by J. D. Robb
"Dee." Zeke set down the single duffel bag he'd packed for New York and added his sister's two sacks to the one he already carried. "You shouldn't have bought all this stuff."
"I remember how you eat." She grinned over her shoulder at him and didn't add that most of her larder consisted of things no respectable Free-Ager would consider consuming. Fat- and chemical-laden snacks, red meat substitutes, alcohol.
"It's robbery what they charge for fresh fruit here, and I don't think those apples you bought came off a tree in the last ten days." Plus he sincerely doubted they'd been organically grown.
"Well, we're kind of short on orchards in Manhattan."
"Still. You should've let me pay for it."
"This is my city, and you're the first of the family to visit me." She pushed open the door, turned to take the sacks.
"There's got to be some Free-Ager co-ops around."
"I don't really do any co-opping or bartering these days. Don't have the time. I pull in a decent salary, Zeke. Don't fuss. Anyway." She blew her hair out of her eyes. "Come on in. It's not much, but it's home now."
He stepped in behind her, scanned the living area with its sagging sofa, cluttered tables, bright poster prints. The window shade was down, something she hurried over to remedy.
She didn't have much of a view, but she enjoyed the rush and rumble of the street below. When the light shot in, she noted that the apartment was every bit as untidy as the street below.
And remembered, abruptly, she'd left a disc text on the mind of the serial torture killer in her computer. She'd have to get it out and bury it somewhere.
"If I'd known you were coming, I'd've picked up a little."
"Why? You never picked up your room at home."
He grinned at her and headed to the tiny kitchen to set down the food sack. Actually, it relieved him to see her living space was so much like her. Steady, unpretentious, basic.
He noted a slow drip from the faucet, a blister burn in the countertop. He could fix those for her, he thought. Though it surprised him she hadn't done so herself.
"I'll do this." She stripped off her coat, her cap, and hurried in behind him. "Go put your things in the bedroom. I'll bunk on the couch while you're here."
"No, you won't." Already he was poking in cabinets to put things away. If he was shocked by the stock in her pantry, particularly the bright red and yellow bag of Tasty Tater Treats, he didn't mention it. "I'll take the sofa."
"It's a pull-out, and fairly roomy." And she thought she probably had clean sheets for it. "But it's lumpy."
"I can sleep anywhere."
"I know. I remember all those camping trips. Give Zeke a blanket and a rock, and he's down for the count." Laughing, she wrapped her arms around him, pressed her cheek to his back. "God, I missed you. I really missed you."
"We—Mom and Dad and the rest of us—hoped you'd make it home for Christmas."
"I couldn't." She stepped back as he turned. "Things got complicated." And she wouldn't speak of that, wouldn't tell him what had been happening, what had been done. "But I'll make time soon. I promise."
"You look different, Dee." He touched his big hand to her cheek. "Official. Settled in. Happy."
"I am happy. I love my work." She lifted her hand to his, pressed down on it. "I don't know how to explain it to you, to make you understand."
"You don't have to. I can see it." He pulled out a six-pack of juice tubes and opened the tiny friggie. Understanding wasn't always the answer. He knew that. Accepting was. "I feel bad about pulling you away from your job."
"Don't. I haven't had any personal time in…" She shook her head as she stuffed boxes and bags onto shelves. "Hell, who remembers? Dallas wouldn't have green-lighted it if we'd been jammed."
"I liked her. She's strong, with dark places. But she's not hard."
"You're right." Head angled, Peabody turned back to him. "And what did Mom tell you about peeking at auras without consent?"
He flushed a little, grinned around it. "She's responsible for you. I didn't look that close, and I like to know who's looking out for my big sister."
"Your big sister's doing a pretty good job of looking out for herself. Why don't you unpack?"
"That'll take me about two minutes."
"Which is about twice the time it'll take me to give you the grand tour." She took his arm and led him across the living space into the bedroom.
"This is about it." A bed, a table, and lamp, a single window. The bed was made—that was habit and training. There was a book on the nightstand. She'd never understood why anyone could choose to curl up with a palm unit and disc. But the fact that it was a grisly murder mystery made her wince when Zeke flipped it over.
"Busman's holiday?"
"I guess."
"You always did like this kind of stuff." He set the book back down. "It comes down to good and evil, doesn't it, Dee? And good's supposed to win when it's over."
"That's the way it works for me."
"Yeah, but what's evil there for in the first place?"
She might have sighed, thinking of all she'd seen, what she'd done, but she kept her gaze level on his. "Nobody's got the answer to that, but you've got to know it's there and deal with it. That's what I do, Zeke."
He nodded, studied her face. He knew it was different from the routine she'd had when she'd moved to New York and put on a uniform. Then it had been traffic incidents, squabbles to break up, and paperwork. Now she was attached to homicide. She dealt with death every day and rubbed shoulders with those who caused it.
Yes, she looked different, Zeke acknowledged. The things she'd seen and done and felt were there behind those dark, serious eyes.
"Are you good at it?"
"Pretty good." Now she smiled a little. "I'm going to be better."
"You're learning from her. From Dallas."
"Yeah." Peabody sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. "Before she took me on as her aide, I studied her. I read her files, I crammed on her technique. I never expected to be able to work with her. Maybe that was luck, maybe it was fate. We were taught to respect both."
"Yeah." He sat next to her.
"She's giving me a chance to find out what I can do. What I can be." Peabody drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. "Zeke, we were raised to take our own path, to pursue it, and to do the best we were capable of. That's what I'm doing."
"You think I don't approve, don't understand."
"I worry about it." She slid her hand down to the regulation stunner strapped to her belt. "About what you—especially you—feel."
"You shouldn't. I don't have to understand what you do to know it's what you need to do."
"You were always the easiest of us, Zeke."
"Nah." He bumped his shoulder against hers. "It's just when you're the last coming up, you get to watch how everyone else screws up. Okay if I take a shower?"
"Sure." She patted his hand and rose. "Water takes awhile to come up to temp."
"No hurry."
When he got his bag and took it into the bath, she pounced on the kitchen 'link, called Charles Monroe, and left a message on his service canceling their date that night.
However wise and broad-minded and adult he'd sounded, she didn't see her baby brother embracing her casual, and just lately spotty, relationship with a licensed companion.
• • •
She might have been surprised at just how much her little brother would understand. As he stood under the spray, let the hot water ease away the faint stiffness from travel, he was thinking of a relationship that wasn't—couldn't be—a relationship. He was thinking of a woman. And he told himself he had no right to think of her.
She was a married woman, and she was his employer.
He had no right to think of her as anything else, less to feel this shaky heat in his gut at the knowledge he would see her again very soon.
But he couldn't get her face out of his mind. The sheer beauty of it. The sad eyes, the soft voice, t
he quiet dignity. He told himself it was a foolish, even childish crush. Horribly inappropriate. But he had no choice but to admit here, in private, where honesty was most valued, that she was one of the primary reasons he'd taken the commission and made the trip east.
He wanted to see her again, no matter how that wanting shamed him.
Still, he wasn't a child who believed he could have whatever he needed.
It would be good for him to see her here, in her own home, with her husband. He liked to think it was the circumstances of how they'd met, of where they'd met, that had caused this infatuation. She'd been alone, so obviously lonely, and had looked so delicate, so cool and golden in the deep desert heat.
It would be different here because she would be different here. And so would he. He would do the job she had asked him to do and nothing more. He would spend time with the sister he had missed so deeply it sometimes made his heart ache. And he would see, at long last, the city and the work that had pulled her away from her family.
The city, he could already admit, fascinated him.
As he toweled off, he tried to see through the tiny, steam-misted window. Even that blurry, narrow view made his blood pump just a little faster.
There was so much of it, he thought now. Not the open vastness of desert and mountain and field he'd grown used to since his family had relocated in Arizona a few years before. But so much of everything rammed and jammed into one small space.
There was so much he wanted to see. So much he wanted to do. As he hitched on a fresh shirt and jeans, he began to speculate, to plot, and to plan. When he stepped back out into the living area, he was eager to begin.
He saw his sister busily tidying and grinned. "You make me feel like company."
"Well…" She'd tucked away every murder and mayhem disc and file she could find. It would have to do. She glanced over, blinked.
Wow, was all she could think. Why hadn't she noticed in her first rush of delight in seeing him? Her baby brother had grown up. And he was a genuine eye treat. "You look good—sort of filled out and everything."
"It's just a clean shirt."
"Right. Do you want some juice, some tea?"
"Ah…I really want to go out. I've got this whole guidebook thing. I studied it on the way east. You know how many museums there are in Manhattan alone?"
"No, but I bet you do." Inside her regulation shoes, Peabody's toes curled and flexed. Her feet, she decided, were about to get a workout. "Let me change, and we'll check them out."
An hour later, she was almost tearfully grateful for the airsoles, for the thick soft wool of her slacks, and the lining of her winter coat. It wasn't just museums Zeke was after. It was everything.
He took videos with the palm unit he told her he'd splurged on for the trip. It would have been ripped off a dozen times if she hadn't kept her eyes peeled for street thieves. No matter how often she lectured him to watch himself, to recognize the signs and the moves, he just smiled and nodded.
They rode to the top of the Empire State Building, stood in the freezing, bitter wind until the tips of her ears went numb. And his pale gray eyes glowed with the wonder of it. They toured the Met, gawked at the storefronts along Fifth, stared up at the tourist blimps, bumped along the sky glides, and gnawed on stale pretzels he'd insisted on buying from a glide-cart.
Only deep and abiding love could have convinced her to agree to skidding over the ice rink at Rockefeller Center when her calf muscles were already weeping from three hours of urban hiking.
But he made her remember what it was to be stunned by the city, to see all it had to offer. She realized, watching him be awed, time after time, that she'd forgotten to look.
And if she had to flash the badge she'd tucked in her coat pocket at a gimlet-eyed grifter looking to score the tourist, it didn't spoil the day.
Still, by the time she finally talked him into stopping for a hot drink and a bite to eat, she'd decided it was imperative she outline some very specific do's and don'ts. He was going to be on his own a great deal when he wasn't working, she thought. He might have been twenty-three, but he had all the naive trust in his fellow man of a sheltered five-year-old.
"Zeke." She warmed her hands on a bowl of lentil soup and tried not to think about the soy-beef burger she'd spied on the menu. "We should talk about what you're going to do while I'm working."
"I'll be building cabinets."
"Yeah, but my hours are…" She gestured vaguely. "You never know. You'll be spending a lot of time on your own, so—"
"You don't have to worry about me." He grinned at her, spooned up his own soup. "I've been off the farm before."
"You've never been here before."
He sat back, shot her the exasperated look brothers reserve for nagging sisters. "I carry my money in my front pocket. I don't talk to the people who cart around those cases full of wrist units and PPCs, and I don't move in to play that card game like the one they had going on Fifth Avenue, even though it looks like fun."
"It's a con. You can't win."
"Still looked like fun." But he wouldn't brood on it, not when she had that line dug between her eyebrows. "I don't strike up conversations on the subway."
"Not with a chemi-head looking to score." She rolled her eyes. "Jesus, Zeke, the guy was practically foaming at the mouth. Anyhow." She waved that away. "I don't expect you to lock yourself into the apartment on your free time. I just want you to be careful. It's a great city, but it eats people every day. I don't want one of them to be you."
"I'll be careful."
"And you'll stick to the major tourist areas, carry your palm-link?"
"Yes, Mom." He grinned at her again, and looked so young Peabody's heart stuttered. "So, you up for the Fly Over Manhattan tour?"
"Sure." She managed to smile instead of wince. "You bet. Soon as we're done here." She took her time with the soup. "When are you supposed to get started on this job?"
"Tomorrow. We set it all up before I left. They approved the plans, the estimates. They paid for my transpo and expenses."
"You said they saw your work when they were out in Arizona on vacation?"
"She did." And just thinking of it had his pulse running a little faster. "She bought one of the carvings I'd done for Camelback Cooperative Artworks. Then she and Silvie—I don't think you ever met Silvie, she's a glass artist. She was running the co-op that day and she mentioned how I'd designed and built the cabinets and counters and the displays. And then Mrs. Branson mentioned how she and her husband were looking for a carpenter, and—"
"What?" Peabody's head snapped up.
"They were looking for a carpenter, and—"
"No, what was that name?" She grabbed his hand, clamped down. "Did you say Branson?"
"That's right. The Bransons hired me. Mr. and Mrs. B. Donald Branson. He owns Branson T and T. Good tools."
"Oh." Peabody set down her spoon. "Oh, shit, Zeke."
• • •
Fixer's was a grungy smear in an area not known for its tidiness. Just off Ninth, a bare block from the entrance to the tunnel, Fixer's was a dilapidated storefront mined with security bars, patched with intercoms and peek lenses, and as welcoming as a cockroach.
The one-way windows offered the passerby a dingy field of black. The door was reinforced steel, studded with a complicated series of locks that made the police seal look like a joke.
People who loitered in the area knew how to mind their own business—which was usually second-story work. One glance at Eve had most of them finding something else to do and somewhere else to do it.
Eve used her master on the police seal, relieved that the sweeper team hadn't engaged Fixer's locks. At least she wouldn't have to spend time decoding them. It made her think of Roarke and wonder how long it would have taken him to slide right through them.
Since a part of her would have enjoyed watching him do just that, she scowled as she stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
It smelled—not quite foul but c
lose, she decided. Sweat, grease, bad coffee, old piss. "Lights, full," she ordered, then narrowed her eyes at the sudden brightness.
The interior of the shop was no more cheerful than the exterior. Not a single chair invited a customer to sit and relax. The floor, the sickly green of baby vomit, carried the grime and scars of decades of wear. The way her boots stuck and made sucking noises as she walked told her that mopping up hadn't been a major occupation of the deceased.
Gray metal shelves rose up one wall and were jammed full in a system that defied all logic.
Miniscreens, security cams, porta-links, desk logs, communication and entertainment systems crowded together in varying stages of repair or harvesting.
Jumbled on the other side of the room were more units she took to be complete as the hand-lettered sign above warned that pickup must be made within thirty days or the customer defaulted the merchandise.
She counted five No Credit Given postings in a room no larger than fifteen feet wide.
Fixer's sense of humor—for lack of a better term—was evidenced by the dangling human skull over the cashier's counter. The sign under the sagging jaw read The Last Shoplifter.
"Yeah, that's a laugh riot," Eve murmured and huffed out a breath.
Damn if the place didn't give her the creeps, she realized. The only window was behind her and barred. The only outside door mired with locks. She glanced up, studied the security monitor. It had been left running and gave her a full view of the street. On another, securing the interior, she could study herself on the crystal-clear screen.
Nobody got in, she decided, unless Fixer wanted them in.
She made a note to ask Sally at NJPSD for copies of the security discs, exterior and interior.
She crossed to the counter, noted that the computer stationed there was an ugly hybrid of scavenged parts. And in all probability, she mused, ran with more speed, efficiency, and reliability than the one in her office at Cop Central.
"Engage, computer."
When nothing happened, she frowned and attempted to boot it manually. The screen shimmered.
Warning: This unit protected by fail safe. Code proper password or voice print within thirty seconds of this message or disengage.