by L. A. Graf
“Oh, all right.” Susan sighed and gave him a little push toward the elevators. “Go do your policeman stuff if you have to.”
“I’ll be back before the next session starts.” Once again, he found himself watching protectively after her while she turned into the room, uneasy at the way the emerging symposium crowd swirled around her. It wasn’t until he saw her find a seat beside Cathy that he finally felt his feet loosen themselves from the carpet and take him toward the elevators.
Rounding the corner, George was startled to see a brand new line of red velvet rope fencing off part of the vestibule. Three gray-suited humans stood near the isolated elevator, carefully guarding its open doors. As soon as they caught sight of him, one of the males pulled out a pocket radio and spoke into it while the female started toward him.
George frowned, recognizing the clean-cut efficiency of the maneuver. If I were Matthew, he thought, I’d say those looked like FBI agents. The woman reached him and nodded politely, but when her eyes scanned the balcony behind him rather than meeting his, George was sure of his guess.
“If you’re going up to your room, you need to use this elevator now,” she informed him, professionally brisk. “Name, please.”
“George Francisco.” George wondered why she couldn’t read it from his badge, then saw she had pulled out a pocket computer with a microphone attached. Checking his voice prints, he guessed. Was the FBI afraid that Purists were disguising themselves as Newcomers?
The computer beeped and the young woman stepped back, allowing him access to the roped-off area. “All right, you’re clear to go up.” She walked him toward the waiting elevator. “You don’t have to worry about hitting any buttons now. It’s programmed to stop at your floor.”
And nowhere else, George guessed, disturbed by this sudden control over his movements. It reminded him too much of the ship, of cages and locked doors and kleezantsun telling him where to go. He was so busy trying to dismiss the ugly images in his mind that he barely watched the elevator display. The efficient hiss of the lifting motors seemed to take longer than usual, but it wasn’t until the doors opened on a sunlit and completely unfamiliar vestibule that George realized what the FBI had done.
“Francisco.” David Jordan greeted him from inside an elaborate nest of communications equipment spread over what must have been a concierge’s desk. Behind him, the windows of the penthouse lounge opened onto a spectacular sixteenth-floor view of rivers and distant traffic. “I’m glad you came up. We’re trying to decide where to put our surveillance cameras.” He gestured down the hall to a group of men armed with ladders and coils of wire. “Should we scan all the room doors or just concentrate on the fire exits?”
It was a transparent attempt to make George feel like they were all part of one big team, and that only made it harder for the gannaum to take a deep breath with the scalding bite of anger in his throat. “That depends on whether you think one of us is going to get killed,” George said acidly, “or is going to be the killer.”
“If we do our jobs right, there won’t be any more killings.” Jordan scowled at him. “What’s your problem? All I’m trying to do is get as much advance warning as I can.”
“Advance warning.” George strode over from the elevator, unable to contain his anger any longer. “Why didn’t you give us some advance warning before you moved us all up to this floor? Who gave you the right to do that?”
“I couldn’t take the chance that the news would leak out before we had secured all the rooms up here,” Jordan leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and tucking his hands in his armpits. The posture signified defensiveness to a Tenctonese. George wasn’t sure why it meant the same thing to humans, who didn’t have sensitive glands to protect in those areas, but apparently it did. “I couldn’t risk that. My orders from D.C. were very clear on that point.”
“Orders from D.C.?” Awareness flooded through George. “Then this isn’t a cooperative operation with the Pittsburgh police?”
Jordan shook his head. “Not any more. I spoke to my department chief in D.C. this morning, and he told me that the bureau has agreed to cover security at this symposium. As of now, you can consider us officially in charge.”
Silence fell while George considered this sudden about-face from yesterday. Only one explanation made sense. “There’s pressure coming down from the legislature?”
Jordan had the grace to redden slightly. “Representative MacLaine is upset about the murders, and she’s influential with the press.” His mouth quirked. “She’s also grateful to the Tenctonese voters who supported her in the last election.”
“So she convinced someone in the bureau to protect us.” George gave the human a sharp look. “Well, what is the FBI going to do to protect us that the Pittsburgh police haven’t already done? Besides moving us to the sixteenth floor without telling us?”
Jordan took a deep breath, as if this was the question he’d been waiting for. “The move is the main protection. Putting everyone up here will eliminate window access from that roofed portico just below the third floor.” Despite his defensive posture, the federal agent managed to sound confident and completely in charge. George wondered if Sikes was right when he claimed they taught them how to talk like that at the FBI Academy. “We’ve also reprogrammed the elevator you came up on so it’s the only one that can reach this floor. It can’t stop to pick up passengers anywhere except the ballroom floor, and we’ve got that access guarded.”
“What about the fire stairs?” George demanded.
“That’s a bit of a problem,” Jordan admitted sheepishly. He cast a disgruntled look down the hall, where men hammered camera mounts into the ceiling. “We can’t block them off for safety reasons, but we’ll post guards at all of them and keep the whole floor monitored for intruders. That should be good enough.”
“Good enough for government work!” George put his hands on his hips in exasperation. “Jordan, did it ever occur to you that we Tenctonese might like to be consulted on this move before you made it? That we might not be willing to just take your word that security here will be ‘good enough’?”
“Hey, it was your congresswoman who pulled the strings that got me here!” Jordan retorted. “If you don’t like the way we’re handling things—”
He broke off when a deep voice rang down the hallway, a staccato shout of rage. George recognized a familiar Tenctonese curse and relaxed so suddenly he felt his stomach muscles ripple. He’d almost forgotten about his missing Newcomer during the argument with Jordan, but his body obviously hadn’t. More shouts came down the hallway, human yelps of shock and indignation.
“Oh, hell!” Jordan vaulted out from behind the desk and ran for the hall. “Goddammit, nothing showed on the monitors!”
“They aren’t all hooked up yet.” George sprinted after him, not waiting for permission to follow. “Which Tenctonese came up before me?”
“That Olympic runner, or whatever she is—Ann Arbor.” At the end of the corridor something crashed against a wall, and George heard the sound of moaning. Jordan must have heard it, too. He cursed again and dove recklessly into the alcove at the end of the hall. A few seconds later, he staggered out of it again, flung backwards by the force of another body hitting his. Both men went down in a tangle of flailing arms and curses.
“Golitko!” Jordan struggled with his blindly thrashing colleague until George reached in and lifted the smaller man away. Golitko tried to wrestle free, then seemed to realize he wasn’t fighting anyone anymore. He subsided into the desperate, whooping gasps of someone who’s been thoroughly winded.
“Who hit you?” demanded Jordan. Golitko pointed wordlessly at the half-open door of Room 1612. Inside, George could hear the raspy breathing of another human, probably unconscious. Then cloth scuffed along the rug, loud enough even for the humans to hear.
George threw a glance at Jordan and saw him nod, then edged in toward the narrow opening. The FBI agent paralleled his course on the other side of t
he door, pulling his gun from its holster as he went. He paused when George held up a warning hand. The scraping sound got louder, then turned abruptly into a thump. The door swung open without either of them touching it, and a limp form in a torn suit fell through it.
“You!” Ann Arbor lifted one strongly muscled arm and pointed an accusing finger at David Jordan. The athlete’s big-boned face wore an expression of disgust. “You stole my medals!”
“What?” Jordan stared back at her, so startled that he forgot to reholster his gun. “What medals?”
“My Olympic medals.” Arbor accusingly showed him a handful of empty satin ribbons. “Your agents took them when they moved my luggage up here!”
George glanced down at the unconscious man at his feet, still hearing Golitko’s gasps behind him. “Did you catch them in the act, Ms. Arbor?”
“No,” she admitted grudgingly. “But who else could have done it? They’re the ones who broke into our rooms without permission and moved all our things!”
Jordan finally remembered to put his gun away, then pushed his mop of tousled hair out of his face. “We had a legal warrant to enter your room, Ms. Arbor,” he pointed out with some dignity. “And it was a hotel employee with a passkey who let us in, in groups of three at a time. I doubt if anyone could have stolen anything without one of the other agents noticing.”
“You could have all been in collusion,” the tall linnaum said stubbornly. “These two were trying to break into my room again just now, looking for something else to steal!”
George thought it best to intervene. “Ms. Arbor.” He reached forward, tugging her gently around to see the ladder in the alcove behind him. “These men were installing a security camera above the fire door. The noise you heard was them hammering on the ceiling, not on your door.”
“Oh.” Ann Arbor’s face stayed stiffly indignant for another moment then melted into a smile of completely unexpected charm. “Oh, dear. Did I beat them up for nothing?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” George bent to help the groaning young man to his feet, dusting off his well-tailored suit. “After all, they did move all our belongings up here without even telling us. I think they deserve to be shot-putted through a few doors for that.” He aimed an exasperated look at Jordan, who had the grace to redden in response. “And I suspect I won’t be the only Tenctonese who thinks so.”
C H A P T E R 1 1
THE ADDRESS SIKES had gotten from the woman at the copy shop was for someplace in a suburb half an hour’s bus ride from downtown. He figured out how to get there by waiting at various street corners, showing the address to bus drivers who stopped, and asking if they could take him there. The sixth driver said yes, and Sikes dropped $2.50 on the loudest, roughest, smelliest transportation this side of the L.A. Freeway. The man next to him talked softly and incessantly about God’s fears for incestuous sinners, and Sikes was working on a headache long before the bus dropped him off in a cheap hotel’s age-cratered parking lot.
Squinting against a spitting snow, he waited for the bus to pull away before digging the ugly flyer out of his pocket and checking the address again. It said Chuck’s. The hotel marquee read Chez Royale. “This is nuts,” Sikes grumbled to himself. He jogged across the parking lot anyway, though, figuring he could at least stay warm in the lobby until the next bus came along.
The interior was dark and badly decorated. Oddly colored sofas and coffee tables, looking like leftovers from the Bates Motel, were scattered unartfully across a carpet whose pattern had long ago been obscured by dirt and traffic. Overhead, dust webs clung to a huge chandelier that no one had bothered to reach for cleaning in decades, and a lumpy gray rock nearly as tall as Sikes stood under glass in one corner. Someone had sliced the rock open to display the purple crystals inside, but a thick accumulation of dust kept them from looking as impressive as Sikes suspected they really were.
The boy at the front desk sat with his back to Sikes, his attention firmly fixed on a palmtop television hanging from a ventilation grate by a twisted length of aluminum foil. Sikes tried to repress a sting of guilt when he saw the tiny Newcomer on the screen and remembered where he was supposed to be. He hoped Cathy wouldn’t be speaking until at least some time this evening, when he might have a chance of getting back in time to hear her. She’d kill him if he didn’t.
Pushing those worries from his mind, he briskly slapped the little bell on the desktop.
The boy didn’t turn. “Yeah?”
Sikes rattled the crumpled paper in a bid for attention. “I’m looking for Chuck’s,” he began, and the kid jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“The basement.”
“What?”
“The basement,” the kid said, with some irritation. “Go to the elevator and press B.”
Didn’t seem to matter what city you were in, a smart-ass was a smart-ass everywhere. “Gee, thanks,” Sikes drawled. “I really appreciate all your incredible effort.”
The kid leaned over to turn up the volume on his TV. “No problem.”
It wasn’t worth it.
The elevator groaned a little on its way down the single floor, then took forever to open its pitted doors onto the concrete and cinder-block basement. Directly across the hallway, a floor-to-ceiling wrought iron gate marked the entrance to a gym. A sign proclaiming Chuck’s was crookedly hung above the doorway. A high-class place, indeed.
“Hello?” Sikes called, looking through the grill-work. “Anybody home?” He tugged experimentally on the gate. It rattled fiercely but didn’t move.
“We’re closed!” somebody yelled from out of sight down one of the hallways beyond the gym’s front desk.
“It’s two in the afternoon,” Sikes countered.
“Tough shit, we’re still closed.” His voice drew clearer as his shadow appeared on the wall ahead of his arrival. “We close early Fridays, especially when—” Then he rounded the corner, arms loaded with sweat suits and towels, and slammed to a stop when he saw Sikes waiting for him.
Sikes grinned at him with malicious delight. “Well, hello, Darren. What’s a sleazeball like you doing in a nice place like this?”
Darren Pickett dropped everything he was carrying and ran.
Sikes grumbled. “Oh, man, I hate it when they get stupid.” At least with Pickett this didn’t come as any big surprise. “Now I’m gonna have to chase him and knock him down.”
Planting one foot against the grillwork, Sikes caught the top of the gate and hauled himself up and over. The space near the ceiling was narrow enough that George would never have made it through. Sikes grinned to himself as he thumped to the ground on the other side; at least there were some advantages left in being a scrawny human amidst all that Tenctonese brawn.
Sikes caught the door frame on his way into the hall, using it to swing around the corner after Pickett without slowing. He expected the hallway to end in a fire door, probably left ajar from Pickett’s hasty departure, instead, he had to nearly plant both hands on the floor to keep from sliding headlong into Pickett. Good thing he was bent over, too, otherwise Pickett’s first swing with the unloaded weight bar would have taken his head clean off.
Sikes scrabbled backward and bounced to his feet again. He felt a secret surge of relief when Pickett chose to stand his ground instead of following. “What are you doin’, Darren?”
Pickett uneasily shifted his grip on the bar, aneorexic frame trembling with either excitement or terror. Sikes hoped it was the latter. “Leave me alone, Sikes,” Pickett insisted frantically. “Jesus! Don’t you have anything better to do than follow me all the way from L.A.?”
“You kidding? I live my life for you, Darren.” He tried to take a step forward but stopped when Pickett’s whole body jerked with tension. “You swing that at me again, and I’ll break your arm.”
“I’ll sue! You’re a cop!”
Sikes grinned at him. “Not here, I’m not. I’m just a concerned citizen, protecting myself from a crazed out-of-state bigot.”<
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That at least enticed Pickett to hesitate and lower the bar by a small degree. Sikes thought about trying to close the distance between them again, then saw how rapidly Pickett was breathing and decided maybe he’d wait. “What are you doing in Pittsburgh?” he asked instead.
Pickett squinted his dark eyes down to suspicious slits. “None of your business.”
Sikes made a guttural buzzing noise. “Wrong answer! Try again.”
“Dammit, Sikes!” the Purist exploded. He shook the empty bar as though not really aware he still held it in his hands. “Why do you have to rag on me like this? What did I ever do to you?”
“You mean besides the occasional riot charge, gay bashing, and illegal firearms?”
Pickett released the bar long enough to swipe one hand across his greasy, pulled-back hair. The bar’s unsupported end clanked heavily on the floor. “This is America. I can think anything I want about other, inferior people.”
“We’re not talking about racism,” Sikes said with a scowl. “We’re talking about crimes.” He lunged forward before Pickett could recover, clamping both hands around the bar and muscling the Purist straight back against the wall with the bar crammed into Pickett’s chest, Sikes was a good six inches taller than the Purist, so had the advantage of better leverage as well as surprise. “Let’s talk about felonies.”
“I can’t breathe!” Pickett wheezed.
Sikes ignored him. “Kidnapping—that’s a felony. So’s murder. And how about breaking and entering? Or do you want to negotiate on that one?”
Pickett squirmed beneath the bar, his face squeezed up into an ugly knot of pain. “I didn’t do any of those things,” he protested in a tight, breathless voice.
“But I’ll bet you know who did.”
“No!” He heaved once against Sikes’s greater weight and strength, then collapsed back against the wall with a groan. “I don’t do that kind of stuff, Sikes, you know that!”