Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Sutherland’s a thirteen, too, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how come he managed it?”

  Carl nodded. “Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.”

  “And that was?”

  “He told me to make a list, keep it to myself, and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.”

  “You didn’t go for the round dozen?”

  “The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.” He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. “Nine of those, I realized I needed to be on Earth to do.”

  The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out the window.

  “Have you done them all yet?” she asked quietly.

  “No. Not yet.” He cleared his throat, frowned. “But I’m getting through them. And it does work. Sutherland was right.”

  For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched around to face him again.

  “You want to hear a secret of mine?”

  “Sure.”

  “Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide-eyed and innocent.” She coughed a little. “Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could have set it in motion.”

  She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilized again.

  He leaned in closer. “So who’d you want to kill?”

  “Amy fucking Westhoff,” she said bitterly. “Fucking bitch who killed Ethan.”

  “You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.”

  “Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at City Hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in Datacrime?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.”

  “You think she knew what he was?”

  “I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.”

  “Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.”

  That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.

  “I don’t believe she knew back then,” Sevgi said finally. “Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did, too, if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. The Truth About Thirteens, how to recognize one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, free phone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. ‘Are You Sleeping with a Thirteen—Thirteen Telltale Signs That Let You Know.’ Fucking bullshit like that.”

  She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated. Voice impatient.

  “Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.”

  “She knew about the pregnancy?”

  “Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.” Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. “That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—”

  “So, not his surrogate then?”

  “No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.”

  Carl saw the link. “You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?”

  “I don’t know. But he went to Datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.” He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on the bed. “But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I told Ethan that, but—” She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “—like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.”

  “Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?”

  “Enough to make a case?” He thought she smiled in the dimness. “No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?”

  “Yeah, you said a downtown number.”

  “Yeah.” She was smiling, bleakly. “Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a Datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have gotten there easily enough.”

  “Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in Datacrime.”

  “No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.”

  “Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in City Hall, maybe?”

  “Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.”

  “And no one else picked up on this?”

  Another weak smile. “No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities. You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.”

  He nodded. He thought it might b
e starting to get light outside.

  “So you planned to kill her. Have her killed. What stopped you?”

  “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. “In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.”

  Beyond the window, the night was definitely beginning to bleach out. Carl saw Sevgi’s face more clearly now, saw the desolation in it. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.

  “Try to get some rest now,” he said.

  “I couldn’t,” she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. “I just couldn’t do it.”

  Rovayo showed up, off duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t funny, and no one laughed. Rovayo toughed it out, spent the time there she’d announced she could, promised awkwardly to return. The look in Sevgi’s eyes suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other. Outside in the corridor afterward, the Rim cop grimaced at Carl.

  “Bad idea, huh?”

  “It was a nice thought.” He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. “You get anything from the crime scene?”

  Rovayo shook her head. “Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys, or a dozen irrelevant Bayview lowlifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.”

  “Yeah, he was.” Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. “You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.”

  “Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.”

  Rovayo blinked. “I see you’re in a great mood.”

  “Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.” He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. “You want to get a coffee downstairs?”

  “Sure.”

  Across the scarred plastic tabletop from her in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the Bulgakov’s Cat bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren, and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends. Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.

  “And we’ll probably lose” was Rovayo’s sour assessment. “Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.”

  “Right.” It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.

  Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table, and said: “I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?”

  “Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-djinn built that has the chaos-modeling capacity to beat this. Haag system’s designed to take down a thirteen, and my immune system’s about twice as efficient as yours, so they had to come up with something pretty unstoppable.”

  Rovayo grunted. “Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?”

  “Black man?”

  “Yeah, black. Black-skinned, like you and me. First they tie cocaine use to the black community, make it a race-based issue. Then they reckon they need a bigger bang to put us down, because we’re all coked up.” The Rim cop made an ironic gesture of presentation. “Welcome to the .357 magnum round.”

  Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. “You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?”

  “Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.”

  He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.”

  “Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.” Rovayo sipped at her coffee. “Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.”

  Carl sat back. “You’re winding me up.”

  “No. Thing was supposed to fire round bullets if you were fighting Christians, square if you were killing heathens.”

  “Come on! There’s no fucking way they could build something like that back then.”

  “No, of course they couldn’t. It didn’t work.” The Rim cop’s voice tinged grim. “But the .357 magnum did. And so does Haag.”

  “Monsters, huh,” said Carl quietly. “How come you know all this stuff, Rovayo?”

  “I read a lot of history,” said the black woman. “Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.”

  They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during, and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a midterm pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage.

  Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.

  Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.

  Her hands and feet feel swollen and increasingly numb.

  When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.

  Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.

  When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the nighttime ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadiköy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.

  Reaching out his hand.

  Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.

  He tried to work.

  Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms, or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.

  “I remembered something this afternoon,” he told the COLIN exec. “Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambarén, he recognized this jacket.”

  Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashing along the sleeve.

  “Yeah? Standard Republican jail wear, I guess any criminal in the Western Hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.”

  “It’s not quite standard.” Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.

  “Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have
in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.”

  “Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now, maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.”

  Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. “All right, we can look. God knows I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?”

  “No. Bambarén, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.”

  “And we don’t know when he did time?”

  “No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.”

  “Or Bambarén misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambarén’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.”

  “All right, leave it with me.” Norton glanced back down the corridor toward Sevgi’s room. “Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?”

  “Sure. That’s why I’m here.”

  Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. “You call me if anything—”

  “Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.”

  For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight, and headed away down the corridor.

  Carl watched him go with folded arms.

  Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night-lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.