by John Shirley
“I did warn him,” Forsythe said. “Your friend had very little talent. We can do without him. We'd rather not have to shoot you too. Keep in mind—you won't be going back to prison. You'll be in government custody but...it'll be comfortable. And quite interesting, I promise you.”
Gulcher looked past Forsythe at the sharpshooters.
And very slowly... Gulcher put up his hands. “Fuck it. I'm tired of the noise in this dump. I surrender. Let's go, General.”
***
THE NEXT MORNING. A rooftop in Harlem.
The sun was just breaking above the upper edges of the buildings to the east. Bleak put on a pair of sunglasses and crossed the brownstone's roof to a cornice overlooking the street. He put a booted foot on the cornice and leaned as far forward as he could, taking in the street scene below.
Some blocks south of the rooftop, the Apollo Theatre was still operating, and small shops and soul-food restaurants and old-time record stores bustled on 125th—but much of Harlem had become increasingly gentrified. Rents had doubled, many old brownstone and limestone buildings had gone condo. Chic little bookstore/ coffee shops and galleries and crepe shops with small tables on the sidewalk had cropped up, causing longtime residents to shake their heads and mutter in disgust.
But Bleak was in a remoter Harlem, a short distance from the Harlem River, a relatively untamed neighborhood. A high school across the street, abandoned for lack of funding, was crawling with arcanely psychedelic graffiti. Turfies in sloppy pants and hooded windbreakers, or wearing the new, shiny Slick Up athletic pants, which were finally replacing the low-belt droop, were congregating in clumps next to a tall metal-mesh fence separating the street from the school's cracked and weedy basketball court, where the hoops had long since been pulled off the backboards. Long shadows stretched from fire hydrants and people. A UPS truck rumbled by. There was a line of parked cars, two of them abandoned and burned out. Parked SUVs and vans looked like brightly colored rectangles from up here.
No telling who might be in those vans.
Bleak glanced up at the sky. Choppers out west but none coming his way. A few gulls flashing in the early-morning light. None of the telltale hard glint of camera drones. He felt no one watching him, at that moment.
He hoped he was safe from CCA here. He had made the deal to collar the skip over a phone that couldn't be traced to him; made the arrangement for them to transfer the bounty, the usual 10 percent of the bail bond, to one of Shoella's accounts, when he turned the skip over to NYPD. He was to drop off the perp “at any police precinct.” The CCA couldn't be covering them all. He'd sensed puzzlement about his refusal to come to the bail bonds office in person, but they'd made the deal.
“Vince” at Second Chance had told him a private detective had made some inquiries and all he'd come up with was this building, the last place anyone had seen the skip, one Lucille Donella Rhione,
wanted on a failure-to-appear. Bleak had seen her mug shot in an e-mail: a bottle-blond, lamp-tanned, scowling woman who, according to the bondsman, “likes to stuff her boobs into stretch-fabric tank tops and her ass into really tight stretchy leggings.” She had skipped out after her aunt, the bail “custodian,” put up a pile of money. Lucille was said to be in the company of a violence-prone white drug dealer who liked to call himself Gandalf. Nothing else much was known about him, except sometimes he came to this building to pick up crystal, which he sold somewhere in the Bronx. And he? carried a gun. His aggressive unpredictability was the reason the private eye had dropped the case. “Said we weren't paying him enough to deal with Gandalf.”
Normally Bleak would have hired two or three guys to help him collar the skip. A couple of burly bodyguards to uptown Big Money worked with Bleak in their spare time. But he didn't want them here with the possibility of CCA coming around at any moment. He was going to have to go it alone this time.
Bleak wasn't telepathic, and his precognitive ability was fitful; but everyone who could actively connect with the Hidden had some psychic capacity. His own clairvoyance was fairly minor—his greatest talents lay in manipulation of the Hidden's energy field, and contact with its entities—but when he focused on Lucille Rhione's picture and reached out into the Hidden, he'd got a mental picture of this building. When he'd come to the address he'd been given—there was the building. So the private eye's information had been good: the Hidden seemed to hint the skip was going to be here soon. Maybe tomorrow.
Which was now today. But so far he hadn't seen any white people approach the building.
He paced along the cornices, watching the mix down below, watching the skies for drones between times. Waiting. Thinking things through. Remembering the strange shock when he'd had the psychic contact with Agent Sarikosca. Loraine Sarikosca.
Her name was Loraine...like a character in an old black-and-white movie. Fascinating sound to it... Loraine...
Bleak shook his head. Why was he thinking that? What was up with him?
He needed to get bounty, pick up Muddy, and Cronin if he'd go, reclaim his boat, and get out of town for a while. Head south along the coast in the cabin cruiser, out of state. Find some way to contact Sean without giving himself up to CCA.
If Sean was really alive.
Wouldn't he feel it, if Sean was alive? He'd never really tried to contact Sean's spirit, assuming the boy had been quickly reincarnated. And he'd shied away from the emotional shock that would go with even trying.
Could he contact him now? But Sean was connected with CCA. If he contacted him now, he'd risk putting them in touch with him.
Could Sean be watching him, psychically, for CCA? No. He'd sense it...probably.
Bleak, like other ShadowComm, had ways of keeping psychic surveillance off. When he used the Hidden, he created a mental pulse of psychic white noise, immediately afterward, that blurred the trace of it. He instinctively kept a kind of psychic camouflage around his own emanation. But it didn't always work. There had been the psychic surveillance that had brought the UAV. Krasnoff. And what if—
He never finished the thought. A blond head was bobbing along the sidewalk, below, a woman walking beside a man with a bald head, small, round dark glasses, and a black goatee. The girl in a clinging tank top and stretchy leggings; the guy wore a hoodie, the hood back now, and jeans. Lucille and Gandalf.
Warm to be wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. Kind of funny too that they were out this early, two people in “the life” of drug dealing—and who knew what else.
They walked up to the building, and Bleak drew back, wishing he had his crew with him. This was where he missed them.
There was someone he might use, though. Bleak closed his eyes and pictured a certain man in repairman's coveralls, with GREG sewed on the breast. Greg Berne... Greg Berne...
Greg the Ghost appeared almost immediately; he was there before Bleak opened his eyes to check. He wasn't transparent—but he was suspended a foot over the roof. He had his hands in the pockets of his coveralls.
“Man, you should work for a search-engine company or something,” Bleak told him. “You're fast.”
“I was just thinking about you, and then I heard you calling,” Greg told him. “And here I am. Any news for me?”
“I kind of got a police detective, guy named Roseland, interested in your case. I got a feeling he might look into reopening the whole thing.”
“That Mormon kid, Braithwaite—I think he killed someone else,” Greg said, gazing out across the city with a kind of dreamy sadness. “I was following him for a while, and then I lost him.... Sometimes, see, I gotta go and kinda curl up in the Hidden for a while and, what you call it, recharge... and when I came back to where I left him, he was gone. But the paramedics, they was taking a dead girl out on a stretcher, in the same block, and I heard 'em say she was strangled.”
“Where was this?”
“Manhattan. East Ninety-fifth and Second Avenue.”
“I'll find some way to tell Roseland that murder might be connected to the ones they
tried to hang on you.”
“Thanks, soldier. But, hey—don't use the words hang and you around me, makes me feel sick. Considering how I died.” Greg wasn't smiling. Wasn't joking.
It was always interesting to Bleak that ghosts could feel sick—even though they had no physical bodies, exactly. “Okay, sorry. So how about doing something for me, Greg?”
“Sure as shit would try, there, Sarge.”
“Two people just went into this building...” Bleak described them and gave their names. “I need you to tell me where exactly they're going, how many people in the place, what the scene is. If there's a window on a fire escape, and if it's locked.”
“I got you. Let me have a look.”
Greg sank vertically into the roof, neither slowly nor quickly, as if taking an elevator down.
How do I pull this off? Bleak wondered. It was the woman he needed to take in. But it was the guy he had to worry about. Bleak had a gun with him—he didn't like to even carry them on a skip trace, preferring, as most professionals did, the element of surprise, a couple of burly helpers, and handcuffs. He could maybe use the gun to get the bald Gandalf to surrender, if he got the drop on him —and if the guy resisted, he could knock him cold, then grab the girl and cuff her. He had pepper spray, could use that on her if she struggled.... He didn't want to have to throw an energy bullet and ruin his cover. “Bleak?”
It sounded like a voice coming out of the air, to Bleak, but someone without his gifts would have heard nothing but a sigh on the wind, at most.
“Yeah, Greg, I'm here.” Saying it out loud. To the wind.
“They're sitting in a top-floor apartment almost right under you, six oh three. I was in the room, watching 'em. They 've been up all night, them two, from what they were saying. So this is like the end of the night for 'em, ya see. They 're doing lines of speed. Guy they 're buying it from, he don't seem like he wants to use it himself. He just watches them and seems to think they're kinda funny. The girls missing a couple teeth—them meth heads lose their teeth from the shit. Let's see—oh, yeah, the back window on the fire escape—it's painted shut. Wait, I'm coming up there.”
Greg ascended partway into view, up to his waist in the roof. He brushed at his face. “I always think, when I go through a wall, that I'm gonna get bugs and cobwebs on my face. Course I don't, but—”
“Greg—could you do one more thing for me? I'm going down to the hall outside the apartment. They're getting toasted in there. When they're toasted, they'll pop out of the toaster and come out into the hall. I need to know when they're about to head for the door. You see any guns on them so far?”
“I was looking, the hoodie guy might have one under his sweatshirt in front, but I dunno, Sarge. Couldn't tell for certain.”
“Okay. Maybe when he stands up you'd see it.”
“You got it. Anything I can do. Meet you down there”—he began to sink into the roof again, saluting, army-style, as he went down—”Sergeant Bleak.” Bleak returned the salute, then went to the roof doorway.
He padded down the stairs to the sixth floor, slipped quietly through the hall to the doorway, passing a small black girl carrying a bag of groceries; the little girl looked at him curiously but hurried past. Bleak found the apartment, the metal door thickly painted in dull red, the number 603 stenciled on it in black. Old jimmy marks scarred the door's lock. He looked at the elevator, which creaked noisily as someone used it, and the stairway, about twenty paces back, and decided they'd probably use the stairway. Tweakers going downstairs were too impatient to wait for a slow old elevator.
“Bleak? You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Bleak muttered.
“They'regoing to the door. “
“Just those two, no one going with them?”
“Right. And when the bald guy stood up, I did see a gun in his waistband. Man, I wish I could pick up a baseball bat or something, I'd back you up. I'd—”
“You've done a great job for me, Greg,” Bleak murmured softly, hurrying to the stairway. “Nothing else needed.”
“He looked kind of bulky, there, Bleak. I was thinking— “ “Quiet, I've got to concentrate,” Bleak whispered.
He heard the door open, down the hall behind him, and walked casually into the stairway as if he were on the way out of the building himself. The stairwell was dusty, unevenly lit, graffiti-tagged, and painted the same fleshy beige. He walked down to the next landing, around the stairwell's turn, down two steps...and waited.
He heard them coming, Lucille Rhione and her old man. Bleak drew his gun, but didn't put his finger on the trigger. He held the gun like a club—but so he could get to the trigger fast if he needed it —and had the cuffs ready in his left hand.
He had a “this isn't going to go very well” feeling—something that came from the Hidden, not from his own nervousness, and that feeling usually turned out to be right.
They were chattering as they came to the stairwell, started clumping down toward him, the girl saying, “We cash out, we can get a better camera, hire them hos from Georgie's, they'll do a video, we can get that into Skyline distrib—”
My, my, Bleak thought. Entrepreneurs. In cheap porn.
And the bald Gandalf, his scalp tattooed with an intricately knotted Celtic symbol, was talking really fast. “Don't be getting too much ahead, I don't know if we're getting outta this, those people got us out of the shit-house set this up, some fucking weirdos, why should I trust them? I got an ounce of shit on me, maybe this is just a fucking setup, maybe it's to get us busted, and Jerry upstairs too, maybe he—”
What does he mean “those people got us out”? Bleak wondered, but it was too late to wonder any more than that, they were coming to his landing, and he was pointing his gun at Gandalf.
“Freeze right there,” Bleak said, stepping in closer. “I'm here for Lucille, I have a warrant, she's wanted for failure-to-appear. She's coming with me—”
“Gan-dalllllf?” the woman squealed. “They never said he'd be in here with us, like this—”
“It is some kinda fucking setup, they said he wouldn't have a gun,” Gandalf chattered, snarling. And pulling his gun as he said it.
Bleak brought his own gun barrel down on Gandalf s bald head—but the guy was hyperalert with methedrine and he jerked back at the last split second, Bleak's gun barrel hitting him glancinglyjust above the left eye, knocking his sunglasses off, creasing his scalp enough to make blood spurt, but with no solid impact, so that Bleak knew that Gandalf wasn't going down yet.
“Gan-dalllllffl.” the girl shrieked, scrambling back. “They said he-”
Staggering for balance, Gandalf showed snaggly, yellow teeth in an animal grimace, his eyes looking as steely as the studs piercing his upper lip and brow. He raised his gun, a black Glock nine.
Oh, shit, Bleak thought, as Gandalf raised the gun, I've got no choice. Not really even having time to think the words, except oh, shit—just realizing it.
He had no time to reach into the Hidden for an energy bullet, or to condense the field, turn the drug dealer's bullet. He had only one option.
His hand found the trigger and he fired directly into the center of that sweatshirt, the middle of Gandalf's chest—Bleak's gun roared, the Rhione woman screamed, and Gandalf was knocked backward with the impact of the shot, slung awkwardly against the iron handrail. The Glock fired, but because Gandalf was off-balance, the shot went wild, ricocheting behind Bleak. The drug dealer's little, round-lensed sunglasses had fallen on the steps. Bleak shifted his stance, kicked the Glock from Gandalf's hand, and swung his own gun at the cowering, crying woman. She scrambled away from him backward. As if he were a horror-movie monster.
“Just come with me, Lucille,” Bleak said. “No one's going to hurt you. We'll call an ambulance for—”
“Fucking vulture!” Gandalf snarled, kicking Bleak's left knee, knocking him off-balance.
Bleak started to fall, managed to partly catch himself on the other railing with the heel of his gun hand.
He braced and used his left foot to kick the dealer in the face. Felt bone and cartilage crunching.
Gandalf yipped in pain and recoiled. Bleak got his feet under him, realizing that Gandalf had a military-grade bulletproof vest on. Where'd he get it? Not unthinkable a dealer would have one, but they were scarcely “standard issue.”
The dealer was clutching his bloodied nose, crimson streaming between his fingers, but he had picked up the Glock with his other hand, was swinging it toward Bleak—grinning bloodily—Bleak had no choice but to bring his own pistol around and shoot Gandalf in the head. One shot, a single round, in the forehead.
The dealer's head snapped back, his eyes crossed, and he sagged, instantly lifeless.
Lucille Rhione's scream was long and piercing.
“Fuck. Okay, well, Lucille, that was self-defense,” Bleak added, the words sounding false even to him.
It was self-defense, he told himself; he knew he'd be dead if he hadn't done it. He had a strong connection to the After, like everyone who lived with an awareness of the Hidden—but he also had the survival instincts every human being had.
He stood over the dealer's still twitching body. Then realized Lucille was crawling up the stairs, sobbing as she went. Dragging a long-strapped purse along the stairs after her, bump bump bump.
“Hold it, Lucille. I'm sorry I had to shoot your old man, but you've still got to...”
She had to do what? Should he let her go? If he turned her in, he'd have to explain about this shooting.
“They're coming,” she sobbed. “And they're gonna get your ass and I'll tell 'em you killed him, you fucking pig.”
I should have come at the guy from behind, stuck a gun to his head—but the girl might've taken off running.
Then it struck Bleak that she'd said, They're coming. And Gandalf had said something about someone getting them “out of the shit-house.” “Who's coming, Lucille?”
But Bleak knew. He could hear the choppers churning the air over the building now. Lucille was no bail skip. She'd already been in jail. CCA had got her out and used Second Chance Bail Bonds to lure him here...and to keep him busy. “Lucille, you dumb bitch,” Gandalf snarled.