Latency

by Blaze Ward

  Four stories of flats facing out over the parking lot, with external walkways across the front. Maybe fifty units, all told, as it stretched around a corner like an L. Air conditioners were local to each unit, but at least the Illymus Merchant Guild had been able to provide humanity a new set of alien technologies that made such things small and hyper-efficient, without making the planet any warmer.

  It would still be the rest of his lifetime and maybe all of Rachel’s before the planet started cooling down again, but hopefully they’d managed to save it in time.

  Not that the people he could see from here would benefit. Or even much care.

  He parked and got out. Rachel was a beat ahead of him.

  “We know he’s gone,” she said. “Do we pick the lock or ask the manager?”

  “I don’t think a guy like Zielinski is going to go out of his way to be friendly with folks, so I doubt that anyone here cares,” Greyson said. “But they might call the cops anyway, and those people are probably the only locals he gets along with.”

  He set off for the manager’s office, noting that the lights were still on.

  He knocked and a sour-faced Anglo woman opened the inner door, scowling up at him through the glass storm door.

  Greyson flashed his badge at her and smiled grimly.

  She opened the storm door just enough that they didn’t have to yell at each other.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “I’d like to look in the apartment of one of your tenants who isn’t home,” he said simply.

  “Got a warrant?” she asked sourly, just like she was supposed to.

  “We’re Hunters,” Greyson said, waggling the badge case just a little to draw her eye to it. “We chase dangerous aliens and kill them. Do I need to go get a warrant and maybe waste your entire week and tear your property apart looking for my answers, or do you want to do things quietly? Your choice.”

  He was only sort of bluffing. She could legitimately push back right now. He’d call Redhawk and have a warrant in his hands in minutes.

  But that would start a clock ticking, because the chances were extremely good that someone somewhere would notice and place a call to Zielinski when his name popped up on a screen. He was in the air right now, but they’d reach him eventually.

  At that point, either the man would start calling in favors or blackmail. Things would get very ugly, or very public.

  Maybe both.

  “Who?” the woman asked after a moment.

  “Olek Zielinski,” Greyson smiled at her.

  This was the magic moment in the adventure.

  How did she feel about the man?

  “That son of a bitch?” she rasped angrily. “What’s that shitbird done now?”

  Bingo.

  You could never really go wrong, expecting Zielinski to be an asshole to people.

  He just didn’t have that badge anymore protecting him from the consequences.

  “We’d like to look in his place as part of an ongoing investigation,” Rachel spoke up, sounding helpful and polite.

  Greyson didn’t have it in him right now.

  “Stay put,” she said, leaving the inner door open as she stepped over and grabbed a key ring out of a bowl nearby.

  The woman was wearing house slippers and an old, faded sundress as she stepped out into the gathering gloom. Night birds and bug zappers competed in a symphony to fill the night with noise. The air was a little sticky with heat and humidity, but nothing he minded.

  “Follow me,” she commanded in a tired voice.

  Greyson put her age at somewhere close enough to dead, except that she looked like the kind of woman who would go down with Satan’s throat in her teeth when he finally came for her.

  She led them up to the third level and halfway across to an apartment with a dark window. The place reminded Greyson of an old roadside motel, now that he thought about it. Maybe it had gone out of business and been converted into cheap apartments at some point?

  None of the units were very wide, nor deep. The side building that made the base of the L looked like a later addition, with doors farther apart, so maybe those were all two bedroom and this wing was studio? That felt right.

  She looked in the window and nodded, muttering a never-ending string of profanities that didn’t once appear to repeat as Greyson listened, which was pretty impressive. Maybe she’d been a Marine in her sordid youth?

  “He’s not home,” she announced.

  “Yes,” Greyson said. “We’ve more or less tricked him into flying to Boston for an emergency, so we had time to see what we might find here.”

  “You going to take his punk ass down hard?” She seemed to light up and turn into a younger woman when she asked, so Greyson assumed a history there that he didn’t pursue.

  “That’s our hope,” Rachel said professionally, playing an admirable job of good cop.

  Greyson wasn’t sure what the next step beyond Bad Cop looked like, but he was probably there. At least in his mind.

  “Here,” the manager said, unlocking the door and stepping back as she opened it. “You folks let me know if you need anything else to ruin that fucker’s day.”

  She turned and departed without looking back, like maybe she didn’t want to be an accessory.

  Greyson listened, but didn’t hear a dog rustling around in the darkness. Didn’t smell a cat’s funk.

  He reached inside and flipped on the overhead light.

  Sterile.

  Even worse than Jansen’s place had been. Greyson wondered if the apartment had come with furniture already and Zielinski had just put his clothes in the dresser. If the place had once been a motel, that logic might fit.

  Just inside the door was a bedroom. Or a bed on the left with a floral bedcover and nightstands on each side. Dresser on the right, just past where the door opened.

  He slipped in and moved to close the curtains against unwelcome peepers. Rachel closed the door and looked around.

  “Yuck,” she pronounced unequivocally.

  Greyson nodded and moved deeper. There was a bathroom midway back. Standard box with a toilet and a tub that had a shower head and a nylon curtain.

  The back of the apartment had the first impression of personality that Greyson had seen. He’d been expecting a sofa, but there was a desk instead, and a comfortable chair just beyond it, lined up to face a screen next to the half-sized kitchen that was just big enough to be called one.

  He looked in the fridge, and was not the least bit surprised. Leftover takeout and bottles of cheap beer. The freezer held frozen dinners and a lot of ice.

  “Greyson.”

  Something in Rachel’s voice had his hand on his nerve scrambler before he was fully around again.

  She was kneeling in the corner. There was a table there, but she was looking under it.

  “Here,” she pointed.

  Greyson moved close and knelt.

  File cabinet. Custom made from the look of it, with three normal-sized drawers across, and three half-height ones above them so it could fit the lowered space under the table.

  You couldn’t see anything from the patio’s sliding glass door, and the desk and chair obscured it from the front.

  Greyson felt his heart sink as he considered what might be in the thing.

  He rose and closed the curtain nearby as well, turning on a light with the outdoor glow gone. The floor in here was tile. The walls were covered over with that bamboo paneling that looked like wood.

  It felt more like an office than a living room.

  Olek just slept up front. He lived back here. Worked here.

  Plotted his revenge here.

  “Check it for power and wires coming out,” he ordered her. “Alarms or something.”

  “What about the lock?” she asked, starting to rifle around the back and sides while he watched.

  Greyson looked close. Old-fashioned mechanical lock you opened with a key. Probably on a ring in Zielinski’s pocket right now, about fifteen t
housand meters up and northbound.

  There had to be a spare. Or he could just steal the damned thing, but Greyson would have expected Zielinski to bolt it to the floor or something. He would have.

  Greyson rose and studied the room. He moved to the desk, but it wasn’t locked. No reason to, if you had a better setup over there. Each drawer was opened and inspected anyway, but he was dealing with an ex-cop who would think like one. And be expecting someone to try to break in at some point.

  Where would I hide a key?

  A brass ashtray on top of the desk caught his eye for reasons that his conscious mind didn’t grasp. Not that big. Not that hefty. He’d have made something like this with three or four times as much metal. This was a thin disk tilted up all the way around the rim, with four spots on the cardinal points where you could rest a cigar.

  The basin was filled with cheap ash, in keeping with Zielinski and his lifestyle. Greyson didn’t think the man was poor, as corrupt as he had been.

  Even after paying bribes and kickbacks he had been raking it in, if Greyson’s investigations that had gotten shut down had been anything remotely accurate.

  No, he just smoked cheap Cubans. Olek Zielinski did everything cheap.

  A number etched on the side of the ashtray finally got his attention.

  207.

  Son of a bitch.

  “What?” Rachel stood up from where she had been kneeling, also going for a pistol. Palmstunner in her case, but still…

  Greyson touched the ash tray with one angry finger to indicate it.

  “Two Oh Seven,” he said.

  “Why is that important?” Rachel asked as she stepped up next to him.

  “That was my badge number, once upon a time,” Greyson said. “What do you want to bet that this was my actual badge? Maybe melted down with a blowtorch and bashed into shape? The records said it had been lost at some point. I have Two Nineteen now.”

  He looked at it, thin brass and all. Yeah, about as much metal as he had in his current badge.

  Greyson lifted the ashtray up and considered Olek Zielinski. There was a trashcan under the desk, and all the ashes were currently cool, so he turned it a little sideways and started to shake the ashes out into the can.

  It wasn’t like Zielinski would be ignorant that someone was in here. Especially not if Greyson ended up making a call and having him arrested at Jansen’s bedside.

  A scraping sound got his attention. Rather than make more of a mess, he grabbed a pen and flicked the rest of ash into the trash can.

  There was a key, buried in those ashes. Right where nobody would think to look if they didn’t have a connection to 207.

  And who would except a Hunter named Greyson Leigh? Or a retired asshole named Olek Zielinski?

  Retired Hunter, rather. He was still an asshole. Greyson had no doubt about that.

  Greyson took the key and walked over to the sink. He washed it clean and handed it to Rachel with a grimace.

  “That’s probably the spare,” he said simply.

  “You two have a scary love/hate relationship,” Rachel observed.

  “Ain’t no love there, Rachel,” he replied.

  “Yeah, I see that,” she said, taking the key and kneeling by the cabinet.

  The lock turned smoothly and she pulled the first drawer open as he got down on his knees next to her.

  She opened the middle drawer while he randomly pulled out a file and began looking at it.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, wondering how often he was going to repeat himself tonight.

  “What?”

  “Recognize the handwriting?” he asked, laying the file flat for her.

  “Looks like yours?” Rachel asked carefully, studying the long hieroglyphics that he routinely put on paper with a pen.

  Just one of the reasons he preferred typing on a keyboard.

  “It is mine,” he said. “This was part of an investigation I was running two years ago, before I got shut down. Zielinski made them disappear from Records.”

  “All this your stuff?” she gestured to the others.

  “Dunno,” Greyson said, sliding the file back and reaching into the middle.

  The particular file he happened to grab said Kwan. He opened it up and confirmed that it was Head Police Commissioner Yulia Kwan. She was an older woman than Greyson by a few years. A Vladivostok Russian/Hong Kong Mix that had always reminded him of the actress Michelle Yeoh, except nearly a foot taller. Almost as beautiful, though.

  More pictures. Yulia in the middle of an orgy, from the way the bodies were arranged on a big bed. Yulia being seriously dominated by a woman who looked like a stone pro, from the expensive gear that Yulia was tied to and being beaten with.

  Greyson didn’t have those sorts of kinks, but he understood that a lot of extremely powerful politicians flipped end-for-end in their private lives. Looked from these photos that Yulia Kwan got her rocks off as a sub.

  Nothing wrong with it on the surface, but these were the sorts of pictures you blackmailed someone with. Ruined their career by leaking them to the press or the opposition.

  Greyson wondered if any of those three strapping men, filling all of her holes at once, were criminals of some sort. They all had ink that suggested Russian mafia, and Vladivostok was known as an underworld hub.

  There was a story here, if he wished to pursue it.

  Greyson put it back and looked for other files. Buford Owens apparently had a monumental addiction to a variety of narcotics, some of which were even legal, but most of which were good for time in the county pen. Especially in the sorts of dosages the man must be running on a daily basis.

  He almost qualified as a dealer, except that he was consuming it all himself.

  Greyson rocked back on his heels and wondered if the rest of this was all the blackmail material Zielinski had managed to accumulate in a lifetime as a corrupt cop, first in Chicago and later in Boston as a Hunter.

  “There are a lot of lives fucked if this comes out, aren’t there?” Rachel asked.

  Greyson flinched. He’d almost forgotten the young woman was sitting next to him.

  He nodded mutely. There was a file for Denise Upkins at the back, properly alphabetized, but Greyson couldn’t bring himself to look in it. How many pictures of him would Greyson find? Olek knew what he’d done for a living for the twenty years before he joined the force.

  Greyson had understood that reporters poking at any sort of public relationship between the two of them would have raised uncomfortable questions, so they had ended it.

  Was Zielinski all set to ruin her life?

  Olek had managed to frame Greyson. Not hard to get people to see things your way if you had their balls in a vice with these files.

  He’d been set up as a fall guy, because Owens and Kwan had both understood that it was their careers or Leigh’s.

  Greyson considered how he might destroy all of them, just as payback for the time off he’d been forced to take. Denise had managed to backdate him for seniority when he returned, so his pension was back on track, if he wanted to stay another eight years to collect a double-twenty.

  Live high on the hog in places like Miami/Dade, perhaps?

  “Greyson?” Rachel asked hesitantly.

  He turned to her and shook his whole body against the sudden chill that had descended.

  He’d always suspected that Olek Zielinski was even worse than anyone ever gave him credit for, but now he had proof.

  “We’re taking it all,” Greyson announced, pulling out the nearest drawer and unlocking the slide so he could stand up with it.

  “We burning it or turning it in?” she pressed.

  “I’ll know that tomorrow,” he said. “After we read it all.”

  24

  Secrets

  Rachel kept watch in the apartment while Greyson hauled those heavy file drawers down to the car and locked them in the trunk. Not that they didn’t trust the neighborhood, but at some point this was likely to turn i
nto a chain of evidence question and she wanted to be able to say that they had things as covered as best they could, given the circumstances.

  Greyson had freaked the fuck out at the contents of some of those files. She had too, to a lesser degree, but she didn’t have any sort of personal relationship with most of the names, so they were just victims with strange kinks, as far as she was concerned.

  It was the top drawers that had caused the most problems.

  Rachel had opened one of them and found a ghost gun. Looked new. Didn’t have a serial number. Ghost was an old term for a firearm manufactured without any serial number at all, like they had done back in the Nineteenth Century.

  For a long time, the law had required such things stamped on, just so guns used in crimes could be traced back to points of sale. That had changed about the time Greyson was a kid if she had the ancient history right.

  Three-dimensional printing had started off with spools of plastic that you could feed in hot and a computer would slowly assemble something in layers. Mostly kitsch, but all early tech seemed to follow a path through hobbyists doing things before working their way up to serious usefulness.

  Over the decades, the technology and the materials had gotten better, so that you could print a working gun.

  The fabs required were still huge, but it was possible to dial up a design and tell a box about the size of the car they’d driven here to pull raw materials from stores and do things with it.

  And if the place was an illegal shop, or maybe one working after hours, they didn’t necessarily stamp or print a serial number on the frame.

  Zielinski had what Rachel would have called a pocket pistol in there. Slugthrower, which were generally illegal in private possession, since you were supposed to store them at the gun range you belonged to.

  But a cop has ways of working the system, especially when he knows the people charged with enforcing them.

  Semi-automatic. 9mm with fifteen rounds stagger-stacked in the grip. The bullets themselves had started life as ball ammunition. Rounded copper tips designed to penetrate like an ice pick. But these had been chopped a little, taking just enough off the tip to expose the lead underneath in an area about four millimeters across.