The Long Fall Into Darkness

by Charlie Cottrell

  “You are a complete ass,” Vera snapped, her eyes opening and focusing all of anger on me. I flinched back a little despite myself. “I spent months – months! – protecting you, keeping you safe, working to track down my sister and put things to right, and you repay me by going behind my back with Xavier?! I should drop you off at the police station myself and be done with you.”

  We sat in silence for a full minute before she added, “I’m sure you can explain.”

  “I can explain! He kidnapped me,” I said quickly.

  “Shut up!” she snapped at me. “You were a fool to follow him, you know that, right? Xavier is an unhinged madman who could have gotten you killed.”

  “But we uncovered something big,” I started.

  Vera cut me off with a look. “I don’t care what you think you found. Unless it’s the location of my sister or her cache of stolen data on you, it’s worthless.” She sat back against the car seat and smoldered. I thought I saw smoke rising from her ears, but that could’ve just been a trick of the light from passing cars.

  “I mean, you haven’t exactly been making good choices, either,” I said. Vera leveled another nasty gaze at me. “Seriously. You left me locked up in a box for months on end, never told me what was happening, never even gave me the option of helping! I could’ve been bait, I could’ve hunted for clues, I could have done something, anything, rather than just sit on my ass in that warehouse. I don’t even know if Maya or Ellen are alive! Why aren’t you telling me everything, Vera? Huh? Do you not trust me? Don’t you think I deserve to know at least something?”

  Vera sat back again and, to my surprise, averted her eyes. She took a deep breath, then let it all out. “You’re…you’re right, Eddie. I’m sorry.” She looked at me again, this time with something like sympathy in her eyes. “Let me first say that Maya and Ellen are perfectly safe. I know they must have worried you, and I know they have been worried about you.”

  I felt a great weight leave my shoulders. Maya and Ellen were okay. Thank God for small favors, at least. “Okay. Thank you. Now, what was that about your sister having a data cache on me?”

  Vera opened up a vid window and adjusted it to display a picture of her sister, Carmen, and a feed of all the vital information we knew about her. “Carmen has been building a dossier on you for years, since long before Dresden Crowder returned to the city,” she said. “She knows all about your history as a police officer and as a private detective. She has case files on every single case you’ve ever worked, including detailed notes on all of your clients and informants. She knows you better than you know yourself. She even knows about your mother.”

  I shuddered. “And she still doesn’t think I’ve suffered enough for one life? Your sister is mean.”

  Vera nodded. “She also knows all about the time you’ve overseen the Organization, which is where things become tricky. She has details of what you’ve dismantled, who you’ve sent to prison, and who you’ve dealt with in more…permanent ways.”

  “Hey, wait, I didn’t have anyone killed,” I said defensively. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m no killer.”

  “I didn’t say you had them murdered,” Vera replied. “Kimiko sent several of the higher-level capos to a…let’s call it a re-education center. There, their memories were wiped, leaving them little better than small children when it comes to anything they might have known about the Organization…or you.”

  I sat in thought for a moment. “I mean, I knew she was doing something to the big bad guys, but she wasn’t killin’ them. I guess I never asked too many questions on purpose.”

  “Kimiko is a valued asset. She knew what needed to be done, and she made sure it was accomplished. But it leaves you in an unenviable spot. Kimiko is gone, detective. She has disappeared, and with her went any chance of clearing your name of having those men’s memories wiped.”

  “Unless we can get hold of your sister’s data hoard,” I said.

  Vera nodded. “We can use that information to exonerate you. And where we find the cache…”

  “…we’re likely to find Carmen,” I said, finishing her sentence. Vera nodded again. “So, what’s the problem, then?”

  Vera sighed. “Carmen is a ghost. She has no digital footprint, no biocode markers that indicate where she has been or where she might be going. She can slip through the city virtually unseen, if she so desires. We have been chasing shadows for months, and it has become a source of never-ending frustration.”

  I grinned. “Well, there’s just one solution to the problem, then,” I said. “We’re gonna give her exactly what she wants. “We’re gonna give her me.”

  IV.

  “I still think this is a completely terrible idea,” Vera said as sat in the town car.

  “Duly noted.”

  “The ninja cannot protect you out in the open like that. Carmen could have snipers, or someone with poison, or—” I had to cut her off.

  “That’s why I’ve got Plan B with me,” I said, holstering my lightning gun. “And Plan C,” I added, patting my coat pocket reassuringly. “Trust me, this’ll work.”

  “I still want everyone else in the restaurant to be one of my people,” Vera insisted.

  “No,” I said, “I keep telling you, that’d be too damn obvious. None of your people can be around, or you’ll spook her.”

  Vera huffed and sat back. “Fine. But if you die…”

  “C’mon. That’s an empty threat and you know it. I mean, what would you do? Revive me and kill me again?”

  Vera glared. “I might.”

  “Whatever. I’m ready,” I said, grabbing my hat and pulling it low over my eyes. It’d been months since I’d felt properly dressed, but now I was back and ready to confront my nemesis. Well, one of my nemeses. It’s a challenge when you’re as popularly unpopular as I am.

  * * *

  I stepped out of the town car on 42nd Street about a block up from the Wainhurst Diner. The Wainhurst was widely considered the single worst diner in the entire city of Arcadia. I’ve occasionally used it as a drop point or a place to meet informants who aren’t too embarrassed to be seen there. The Little Blind Girl, for instance, refuses to meet me here, as she, “Wouldn’t be caught dead in that fuckin’ place, and the way they fix their coffee, it’s a real possibility I would die.”

  I entered the diner and felt immediately at home. The place was a shithole, but it was my shithole. I slid into a worn-out booth and accepted a menu from a passing waitress. I was trying to decide between chicken fried steak and a Denver omelet when someone got into the booth across the table from me. I tilted the menu down and revealed the smirking face of Carmen.

  She looked a little the worse for wear from the last time I’d seen her. Of course, I also assumed she’d faced off against Kimiko since then, so the fact that she was alive at all was pretty damn impressive.

  “I like the eyepatch. Very rakish,” I said, taking a long sip of my coffee.

  “You know why I’m here,” she replied. “You’re an idiot for stepping out from whatever hole you’ve been hiding in.”

  “Or am I?” I asked. I pulled aside my jacket just enough for her to see the holster of the lightning gun under my right arm. “I’m fairly confident I can take you out without too much of a problem.”

  Carmen gave a short bark of a laugh. “Do you seriously think I’m fool enough to come here alone?” she scoffed.

  “Why not? You seem to think I did.” I took another sip of coffee. “Mmm, that’s damn fine coffee.”

  The smirk was gone from Carmen’s face now, replaced with a look of wary caution. “Perhaps I have underestimated you,” she said. “Let us try again.”

  “Yes, let’s,” I said with a faint smile of my own. “I know why I’m here, and I’m pretty sure I know why you’re here, but why don’t we both lay all our cards down on the table and make sure everyone is playing on an even, level playing field. I’ll start. I know you hit the building where Cornwallis was staying while we were in
side. I’m pretty sure you know where Xavier is and even Vera, your lovely sister, is currently hiding. I only want two things. First, the data cache you’ve got on me, and second, to know why the hell you want me dead in the first place.”

  Carmen chuckled. “Do you not even understand that? You are simply in the way, Detective Hazzard, and the powers that be have deemed that you must die for that transgression.”

  “The powers that be? Like, God?” I asked, suddenly a little nervous.

  “Of course not, no.”

  “You don’t mean the mayor. Tomlinson hates me, but he’s too gutless to ever order a hit on anyone.”

  “Tomlinson is no longer mayor. Esperanza beat him in the election last month.”

  “Really? Damn. I didn’t think she had the nerve to take him on.”

  “But you’re still missing the point. You don’t even know who actually runs Arcadia.” Carmen’s smirk was back again.

  “I know it’s not you,” I shot back, wiping the smirk off her face again. She looked like she wanted to just murder me now, which was much more familiar ground for me. “Look, I don’t really care who ‘runs the city of Arcadia,’” I said, wiggling my fingers in the air all spooky, “and I don’t really give a damn who you’re working for right now. I figure they’ll keep coming after me long after you’re rotting in a cell in Pratchett, and I’ll figure out who they are and what horrible thing they’re trying to do to my city, and I’ll take ‘em down, just like I have every asshole I’ve gone up against.” I picked up my coffee and said, “So, yeah, go ahead and leap across the table at me. You may get a couple of hits in, but I’ll come out on top. I always do.”

  So that’s when she leapt across the table and tried to kill me.

  V.

  Carmen hit me solid, knocking the coffee mug out of my hand and tearing the booth free of its moorings. We collapsed over backward in a heap, her punching and kicking and screaming at me. She was mostly unintelligible, though “I’ll kill you!” came through loud and clear. I huddled up, trying to protect my face and head with my arms. Carmen hit me again and again, slamming her fists into my arms, my torso, wherever she could land a punch. I was surrounded by the debris of my booth, so I couldn’t really get away from her. I tried to heave back against her, outweighing her as I did by at least a hundred pounds, but she was determined. Doggéd, even, with the extra accent over the e so it sounds fancier and has two syllables.

  “You’re nothing but a lackey,” I growled, lifting her off me with my legs and tossing her clear of the wreckage of my booth. I struggled to my feet, but Carmen was already back up and heading toward me. She had a steak knife in her hand and a look of pure rage on her face. She came in low with the knife, aiming for the femoral artery. I did the only thing I could do in this situation: I activated my force field.

  The air around me suddenly shimmered, and I was surrounded by a kinetic barrier that caused Carmen’s swipe with the knife to bounce right off. Carmen came at me again, slashing across my chest several times in rapid succession. Each blow caused the force field to ripple and glimmer under the harsh fluorescent lights of the diner, but none of them got anywhere near actually hurting me. Crying out wordlessly in rage, Carmen decided to tackle me. She knocked me onto the floor and squatted on top of my torso. Holding the knife in both hands, she began to take advantage of the barrier’s one fatal flaw: slow things could work their way through if you were persistent and patient enough.

  Carmen slowly lowered the knife toward me. The barrier shimmered and flickered as the blade began to penetrate through the layers of energy between me and certain death. Given the circumstances, I did the only thing I could do: I laughed.

  “What’s so funny, dead man?” Carmen asked.

  “Plan C,” I said.

  Ellen Typewell stepped up behind Carmen and gave her a not-so-gentle tap on the head with a kosh. Carmen went down like a sack of potatoes, and I heaved her off of me and stood up on trembling legs.

  “Took you long enough,” I said, panting a little. Near-death experiences can get your heart rate up a bit, as it turns out.

  “That is a weird way to say, ‘you’re welcome,’ Eddie,” Ellen said. Then she gave up all pretense and wrapped me in a bear hug. “I was so worried about you, you idiot! Don’t ever disappear like that ever again!”

  “Yes’m,” I croaked. Miss Typewell let me go and we stood back from each other, looking down at Carmen. “Okay, so, the plan worked perfectly.”

  “She almost killed you,” Ellen pointed out.

  “The plan worked perfectly,” I repeated. “Now, let’s get her tied up and get the hell out of here before someone gets brave and calls the cops.”

  * * *

  Reuniting with Miss Typewell had been just the jolt I needed to get serious about solving this case. When I called her, she immediately agreed to help me get the drop on Carmen. “I’ve been sitting in this damn hidey hole for months, Eddie! Lemme at ‘er.”

  “Easy there, tiger,” I’d said. “You’re there as Plan C. You only jump in if it looks like things are about to get really, really bad.”

  “Why is that Plan C?” Ellen asked. “Things always get really, really bad. I’d think me being there would be Plan A.”

  “That’s why you’re not in charge of putting together the plans, Miss Typewell,” I said.

  * * *

  Ellen punched me in the arm as we walked out of the Wainhurst Diner. “Ow! What was that for?” I whined.

  “For saying I’m not the one in charge of putting together the plans, you ass,” she replied. “Next time, make me Plan A.”

  “Yes’m,” I replied, rubbing my arm. “You told the waitress what to tell the cops when they show up, right?”

  “Of course. She’ll follow the plan to the letter, unlike some people.”

  “Plans, like rules, were made to broken,” I said. “It says that in the Bible somewhere, I think.”

  Ellen cocked an eyebrow at me. “What Bible have you been reading?”

  “Um, I think it was the Gospel According to Saint Arnold,” I said. “Anyway, that went better than expected. Next up, we gotta find her data cache.”

  “Good thing I pickpocketed her phone while I was tying her up,” Ellen said, holding up the offending machine.

  “Ha! Perfect. Let’s go get Maya and get started cracking it,” I said. I took out my phone and sent a message to Ms. Stewart to pick us up.

  VI.

  Maya came in with a flying bear hug, wrapping her lanky arms around me and squeezing with all her might. There wasn’t much of it, admittedly, but she did the best with what she had.

  “Sir! I’m so glad to see you!” she yelped, her head buried somewhere just south of my armpit.

  “You too, kiddo,” I said, returning her hug as best I could with my arms pinned to my sides. “I’m glad you two were safe.”

  Ellen handed her the computer and we explained what we needed. Maya was anxious to leap into proverbial action, pulling out leads from her own machine and attaching them to Carmen’s before typing away on a vid window for several minutes, muttering to herself in some language that sounded an awful lot like English except it featured way more references to “lines of code” and “hack the planet[DS5].”

  Within ten minutes, though, Maya had cracked open the security on Carmen’s phone and had it operational for us. “I’ve turned off Bluetooth and any GPS subsystem that was running,” she said. “It’s not even accessing the wi-fi here, so it’s as off-the-grid as it can possibly get.”

  “What if her data cache isn’t local to the machine?” I asked.

  “We’ll worry about that after we’ve done a scan of the hard drive. I might be able to access her cloud account remotely from my machine and run it through a whole bunch of other IP addresses so they can’t trace me.”

  “Great. Do a search, looking for references to me, Vera, Ellen, you, and anyone else you think Carmen might have included in her data cache.” Maya nodded and set to work searc
hing every square micrometer of the machine’s memory.

  “She’s got over a hundred terabytes of data on this thing,” Maya said. “It’s gonna take a while to search the whole hard drive.”

  The vid window where Maya was conducting the search suddenly beeped at her and flashed bright red. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “She’s got extra layers of security on this thing,” Maya replied. “Gimme a minute to see if I can crack it.” She set to typing again, her hands flying across the vid window almost too fast to see. “This stuff is top of the line,” she muttered. “But I think I…got it!” The vid window went green for a brief instant, then returned to its usual yellowish-orange. “Okay, I disabled the extra security, but there might be some other subroutine buried deeper in the code that I didn’t catch. I’ll have to be careful.” She typed a few things into the vid window and continued her search. “You guys should, um, settle in. This is going to take a while.”

  * * *

  It took almost twelve hours, in fact, for Maya to comb through the entire hard drive on Carmen’s phone. What she came up with didn’t exactly surprise me.

  “Nothing,” she said, downtrodden. “There’s nothing on there related to the data cache.”

  “Eh, it’s okay. We knew this was a possibility,” I said, patting Maya on the shoulder companionably.

  “On the other hand, I did find a location datapoint for the cache,” Maya said with a smile.

  “Attagirl,” I said, grinning. “Well? Where is it?”

  Maya’s smile disappeared. “Um, you’re probably not gonna like it,” she said.

  “Why not? Is it in a police station or something?” I joked. Maya didn’t respond. “It’s not in a police station, right? You’d tell me if she’d done something truly asinine like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s definitely not in a police station,” Maya admitted.

  “Oh, good,” I said with relief.

  “It’s at the mayor’s office in city hall.”