxter’s hands with his left and jabbed at him with the knife, shredding a fold of Baxter’s halfvest. Cooper gathered himself for another strike. I hopped forward and side-kicked him into a bathroom stall.
The door slammed against the stall wall. Cooper banged against the toilet. His knife spun away and landed point-down in my canvas sneaker. I shrieked and staggered. Baxter shoved me out of the way and disappeared into the now-crowded stall.
“Hello,” he said. Cooper groaned. Baxter’s elbow jutted from the stall, then leapt back inside as he socked Cooper’s face. “You work for Brock, Inc. Does Brock, Inc. work for HemiCo?”
“Suck my—”
The elbow reappeared, then pistoned into the stall with a hard, meaty crack. “I’ll rephrase: what is the name of your contact at HemiCo?”
“John Quilan,” Cooper gasped.
“Why did you trash my office?”
I yanked the knife from my foot. My sight fogged over with black and white speckles and I decided to lie on the tiles for a moment. When I came to, Pete was inspecting my bleeding foot and Baxter was attempting to flush Cooper’s face down the toilet.
The bathroom door clapped open. A young man with his hair twisted into spikes gaped at us.
“No worries, I just shit meself instead,” he said in an Australian accent. He backed out the door.
Pete put his hand on my shoulder. “Can you walk?”
“Can you carry me?”
“Meet you halfway.” He lifted me to my feet and we hobbled to the exit. The toilet whooshed again. Baxter jogged past to get the door for us. After a couple turns of the hall, we burst into a hushed restaurant. Faces turned our way, moonlike in the candles.
“Happy anniversaries!” Baxter announced.
He hustled for the front doors. I hopped behind him, Pete propping me up. We hit the street. By the time we scrambled into the safety of the parking garage, the first sirens whooped through the night.
* * *
After that, we were swiftly summoned to the palace.
On our way in, which lasted for well over a mile, Baxter thoroughly ignored the manicured wonders of the bright gardens and sculpted brush of Lee Jefferson’s primary residence. Whiffs of pollen and chlorophyll spilled through the car’s AC. The milky pillars of the house glittered in the sunlight, screened by twenty-foot sunflowers, radially symmetrical shrubs, and wildflowers cunningly tended to appear as distant mountain ranges. At both flanks of the manor, a tower soared a hundred high, ringed by pines. I hadn’t yet seen the whole thing at once, but the house proper was rumored to resemble the offspring of the Parthenon and a Southern plantation.
I couldn’t decide if the architectural choice was made more or less questionable by the fact Lee Jefferson was black. Oddly, she hadn’t grown up in Georgia or South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still appeared, groundhog-like, on the fenders of some bikes and minis. Instead, she’d been born and raised thirty miles from here in Helena. Montana hadn’t even been a state until a generation after the Civil War. On top of that, the big collapse a hundred years back had been so thorough and catastrophic that the rebuilders had had free reign to wipe the economic slate clean. Financial racial inequality had all but disappeared, and within a couple generations of that, racism as we knew it virtually vanished, believe it or not.
So I had no clue what Lee Jefferson was trying to say with her throwback homestead. But it was this exact tendency to ignore convention, tact, and uselessly literal details that had helped her accumulate her personal $108 billion, a fraction of which she’d since pumped into NightVision Resources.
Something had been on my mind since the night before. “Do you think what we did was a felony?”
“Four felonies, I think. At least.”
“Well, maybe they cancel each other out.”
“If Lee Jefferson has a problem fighting fire with fire, why can’t she just call me?”
The car dimmed as we entered a tunnel of trellised rose bushes. “This is how the wealthy do these things.”
He frowned at me, as if the notion of etiquette were an abstract painting. The tunnel of
roses curved, disgorging us into rich spring sunlight. The minicar ground to a stop on the pink gravel drive. I nodded to the driver as he swung open my door.
The main wing of the Crystal Palace stood five stories high and the quartz pillars supporting its front eaves stretched from ground to roof. Reports varied as to whether they solid quartz had been grown in a lab or extracted miles below the Earth’s surface and erected here.
“Impressive,” Baxter said.
The double doors opened. The doorman led us through an airy red hall. Canvas-sized spacescapes of the System’s planets were painted directly onto the walls. A glass elevator provided us with a full view of the sprawling grounds as it raised us to the fifth floor. This was a vast and sparse room interrupted by marble columns and wrought iron chairs. We followed the doorman to the arched door at its far end, where he touched a flesh-colored button on the side of his throat and murmured so softly you wouldn’t have recognized it as speech unless you were watching his mouth move. He nodded and rested his hand on the iron door handle.
“Watch your step.”
Beyond the door lay a cavern of dark and light, a geode blown up to titanic size. Milk-white crystals as long and thick as trees stood at all angles, gleaming under the concealed lights. Black nothing filled the space between and beneath them; the lights faded to total darkness at the room’s edges, suggesting an expanse into forever. An irregular bridge of crystals stretched into the gloom, sketching a path to the other side.
“You first,” I said. Baxter stepped onto a log-like crystal. I followed, limping a bit from my knife wound, placing one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker. Laughter echoed around the chamber. I wobbled and crouched low.
“You could at least put up handrails,” I called.
“And rob you of your only chance to sue me?” Jefferson’s voice echoed from the other side of the cavern. My foot slipped and I concentrated on not falling into the eerie darkness, which my eyes told me went on for eternity even as my brain reassured me that there had to be a floor just two or three feet down.
Untroubled by the illusion of a bottomless fall, the ridiculous crystalline sidewalk, or a recently-stabbed foot, Baxter strolled ahead. I reminded myself I had survived infinitely worse and hurried after him, nearly catching up by the time he reached Lee Jefferson. She sat on a blanket on a flat crystal as broad as a bedroom. She was a thin and crisp-featured woman of some fifty apparent years, her light brown skin a shade or two past my generic Mediterranean tone. To her left sat a closed omni; to her right a plate of potato chips, a fat bottle, a glass of champagne as bubbly and semi-translucent as the crystals around us, and a hardback book.