Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  No time—the machete swung down. His attacker was a big guy, tall and reachy, the response wrote itself. Carl hurled himself forward, inside the chopping arc, blocked and stamped, took the fight to the ground. Against all expectation, the other man flailed like an upturned beetle. Carl got in with an elbow, stunning blow to the face, tanindo grasp on the machete arm, twist and the weapon clattered free. A knee came up and caught him in the groin, not full force but enough to half kill his strength. The other man was screaming at him, weird invective and what sounded like religious invocation. Hands came clawing for his throat. It was no kind of fighting Carl knew. He fended, expecting a trick. Got feeble repetition instead. He did the obvious thing, grabbed a finger and snapped it sideways. The invocation broke on a scream. Another long leg lashed at him, but he smothered it, kept hold of the snapped finger, twisted some more. His attacker screamed again, quivered like a gaffed fish. Carl had time to look down into the eyes again, saw no surrender there. He chopped down, into the side of the throat, pulled it a little at the last moment—he’d need to talk to this guy.

  The fight died.

  Rovayo circled in, gun drawn, leveled on the unmoving figure on the floor. Carl grunted around the ache in his balls, shot the pistol an ironic glance.

  “Thanks. Little late for that.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not yet.” Carl levered himself to his feet, groaned again, glanced around. The gathered crowd gaped back. “Just him, huh?”

  “Looks that way.” Rovayo hauled an arm aloft, showed the holo in her palm to the spectators.

  “RimSec,” she stated it like a challenge. “Anyone work security around here?”

  Hesitation, then a thickset uniform with blunt Samoan features shouldered his way through the others.

  “I do.”

  “Good, you’re deputized.” She read the name off his chest ID. “Suaniu. Call this in, get some backup. The rest of you, give me some space.”

  On the floor, Carl’s attacker coughed and flopped. They all looked. Carl saw suddenly that he was young, younger even than Dudeck had been. Barely out of his teens. He cast about and saw a cluster of carbon-fiber chairs and tables around a sushi counter that had closed for the night. He hauled the boy up by the lapels and dragged him toward the nearest chair. The crowd skittered back out of his path. The boy’s eyes fluttered. Carl dumped him into the chair, settled him there, and slapped him hard across the face.

  “Name?”

  The boy gagged, tried to rub at his neck where Carl’s stunning chop had gone home. The black man slapped him again.

  “Name,” he said again.

  “You can’t do that,” said a woman’s voice from the crowd. Australian twang to it. Carl turned his head, found her with a narrow look. Elegant olive-skinned shopper, early fifties, stick-thin. A couple of bags, ocher and green parcels, black cord handles, flicker ad for some franchise or other across the ocher in black Thai script.

  His lip curled. “Haven’t you got some shoes to go buy?”

  “Fuck you, buddy.” She wasn’t backing down. “This isn’t the Rim. You can’t walk all over us like this.”

  “Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.” Carl went back to the boy in the chair, backhanded him and got blood. “Name.”

  “Marsalis,” Rovayo was at his side. “That’s enough.”

  “You think?”

  Her voice dropped to a mutter. “She’s right, this isn’t the Rim. There’s only so far we can push this.”

  Carl looked around. The Samoan security guard was talking into a phone, but his eyes were fixed on the boy and the black man standing over him. And the crowd had shuffled back when Rovayo ordered them to, but beyond that they were staying put. Carl guessed maybe one in ten had actually seen the fight, even less the machete attack that preceded it. The scenario was wide open for interpretation.

  He shrugged. “You’ve got the gun.”

  “Yeah, I do. And I’m not about to start shooting these people with it.”

  “I don’t think it’d come to that.”

  “Marsalis, forget it. I’m not—”

  Spluttering cough. The boy in the chair floundered there, grasping the carbon-weave arms. His gaze was locked on Carl’s face.

  “Black man,” he spat.

  Carl glanced sideways at Rovayo. “Observant little fucker, isn’t he.”

  The Rim cop grimaced and put herself between Carl and the chair. She showed the RimSec holo to the boy. “See that? Do you know how much trouble you’re in, son?”

  The boy glared back at her. “I know you lie for him. Authority out of Babylon, and black lies that shield the servants of Satan. I know who your master is.”

  “Oh great.”

  “Marsalis, shut up a minute.” Rovayo closed her hand, stowed her gun, and scrutinized their prisoner with hands on hips. “You’re from Jesusland, right? You’re a fence hopper? You got any idea how quickly I can have you sent back there?”

  “I do not answer to your laws. I do not bow down before Mammon and Belial. I have been chosen.” In the crystalline lighting of the mall, the boy’s face was pale and slick with sweat. “I have gone beyond.”

  “You certainly have,” said Carl wearily.

  “Marsalis!”

  “Hey, he didn’t come at you with the fucking machete.”

  The boy tried to stand. Rovayo stiff-armed him impatiently in the chest, sent the chair skidding back a little as he collapsed back into it.

  “Sit down,” she advised him.

  Rage detonated in his eyes. His voice scaled upward.

  “You are false judges. False lawgivers, money changers, sunk in stinking sins of flesh and corruption.” It was as if he were vomiting up something long suppressed. “You will not lead me astray, you will not pre—”

  “You want me to shut him up?”

  “—vail, I am beyond your traps. Judgment—”

  “No, I fucking don’t. I want—”

  “—is coming. He is here! He lives, in the flesh, among us! You know Him as Merrin but you know nothing, He is—”

  The tirade ebbed a little, lost some of its shrill rage, as Carl and Rovayo both stared down at the boy with fresh interest.

  “—the Commander of the legions of Heaven,” he finished uncertainly.

  “Merrin’s here?” jerked out of Carl. “Aboard the Cat? Now?”

  The boy’s lips tightened. Carl switched gazes to Rovayo. She reached for her phone.

  “Can you lock this place down?”

  “On it.” She was already dialing. She put the phone to her ear, looked at him as she listened. “Alcatraz can authorize a block on traffic in and out. Might have to get a couple of people out of bed to do it, but—”

  The phone crickled audibly with scrambler protocols and then a voice. Rovayo cut across it.

  “Alicia Rovayo, Special Cases. Print me, and then get me the Alcatraz duty officer.”

  Pause. Very deliberately, Carl turned his back on the boy in the chair. Casually, he asked, “Is that going to be satellite-enforceable?”

  Rovayo nodded. “There’s bound to be something overhead. One of ours, or something we can rent the time on. Special Cases can usually. Hello? Yeah, this is Rovayo, listen—”

  “Hey! No!”

  Carl didn’t really need the anonymous yell. Tanindo, as taught by Sutherland, worked up a high level of proximity sense, and the mesh tuned it tighter still. He felt the boy come out of the chair without needing to turn and see it. He turned anyway, at a leisurely rate, and caught the escape bid with a peripheral glimpse, the same peeled awareness that had saved him from the machete attack in the first place. The boy was already out of tackle range, heading for the refuge of a side access walkway. Pumping limbs, head thrown back, a spurt of desperate speed. Not bad, all things considered.

  He saw Rovayo stiffen, stop speaking to Alcatraz. Reach for her stowed gun. He put out an arm to forestall her, shook his head.

  “Let him go. I’m on it.”
/>   “But you—”

  “Relax. Running after idiots is what I do for a living.”

  He turned away. Would have liked the gun, but it wasn’t like there was the time to talk it through—

  “He’s getting away,” shouted the Australian woman.

  Carl spared her a murderous look, then he was in motion. Slow run building to a sprint, gathering speed and purpose, the fine focal intensity of the hunt.

  Time to find Merrin and shut him down.

  CHAPTER 38

  Wide awake, jet-lagged to pieces even the syn didn’t seem able to fix, she sat in the window of the hotel room and stared out over the bay. COLIN privileges—top-floor suite, unobstructed views. The marching lights of the Bay Bridge led her gaze inexorably across to where Oakland’s own nighttime display glowed from the waterline and twinkled up into the hills.

  Cheap fucking piece of shit.

  Norton wanted to put out a citywide search and detain, but neither she nor Coyle was interested. They both knew damn well where Marsalis was, and the fact that he was technically absent without authorization was the least of it. Rovayo wasn’t answering her phone, and what that meant was punched onto the other Rim cop’s face like bruising from a street fight. Sevgi couldn’t be sure if Coyle and Rovayo had ever been an item as such, but they were partners and most of the time that ran deeper. Higher loyalty stakes—the people you accepted into your bed weren’t likely to have to save your life on any given day. Back with NYPD, Sevgi’d had her share of ill-advised co-worker liaisons, but she never, never crossed that particular line with anybody she partnered, not because she hadn’t occasionally been tempted, but because it would have been stupid. Like taking one of harbor patrol’s big powerboats into the shallow waters off some white sand tourist beach. You just knew that you were going stick and tip.

  Not like now, huh, Sev, the syn sneered at her. This one, you’ve got well under control, don’t you? Deep water and an even keel all the way.

  Oh shut up.

  She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, disconnected into the sprinkle-lit night, when someone started hammering on the door.

  “Sevgi?”

  She blinked. It was Norton’s voice, muffled through the soundproofing on the door, and slightly slurred. They’d sat up in the hotel bar for a while earlier, barely touched drinks and not much to say. At least she’d thought the drinks were barely touched until, out of nowhere, he said to her quietly, Just like cocaine, right. No evolved defenses, too much strain on your heart. She stared back at him, aware that he’d nailed her somehow but unable to make exact rational sense of the words. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, Tom, she answered stiffly. But I’m sitting here thinking about Helena Larsen and how we still haven’t caught the motherfucker who murdered her. It was only halfway to a lie. The promises she’d made to herself and the mutilated corpse back in June weighed heavily whenever she gave them headroom.

  So she’d fled the bar, left Norton sitting there with a brief good night. Now it seemed he’d stayed for the long haul.

  “Sev. You in there?”

  She sighed and levered herself off the window shelf to the floor. Padded across to the door and opened it. Norton leaned on the door frame with one raised arm, not as drunk as she’d feared.

  “Yeah, I’m in here,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  He grinned. “This you are going to love. Coyle just called.”

  “Yeah?” She turned away, left the door open. “Come on in. So what happened? He storm over to Rovayo’s place and drag Marsalis out of her bed?”

  “No, not quite.” Norton followed her in, waited until she turned back to face him. He was still grinning. She folded her arms.

  “So?”

  “So Rovayo and Marsalis stormed Bulgakov’s Cat this evening, bullied their way into Daskeen Azul’s offices, and made a mess. Someone took exception and came at Marsalis with a machete.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. Now Rovayo’s called a RimSec lockdown on the whole raft, and Marsalis is somewhere down in the belly of the beast, chasing the machete artist because he thinks it’s all part of some grand conspiracy that’ll lead him to Merrin.”

  “Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Well—where’s Coyle?”

  “On his way here, now. He’s heading out to the party with a detachment of RimSec’s public order thugs in tow. I sort of insisted he stop by and pick us up.”

  Sevgi grabbed her jacket off the bed and shouldered her way into it.

  “Would have settled for him just fucking her,” she muttered, then suddenly remembered she was no longer alone.

  Norton pretended not to hear.

  In the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat, Carl found a curious relief. There were at least no fucking stores down here.

  His short-term memory spilled recall of endless smooth-floored covered thoroughfares and changing frontages in such volume that their individuality finally blurred into perceptible patterns of appeal. Clothing under glass, museum exhibit sober or in shout-out garish display, depending on the prey it was designed to hook. Little chunks and slices of hardware under soft gleaming lights. Food and drink laid out in holo-real impressionistic tumbles of plenty designed to imitate some ghost memory of a street market. Psychochemicals blown up in holodisplay to sizes where pills and the molecules they were made of each started to resemble the fetishized pieces in the hardware shops. Services and intangibles sold with broad cinematic images that offered almost no intelligible connection with the product. Level after level after level of it, walkway after walkway, maze of corridors, of elevators and staircases, all bright and endless.

  He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse nighttime crowds would allow.

  He’d long ago learned that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency—if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.

  Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin color. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate—the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible—but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.

  He hung back, he used the mirrored surfaces, the camera playback-and-display narcissism of the mall space, and he watched as his quarry’s frantic, spinning, backward staring run damped down to a slower, purposeful threading through the crowd. The full-body turns became frequent over-the-shoulder glances, and then not so frequent. Carl eased forward, keeping behind knots of shoppers and going bent-kneed where there was no one tall enough to give him cover.

  Then the stores ran out.

  They’d been dropping levels slowly but steadily, taking gleaming marbled stairways and the odd gleaming jewel-box elevator, all consistently downward. At first Carl thought they might be heading back to Daskeen Azul, but they’d already gone too low for that, and he didn’t think the boy had the skills or presence of mind to lay a double-back track. In the frontages, prices came down. Empty rental space began to interpose itself between the taken units. The holodisplays got ragged, the merchandise and the way it was sold took on an imitative quality, a not-quite-
good copy of what the upper decks carried. The services on offer became less wholesome, or at least less smoothly packaged. killbitch available, he saw in cheap neon, wasn’t sure what it referred to, wasn’t sure he wanted to. Elsewhere, someone had spray-canned a huge empty rectangle on the glass front of an untenanted unit and filled it with the words buy consume die—artwork to follow. No one had cleaned it off.

  The boy flickered left out of the flow of shoppers and took another staircase. This time it was a utilitarian unpolished metal affair, and no one else was using it. When Carl got to it, he could hear his quarry’s steps clattering down in the well.

  Fuck.

  He waited until the metallic footfalls stopped, then went down after them, trying to make as little noise as possible. At the bottom of the well, he found himself in a low-rent residential section, simple green security doors set in bleak gray corridor walls whose ragged graffiti scars were almost a relief. A steady thrum in the structure suggested heavy-duty engines somewhere close. The floor was dirty, stains and patches of dust that crunched underfoot, neat lines of detritus swept to the sides either by mechanical cleaning carts or possibly the residents themselves. Clear evidence, if he’d been in need of it, that the nanohygiene systems didn’t make it down here much. Nor, he supposed, did anyone else who didn’t either live here or know someone who did.

  Which, of course, made it perfect for Merrin.

  The corridor was deserted. Receding rows of closed doors and no sign of machete boy anywhere. Branch corridors up ahead to left and right, the same story again when he reached them and peered down the dingy perspectives they offered. Meshed-up tension sagging slowly into the realization that his quarry had gone to ground. He held off the settling feeling as best he could, prowled down the left-hand branch passage, ears tuned past the engine thrum for the sound of voices or footsteps. Well aware—I know, I fucking know—that the doors would have security cameras and that each one he passed upped the risk of being spotted if his quarry was in one of the apartments behind, watching the screen.