Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

Norton gestured. “Sure, they’re pushing. They’d like to know where the hell you are, that’s for sure. Why you walked out like that. I’ve got you down as officially helping COLIN with its internal investigation, witness-protected as part of the deal. They don’t buy it, but hey, they’re just cops. They don’t get to argue with us about stuff like this.”

  “They ask about anything else?”

  The COLIN exec looked away. He’d never asked what Carl had found to do in Manhattan the rest of that day. “No, they haven’t. Why, is there something else I should know about?”

  Carl gave the question a moment’s honest consideration. “That you should know about? No. Nothing else.”

  The death of NYPD sergeant Amy Westhoff had made some headlines across the Union, he’d checked for it, but he doubted Norton had the spare time or energy to make any connection there still might be with Sevgi Ertekin. Four years was a long time, and he was pretty sure he’d covered his tracks when he called Westhoff. The woman’s guilt had done most of the heavy lifting for him.

  “If I’m honest,” said Norton tiredly, “I’m more worried about the Weill Cornell people than the police. There’s some serious finance lying about in that place, some people with access to high-level ears, and some seriously dedicated medical staff who don’t like losing their patients under mysterious circumstances. Not to mention the fact that the Ortiz family’s personal physician has a consultant residency there.”

  “Did you have to pay off the crash team?”

  “No, they’re not the problem. They’re all juniors, looking to build careers, and they know what a malpractice suit can do to a résumé, even by association. I had them pronounce Ortiz dead at the scene and then chased them out, told them it wasn’t their responsibility any longer. You should have seen their faces—they were all very relieved to get out of that room.”

  Carl paused by a gig listing. FAT MEN ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP—BLYTHE MARS MEMORIAL HALL, NOVEMBER 25. Nearly three weeks away. He wondered briefly where he’d be when the Fat Men took the stage. Put the thought away, barely looked at.

  “Got an exit strategy for Ortiz yet?”

  Norton peered into the dregs of coffee gone two hours cold. “Variations on a theme. Unsuspected late-stage viral contamination from the bioware slugs he was shot with. Or interface incompatibilities; his body rejected the nanorepair suite he was implanted with, and he was too weak to survive the shock. Either way, you can be damn sure there’ll be no postmortem worth worrying about. Alvaro Ortiz is going to get a statesman’s funeral, eulogies over a tragic untimely death, and his name on a big fucking plaque somewhere. None of this is ever going to come out. That’s how we buy the family’s silence.”

  Carl gave him a curious look from across the room. Something had happened to Norton since he’d seen him last, something that went beyond the weary lack of capacity for surprise. It was hard to pin down, but the COLIN exec seemed to have taken to his new role as the Initiative’s fixer with a bitter, masochistic pleasure. In some obscure way, like a driven athlete with pain, he looked to be learning to enjoy the power he’d been handed. In the vacuum vortex created by the death of Ortiz and his brother, Tom Norton was the man of the hour, and he’d risen to it like a boxer to the bell, like the reluctant hero finally called to arms. As if, along with the young-patrician demeanor and the studied press-conference calm, this was just part and parcel of what he’d been made for after all.

  “And the feeds?” Carl asked him. “The press?”

  Norton snorted. “Oh, the press. Don’t make me fucking laugh.”

  Carl came back to the table and stood staring out of the observation port. Up and down the lines of traffic, breath frosted from the mouths of uniformed immigration officers as they moved briskly about in the chilled desert night, bending and peering into vehicles at random with long tubular steel flashlights raised to the shoulder like some kind of mini bazooka. The queues stretched all the way back to the bridge, where Interstate 10 came across the Colorado River from Arizona under a frenzy of LCLS and wandering spotbeams. The prickly, piled-up fortifications around the bridge were blasted into black silhouette by the light.

  “Come on, Suerte,” he muttered. “Where the fuck are you?”

  There were two armed guards hanging about at the far side of the suspension bridge in the canyon, both of them bored to distraction, yawning and cold, weapons slung. One, the younger of the two, a lad barely out of his teens called Lucho Acosta, sat on a rock where the path began again, tossing pebbles idly out into the river. His somewhat older companion was still on his feet but propped casually back against the rope cabling on one side of the bridge, smoking a handmade cigarette and tipping his head back occasionally to look up out of the canyon at the sky. Miguel Cafferata was sick of this gig, sick of being buried down here a day’s hard drive from the lights of Arequipa and his family, sick of the chafing bulk of the weblar jacket, slimline though it was supposed to be, and sick of Lucho who didn’t seem to have a single interest in life outside soccer and porn. Miguel had the depressing sense when he spent time with the boy that he was looking at a premonition of his own son ten years hence, and the impression was making him irritable. When Lucho got to his feet and pointed upward to the path, he barely bothered following the gesture.

  “Mules coming down.”

  “Yeah, so I see.”

  Conversation was exhausted between the two of them. They’d both been on the same duty every day for the last two or three weeks, the same dawn-to-midafternoon shift. The boss was twitchy; he wanted the place locked down tight, no unnecessary changing of the guard. The two of them watched in silence as the solitary figure and the two mules picked their way down the concertina turns of the path in the early-morning sun. It was a common enough sight, and anyway, you couldn’t be surprised down here in daylight, except maybe by snipers or a fucking airstrike.

  Even when the mule driver and his animals made it onto the last few hairpin twists before the bridge, Miguel didn’t tense as such. But a flicker of interest woke on his weathered face. Behind him, he heard Lucho get to his feet off the rock.

  “Isn’t that Sumariva’s mule, leading?”

  Miguel shaded his eyes. “Looks like it. But that sure isn’t Sumariva. Way too big. And look at the way he’s walking.”

  It was a fair comment. The tall figure clearly didn’t have the hang of coming down a mountain path. He jolted heavily, scudding up powdery white dust every couple of steps. Seemed to be walking with a limp, too, and he didn’t appear to have much idea of how to lead the mules. Big, modern boots and a long coat plastered with the dust of his ungainly descent, battered leather Stetson. Beneath the brim of the hat, a face flashed pale. Miguel grunted.

  “It’s a fucking gringo,” he said curiously.

  “You think…”

  “Don’t know. Supposed to be looking out for some black guy, not a gringo and a couple of mules. Maybe this is someone from the university. A lot of those guys are from the north, doing survey experiments down here for Mars. Testing equipment.”

  The mules did appear, now that he looked, to be loaded with small, shallow-draft crates that winked metallic in the high-angled slant of the sun.

  “Well, he ain’t fucking testing it around here,” said Lucho, unshipping his shotgun with a youthful glower. He pumped a round into the chamber and stepped onto the bridge planking. Miguel winced wearily at the sound.

  “Just let him come to us, all right? No sense rushing up to meet him, and there’s no space to do a search on that side anyway. Let him get across to this side, then we’ll see who he is, turn him around, and send him on his way.”

  But when the gringo got to the bridge, he didn’t come out onto the planks immediately. Instead he stopped and sent one of the mules across ahead of him. The animal made the crossing with accustomed docility, while back on the other side the gringo in the hat seemed more concerned with searching his pockets and fiddling with the webbing straps across the other animal’s back.

/>   “This is Sumariva’s mule,” Lucho said as the animal clopped solemnly up to them, then past and onto the solid ground of the riverbank, where it stood and waited for its owner to catch up. “You think he’d loan it out like that?”

  “For enough cash, yeah. Wouldn’t you?” Miguel shifted to Spanish, raised his voice. “Hoy you, you can’t come down here. This is private property.”

  The figure at the other end of the bridge waved an arm. The voice came back in Quechua. “Just give me a minute, will you.”

  Then he started to lead the other mule out onto the bridge. Hat tilted down over his eyes.

  “All right, you stay here,” Miguel told the boy. The language had floored him; he’d never met a gringo before who spoke it. “I’ll go see what this is about.”

  “You want me to call it in?”

  Miguel glanced at the mule standing there like the most ordinary thing in the world. It blinked back at him out of big liquid eyes. He grunted impatiently.

  “Nah, don’t bother. Not like they won’t hear it if we have to shoot this guy.”

  But he unslung his shotgun, and he went out to meet the new arrival with the vague crawl of unease in him. And he slowed as he closed the last few meters of the rapidly shrinking gap between himself and the advancing stranger. Came to a stop near the middle of the bridge, stood athwart, and pumped a round of his own into the shotgun in his hands.

  The stranger stopped at the dry rack-clack of the action.

  “That’ll do,” Miguel said, in Quechua. “Didn’t you hear me? This is private fucking property.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “So what the fuck are you doing down here, gringo?”

  “I’m here to see the witch.”

  That was when the stranger tipped up his head so Miguel could see his face properly. It was also when he realized he’d made a mistake. The white they’d seen flashing under the hat brim as he came down the path above was pasty and unreal, clotted and streaked on the face like a poorly applied clown’s mask or a half-melted Day of the Dead candy skull. The eyes were dark and impassive, and they stared out of the disintegrating white face with no more humanity than a pair of gun muzzles.

  Pistaco.

  Miguel had time for that single quailing thought, and then something erupted behind him in a string of firecracker fury. He locked up, tugged both ways at once, and the stranger’s long dusty coat split open and he had a flash glimpse of some stubby, ugly weapon cradled there in the pistaco’s arms.

  Deep, throat-clearing cough, spiteful shredding whine.

  Then there was only impact, a sense of being tugged violently backward, a split second of the sky and Colca’s steep-angled sides tilting and spinning, and then everything was gone.

  Carl Marsalis sprinted past the ruins of the first familia gunman, closed the gap with the second while the other man raised his shotgun and snapped off a useless blast from the hip. This one was already panicked beyond any professional combat training he might have had, the remote-triggered firecrackers in the lead mule’s panniers, the sudden explosive death of his comrade. Carl ran in firing, too far out for the sharkpunch to have any serious impact yet, but the boy ahead of him flinched and staggered with the few shards that found their mark.

  It wasn’t an ideal weapon for the circumstances, and out of the water it was too fucking heavy for comfort. He’d had to drape the long elastic sling it came with around his neck, and stick a cling patch on his right thigh to hold the damn thing still under his coat. His leg ached with the extra effort of walking with the weight. But the patented Cressi sharkpunch had the sterling advantage that it was classed as sub-aqua sports equipment, which meant he’d gotten it through security in his baggage without a second look, when second looks were the last thing he needed. And a gun that punched razor-sharp spinning slivers of alloy through water hard enough to eviscerate a great white shark did have some considerable reach in air, even if the spread made accuracy a joke. The young guard had blood running down his face as he fumbled at the slide on his shotgun, he was probably dazed from the sound of the explosions, and he was clearly terrified.

  Carl closed the gap, pulled the trigger on the sharkpunch again. The boy slammed back against the side cables of the bridge. Large chunks of him slopped through and fell into the river; the rest collapsed skeletally onto the suddenly blood-drenched planking.

  Over.

  The mule carrying the firecrackers had, not unreasonably, panicked as much as anybody else. It was headed up the path along the riverside, bucking and snorting. No time to hang about. Carl loped after the animal, ears open for the sounds of other humans.

  He met a third gunman a couple of hundred meters along the river, hurrying down the path toward the sounds of gunfire, a matte-gray Steyr assault rifle held unhandily across his body as he jogged. The man saw the mule, tried to get out of its way, and Carl darted around one side of the animal, threw out the sharkpunch, and fired more or less blind. The other man went down as if ripped apart by invisible hands. Carl scanned the path up ahead, saw and heard nothing, and stopped by the ruins of the man he’d just killed. He crouched and scooped up the Steyr left-handed out of the mess, dumped it immediately with a grunt of frustration. The guy had still been holding it across his body when Carl shot him, and the anti-shark load had smashed the breech beyond repair.

  “Fuck!”

  He picked and prodded his way around the shattered carcass, sharkpunch still leveled watchfully over his knee at the path ahead. Came up finally with a blood-soaked holster holding a shiny new semi-automatic. He tugged the gun loose and held it up to the light—Glock 100 series, not a bad gun. Pricey, shiny ordnance for backwoods muscle like this, but Carl supposed even here the power of branding must hold sway.

  Tight, adrenaline-crazy grin. He put down the sharkpunch for a moment to work the action on the other weapon. It seemed to be undamaged, would be accurate to a point, but…

  Still no decent longer-range weapon. The shotguns they’d been packing back at the river had no more reach than the sharkpunch, and he still had no clear idea how many more of Bambarén’s security there were between him and Greta Jurgens’s winter retreat. Outside of actual location, Suerte Ferrer had been hopelessly vague.

  He shrugged and got back to his feet. Tucked the Glock into his waistband, hefted the sharkpunch again, and moved past the shattered man on the ground. Up ahead, the path seemed to rise slowly out of the rock-walled groove where it ran along the riverside. The mule had bolted on ahead, seemed to have finally found open ground off to the right.

  Carl settled the leather hat a little more carefully on his head and followed. The combat high pounded through him. The mesh picked up the beat, fed it. The grin on his face felt like it would never come off.

  “You need to get a sense of geography about this, Suerte.”

  Suerte Ferrer glowered up from the holding cell chair as Carl walked around him. Immigration had cuffed him there. “Don’t need no fucking geography lessons from you, nigger.”

  The insult twanged through him, freighted with memories from South Florida State. It was the first time he’d heard it since Dudeck.

  Of course, he’d heard the word twist a few times in the interim.

  “I see you’re acclimatizing to Jesusland culture pretty well.” Carl completed his circuit and leaned on the table at Ferrer’s level. Their captive was still grimy and tired looking from his border transit in a false-bottomed crate purporting to contain experimentally gene-modified rapeseed oil. He flinched back as Carl went face-to-face with him. “You want to go back there, maybe, Suerte? That what you want?”

  “Quiros said—”

  Carl slammed the table. “I don’t know this Quiros. And I don’t fucking want to know him. You think we pulled your autohauler out of the line for luck? You have been sold, to me, and by someone a lot farther up the food chain than your pal Quiros. So if you think you’re going get some slick down-the-wire Seattle lawyer come pull you out of here, you’r
e wrong.”

  He went around the table and took a seat again, next to Norton, who’d done nothing but sit with his legs thrust out in front of him and stare somberly the whole time. Carl jerked a thumb toward the cell door, which they’d left promisingly ajar when they came in.

  “Out there, Suerte, you’ve got a highway that goes in two directions. It goes west to the Freeport, or it goes east back into Jesusland and a bust for illegal crossover. Your choice which direction you get to take.”

  “Who the fuck are you people?” Ferrer asked.

  Norton exchanged a look with Carl. He leaned forward and cleared his throat. “We’re you’re fairy godmothers, Ferrer. Surprised you didn’t recognize us.”

  “Yeah, we’re looking to grant all your wishes.”

  “See, this identity is blown.” Norton gestured at the tabletop, where the documents Ferrer had been carrying were spread out. “Carlton Garcia. RimSec have a warrant out on you under that name from San Diego to Vancouver and back. Even if we hadn’t fished you out here, you’d get about three days into the Rim before you tripped something and ended up either busted or yoked to some gang-master who’d put you to work fifteen hours a day in a trench and expect you to suck his dick for the privilege.”

  Carl grinned skullishly. “Was that the Rimside dream you had in mind, Suerte?”

  “Go west, young man, go west,” Norton said piously. “But go with some cash and a decent fake ID.”

  “Both of which we’ll give you,” Carl told him. “Together with a bus ticket right into the Freeport. And all you’ve got to do is answer a couple of questions we have about your cousin Manco Bambarén.”

  “Hey!” Suerte Ferrer backed up in the chair. His hands chopped a flat cross out of the air in front of him. “I don’t know nothing about Manco’s operation, they didn’t tell me shit about any of that. I didn’t live down there more than a couple of years on and off anyway.”

  Carl and Norton swapped another look. Carl sighed.

  “That’s a shame,” he said.