“I don’t get it,” she muttered, looking at Dog. His sympathetic, curious expression held no answers, either.
Sheb said, “I’m real sorry that I can’t be of more help, Lou. I told her she should contact you directly. I even gave her your mail address, if that helps.”
“Did you get hers?” she asked, a quick flash of hope.
Sheb polished at his spotless counter. “No. Sorry. If she comes back…”
Lou shot him a weak smile as she folded her Paper and stuffed it into her back pocket. “Oh well, not to worry.” She took a long pull on the cold water, coughed badly, and handed the glass back. “Listen, we’re heading over to the New Raffles, looking for these two guys. If you hear anything, or if you don’t hear from me later…”
Sheb waved her off, looking worried. “Maybe that’s the hotel she meant.”
“There’s a comforting thought,” she muttered. “Come on, Dog.”
Most of the New Raffles Hotel was shutdown, the exterior surfaces unpowered, inert and untextured. At one time, in the years before the Stalk, it had been the only quality hotel in town. That was when the big mining projects outside of town used giant mass-drivers to fire cans of impossibly valuable ore into orbit, and when passenger ships still used the old spaceport. The Raffles, at that time, had an air of sultry glamour. It was a fine place where instant tycoons could enjoy the spectacular wealth they had made during the Kestrel resources boom, and where they could schmooze their way into still more money and bigger deals at the gaming tables.
The building of the Stalk, and the discovery of hypertubes, made commercial import/export much more efficient than the old mass-driver transport methods of the past and led to the crass franchised commercialism of the StalkPlex. Instant tycoons weren’t so common anymore. Suddenly, there were lots of management types around. The glory of the resources boom became a bottom-line business involving the movement of “product.” The Raffles experienced a twilight period of languid sidewalk café culture, out on the Avenue, for the benefit of the thousands of passing tourists who had been lured by its pale evocations of the past. One could sip exotic beverages and watch the beautiful people passing through, on their way elsewhere, to worlds more exciting and distant.
These days, the hotel was barely operational, and catered — if one could call such lack of service “catering” —to the bottom-end of the market: dirt-poor tourists traveling very light; decrepit, skinny old folks in endlessly-repaired and out-of-date suits who got by on charity junk jobs and telling tall stories about the old boom-town days; and the likes of Marcel and Michel Tourignon, hanging on by their grubby fingernails, doing an amount of crime too small for the local cops to care about.
Lou entered the courtyard, which was filled with broken furniture that had obviously been pushed out of upper-level windows. The Monsoon rains hadn’t gotten to the stuff yet, so it must have been tossed recently, in the last few months, during the Panic. Broken glass was everywhere, mixed with smashed statuary. Lou carried Dog through the courtyard, her boots crunching on shards of glass, into the abandoned reception area.
In what was once the lobby, she found torn-up carpet, wine and urine stains, busted beer bottles, and more broken windows. The stink was enough to drive Lou and Dog out into the courtyard again, gasping. At length, they ventured back in. Lou looked around everywhere, especially behind her. The interior was a jarring contrast in deep shadows and angular blocks of reflected gray light.
The reception counter was closed, the security screens smashed in, displays trashed. On the walls they found weird slogans smeared in human feces. Lots of anti-cop sentiment as well as gnomic statements neither she nor Dog understood. Everything looked like some kind of dire warning against evil spirits. Lou was pretty sure she saw, gathered in the room’s corners, small piles of animal bones, dark bird feathers and other things about which she didn’t want to inquire too closely.
The things people do when the end of the world comes, she thought, mouth-breathing, feeling ill, wanting to be gone. Dog, she noticed, was agitated, back fur bristling as he glanced about the room.
“Can we please hurry, Ms. Meagher?”
With the elevators offline, she and Dog hunted among the wreckage and filth for the fire stairs. In their search, they found the tenants’ mess hall, once a grand restaurant, its walls and floor gouged and pocked with bullet holes and splattered with dry blood. Lou thought it looked like the work of cops digging out squatters. Long dark smears along the floors showed where the victors dragged the dead and dying outside.
“This blood smells fairly recent, Ms. Meagher,” Dog said, sniffing at the trails, looking edgy. “No more than two or three weeks old.”
That the cops were crazy killer bastards with too much firepower was not news. Nonetheless, Lou kept watching her back, peering at corners and vents and anywhere else cops could still have spybots floating around. She knew the cops, these days, used sensors ordinary folks could not see, but she looked anyway. The shadows hid things, and light zagged across tumbles of wrecked furniture and glinted off broken glass. Blasts of cold air from outside whistled through busted windows. The stink of fresh feces and rot stung her nose. The skitter of rats running from her approach raised goosebumps on her skin.
Dog said, “I’m having a hard time concentrating here, Ms. Meagher. There’s too much stimulation.
She wondered if she should have left him at the penthouse, but decided she didn’t want Dog and Tom having some kind of sick alpha-male turf war. And besides, the dog was a hound for God’s sake, bred for snuffling and hunting.
Lou also considered drawing her gun, but decided against it, knowing how having a gun in your hand makes you inclined to use it in bad moments. She popped the trouser pocket-flap open anyway, just in case.
The fire stairs were in the back, down a dark corridor, with doors on either side leading to staff offices.
“What’s that?” Lou said, spying something on a doorknob. She stopped, stared at the knob, and began to feel queasy, fluttery. “Oh God…” She moved closer to see it better.
The doorknob was smeared with wet blood. She whispered to Dog, “You want to give us an opinion on this, Dog?”
Dog stood up on his back legs, tail sticking out for balance, and craned his head towards the handle, sniffing.
“Smells very strong. Definitely human; doesn’t smell like an animal’s blood. Still some heat in it, too.”
Lou felt her mind trying to process all this. Fresh human blood; it hadn’t even started to congeal. She tried to think back to when she still had blood, and tried to remember anything she knew about clotting times.
“Marvelous.” She felt very cold now. She knew that whomever had left this blood could still be around, hiding in the shadows. Dog, she thought, could follow the trail and find the person.
Yeah, and get killed doing it. She now had the prospect of facing real violence, real close. Chills raced in her belly. This was different from seeing cops in the distance bashing looters. Okay, she said to herself, take it easy. Keep your stupid eyes and ears open. Remember your limitations. Bloody hell. She looked around, not seeing a damn thing.
She drew the gun and thumbed the mode to ready, thinking this might be a good time to check the gun’s action, and see if she could rely on it if she had to. She popped out the ammo-pack, checked the block of rounds.
Seeing the rounds, and then checking again to make sure she had indeed seen what she thought she had seen, Lou swore with particular gusto, not caring about Dog’s presence. “God, those bloody bastards!”
“Ms. Meagher?” Dog looking at her, worried, agitated.
She showed him the ammo-pack. “Blanks! Bloody blanks! The cops switched ammo on me!”
Where am I going to get replacement ammunition for a gun like this?
Lou slapped the pack back in and locked in the feed, furi
ous. She swore out loud. She collapsed into helpless, bent-over, coughing.
Then a thought occurred to her: what else had the cops done to her gun? She stared at the crisp white ceramic finish, the engraved name of the manufacturer, Bausch and Franke, along the barrel. No serial number, she noticed. Someone had gouged it out. What is going on here?
Lou continued to stare at this gun, this very fishy gun, and thought about how the cops hadn’t kept it when they could have.
First chance I get, I’m dumping the bloody thing.
Then, looking around at what had become of her hometown, she sighed, looked back at the gun, and thought, On the other hand… Sad that things had come to this, that she was safer with a gun full of blanks than without it, she pushed open the door to the fire stairs. And noticed more wet blood on the floor, starting to clot. The stairs went up to the residential levels and down into the underground basements, laundry, kitchens, gym and swimming pool areas, and whatever the hell else might be down there these days. She knew that, back in the glory days, there were stories of secret bordellos, drug playgrounds, and similar illegal activities in the bowels of this establishment. These days, it could be just a bunch of storerooms.
Dog, looking around on the floor, said, “Ms. Meagher?”
“What’ve you got?”
The animal pointed his nose at the trail of wet blood-dribble leading upstairs. He turned to look up at her, tail curled between his legs. She bent down, and scratched him behind the ears. “I know just how you feel.”
Up on the eighth floor, with Lou’s back and legs burning, and reeking sweat dripping off her, she made her way along the hallway, looking for room 846. Dog padded along beside her, nose to the floor, following the blood trail. It led all the way to the Tourignon brothers’ room.
Geez, guys, make it hard for me, she thought.
“I don’t like this one little bit,” she muttered under her breath, holding the gun out, cocked and ready. She hoped she looked the part, going for the technique of inspired bluffing.
Near the doorway, there were bloodstains everywhere, including sticky smears around the doorknob.
She was stunned at the incredible stink of the blood and the feeling of dread, too, knowing there was nothing good in that room. Lou wanted to get the hell out.
Dog was looking at her. He was shivering, sitting there next to her.
She took a big breath, uttered a short silent prayer to the patron saint of truly stupid sentimental private eyes, and kicked the door fully open before pulling back to one side, waiting for a reaction.
Nothing happened.
Dog, listening, nodded up at her.
Whispering “okay”, she plunged in, gun drawn and ready to intimidate the crap out of anybody she found. You’d hardly ever need to fire this monstrous bloody gun, she figured. The sheer sight of the big square muzzle in your face would inspire both cooperation and instant bowel action.
Almost immediately, though, the stench of death got to her. “Oh, bloody hell!” she gasped, bile rising. “Where is that coming from?”
It was no great mystery. The trail of gore led to the closet, the door smeared with bloody handprints. There was blood seeping out from under it. “Uh-oh…” Lou covered her nose and mouth and pulled open the door, wishing to any gods listening that she not find what she knew she was about to find.
It was an adult male, knifed to death in his cheap nanofabbed underwear, sitting there in the closet, knees bunched up, head leaning forward. Blood and gore formed a sticky puddle of sludge on the closet floor.
Lou ran out of the room and dry-heaved, leaning against the wall for a long, clammy while, trying to cry. Dog stood with her, whimpering in sympathy.
With no idea how much time had passed, Lou pulled herself into some kind of shape, and decided to venture back in. She was sweating, weak at the knees, with her guts and back aching. Dog followed behind, saying nothing about his own feelings. From the look on his face and his manner, she knew he was suffering. Lou scratched him behind the ears, told him with a scratchy voice that he was a good dog. Dog managed a feeble wag of the tail for that.
None of her wishes had come true. The body was still there, only now he had begun to fall out of the open closet, rolling sideways. It was hard to tell which of the brothers this was.
She forced herself, trying hard not to retch, to check near the body for the murder weapon, but couldn’t find it. Whomever killed this man had been furiously keen to do a thorough job of it. There had been so many lunging stabs, a few slashes across the face, arms, all over the chest and gut. Not even the legs were spared, she saw, unable to comprehend how a man could do this. She guessed, based on what she’d seen in Dog’s memory feed of Michel and Marcel arguing, that this might be one of the brothers, and that their conflict had come to a violent head. Still, it was hard to say without more evidence.
Lou got up, grunting from the pain in her joints, feeling dizzy and sick, her skin clammy. Dog peered at her. “Ms. Meagher, are you all right?”
She said, leaning against the doorway, “You wouldn’t think a dead person would be sickened like this by the sight of another dead person.” It looked as if the victim had been killed in bed, then dragged across the room to the closet.
Dog pointed out, “Ms. Meagher, I should point out that I can smell two blood scents here.”
“Two? So, the victim might have hurt his attacker?”
“It’s possible.” He looked very unhappy with the idea, as if he could almost feel the anger hanging in the room like a mist.
Lou looked around the room, and thought about all the blood she’d seen on the way up here. She imagined a lethal fight for control of a knife, with the victim trying to kill his attacker, even as the attacker tried to kill his victim. It was easy, she reflected, to think of Marcel and Michel in that scene.
Dog looked dubiously towards the closet. “Doesn’t seem very clever, just dumping the body in the closet like that, with everything pointing to it, to say nothing of the smell.”
Lou felt her knees weakening, and she fought another urge to cry. She took some breaths, but with each intake only got gusts of ordure, and that only made her more ill. “I need to get out of here, Dog.” She lurched outside into the corridor, slumped against the wall, gasping. “Oh God, oh God…”
Dog flopped next to her, shivering. His big wet eyes looked up at her. “What if Kid’s hurt?”
“That reminds me,” Lou said. And she told Dog about the strange things she’d heard from his synth-box while he’d been unconscious. “There was a sound like the breaking of ocean surf, but more rhythmic and another, more disturbing one, that could have been Kid choking as something was shoved down his throat.” She explained.
Dog pricked up his ears, staring at her. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Lou sighed, trying to get herself back together. She could still smell the body. Briefly, she wondered if she should call the cops. “Dog — by the time you got up, I had Tom to deal with—”
“You said he wouldn’t get in the way of the investigation.”
“Well, I didn’t know he was gonna come and bloody visit, did I?”
“I still think he’s lying, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Something didn’t feel right. I don’t know.”
Lou ran her hands through her sweat-wet hair. “Yeah, well, we’ll see. I think he’s on the level about his medical condition.”
Dog was looking up and down the hallway. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Lou didn’t want to think about Tom right now. Didn’t want to think about much of anything. “We have to call this in to the cops, Dog. They might not do much about it, but at least we won’t get busted for not reporting it.”
Dog nodded and waited while Lou stood up.
She said to hi
m, once she got herself together, “Do you think you could pick up Kid’s scent in there, despite the blood and everything?”
Dog looked towards the doorway, his black nose wrinkling. “I could give it a try. If Kid spent much time in there, the kidnappers would have to have taken care of him. He has no bladder control to speak of, other than what I could do for him. He has other … sphincters … too.”
“So, the guys would be stuck with a large baby, in other words?” Lou thought this over, chewing on her lip before she remembered she shouldn’t.
“In essence, yes, that would be about right.”
“Right,” Lou said, steeling herself for her third trip into the room. “Ignore the body as much as you can. Look for Kid’s scent, or anything else you can find suggesting Michel and Marcel kept him here. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dog said, though he didn’t look happy about going back in.
Lou managed about fifteen minutes in Room 846 before the stink drove her out, coughing and retching, into the corridor. Dog lasted a bit longer, searching, like a fanatic, through the mess in the room, sniffing everything in sight; looking for some trace of Kid. Finally, Dog came back out and flopped to the floor on the far side of the hall.
“I’m assuming,” Lou said, feeling wretched, “that if you’d found anything promising, you’d have said something by now.”
Dog only whimpered, his eyes huge and wet.
“Thought so,” she said, nodding. “Damn it!”
She reattached Dog’s leash, wincing as she crouched, and wincing more at the pain in her knuckles as she tied the knot on Dog’s collar. “There. Come on, Dog. We have to go talk to the cops.” When she found Dog not budging, she turned back, said to him, managing a smile, “Anonymous call, okay?”
He picked himself up and trotted along.
Down the fire stairs, around the sixth level, Dog suddenly stopped, his head cocked, ears alert. “Wait. Did you hear that, Ms. Meagher?”
Lou looked at the dog. “With these ears? Whatcha got?”
Dog was still looking back up the stairs. “I thought I heard a door slam, back up there. Maybe a voice.”
Orbital Burn Page 9